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Great Purge

The Great Purge or the Great Terror (Russian: Большой террор), also known as the Year of '37 (37-й год, Tridtsat sedmoi god) and the Yezhovshchina ('period of Yezhov'),[8] was Soviet General Secretary Joseph Stalin's campaign to solidify his power over the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and the state; the purges were also designed to remove the remaining influence of Leon Trotsky as well as other prominent political rivals within the party. It occurred from August 1936 to March 1938.[9]

Great Purge
Part of the Purges of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union
People of Vinnytsia searching for relatives among the exhumed victims of the Vinnytsia massacre, 1937
LocationSoviet Union, East Turkestan, Mongolian People's Republic
Date1936–1938
TargetPolitical opponents, Trotskyists, Red Army leadership, kulaks, religious activists and leaders
Attack type
Deaths700,000[1][2] to 1.2 million[3]
(higher estimates overlap with at least 116,000[3] deaths in the Gulag system)
PerpetratorsJoseph Stalin, the NKVD (Genrikh Yagoda, Nikolai Yezhov, Lavrentiy Beria, Ivan Serov and others), Vyacheslav Molotov, Andrey Vyshinsky, Lazar Kaganovich, Kliment Voroshilov, Robert Eikhe and others
MotiveElimination of political opponents,[4] consolidation of power,[5] fear of counterrevolution,[6] fear of party infiltration[7]

Following the death of Vladimir Lenin in 1924, a power vacuum opened in the Communist Party, the ruling party in the Soviet Union (USSR). Various established figures in Lenin's government attempted to succeed him. Joseph Stalin, the party's General Secretary, outmaneuvered political opponents and ultimately gained control of the party by 1928.[10] Initially, Stalin's leadership was widely accepted; his main political adversary Trotsky was forced into exile in 1929, and the doctrine of "socialism in one country" became enshrined party policy. However, by the early 1930s, party officials began losing faith in his leadership following the human cost of the first five-year plan and the collectivization of agriculture. By 1934 several of Stalin's rivals, such as Trotsky, began calling for Stalin's removal and attempted to break his influence over the party.[11]

In this atmosphere of doubt and suspicion, a popular high-ranking official, Sergei Kirov, was assassinated. His death led to an investigation that revealed a network of party members supposedly working against Stalin, including several of Stalin's rivals.[12] Many of those arrested after Kirov's assassination also confessed plans to kill Stalin himself, including high-ranking party officials.[13] The validity of these claims is still debated by historians, but there is consensus that Kirov's death was the flashpoint where Stalin took action and began the purges.[14][15]

By 1936, Stalin's paranoia reached its peak. The fear of losing his position and the potential return of Trotsky drove him into authorizing the Great Purge. The purges themselves were largely conducted by the NKVD (People's Commissariat for Internal Affairs), the secret police of the USSR. The NKVD began the removal of the central party leadership, Old Bolsheviks, government officials, and regional party bosses.[16] Eventually, the purges were expanded to the Red Army and military high command, which had a disastrous effect on the military.[17][18] Three successive trials were held in Moscow that removed most of the Old Bolsheviks and the challenges to Stalin's position.[19] As the scope of the purge began widening, the omnipresent suspicion of saboteurs and counter-revolutionaries began impacting civilian life. The NKVD began targeting certain ethnic minorities such as the Volga Germans, who were subjected to forced deportation and extreme repression. During its mass operations, the NKVD widely utilized imprisonment, torture, violent interrogation, and arbitrary executions to solidify control over civilians through fear.[20]

In 1938, Stalin reversed his stance on the purges and declared that the internal enemies had been removed. Stalin criticized the NKVD for carrying out mass executions and subsequently executed Genrikh Yagoda and Nikolai Yezhov, who headed the NKVD during the purge years. Despite the Great Purge being over, the atmosphere of mistrust and widespread surveillance continued for decades after. Scholars estimate the death toll for the Great Purge (1936–1938) to be roughly 700,000.[21][22] The term great purge itself was popularized by the historian Robert Conquest in his 1968 book The Great Terror. Conquest's title itself was an allusion to the period from the French Revolution known as the Reign of Terror.[23] While the Soviet government desired to put Trotsky on trial during the purge, his exile prevented this. Trotsky survived the purge, though he would be assassinated in 1940 by the NKVD on the orders of Stalin.[24][19]

Introduction

 
An excerpt of NKVD Order No. 00447
 
The politburo decision to extend the time limits of the "national line" (ethnic-based) purge operations signed by Stalin, Molotov, Kaganovich, Voroshilov, Mikoyan, and Chubar.

The term repression was officially used by the leader of the Soviet Union at the time, Soviet general secretary Joseph Stalin, to describe the prosecution of people considered counter-revolutionaries and enemies of the people. Historians debate the causes of the purge, such as Stalin's paranoia, or his desire to remove dissenters from the Communist Party or to consolidate his authority. The purges began in the Red Army, and the techniques developed there were quickly adapted to purges in other sectors.[25]

Most public attention was focused on the purge of certain parts of the leadership of the Communist Party, as well as of government bureaucrats and leaders of the armed forces, most of whom were Party members. The campaigns also affected many other categories of the society: intelligentsia, peasants—especially those lending out money or wealth (kulaks)—and professionals.[26]

A series of NKVD operations affected a number of national minorities[citation needed], accused of being "fifth-column" communities. A number of purges were officially explained as an elimination of the possibilities of sabotage and espionage by the Polish Military Organisation and, consequently, many victims of the purge were ordinary Soviet citizens of Polish origin.[citation needed]

According to Nikita Khrushchev's 1956 speech, "On the Cult of Personality and Its Consequences", and to historian Robert Conquest, a great number of accusations, notably those presented at the Moscow show trials, were based on forced confessions, often obtained through torture,[27] and on loose interpretations of Article 58 of the RSFSR Penal Code, which dealt with counter-revolutionary crimes. Due legal process, as defined by Soviet law in force at the time, was often largely replaced with summary proceedings by NKVD troikas.[28]

Hundreds of thousands of victims were accused of various political crimes (espionage, wrecking, sabotage, anti-Soviet agitation, conspiracies to prepare uprisings and coups). They were quickly executed by shooting or sent to the Gulag labor camps. Many died at the penal labor camps of starvation, disease, exposure, and overwork. Other methods of dispatching victims were used on an experimental basis. In Moscow, the use of gas vans to kill the victims during their transportation to the Butovo firing range has been documented.[29]

The Great Purge began under NKVD chief Genrikh Yagoda but reached its peak between September 1936 and August 1938 under the leadership of Nikolai Yezhov, hence the name Yezhovshchina. The campaigns were carried out according to the general line of the party, often by direct orders of the politburo headed by Stalin.[30]

Background

From 1930 onwards, the Party and police officials feared the "social disorder" caused by the upheavals of forced collectivization of peasants and the resulting famine of 1932–1933, as well as the massive and uncontrolled migration of millions of peasants into cities. The threat of war heightened Stalin's and generally Soviet perception of marginal and politically suspect populations as the potential source of an uprising in case of invasion. Forged documents and misinformation spread by Nazi Germany in order to incriminate innocent Soviet citizens also contributed to this perception.[31] Stalin began to plan for the preventive elimination of such potential recruits for a mythical "fifth column of wreckers, terrorists and spies."[32][33][34]

 
Leon Trotsky, in 1929, shortly before being driven out of the Soviet Union.

The term "purge" in Soviet political slang was an abbreviation of the expression purge of the Party ranks. In 1933, for example, the Party expelled some 400,000 people. But from 1936 until 1953, the term changed its meaning, because being expelled from the Party came to mean almost certain arrest, imprisonment, and often execution.

According to an October 1993 study published in The American Historical Review, much of the Great Purge was directed against the widespread banditry and criminal activity which was occurring in the Soviet Union at the time.[35] The political purge was primarily an effort by Stalin to eliminate challenge from past and potential opposition groups, including the left and right wings led by Leon Trotsky and Nikolai Bukharin, respectively. Following the Civil War and reconstruction of the Soviet economy in the late 1920s, veteran Bolsheviks no longer thought necessary the "temporary" wartime dictatorship, which had passed from Lenin to Stalin. Stalin's opponents inside the Communist Party chided him as undemocratic and lax on bureaucratic corruption.[36]

This opposition to current leadership may have accumulated substantial support among the working class by attacking the privileges and luxuries the state offered to its high-paid elite. The Ryutin affair seemed to vindicate Stalin's suspicions. Ryutin was working with the even larger secret Opposition Bloc in which Leon Trotsky and Grigori Zinoviev participated,[37][38] and which later led to both of their deaths. Stalin enforced a ban on party factions and banned those party members who had opposed him, effectively ending democratic centralism.

In the new form of Party organization, the Politburo, and Stalin in particular, were the sole dispensers of ideology. This required the elimination of all Marxists with different views, especially those among the prestigious "old guard" of revolutionaries. As the purges began, the government (through the NKVD) shot Bolshevik heroes, including Mikhail Tukhachevsky and Béla Kun, as well as the majority of Lenin's Politburo, for disagreements in policy. The NKVD attacked the supporters, friends, and family of these "heretical" Marxists, whether they lived in Russia or not. The NKVD nearly annihilated Trotsky's family before killing him in Mexico; the NKVD agent Ramón Mercader was part of an assassination task force put together by Special Agent Pavel Sudoplatov, under the personal orders of Stalin.[39]

 
Leningrad party leader Sergei Kirov with Stalin (and his daughter Svetlana) in 1934.

In 1934, Stalin used the murder of Sergey Kirov as a pretext to launch the Great Purge, in which about a million people perished (see § Number of people executed). Some later historians came to believe that Stalin arranged the murder, or at least that there was sufficient evidence to reach such a conclusion.[40] Kirov was a staunch Stalin loyalist, but Stalin may have viewed him as a potential rival because of his emerging popularity among the moderates. The 1934 Party Congress elected Kirov to the central committee with only three votes against, the fewest of any candidate, while Stalin received 292 votes against. After Kirov's assassination, the NKVD charged the ever-growing group of former oppositionists with Kirov's murder as well as a growing list of other offenses, including treason, terrorism, sabotage, and espionage.

Another justification for the purge was to remove any possible "fifth column" in case of a war. Vyacheslav Molotov and Lazar Kaganovich, participants in the repression as members of the Politburo, maintained this justification throughout the purge; they each signed many death lists.[41] Stalin believed war was imminent, threatened both by an explicitly hostile Germany and an expansionist Japan. The Soviet press portrayed the country as threatened from within by fascist spies.[40]

From the October Revolution[42] onward,[43] Lenin had used repression against perceived and legitimate enemies of the Bolsheviks as a systematic method of instilling fear and facilitating control over the population in a campaign called the Red Terror. As the Russian Civil War drew to a close, this campaign was relaxed although the secret police did remain active. From 1924 to 1928 the mass repression including incarceration in the Gulag system dropped significantly. [44]

By 1929, Stalin had outmaneuvered his political opponents and gained full control over the party. He organized a committee to begin the process of industrialization of the Soviet Union. Backlash against industrialization and collectivization of agriculture escalated which prompted Stalin to increase police presence in rural areas. Soviet authorities increased repression against the kulaks, who were wealthy peasants that owned farmland in a policy called dekulakization. The kulaks responded by destroying crop yields and other acts of sabotage against the Soviet government.[45] The food shortage created lead to a mass famine across the USSR and slowed the Five Year Plan.

Lev Kopelev wrote "In Ukraine 1937 began in 1933", referring to the comparatively early beginning of the Soviet crackdown in Ukraine.[46]: 418  A distinctive feature of the Great Purge was that, for the first time, members of the ruling party were included on a massive scale as victims of the repression. In addition to ordinary citizens prominent members of the Communist Party were also targets for the purges.[47] The purge of the Party was accompanied by the purge of the whole society. Soviet historians organize the Great Purge into three corresponding trials. The following events are used for the demarcation of the period:

Moscow Trials

First and Second Moscow trials

 
Bolshevik revolutionaries Leon Trotsky, Lev Kamenev and Grigory Zinoviev

Between 1936 and 1938, three very large Moscow trials of former senior Communist Party leaders were held, in which they were accused of conspiring with fascist and capitalist powers to assassinate Stalin and other Soviet leaders, dismember the Soviet Union and restore capitalism. These trials were highly publicized and extensively covered by the outside world, which was mesmerized by the spectacle of Lenin's closest associates confessing to most outrageous crimes and begging for death sentences.[original research?]

  • The first trial was of 16 members of the so-called "Trotskyite-Kamenevite-Zinovievite-Leftist-Counter-Revolutionary Bloc," held in August 1936,[49] at which the chief defendants were Grigory Zinoviev and Lev Kamenev, two of the most prominent former party leaders, who had indeed been members of a Conspiratorial Bloc that opposed Stalin, although its activities were exaggerated.[37] Among other accusations, they were incriminated with the assassination of Kirov and plotting to kill Stalin. After confessing to the charges, all were sentenced to death and executed.[50]
  • The second trial in January 1937 involved 17 lesser figures known as the "anti-Soviet Trotskyite-centre" which included Karl Radek, Yuri Piatakov and Grigory Sokolnikov, and were accused of plotting with Trotsky, who was said to be conspiring with Germany. Thirteen of the defendants were eventually executed by shooting. The rest received sentences in labor camps where they soon died.[51]
  • There was also a secret trial before a military tribunal of a group of Red Army commanders, including Mikhail Tukhachevsky, in June 1937.[52]

It is now known that the confessions were given only after great psychological pressure and torture had been applied to the defendants.[53] From the accounts of former OGPU officer Alexander Orlov and others, the methods used to extract the confessions are known: such tortures as repeated beatings, simulated drownings, making prisoners stand or go without sleep for days on end, and threats to arrest and execute the prisoners' families. For example, Kamenev's teenage son was arrested and charged with terrorism. After months of such interrogation, the defendants were driven to despair and exhaustion.[54]

Zinoviev and Kamenev demanded, as a condition for "confessing", a direct guarantee from the Politburo that their lives and that of their families and followers would be spared. This offer was accepted, but when they were taken to the alleged Politburo meeting, only Stalin, Kliment Voroshilov, and Yezhov were present. Stalin claimed that they were the "commission" authorized by the Politburo and gave assurances that death sentences would not be carried out. After the trial, Stalin not only broke his promise to spare the defendants, he had most of their relatives arrested and shot.[55]

Dewey Commission

In May 1937, the Commission of Inquiry into the Charges Made against Leon Trotsky in the Moscow Trials, commonly known as the Dewey Commission, was set up in the United States by supporters of Trotsky, to establish the truth about the trials. The commission was headed by the noted American philosopher and educator John Dewey. Although the hearings were obviously conducted with a view to proving Trotsky's innocence, they brought to light evidence which established that some of the specific charges made at the trials could not be true.[56]

For example, Georgy Pyatakov testified that he had flown to Oslo in December 1935 to "receive terrorist instructions" from Trotsky. The Dewey Commission established that no such flight had taken place.[57] Another defendant, Ivan Smirnov, confessed to taking part in the assassination of Sergei Kirov in December 1934, at a time when he had already been in prison for a year.

The Dewey Commission later published its findings in a 422-page book titled Not Guilty. Its conclusions asserted the innocence of all those condemned in the Moscow Trials. In its summary, the commission wrote

Independent of extrinsic evidence, the Commission finds:

  • That the conduct of the Moscow Trials was such as to convince any unprejudiced person that no attempt was made to ascertain the truth.
  • That while confessions are necessarily entitled to the most serious consideration, the confessions themselves contain such inherent improbabilities as to convince the Commission that they do not represent the truth, irrespective of any means used to obtain them.
  • That Trotsky never instructed any of the accused or witnesses in the Moscow trials to enter into agreements with foreign powers against the Soviet Union [and] that Trotsky never recommended, plotted, or attempted the restoration of capitalism in the USSR.

The commission concluded: "We therefore find the Moscow Trials to be frame-ups."[58]

Implication of the Rightists

In the second trial, Karl Radek testified that there was a "third organization separate from the cadres which had passed through [Trotsky's] school,"[59] as well as "semi-Trotskyites, quarter-Trotskyites, one-eighth-Trotskyites, people who helped us, not knowing of the terrorist organization but sympathizing with us, people who from liberalism, from a Fronde against the Party, gave us this help."[60]

By the "third organization," he meant the last remaining former opposition group called the Rightists, led by Bukharin, whom he implicated by saying:

I feel guilty of one thing more: even after admitting my guilt and exposing the organisation, I stubbornly refused to give evidence about Bukharin. I knew that Bukharin's situation was just as hopeless as my own, because our guilt, if not juridically, then in essence, was the same. But we are close friends, and intellectual friendship is stronger than other friendships. I knew that Bukharin was in the same state of upheaval as myself. That is why I did not want to deliver him bound hand and foot to the People's Commissariat of Home Affairs. Just as in relation to our other cadres, I wanted Bukharin himself to lay down his arms.[59]

Third Moscow trial

 
NKVD chiefs responsible for conducting mass repressions (left to right): Yakov Agranov; Genrikh Yagoda; unknown; Stanislav Redens. All three were themselves eventually arrested and executed.

The third and final trial, in March 1938, known as The Trial of the Twenty-One, is the most famous of the Soviet show trials, because of persons involved and the scope of charges which tied together all loose threads from earlier trials. Meant to be the culmination of previous trials,[neutrality is disputed] it included 21 defendants alleged to belong to the "Bloc of Rightists and Trotskyites", supposedly led by Nikolai Bukharin, the former chairman of the Communist International, former premier Alexei Rykov, Christian Rakovsky, Nikolai Krestinsky and Genrikh Yagoda, recently disgraced head of the NKVD.[37]

Although an Opposition Bloc led by Trotsky and with zinovievites really existed, Pierre Broué asserts that Bukharin was not involved.[37] Differently from Broué, one of his former allies,[61] Jules Humbert-Droz, said in his memoirs that Bukharin told him that he formed a secret bloc with Zinoviev and Kamenev in order to remove Stalin from leadership.[62]

The fact that Yagoda was one of the accused showed the speed at which the purges were consuming their own. It was now alleged that Bukharin and others sought to assassinate Lenin and Stalin from 1918, murder Maxim Gorky by poison, partition the U.S.S.R and hand its territories to Germany, Japan, and Great Britain, and other charges.[citation needed]

Even previously sympathetic observers who had accepted the earlier trials found it more difficult to accept these new allegations as they became ever more absurd, and the purge expanded to include almost every living Old Bolshevik leader except Stalin and Kalinin.[citation needed] No other crime of the Stalin years so captivated Western intellectuals as the trial and execution of Bukharin, who was a Marxist theorist of international standing.[63] For some prominent communists such as Bertram Wolfe, Jay Lovestone, Arthur Koestler, and Heinrich Brandler, the Bukharin trial marked their final break with communism, and even turned the first three into fervent anti-communists eventually.[64][65] To them, Bukharin's confession symbolized the depredations of communism, which not only destroyed its sons but also conscripted them in self-destruction and individual abnegation.[63]

Bukharin's confession

 
Nikolai Bukharin, Russian Bolshevik revolutionary executed in 1938.

On the first day of trial, Krestinsky caused a sensation when he repudiated his written confession and pleaded not guilty to all the charges. However, he changed his plea the next day after "special measures", which dislocated his left shoulder among other things.[66]

Anastas Mikoyan and Vyacheslav Molotov later claimed that Bukharin was never tortured, but it is now known[neutrality is disputed] that his interrogators were given the order "beating permitted", and were under great pressure to extract confession out of the "star" defendant. Bukharin initially held out for three months, but threats to his young wife and infant son, combined with "methods of physical influence" wore him down. But when he read his confession amended and corrected personally by Stalin, he withdrew his whole confession. The examination started all over again, with a double team of interrogators.[67]

Bukharin's confession in particular became subject of much debate among Western observers, inspiring Koestler's acclaimed novel Darkness at Noon and philosophical essay by Maurice Merleau-Ponty in Humanism and Terror. His confessions were somewhat different from others in that while he pleaded guilty to "sum total of crimes", he denied knowledge when it came to specific crimes. Some astute observers noted that he would allow only what was in written confession and refuse to go any further.[citation needed]

The result was a curious mix of fulsome confessions (of being a "degenerate fascist" working for "restoration of capitalism") and subtle criticisms of the trial. One observer noted that after disproving several charges against him, Bukharin "proceeded to demolish or rather showed he could very easily demolish the whole case."[68] He continued by saying that "the confession of the accused is not essential. The confession of the accused is a medieval principle of jurisprudence" in a trial that was based solely on confessions. He finished his last plea with the words:[69]

[T]he monstrousness of my crime is immeasurable especially in the new stage of struggle of the U.S.S.R. May this trial be the last severe lesson, and may the great might of the U.S.S.R. become clear to all.

Romain Rolland and others wrote to Stalin seeking clemency for Bukharin, but all the leading defendants were executed except Rakovsky and two others (who were killed in NKVD prisoner massacres in 1941). Despite the promise to spare his family, Bukharin's wife, Anna Larina, was sent to a labor camp, but she survived to see her husband posthumously rehabilitated a half-century later by the Soviet state under Mikhail Gorbachev in 1988.[citation needed]

"Ex-kulaks" and other "anti-Soviet elements"

On 2 July 1937, in a top secret order to regional Party and NKVD chiefs Stalin instructed them to produce the estimated number of "kulaks" and "criminals" in their districts. These individuals were to be arrested and executed, or sent to the gulag camps. The party chiefs complied and produced these lists within days, with figures which roughly corresponded to the individuals who were already under secret police surveillance.[34]

On 30 July 1937 the NKVD Order no. 00447 was issued, directed against "ex-kulaks" and other "anti-Soviet elements" (such as former officials of the Tsarist regime, former members of political parties other than the communist party, etc.). They were to be executed or sent to Gulag prison camps extrajudicially, under the decisions of NKVD troikas.

The following categories appear to have been on index-cards, catalogues of suspects assembled over the years by the NKVD and were systematically tracked down: "ex-kulaks" previously deported to "special settlements" in inhospitable parts of the country (Siberia, Urals, Kazakhstan, Far North), former tsarist civil servants, former officers of the White Army, participants in peasant rebellions, members of the clergy, persons deprived of voting rights, former members of non-Bolshevik parties, ordinary criminals, like thieves, known to the police and various other "socially harmful elements".[70]

However, a large number of people were arrested at random in sweeps, on the basis of denunciations or because they were related to, were friends with or knew people already arrested. Engineers, peasants, railwaymen, and other types of workers were arrested during the "Kulak Operation" based on the fact that they worked for or near important strategic sites and factories where work accidents had occurred due to "frantic rhythms and plans". During this period the NKVD reopened these cases and relabeled them as "sabotage" or "wrecking."[71]

 
Yevgeny-Ludvig Karlovich Miller, one of the remaining leaders of the White movement, was kidnapped by the NKVD in 1937 and executed 19 months later.

The Orthodox clergy, including active parishioners, was nearly annihilated: 85% of the 35,000 members of the clergy were arrested. Particularly vulnerable to repression were also the so-called "special settlers" (spetzpereselentsy) who were under permanent police surveillance and constituted a huge pool of potential "enemies" to draw on. At least 100,000 of them were arrested in the course of the Great Terror.[72]

Common criminals such as thieves, "violators of the passport regime", etc. were also dealt with in a summary way. In Moscow, for example, nearly one third of the 20,765 persons executed on the Butovo firing range were charged with a non-political criminal offence.[72]

To carry out the mass arrests, the 25,000 officers of the State Security personnel of NKVD were complemented with units of ordinary police, and Komsomol (Young Communist League) and civilian Communist Party members. Seeking to fulfill the quotas, the police rounded up people in markets and train stations, with the purpose of arresting "social outcasts".[34] Local units of the NKVD, in order to meet their "casework minimums" and force confessions out of arrestees worked long uninterrupted shifts during which they interrogated, tortured and beat the prisoners. In many cases those arrested were forced to sign blank pages which were later filled in with a fabricated confession by the interrogators.[34]

After the interrogations the files were submitted to NKVD troikas, which pronounced the verdicts in the absence of the accused. During a half-day-long session a troika went through several hundred cases, delivering either a death sentence or a sentence to the Gulag labor camps. Death sentences were immediately enforceable. The executions were carried out at night, either in prisons or in secluded areas run by the NKVD and located as a rule on the outskirts of major cities.[70]

The "Kulak Operation" was the largest single campaign of repression in 1937–38, with 669,929 people arrested and 376,202 executed, more than half the total of known executions.[73]

Campaigns targeting nationalities

 
Israil Pliner; (1896–1939) chief of Gulag NKVD (1937–1938), later himself arrested and executed in 1939

A series of mass operations of the NKVD was carried out from 1937 through 1938 targeting specific nationalities within the Soviet Union, on the order of Nikolai Yezhov.

The Polish operation of the NKVD was the largest of this kind.[74] The Polish operation claimed the largest number of the NKVD victims: 143,810 arrests and 111,091 executions according to records. Snyder estimates that at least eighty-five thousand of them were ethnic Poles.[74] The remainder were 'suspected' of being Polish, without further inquiry.[75]

Poles comprised 12.5% of those who were killed during the Great Terror, while comprising only 0.4% of the population. Overall, national minorities targeted in these campaigns composed 36%[76] of the victims of the Great Purge, despite being only 1.6%[76] of the Soviet Union's population. 74%[76] of ethnic minorities arrested during the Great Purge were executed while those sentenced during the Kulak Operation had only a 50% chance of being executed,[76] (though this may have been due to the Gulag camp's lack of space in the late stages of the Purge rather than deliberate discrimination in sentencing.).[76]

The wives and children of those arrested and executed were dealt with by the NKVD Order No. 00486. The women were sentenced to forced labour for 5 or 10 years.[77] Their minor children were put in orphanages. All possessions were confiscated. Extended families were purposely left with nothing to live on, which usually sealed their fate as well, affecting up to 200,000–250,000 people of Polish background depending on the size of their families.[77] The NKVD national operations were conducted on a quota system using album procedure. The officials were mandated to arrest and execute a specific number of so-called "counter-revolutionaries", compiled by administration using various statistics but also telephone books with names sounding non-Russian.[78]

The Polish Operation of the NKVD served as a model for a series of similar NKVD secret decrees targeting a number of the Soviet Union's diaspora nationalities: the Finnish, Latvian, Estonian, Bulgarian, Afghan, Iranian, Greek, and Chinese.[79] Of the operations against national minorities, it was the largest one, second only to the "Kulak Operation" in terms of the number of victims. According to Timothy Snyder, ethnic Poles constituted the largest group of victims in the Great Terror, comprising less than 0.5% of the country's population but comprising 12.5% of those executed.[80] Timothy Snyder attributes 300,000 deaths during the Great Purge to "national terror" including ethnic minorities and Ukrainian Kulaks who survived the early 1930s.[81]

Concerning diaspora minorities, the vast majority of whom were Soviet citizens and whose ancestors had resided for decades and sometimes centuries in the Soviet Union and Russian Empire, "this designation absolutized their cross-border ethnicities as the only salient aspect of their identity, sufficient proof of their disloyalty and sufficient justification for their arrest and execution" (Martin, 2001: 338).[82] Some scholars have called the National Operations of the NKVD genocidal.[83][84][85][86] Norman Naimark called Stalin's policy towards Poles in the 1930s "genocidal;"[86] however he doesn't consider the Great Purge entirely genocidal because it also targeted political opponents.[86]

Most scholars, however, focus on the security dilemma in the border areas suggesting the need to secure the ethnic integrity of Soviet space vis-à-vis neighboring capitalistic enemy states.[79] They stress the role of international relations and believe that representatives of these minorities were killed not because of their ethnicity, but because of their possible relations to countries hostile to the USSR and fear of disloyalty in the case of an invasion.[79] Nevertheless, little proof exists to suggest that Russia's and Stalin's alleged prejudices played a central causal role in the Great Purge.[87]

Purge of the army

 
The first five Marshals of the Soviet Union in November 1935. (l-r): Mikhail Tukhachevsky, Semyon Budyonny, Kliment Voroshilov, Vasily Blyukher, Alexander Yegorov. Only Budyonny and Voroshilov survived the Great Purge.

The purge of the Red Army and Military Maritime Fleet removed three of five marshals (then equivalent to four-star generals), 13 of 15 army commanders (then equivalent to three-star generals),[88] eight of nine admirals (the purge fell heavily on the Navy, who were suspected of exploiting their opportunities for foreign contacts),[89] 50 of 57 army corps commanders, 154 out of 186 division commanders, 16 of 16 army commissars, and 25 of 28 army corps commissars.[90]

At first, it was thought 25–50% of Red Army officers had been purged; the true figure is now known to be in the area of 3.7–7.7%. This discrepancy was the result of a systematic underestimation of the true size of the Red Army officer corps, and it was overlooked that most of those purged were merely expelled from the Party. Thirty percent of officers purged in 1937–1939 were allowed to return to service.[91]

The purge of the army was claimed to be supported by German-forged documents (said to have been correspondence between Marshal Tukhachevsky and members of the German high command).[92] The claim is unsupported by facts, as by the time the documents were supposedly created, two people from the eight in the Tukhachevsky group were already imprisoned, and by the time the document was said to reach Stalin the purging process was already underway. However the actual evidence introduced at trial was obtained from forced confessions.[93]

The purge had a significant effect on German decision making in World War II: many German generals opposed an invasion of Russia, but Hitler disagreed, arguing that the Red Army was less effective after its intellectual leadership had been eliminated in the purge.[94]

Wider purge

External video
  Soviet woman speech during the Great purge
  Nikita Khrushchev speech during Great purge

Eventually almost all of the Bolsheviks who had played prominent roles during the Russian Revolution of 1917, or in Lenin's Soviet government, were executed.[original research?] Out of six members of the original Politburo during the 1917 October Revolution who lived until the Great Purge, Stalin himself was the only one who remained in the Soviet Union, alive.[42] Four of the other five were executed; the fifth, Leon Trotsky, had been forced into exile outside the Soviet Union in 1929, but was assassinated in Mexico by Soviet agent Ramón Mercader in 1940. Of the seven members elected to the Politburo between the October Revolution and Lenin's death in 1924, four were executed, one (Tomsky) committed suicide, and two (Molotov and Kalinin) lived.[citation needed]

While being the most visible part, the trials and executions of the former Bolshevik leaders were only a minor aspect of the purges.[original research?] A series of documents discovered in the Central Committee archives in 1992 by Vladimir Bukovsky demonstrate that there were limits for arrests and executions as for all other activities in the planned economy.[95]

The victims were convicted in absentia and in camera by extrajudicial organs—the NKVD troikas sentenced indigenous "enemies" under NKVD Order no. 00447 and the two-man dvoiki (NKVD Commissar Nikolai Yezhov and Main State Prosecutor Andrey Vyshinsky, or their deputies) those arrested along national lines.[citation needed][96] A characteristic of all the mass operations of the NKVD was flexibility: first, the numbers—the so-called limit—could be easily increased; second, it was left entirely to the NKVD officers whether a particular prisoner was to be shot or sent to the prison camps; third, the time-limits set for the completion of single operations were extended time and again.[original research?]

The victims were executed at night, either in prisons, in the cellars of NKVD headquarters, or in a secluded area, usually a forest. The NKVD officers shot prisoners in the head using pistols.[72][97]

Intelligentsia

 
1938 NKVD arrest photo of the poet Osip Mandelstam, who died in a labor camp.
 
The NKVD photo of writer Isaac Babel made after his arrest.
 
Theatre director Vsevolod Meyerhold at the time of his arrest.
 
Botanist Nikolai Vavilov's photo, taken at the time of his arrest.

In the 1920s and 1930s, 2,000 writers, intellectuals, and artists were imprisoned and 1,500 died in prisons and concentration camps.[citation needed] After sunspot development research was judged un-Marxist, 27 astronomers disappeared between 1936 and 1938. The Meteorological Office was violently purged as early as 1933 for failing to predict weather harmful to the crops.[98] However, the toll was especially high among writers.[original research?] Those who perished during the Great Purge include:

 
Pianist Khadija Gayibova, executed in 1938.
 
Aino Forsten; (1885–1937) Finnish educator and Social Democratic politician,[99] later arrested and executed.
 
Paleontologist and geologist Dmitrii Mushketov, executed in 1938.
 
Vasili Oshchepkov, who popularized judo in the USSR and co-invented sambo. He was accused of being a Japanese spy, and extrajudicially executed in the Butyrka in 1938.
  • Poet Osip Mandelstam was arrested for reciting his famous anti-Stalin poem Stalin Epigram to his circle of friends in 1934. After intervention by Nikolai Bukharin and Boris Pasternak (Stalin jotted down in Bukharin's letter with feigned[according to whom?] indignation: "Who gave them the right to arrest Mandelstam?"), Stalin instructed NKVD to "isolate but preserve" him, and Mandelstam was "merely" exiled to Cherdyn for three years, but this proved to be a temporary reprieve. In May 1938, he was arrested again for "counter-revolutionary activities".[100] On 2 August 1938, Mandelstam was sentenced to five years in correction camps and died on 27 December 1938 at a transit camp near Vladivostok.[101] Pasternak himself was nearly purged, but Stalin is said to have crossed Pasternak's name off the list, saying "Don't touch this cloud dweller."[102]
  • Writer Isaac Babel was arrested in May 1939, and according to his confession paper (which contained a blood stain) he "confessed" to being a member of a Trotskyist organization and being recruited by French writer André Malraux to spy for France. In the final interrogation, he retracted his confession and wrote letters to the prosecutor's office stating that he had implicated innocent people, but to no avail. Babel was tried before an NKVD troika and convicted of simultaneously spying for the French, Austrians and Trotsky, as well as "membership in a terrorist organization". On 27 January 1940, he was shot in Butyrka prison.[103]
  • Writer Boris Pilnyak was arrested on 28 October 1937 for counter-revolutionary activities, spying and terrorism. One report alleged that "he held secret meetings with [André] Gide, and supplied him with information about the situation in the USSR. There is no doubt that Gide used this information in his book attacking the USSR." Pilnyak was tried on 21 April 1938. In the proceeding that lasted 15 minutes, he was condemned to death and executed shortly afterward.[103]
  • Theatre director Vsevolod Meyerhold was arrested in 1939 and shot in February 1940 for "spying" for Japanese and British intelligence. His wife, the actress Zinaida Raikh, was murdered in her apartment.[104] In a letter to Molotov dated 13 January 1940, Meyerhold wrote:

    The investigators began to use force on me, a sick 65-year-old man. I was made to lie face down and beaten on the soles of my feet and my spine with a rubber strap ... For the next few days, when those parts of my legs were covered with extensive internal hemorrhaging, they again beat the red-blue-and-yellow bruises with the strap and the pain was so intense that it felt as if boiling water was being poured on these sensitive areas. I howled and wept from the pain. I incriminated myself in the hope that by telling them lies I could end the ordeal. When I lay down on the cot and fell asleep, after 18 hours of interrogation, in order to go back in an hour's time for more, I was woken up by my own groaning and because I was jerking about like a patient in the last stages of typhoid fever.[103]

  • Georgian poet Titsian Tabidze was arrested on 10 October 1937 on a charge of treason and was tortured in prison. In a bitter humor, he named only the 18th-century Georgian poet Besiki as his accomplice in anti-Soviet activities.[105] He was executed on 16 December 1937.
  • Tabidze's lifelong friend and fellow poet, Paolo Iashvili, having earlier been forced to denounce several of his associates as the enemies of the people, shot himself with a hunting gun in the building of the Writers' Union.[106] He witnessed and was even forced to participate in public trials that ousted many of his associates from the Writers' Union, effectively condemning them to death. When Lavrentiy Beria, chief of the Soviet security and secret police apparatus under Stalin and subsequently head of the NKVD, further pressured Iashvili with the alternatives of denouncing Tabidze or being arrested and tortured by the NKVD, Iashvili killed himself.[107]
  • In early 1937, poet Pavel Nikolayevich Vasiliev is said to have defended Nikolai Bukharin as "a man of the highest nobility and the conscience of peasant Russia" at the time of his denunciation at the Pyatakov Trial (Second Moscow Trial) and damned other writers then signing the routine condemnations as "pornographic scrawls on the margins of Russian literature". He was promptly shot on 16 July 1937.[108]
  • Jan Sten, philosopher and deputy head of the Marx-Engels Institute, was Stalin's private tutor when Stalin was trying hard to study Hegel's dialectic. (Stalin received lessons twice a week from 1925 to 1928, but he found it difficult to master even some of the basic ideas. Stalin developed enduring hostility toward German idealistic philosophy, which he called "the aristocratic reaction to the French Revolution".) Sten eventually became a member of an underground opposition group, and this group later joined the Bloc of Soviet Oppositions which was led by Leon Trotsky.[37] In 1937, Sten was seized on the direct order of Stalin, who declared him one of the chiefs of "Menshevizing idealists". On 19 June 1937, Sten was put to death in Lefortovo prison.[109]
  • Poet Nikolai Klyuev was arrested in 1933 for contradicting Soviet ideology. He was shot in October 1937.
  • Russian linguist Nikolai Durnovo, born into the Durnovo noble family, was executed on 27 October 1937. He created a classification of Russian dialects that served as a base for modern scientific linguistic nomenclature.[110]
  • Mari poet and playwright Sergei Chavain was executed in Yoshkar-Ola on 11 November 1937. The State prize of Mari El is named after Chavain.
  • Ukrainian theater and movie director Les Kurbas, considered by many to be the most important Ukrainian theater director of the 20th century, was shot on 3 November 1937.
  • Russian writer and explorer Maximilian Kravkov was arrested on a charge of his alleged participation in the "Japanese-SR Terrorist Subversive Espionage Organization". He was executed on 12 October 1937.
  • Russian Esperanto writer and translator Nikolai Nekrasov was arrested in 1938, and accused of being "an organizer and leader of a fascist, espionage, terrorist organization of Esperantists". He was executed on 4 October 1938. Another Esperanto writer Vladimir Varankin was executed on 3 October 1938.
  • Playwright and avant-garde poet Nikolay Oleynikov was arrested and executed for "subversive writing" on 24 November 1937.
  • Yakut writer Platon Oyunsky, seen as one of the founders of modern Yakut literature, died in prison in 1939.
  • Russian dramaturge Adrian Piotrovsky, responsible for creating the synopsis for Sergei Prokofiev's ballet Romeo and Juliet, was executed on 21 November 1937.
  • Boris Shumyatsky, de facto executive producer for the Soviet film monopoly from 1930 to 1937, was executed as a "traitor" in 1938, following a purge of the Soviet film industry.
  • Sinologist Julian Shchutsky was convicted as a "Japanese spy" and executed on 2 February 1938.
  • Russian linguist Nikolai Nevsky, an expert on East Asian languages, was arrested by the NKVD on the charge of being a "Japanese spy". On 27 November 1937 he was executed, along with his Japanese wife Isoko Mantani-Nevsky.
  • Ukrainian drama writer Mykola Kulish was executed on 3 November 1937. He is considered to be one of the lead figures of Executed Renaissance.

Western émigré victims

Victims of the terror included American immigrants to the Soviet Union who had emigrated at the height of the Great Depression to find work. At the height of the Terror, American immigrants besieged the US embassy, begging for passports so they could leave the Soviet Union. They were turned away by embassy officials, only to be arrested on the pavement outside by lurking NKVD agents. Many[quantify] were subsequently shot dead at Butovo firing range.[111] In addition, 141 American Communists of Finnish origin were executed and buried at Sandarmokh.[112] 127 Finnish Canadians were also shot and buried there.[113]

Executions of Gulag inmates

Political prisoners already serving a sentence in the Gulag camps were also executed in large numbers. NKVD Order no. 00447 also targeted "the most vicious and stubborn anti-Soviet elements in camps", they were all "to be put into the first category" – that is, shot. NKVD Order no. 00447 decreed 10,000 executions for this contingent, but at least three times more were shot in the course of the secret mass operation, the majority in March–April 1938.[72]

Mongolian Great Purge

 
 
Statue of Khorloogiin Choibalsan in front of the National University of Mongolia, and portrait of Sheng Shicai, who both organized large-scale murderous purges in Mongolia and Xinjiang.

During the late 1930s, Stalin dispatched NKVD operatives to the Mongolian People's Republic, established a Mongolian version of the NKVD troika, and proceeded to execute tens of thousands of people accused of having ties to "pro-Japanese spy rings".[114] Buddhist lamas made up the majority of victims, with 18,000 being killed in the terror. Other victims were nobility and political and academic figures, along with some ordinary workers and herders.[115] Mass graves containing hundreds of executed Buddhist monks and civilians have been discovered as recently as 2003.[116]

Xinjiang Great Purge

The pro-Soviet leader Sheng Shicai of Xinjiang province in China launched his own purge in 1937 to coincide with Stalin's Great Purge. The Xinjiang War (1937) broke out amid the purge.[117] Sheng received assistance from the NKVD. Sheng and the Soviets alleged a massive Trotskyist conspiracy and a "Fascist Trotskyite plot" to destroy the Soviet Union. The Soviet Consul General Garegin Apresoff, General Ma Hushan, Ma Shaowu, Mahmud Sijan, the official leader of the Xinjiang province Huang Han-chang and Hoja-Niyaz were among the 435 alleged conspirators in the plot. Xinjiang came under virtual Soviet control.[118]

Timeline

The Great Purge of 1936–1938 can be roughly divided into four periods:[119]

October 1936 – February 1937
Reforming the security organizations, adopting official plans on purging the elites.
March 1937 – June 1937
Purging the elites; adopting plans for the mass repressions against the "social base" of the potential aggressors, starting of purging the "elites" from opposition.
July 1937 – October 1938
Mass repressions against "kulaks", "dangerous" ethnic minorities, family members of oppositionists, military officers, saboteurs in agriculture and industry.
November 1938 – 1939
Stopping of mass operations, abolishing of many organs of extrajudicial executions, repressions against some organizers of mass repressions.

End

 
 
Damnatio memoriae of Nikolai Yezhov. He was posthumously removed from pictures, such as here where he stood next to Joseph Stalin.

In the summer of 1938, Yezhov was relieved from his post as head of the NKVD and was eventually tried and executed. Lavrentiy Beria succeeded him as head. On 17 November 1938 a joint decree of Sovnarkom USSR and Central Committee of VKP(b) (Decree about Arrests, Prosecutor Supervision and Course of Investigation) and the subsequent order of the NKVD undersigned by Beria, cancelled most of the NKVD orders of systematic repression and suspended implementation of death sentences. The decree signaled the end of massive Soviet purges.[120] When Yezhov was executed, Stalin claimed in a private conversation with Aleksandr Yakovlev that it was because he had killed many innocent people.[121]

Michael Parrish argues that while the Great Terror ended in 1938, a lesser terror continued in the 1940s.[122] Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (a Soviet Army officer who became a prisoner for a decade in the Gulag system) presents in The Gulag Archipelago the most holistic view of the timeline of all the Leninist and Stalinist purges (1918–1956), in which the 1936–1938 purge may have been simply the one that got the most attention from people in a position to record its magnitude for posterity—the intelligentsia—by directly targeting them, whereas several other waves of the ongoing flow of purges, such as the First five-year plan of 1928–1933's collectivization and dekulakization, were just as huge and just as devoid of justice but were more successfully swallowed into oblivion in the popular memory of the (surviving) Soviet public.[123]

In some cases, high military command arrested under Yezhov were later executed under Beria. Some examples include Marshal of the Soviet Union Alexander Yegorov, arrested in April 1938 and shot (or died from torture) in February 1939 (his wife, G. A. Yegorova, was shot in August 1938); Army Commander Ivan Fedko, arrested July 1938 and shot February 1939; Flagman Konstantin Dushenov [ru], arrested May 1938 and shot February 1940; Komkor G. I. Bondar, arrested August 1938 and shot March 1939. All the aforementioned have been posthumously rehabilitated.[124]

 
Polish-born Soviet politician Stanislav Kosior, a contributor to the 1932–33 famine in Ukraine, was executed in 1939.

When the relatives of those who had been executed in 1937–38 inquired about their fate, they were told by NKVD that their arrested relatives had been sentenced to "ten years without the right of correspondence" (десять лет без права переписки). When these ten-year periods elapsed in 1947–48 but the arrested did not appear, the relatives asked MGB about their fate again and this time were told that the arrested died in imprisonment.[125]

Western reactions

Although the trials of former Soviet leaders were widely publicized, the hundreds of thousands of other arrests and executions were not. These became known in the West only as a few former gulag inmates reached the West with their stories.[126] Not only did foreign correspondents from the West fail to report on the purges, but in many Western nations (especially France), attempts were made to silence or discredit these witnesses;[127] according to Robert Conquest, Jean-Paul Sartre took the position that evidence of the camps should be ignored so the French proletariat would not be discouraged.[127] A series of legal actions ensued at which definitive evidence was presented that established the validity of the former labor camp inmates' testimony.[128]

According to Robert Conquest in his 1968 book The Great Terror: Stalin's Purge of the Thirties, with respect to the trials of former leaders, some Western observers were unintentionally or intentionally ignorant of the fraudulent nature of the charges and evidence, notably Walter Duranty of The New York Times, a Russian speaker; the American Ambassador, Joseph E. Davies, who reported, "proof ... beyond reasonable doubt to justify the verdict of treason";[129] and Beatrice and Sidney Webb, authors of Soviet Communism: A New Civilization.[130] While "Communist Parties everywhere simply transmitted the Soviet line", some of the most critical reporting also came from the left, notably The Manchester Guardian.[131] The American journalist H. R. Knickerbocker also reported on the executions. He called them in 1941 "the great purges", and described how over four years they affected "the top fourth or fifth, to estimate it conservatively, of the Party itself, of the Army, Navy, and Air Force leaders and then of the new Bolshevik intelligentsia, the foremost technicians, managers, supervisors, scientists". Knickerbocker also wrote about dekulakization: "It is a conservative estimate to say that some 5,000,000 [kulaks] ... died at once, or within a few years."[132]

Evidence and the results of research began to appear after Stalin's death. This revealed the full enormity of the Purges. The first of these sources were the revelations of Nikita Khrushchev, which particularly affected the American editors of the Communist Party USA newspaper, the Daily Worker, who, following the lead of The New York Times, published the Secret Speech in full.[133]

Rehabilitation

 
Posthumously rehabilitated, Tukhachevsky on a 1963 postage stamp of the Soviet Union
 
Monument to victims of the repressions in Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia

The Great Purge was denounced by Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev following Stalin's death. In his secret speech to the 20th CPSU congress in February 1956 (which was made public a month later), Khrushchev referred to the purges as an "abuse of power" by Stalin which resulted in enormous harm to the country. In the same speech, he recognized that many of the victims were innocent and were convicted on the basis of false confessions extracted by torture. Khrushchev later claimed in his memoirs that he had initiated the process, overcoming objections and protests from the rest of Party leadership, but the transcripts belie this, although they show differences of opinion regarding the contents.[134] Starting from 1954, some of the convictions were overturned. Mikhail Tukhachevsky and other generals convicted in the Trial of Red Army Generals were declared innocent ("rehabilitated") in 1957. The former Politburo members Yan Rudzutak and Stanislav Kosior and many lower-level victims were also declared innocent in the 1950s. Nikolai Bukharin and others convicted in the Moscow Trials were not rehabilitated until as late as 1988. Leon Trotsky, considered a major player in the Russian Revolution and a major contributor to Marxist theory, was never rehabilitated by the USSR. The book Rehabilitation: The Political Processes of the 1930s–50s (Реабилитация. Политические процессы 30-50-х годов) (1991) contains a large amount of newly presented original archive material: transcripts of interrogations, letters of convicts, and photos. The material demonstrates in detail how numerous show trials were fabricated.[citation needed]

Number of people executed

Official figures put the total number of documentable executions during the years 1937 and 1938 at 681,692,[135][136] in addition to 116,000 deaths in the Gulag,[3] and 2,000 unofficially killed in non-article 58 shootings;[3] whereas the total estimate of deaths brought about by Soviet repression during the Great Purge ranges from 950,000 to 1.2 million, which includes executions, deaths in detention and those who died shortly after being released from the Gulag, as a result of their treatment therein.[3]

According to Robert Conquest, a practice of falsification for lowering the execution numbers was disguising executions with the sentence "ten years without the right of correspondence" which almost always meant execution. All of the bodies identified from the mass graves at Vinnitsa and Kuropaty were of individuals who had received this sentence.[137] Despite this, the lower figure did roughly confirm Conquest's original 1968 estimate of 700,000 "legal" executions and in the preface to the 40th anniversary edition of The Great Terror, Conquest claimed that he had been "correct on the vital matter—the numbers put to death: about one million".[138]

According to J. Arch Getty and Oleg V. Naumov, "popular estimates of executions in the great purges vary from 500,000 to 7 million." However, according to them, "the archival evidence from the secret police rejects the astronomically high estimates often given for the number of terror victims" and "the data available at this point make it clear that the number shot in the two worst purge years [1937–38] was more likely in the hundreds of thousands than in the millions."[139] According to historian Corrina Kuhr, 700,000 people were executed during the Great Purge out of the 2.5 million who were arrested.[1] Professor Nérard François-Xavier estimates the same number of people who were sentenced to death, however he states that 1.3 million people were arrested.[2]

The Soviets themselves made their own estimates with Vyacheslav Molotov saying "The report written by that commission member…says that 1,370,000 arrests were made in the 1930s. That's too many. I responded that the figures should be thoroughly reviewed".[140]

 
Memorial events in Bykovnya Graves reserve.

Stalin's role

 
A list from the Great Purge signed by Molotov, Stalin, Voroshilov, Kaganovich, and Zhdanov

Historians with archival access have confirmed that Stalin was intimately involved in the purge. Russian historian Oleg V. Khlevniuk states "theories about the elemental, spontaneous nature of the terror, about a loss of central control over the course of mass repression, and about the role of regional leaders in initiating the terror are simply not supported by the historical record".[141] Besides signing Yezhov's lists, Stalin sometimes gave instructions concerning certain individuals. In one instance, he told Yezhov "Isn't it time to squeeze this gentleman and force him to report on his dirty little business? Where is he: in a prison or a hotel?" In another, while reviewing one of Yezhov's lists, he added to M. I. Baranov's name, "beat, beat!"[142] Stalin also signed 357 lists in 1937 and 1938 authorizing executions of some 40,000 people, and about 90% of these are confirmed to have been shot,[143] this was 7.4% of those executed legally.[144] While reviewing one such list, Stalin reportedly muttered to no one in particular: "Who's going to remember all this riff-raff in ten or twenty years time? No one. Who remembers the names now of the boyars Ivan the Terrible got rid of? No one."[145]

It is quite possible that Yezhov misled Stalin about the aspects of the purge process.[146] Many people at the time, and also a few subsequent commentators, surmised that the Great Purge wasn't started by Stalin's initiative, so the idea got about that the process was entirely out of control once it had begun.[146] Stalin may have failed to anticipate the catastrophic excesses of the NKVD under Yezhov.[146] Stalin also objected to the large numbers of people that Yezhov was purging. For example, when Yezhov announced that 200,000 party members were expelled, Stalin interrupted him, said that they were "very many" and suggested instead to only expel 30,000 and 600 former Trotskyists and Zinovievists which "would be a bigger victory".[147]

Stephen G. Wheatcroft posits that while the 'purposive deaths' caused by Hitler constitute 'murder', those caused under Stalin fall into the category of 'execution', although in terms of "causing death by criminal neglect and ruthlessness (...) Stalin probably exceeded Hitler".[148] Wheatcroft elaborates:

Stalin undoubtedly caused many innocent people to be executed, but it seems likely that he thought many of them guilty of crimes against the state and felt that the execution of others would act as a deterrent to the guilty. He signed the papers and insisted on documentation. Hitler, by contrast, wanted to be rid of the Jews and communists simply because they were Jews and communists. He was not concerned about making any pretence at legality. He was careful not to sign anything on this matter and was equally insistent on no documentation.[148]

Soviet investigation commissions

 
Opening of monument to victims of political repressions, Moscow, 1990

At least two Soviet commissions investigated the show-trials after Stalin's death. The first was headed by Molotov and included Voroshilov, Kaganovich, Suslov, Furtseva, Shvernik, Aristov, Pospelov, and Rudenko. They were given the task to investigate the materials concerning Bukharin, Rykov, Zinoviev, Tukhachevsky, and others. The commission worked in 1956–1957. While stating that the accusations against Tukhachevsky et al. should be abandoned, it failed to fully rehabilitate the victims of the three Moscow trials, although the final report does contain an admission that the accusations have not been proven during the trials and "evidence" had been produced by lies, blackmail, and "use of physical influence". Bukharin, Rykov, Zinoviev, and others were still seen as political opponents, and though the charges against them were obviously false, they could not have been rehabilitated because "for many years they headed the anti-Soviet struggle against the building of socialism in USSR".[citation needed]

The second commission largely worked from 1961 to 1963 and was headed by Shvernik ("Shvernik Commission"). It included Shelepin, Serdyuk, Mironov, Rudenko, and Semichastny. The hard work resulted in two massive reports, which detailed the mechanism of falsification of the show-trials against Bukharin, Zinoviev, Tukhachevsky, and many others. The commission based its findings in large part on eyewitness testimonies of former NKVD workers and victims of repressions, and on many documents. The commission recommended rehabilitating every accused with the exceptions of Radek and Yagoda, because Radek's materials required some further checking, and Yagoda was a criminal and one of the falsifiers of the trials (though most of the charges against him had to be dropped too, he was not a "spy", etc.). The commission stated:

Stalin committed a very grave crime against the Communist party, the socialist state, Soviet people and worldwide revolutionary movement...Together with Stalin, the responsibility for the abuse of law, mass unwarranted repressions and death of many thousands of wholly innocent people also lies on Molotov, Kaganovich, Malenkov....

Molotov stated "We would have been complete idiots if we had taken the reports at their face value. We were not idiots." and that "the cases were reviewed and some people were released"[149][150]

 
"Wall of sorrow" at the first exhibition of the victims of Stalinism in Moscow, 19 November 1988

Mass graves and memorials

In the late 1980s, with the formation of the Memorial Society and similar organisations across the Soviet Union at a time of Gorbachev's glasnost ("openness and transparency") it became possible not only to speak about the Great Terror but to begin locating the killing grounds of 1937–1938 and identifying those who lay buried there.

In 1988, for instance, the mass graves at Kurapaty in Belarus were the site of a clash between demonstrators and the police. In 1990, a boulder stone was brought from the former Solovki prison camp in the White Sea, and erected next to KGB headquarters in Moscow as a memorial to all "the victims of political repression" since 1917.

Following the collapse of the Soviet Union, many more mass graves filled with executed victims of the terror were discovered and turned into memorial sites.[151][152][153][154] Some, such as the Bykivnia killing fields near Kyiv, are said to contain up to 200,000 corpses.[155][156][157][better source needed]

In 2007, one such site, the Butovo firing range near Moscow, was turned into a shrine to the victims of Stalinism. Between August 1937 and October 1938, more than 20,000 people were shot and buried there.[158]

On 30 October 2017, President Vladimir Putin opened the Wall of Sorrow, an official but controversial recognition of the crimes of the Soviet regime.[159]

In August 2021, a mass grave containing between 5,000 and 8,000 skeletons was discovered in Odessa, Ukraine, during exploration works for a planned expansion of Odesa International Airport. The graves are believed to date back to the late 1930s during the purge.[160]

Historical interpretations

The Great Purge has provoked numerous debates about its purpose, scale, and mechanisms. According to one interpretation, Stalin's regime had to maintain its citizens in a state of fear and uncertainty to stay in power (Brzezinski, 1958). Robert Conquest emphasized Stalin's paranoia, focused on the Moscow show trial of "Old Bolsheviks", and analyzed the carefully planned and systematic destruction of the Communist Party. Some others view the Great Purge as a crucial moment, or rather the culmination, of a vast social engineering campaign started at the beginning of the 1930s (Hagenloh, 2000; Shearer, 2003; Werth, 2003).[34]

According to historian James Harris, contemporary archival research pokes "rather large holes in the traditional story" weaved by Conquest and others.[161] His findings, while not exonerating Stalin or the Soviet state, dispel the notion that the bloodletting was merely the result of Stalin attempting to establish his own personal dictatorship; evidence suggests he was committed to building the socialist state envisioned by Lenin. The real motivation for the terror, according to Harris, was an exaggerated fear of counterrevolution.[6]

So what was the motivation behind the Terror? The answers required a lot more digging, but it gradually became clearer that the violence of the late 1930s was driven by fear. Most Bolsheviks, Stalin among them, believed that the revolutions of 1789, 1848 and 1871 had failed because their leaders hadn't adequately anticipated the ferocity of the counter-revolutionary reaction from the establishment. They were determined not to make the same mistake.[162]

Two major lines of interpretation have emerged among historians. One argues that the purges reflected Stalin's ambitions, his paranoia, and his inner drive to increase his power and eliminate potential rivals. Revisionist historians explain the purges by theorizing that rival factions exploited Stalin's paranoia and used terror to enhance their own position. Peter Whitewood examines the first purge, directed at the Army, and comes up with a third interpretation that Stalin and other top leaders believing that they were always surrounded by capitalist enemies, always worried about the vulnerability and loyalty of the Red Army.[7] It was not a ploy – Stalin truly believed it. "Stalin attacked the Red Army because he seriously misperceived a serious security threat"; thus "Stalin seems to have genuinely believed that foreign‐backed enemies had infiltrated the ranks and managed to organize a conspiracy at the very heart of the Red Army." The purge hit deeply from June 1937 and November 1938, removing 35,000; many were executed. Experience in carrying out the purge facilitated purging other key elements in the wider Soviet polity.[163][164][165] Historians often cite the disruption as factors in the Red Army's disastrous military performance during the German invasion.[166] Robert W. Thurston reports that the purge was not intended to subdue the Soviet masses, many of whom helped enact the purge, but to deal with opposition to Stalin's rule among the Soviet elites.[167]

See also

References

Citations

  1. ^ a b Kuhr, Corinna (1998). "Children of "Enemies of The People" as Victims of the Great Purges". Cahiers du Monde russe. 39 (1/2): 209–220. doi:10.3406/cmr.1998.2520. ISSN 1252-6576. JSTOR 20171081 – via JSTOR. According to latest estimates 2,5 million people were arrested and 700,000 of them shot. These figures are based on reliable archival materials [...]
  2. ^ a b François-Xavier, Nérard (27 February 2009). "The Levashovo cemetery and the Great Terror in the Leningrad region". Paris Institute of Political Studies. The Yezhovshchina or Stalin's Great Terror [...] The precise end result of these operations is difficult to establish, but the total of the condemnations is estimated at roughly 1,300,000 of which 700,000 were sentenced to death, most of the others were sentenced to ten years in the camps (document translated in Werth, 2006: 143).{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: url-status (link)
  3. ^ a b c d e Ellman, Michael (2002). "Soviet Repression Statistics: Some Comments" (PDF). Europe-Asia Studies. 54 (7): 1151–1172. doi:10.1080/0966813022000017177. S2CID 43510161. The best estimate that can currently be made of the number of repression deaths in 1937–38 is the range 950,000–1.2 million, i.e. about a million. This is the estimate which should be used by historians, teachers and journalists concerned with twentieth century Russian—and world—history
  4. ^ Conquest 2008, p. 53.
  5. ^ Brett Homkes (2004). "Certainty, Probability, and Stalin's Great Party Purge". McNair Scholars Journal. 8 (1): 13.
  6. ^ a b Harris 2017, p. 16.
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  29. ^ This information was published first in 1990 in a Komsomolskaya Pravda article (October 28, 1990, p. 2). Later, it was cited by several sources, including: Albats, Yevgenia. 1995. KGB: The State Within a State. p. 101; Gellately, Robert. 2007. Lenin, Stalin, and Hitler: The Age of Social Catastrophe. Knopf. ISBN 1-4000-4005-1. p. 460; Merridale, Catherine. 2002. Night of Stone: Death and Memory in Twentieth-Century Russia. Penguin Books. ISBN 0-14-200063-9. p. 200; Colton, Timothy J. 1998. Moscow: Governing the Socialist Metropolis. Harvard University Press. ISBN 0674587499, 9780674587496. p. 286; and Alexandr Solzhenitsyn. Two Hundred Years Together.
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  94. ^ "Despite the fact that the combined firepower of the Red Army was greater than that of the Germans, the Purges had effectively crippled it by destroying the officer corps. This was the decisive element which persuaded Hitler to attack in 1941. At the Nuremberg trial, Marshal Keitel testified that many German generals had warned Hitler not to attack Russia, arguing that the Red Army was a formidable opponent. Rejecting these Hitler gave Keitel his main reason "The first-class high-ranking officers were wiped out by Stalin in 1937, and the new generation cannot yet provide the brains they need."" Roy Medvedev, Let History Judge, p.214
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Sources

Further reading

  • A. Artizov, Yu. Sigachev, I. Shevchuk, V. Khlopov under editorship of acad. A. N. Yakovlev. Rehabilitation: As It Happened. Documents of the CPSU CC Presidium and Other Materials. Vol. 2, February 1956–Early 1980s. Moscow, 2003.
  • Chase, William J. (2001). Enemies within the Gates?: The Comintern and the Stalinist Repression, 1934–1939. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. ISBN 978-0-300-08242-5.
  • Colton, Timothy J. (1998). Moscow: Governing the Socialist Metropolis. Belknap Press. ISBN 978-0-674-58749-6.
  • Conquest, Robert (1973) [1968]. The Great Terror: Stalin's Purge of the Thirties (Revised ed.). London: Macmillan. ISBN 978-0-02-527560-7.
  • Hill, Alexander (2017), The Red Army and the Second World War, Cambridge University Press, ISBN 978-1-1070-2079-5.
  • Hoffman, David L., ed. (2003). Stalinism: The Essential Readings. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers. ISBN 978-0-631-22890-5.
  • Ilic, Melanie, ed. (2006). Stalin's Terror Revisited. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
  • Karlsson, Klas-Göran; Schoenhals, Michael (2008). (PDF). Forum for Living History. ISBN 978-91-977487-2-8. Archived from the original (PDF) on 24 August 2010.
  • Lyons, Eugene (1937). Assignment in Utopia. Harcourt Brace and Company.
  • Merridale, Catherine (2002). Night of Stone: Death and Memory in Twentieth-Century Russia. London: Penguin. ISBN 978-0-14-200063-2.
  • Naimark, Norman M. (2010). Stalin's Genocides (Human Rights and Crimes against Humanity). Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. ISBN 978-0-691-14784-0.
  • Rogovin, Vadim (1996). Two Lectures: Stalin's Great Terror: Origins and Consequences—Leon Trotsky and the Fate of Marxism in the USSR. Mehring books. ISBN 978-0-929087-83-2.
  • —— (1998). 1937: Stalin's Year of Terror. Mehring Books. ISBN 978-0-929087-77-1.
  • Rosefielde, Steven (2009). Red Holocaust. London: Routledge. ISBN 978-0-415-77757-5.
  • Snyder, Timothy (2005). Sketches from a Secret War: A Polish Artist's Mission to Liberate Soviet Ukraine. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. ISBN 978-0-300-10670-1.
  • —— (2010). Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin. New York: Basic Books. ISBN 978-0-465-00239-9 – via Google Books.
  • Tzouliadis, Tim (2008). The Forsaken: An American Tragedy in Stalin's Russia. London: Penguin. ISBN 978-1-59420-168-4.
  • Watt, Donald Cameron. "Who plotted against whom? Stalin's purge of the soviet high command revisited." Journal of Soviet Military Studies 3.1 (1990): 46–65.
  • Wheatcroft, Stephen (1996). "The Scale and Nature of German and Soviet Repression and Mass Killings, 1930–45" (PDF). Europe-Asia Studies. 48 (8): 1319–1353. doi:10.1080/09668139608412415. JSTOR 152781.
  • Whitewood, Peter. The Red Army and the Great Terror: Stalin's Purge of the Soviet Military (2015)
  • Whitewood, Peter. "The Purge of the Red Army and the Soviet Mass Operations, 1937–38." Slavonic & East European Review 93.2 (2015): 286–314. online
  • —— "Subversion in the Red Army and the Military Purge of 1937–1938." Europe-Asia Studies 67.1 (2015): 102–122.
  • —— "In the shadow of the war: Bolshevik perceptions of polish subversive and military threats to the Soviet Union, 1920–32." Journal of Strategic Studies (2019): 1–24.
  • Yakovlev, Alexander N., ed. (1991). Реабилитация. Политические процессы 30-50-х годов [Rehabilitation: Political Trials of the 1930s–50s]. Moscow: ROSSPEN.
  • —— (2004) [2002]. A Century of Violence in Soviet Russia. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. ISBN 978-0-300-10322-9.

Film

  • Pultz, David, dir. 1997. Eternal Memory: Voices from the Great Terror [81:00, documentary film]. Narrated by Meryl Streep. USA.

External links

  •   Media related to Great Purge at Wikimedia Commons
  • The Case of Bukharin—Transcript of Nikolai Bukharin's testimonies and last plea; from "The Case of the Anti-Soviet Block of Rights and Trotskyites", Red Star Press, 1973, pages 369–439, 767–779
  • Actual video footage from Third Moscow Trial on YouTube
  • Nicolas Werth Case Study: The NKVD Mass Secret Operation n° 00447 (August 1937 – November 1938)
  • "Documenting the Death Toll: Research into the Mass Murder of Foreigners in Moscow, 1937–38" by Barry McLoughlin, American Historical Association, 1999

great, purge, this, article, about, 1936, 1938, soviet, purge, political, purges, general, purge, period, french, revolution, reign, terror, other, uses, great, terror, disambiguation, great, terror, russian, Большой, террор, also, known, year, год, tridtsat, . This article is about the 1936 1938 Soviet purge For political purges in general see Purge For the period of the French Revolution see Reign of Terror For other uses see Great Terror disambiguation The Great Purge or the Great Terror Russian Bolshoj terror also known as the Year of 37 37 j god Tridtsat sedmoi god and the Yezhovshchina period of Yezhov 8 was Soviet General Secretary Joseph Stalin s campaign to solidify his power over the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and the state the purges were also designed to remove the remaining influence of Leon Trotsky as well as other prominent political rivals within the party It occurred from August 1936 to March 1938 9 Great PurgePart of the Purges of the Communist Party of the Soviet UnionPeople of Vinnytsia searching for relatives among the exhumed victims of the Vinnytsia massacre 1937LocationSoviet Union East Turkestan Mongolian People s RepublicDate1936 1938TargetPolitical opponents Trotskyists Red Army leadership kulaks religious activists and leadersAttack typeSummary executions Massacres Mass murder Ethnic cleansingDeaths700 000 1 2 to 1 2 million 3 higher estimates overlap with at least 116 000 3 deaths in the Gulag system PerpetratorsJoseph Stalin the NKVD Genrikh Yagoda Nikolai Yezhov Lavrentiy Beria Ivan Serov and others Vyacheslav Molotov Andrey Vyshinsky Lazar Kaganovich Kliment Voroshilov Robert Eikhe and othersMotiveElimination of political opponents 4 consolidation of power 5 fear of counterrevolution 6 fear of party infiltration 7 Following the death of Vladimir Lenin in 1924 a power vacuum opened in the Communist Party the ruling party in the Soviet Union USSR Various established figures in Lenin s government attempted to succeed him Joseph Stalin the party s General Secretary outmaneuvered political opponents and ultimately gained control of the party by 1928 10 Initially Stalin s leadership was widely accepted his main political adversary Trotsky was forced into exile in 1929 and the doctrine of socialism in one country became enshrined party policy However by the early 1930s party officials began losing faith in his leadership following the human cost of the first five year plan and the collectivization of agriculture By 1934 several of Stalin s rivals such as Trotsky began calling for Stalin s removal and attempted to break his influence over the party 11 In this atmosphere of doubt and suspicion a popular high ranking official Sergei Kirov was assassinated His death led to an investigation that revealed a network of party members supposedly working against Stalin including several of Stalin s rivals 12 Many of those arrested after Kirov s assassination also confessed plans to kill Stalin himself including high ranking party officials 13 The validity of these claims is still debated by historians but there is consensus that Kirov s death was the flashpoint where Stalin took action and began the purges 14 15 By 1936 Stalin s paranoia reached its peak The fear of losing his position and the potential return of Trotsky drove him into authorizing the Great Purge The purges themselves were largely conducted by the NKVD People s Commissariat for Internal Affairs the secret police of the USSR The NKVD began the removal of the central party leadership Old Bolsheviks government officials and regional party bosses 16 Eventually the purges were expanded to the Red Army and military high command which had a disastrous effect on the military 17 18 Three successive trials were held in Moscow that removed most of the Old Bolsheviks and the challenges to Stalin s position 19 As the scope of the purge began widening the omnipresent suspicion of saboteurs and counter revolutionaries began impacting civilian life The NKVD began targeting certain ethnic minorities such as the Volga Germans who were subjected to forced deportation and extreme repression During its mass operations the NKVD widely utilized imprisonment torture violent interrogation and arbitrary executions to solidify control over civilians through fear 20 In 1938 Stalin reversed his stance on the purges and declared that the internal enemies had been removed Stalin criticized the NKVD for carrying out mass executions and subsequently executed Genrikh Yagoda and Nikolai Yezhov who headed the NKVD during the purge years Despite the Great Purge being over the atmosphere of mistrust and widespread surveillance continued for decades after Scholars estimate the death toll for the Great Purge 1936 1938 to be roughly 700 000 21 22 The term great purge itself was popularized by the historian Robert Conquest in his 1968 book The Great Terror Conquest s title itself was an allusion to the period from the French Revolution known as the Reign of Terror 23 While the Soviet government desired to put Trotsky on trial during the purge his exile prevented this Trotsky survived the purge though he would be assassinated in 1940 by the NKVD on the orders of Stalin 24 19 Contents 1 Introduction 2 Background 3 Moscow Trials 3 1 First and Second Moscow trials 3 1 1 Dewey Commission 3 1 2 Implication of the Rightists 3 2 Third Moscow trial 3 2 1 Bukharin s confession 4 Ex kulaks and other anti Soviet elements 5 Campaigns targeting nationalities 6 Purge of the army 7 Wider purge 7 1 Intelligentsia 7 2 Western emigre victims 7 3 Executions of Gulag inmates 7 4 Mongolian Great Purge 7 5 Xinjiang Great Purge 8 Timeline 9 End 10 Western reactions 11 Rehabilitation 12 Number of people executed 13 Stalin s role 14 Soviet investigation commissions 15 Mass graves and memorials 16 Historical interpretations 17 See also 18 References 18 1 Citations 18 2 Sources 19 Further reading 19 1 Film 20 External linksIntroduction Edit An excerpt of NKVD Order No 00447 The politburo decision to extend the time limits of the national line ethnic based purge operations signed by Stalin Molotov Kaganovich Voroshilov Mikoyan and Chubar The term repression was officially used by the leader of the Soviet Union at the time Soviet general secretary Joseph Stalin to describe the prosecution of people considered counter revolutionaries and enemies of the people Historians debate the causes of the purge such as Stalin s paranoia or his desire to remove dissenters from the Communist Party or to consolidate his authority The purges began in the Red Army and the techniques developed there were quickly adapted to purges in other sectors 25 Most public attention was focused on the purge of certain parts of the leadership of the Communist Party as well as of government bureaucrats and leaders of the armed forces most of whom were Party members The campaigns also affected many other categories of the society intelligentsia peasants especially those lending out money or wealth kulaks and professionals 26 A series of NKVD operations affected a number of national minorities citation needed accused of being fifth column communities A number of purges were officially explained as an elimination of the possibilities of sabotage and espionage by the Polish Military Organisation and consequently many victims of the purge were ordinary Soviet citizens of Polish origin citation needed According to Nikita Khrushchev s 1956 speech On the Cult of Personality and Its Consequences and to historian Robert Conquest a great number of accusations notably those presented at the Moscow show trials were based on forced confessions often obtained through torture 27 and on loose interpretations of Article 58 of the RSFSR Penal Code which dealt with counter revolutionary crimes Due legal process as defined by Soviet law in force at the time was often largely replaced with summary proceedings by NKVD troikas 28 Hundreds of thousands of victims were accused of various political crimes espionage wrecking sabotage anti Soviet agitation conspiracies to prepare uprisings and coups They were quickly executed by shooting or sent to the Gulag labor camps Many died at the penal labor camps of starvation disease exposure and overwork Other methods of dispatching victims were used on an experimental basis In Moscow the use of gas vans to kill the victims during their transportation to the Butovo firing range has been documented 29 The Great Purge began under NKVD chief Genrikh Yagoda but reached its peak between September 1936 and August 1938 under the leadership of Nikolai Yezhov hence the name Yezhovshchina The campaigns were carried out according to the general line of the party often by direct orders of the politburo headed by Stalin 30 Background EditSee also Purges of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union From 1930 onwards the Party and police officials feared the social disorder caused by the upheavals of forced collectivization of peasants and the resulting famine of 1932 1933 as well as the massive and uncontrolled migration of millions of peasants into cities The threat of war heightened Stalin s and generally Soviet perception of marginal and politically suspect populations as the potential source of an uprising in case of invasion Forged documents and misinformation spread by Nazi Germany in order to incriminate innocent Soviet citizens also contributed to this perception 31 Stalin began to plan for the preventive elimination of such potential recruits for a mythical fifth column of wreckers terrorists and spies 32 33 34 Leon Trotsky in 1929 shortly before being driven out of the Soviet Union The term purge in Soviet political slang was an abbreviation of the expression purge of the Party ranks In 1933 for example the Party expelled some 400 000 people But from 1936 until 1953 the term changed its meaning because being expelled from the Party came to mean almost certain arrest imprisonment and often execution According to an October 1993 study published in The American Historical Review much of the Great Purge was directed against the widespread banditry and criminal activity which was occurring in the Soviet Union at the time 35 The political purge was primarily an effort by Stalin to eliminate challenge from past and potential opposition groups including the left and right wings led by Leon Trotsky and Nikolai Bukharin respectively Following the Civil War and reconstruction of the Soviet economy in the late 1920s veteran Bolsheviks no longer thought necessary the temporary wartime dictatorship which had passed from Lenin to Stalin Stalin s opponents inside the Communist Party chided him as undemocratic and lax on bureaucratic corruption 36 This opposition to current leadership may have accumulated substantial support among the working class by attacking the privileges and luxuries the state offered to its high paid elite The Ryutin affair seemed to vindicate Stalin s suspicions Ryutin was working with the even larger secret Opposition Bloc in which Leon Trotsky and Grigori Zinoviev participated 37 38 and which later led to both of their deaths Stalin enforced a ban on party factions and banned those party members who had opposed him effectively ending democratic centralism In the new form of Party organization the Politburo and Stalin in particular were the sole dispensers of ideology This required the elimination of all Marxists with different views especially those among the prestigious old guard of revolutionaries As the purges began the government through the NKVD shot Bolshevik heroes including Mikhail Tukhachevsky and Bela Kun as well as the majority of Lenin s Politburo for disagreements in policy The NKVD attacked the supporters friends and family of these heretical Marxists whether they lived in Russia or not The NKVD nearly annihilated Trotsky s family before killing him in Mexico the NKVD agent Ramon Mercader was part of an assassination task force put together by Special Agent Pavel Sudoplatov under the personal orders of Stalin 39 Leningrad party leader Sergei Kirov with Stalin and his daughter Svetlana in 1934 In 1934 Stalin used the murder of Sergey Kirov as a pretext to launch the Great Purge in which about a million people perished see Number of people executed Some later historians came to believe that Stalin arranged the murder or at least that there was sufficient evidence to reach such a conclusion 40 Kirov was a staunch Stalin loyalist but Stalin may have viewed him as a potential rival because of his emerging popularity among the moderates The 1934 Party Congress elected Kirov to the central committee with only three votes against the fewest of any candidate while Stalin received 292 votes against After Kirov s assassination the NKVD charged the ever growing group of former oppositionists with Kirov s murder as well as a growing list of other offenses including treason terrorism sabotage and espionage Another justification for the purge was to remove any possible fifth column in case of a war Vyacheslav Molotov and Lazar Kaganovich participants in the repression as members of the Politburo maintained this justification throughout the purge they each signed many death lists 41 Stalin believed war was imminent threatened both by an explicitly hostile Germany and an expansionist Japan The Soviet press portrayed the country as threatened from within by fascist spies 40 From the October Revolution 42 onward 43 Lenin had used repression against perceived and legitimate enemies of the Bolsheviks as a systematic method of instilling fear and facilitating control over the population in a campaign called the Red Terror As the Russian Civil War drew to a close this campaign was relaxed although the secret police did remain active From 1924 to 1928 the mass repression including incarceration in the Gulag system dropped significantly 44 By 1929 Stalin had outmaneuvered his political opponents and gained full control over the party He organized a committee to begin the process of industrialization of the Soviet Union Backlash against industrialization and collectivization of agriculture escalated which prompted Stalin to increase police presence in rural areas Soviet authorities increased repression against the kulaks who were wealthy peasants that owned farmland in a policy called dekulakization The kulaks responded by destroying crop yields and other acts of sabotage against the Soviet government 45 The food shortage created lead to a mass famine across the USSR and slowed the Five Year Plan Lev Kopelev wrote In Ukraine 1937 began in 1933 referring to the comparatively early beginning of the Soviet crackdown in Ukraine 46 418 A distinctive feature of the Great Purge was that for the first time members of the ruling party were included on a massive scale as victims of the repression In addition to ordinary citizens prominent members of the Communist Party were also targets for the purges 47 The purge of the Party was accompanied by the purge of the whole society Soviet historians organize the Great Purge into three corresponding trials The following events are used for the demarcation of the period 1936 the first Moscow trial 1937 introduction of NKVD troikas for implementation of revolutionary justice 1937 passage of Article 58 14 about counter revolutionary sabotage 1937 the second Moscow trial 1937 the military purge 48 1938 the third Moscow trial Moscow Trials EditMain article Moscow trials First and Second Moscow trials Edit Bolshevik revolutionaries Leon Trotsky Lev Kamenev and Grigory Zinoviev Between 1936 and 1938 three very large Moscow trials of former senior Communist Party leaders were held in which they were accused of conspiring with fascist and capitalist powers to assassinate Stalin and other Soviet leaders dismember the Soviet Union and restore capitalism These trials were highly publicized and extensively covered by the outside world which was mesmerized by the spectacle of Lenin s closest associates confessing to most outrageous crimes and begging for death sentences original research The first trial was of 16 members of the so called Trotskyite Kamenevite Zinovievite Leftist Counter Revolutionary Bloc held in August 1936 49 at which the chief defendants were Grigory Zinoviev and Lev Kamenev two of the most prominent former party leaders who had indeed been members of a Conspiratorial Bloc that opposed Stalin although its activities were exaggerated 37 Among other accusations they were incriminated with the assassination of Kirov and plotting to kill Stalin After confessing to the charges all were sentenced to death and executed 50 The second trial in January 1937 involved 17 lesser figures known as the anti Soviet Trotskyite centre which included Karl Radek Yuri Piatakov and Grigory Sokolnikov and were accused of plotting with Trotsky who was said to be conspiring with Germany Thirteen of the defendants were eventually executed by shooting The rest received sentences in labor camps where they soon died 51 There was also a secret trial before a military tribunal of a group of Red Army commanders including Mikhail Tukhachevsky in June 1937 52 It is now known that the confessions were given only after great psychological pressure and torture had been applied to the defendants 53 From the accounts of former OGPU officer Alexander Orlov and others the methods used to extract the confessions are known such tortures as repeated beatings simulated drownings making prisoners stand or go without sleep for days on end and threats to arrest and execute the prisoners families For example Kamenev s teenage son was arrested and charged with terrorism After months of such interrogation the defendants were driven to despair and exhaustion 54 Zinoviev and Kamenev demanded as a condition for confessing a direct guarantee from the Politburo that their lives and that of their families and followers would be spared This offer was accepted but when they were taken to the alleged Politburo meeting only Stalin Kliment Voroshilov and Yezhov were present Stalin claimed that they were the commission authorized by the Politburo and gave assurances that death sentences would not be carried out After the trial Stalin not only broke his promise to spare the defendants he had most of their relatives arrested and shot 55 Dewey Commission Edit Main article Dewey Commission In May 1937 the Commission of Inquiry into the Charges Made against Leon Trotsky in the Moscow Trials commonly known as the Dewey Commission was set up in the United States by supporters of Trotsky to establish the truth about the trials The commission was headed by the noted American philosopher and educator John Dewey Although the hearings were obviously conducted with a view to proving Trotsky s innocence they brought to light evidence which established that some of the specific charges made at the trials could not be true 56 For example Georgy Pyatakov testified that he had flown to Oslo in December 1935 to receive terrorist instructions from Trotsky The Dewey Commission established that no such flight had taken place 57 Another defendant Ivan Smirnov confessed to taking part in the assassination of Sergei Kirov in December 1934 at a time when he had already been in prison for a year The Dewey Commission later published its findings in a 422 page book titled Not Guilty Its conclusions asserted the innocence of all those condemned in the Moscow Trials In its summary the commission wroteIndependent of extrinsic evidence the Commission finds That the conduct of the Moscow Trials was such as to convince any unprejudiced person that no attempt was made to ascertain the truth That while confessions are necessarily entitled to the most serious consideration the confessions themselves contain such inherent improbabilities as to convince the Commission that they do not represent the truth irrespective of any means used to obtain them That Trotsky never instructed any of the accused or witnesses in the Moscow trials to enter into agreements with foreign powers against the Soviet Union and that Trotsky never recommended plotted or attempted the restoration of capitalism in the USSR The commission concluded We therefore find the Moscow Trials to be frame ups 58 Implication of the Rightists Edit In the second trial Karl Radek testified that there was a third organization separate from the cadres which had passed through Trotsky s school 59 as well as semi Trotskyites quarter Trotskyites one eighth Trotskyites people who helped us not knowing of the terrorist organization but sympathizing with us people who from liberalism from a Fronde against the Party gave us this help 60 By the third organization he meant the last remaining former opposition group called the Rightists led by Bukharin whom he implicated by saying I feel guilty of one thing more even after admitting my guilt and exposing the organisation I stubbornly refused to give evidence about Bukharin I knew that Bukharin s situation was just as hopeless as my own because our guilt if not juridically then in essence was the same But we are close friends and intellectual friendship is stronger than other friendships I knew that Bukharin was in the same state of upheaval as myself That is why I did not want to deliver him bound hand and foot to the People s Commissariat of Home Affairs Just as in relation to our other cadres I wanted Bukharin himself to lay down his arms 59 Third Moscow trial Edit Further information Case of the Anti Soviet Bloc of Rightists and Trotskyites NKVD chiefs responsible for conducting mass repressions left to right Yakov Agranov Genrikh Yagoda unknown Stanislav Redens All three were themselves eventually arrested and executed The third and final trial in March 1938 known as The Trial of the Twenty One is the most famous of the Soviet show trials because of persons involved and the scope of charges which tied together all loose threads from earlier trials Meant to be the culmination of previous trials neutrality is disputed it included 21 defendants alleged to belong to the Bloc of Rightists and Trotskyites supposedly led by Nikolai Bukharin the former chairman of the Communist International former premier Alexei Rykov Christian Rakovsky Nikolai Krestinsky and Genrikh Yagoda recently disgraced head of the NKVD 37 Although an Opposition Bloc led by Trotsky and with zinovievites really existed Pierre Broue asserts that Bukharin was not involved 37 Differently from Broue one of his former allies 61 Jules Humbert Droz said in his memoirs that Bukharin told him that he formed a secret bloc with Zinoviev and Kamenev in order to remove Stalin from leadership 62 The fact that Yagoda was one of the accused showed the speed at which the purges were consuming their own It was now alleged that Bukharin and others sought to assassinate Lenin and Stalin from 1918 murder Maxim Gorky by poison partition the U S S R and hand its territories to Germany Japan and Great Britain and other charges citation needed Even previously sympathetic observers who had accepted the earlier trials found it more difficult to accept these new allegations as they became ever more absurd and the purge expanded to include almost every living Old Bolshevik leader except Stalin and Kalinin citation needed No other crime of the Stalin years so captivated Western intellectuals as the trial and execution of Bukharin who was a Marxist theorist of international standing 63 For some prominent communists such as Bertram Wolfe Jay Lovestone Arthur Koestler and Heinrich Brandler the Bukharin trial marked their final break with communism and even turned the first three into fervent anti communists eventually 64 65 To them Bukharin s confession symbolized the depredations of communism which not only destroyed its sons but also conscripted them in self destruction and individual abnegation 63 Bukharin s confession Edit Nikolai Bukharin Russian Bolshevik revolutionary executed in 1938 On the first day of trial Krestinsky caused a sensation when he repudiated his written confession and pleaded not guilty to all the charges However he changed his plea the next day after special measures which dislocated his left shoulder among other things 66 Anastas Mikoyan and Vyacheslav Molotov later claimed that Bukharin was never tortured but it is now known neutrality is disputed that his interrogators were given the order beating permitted and were under great pressure to extract confession out of the star defendant Bukharin initially held out for three months but threats to his young wife and infant son combined with methods of physical influence wore him down But when he read his confession amended and corrected personally by Stalin he withdrew his whole confession The examination started all over again with a double team of interrogators 67 Bukharin s confession in particular became subject of much debate among Western observers inspiring Koestler s acclaimed novel Darkness at Noon and philosophical essay by Maurice Merleau Ponty in Humanism and Terror His confessions were somewhat different from others in that while he pleaded guilty to sum total of crimes he denied knowledge when it came to specific crimes Some astute observers noted that he would allow only what was in written confession and refuse to go any further citation needed The result was a curious mix of fulsome confessions of being a degenerate fascist working for restoration of capitalism and subtle criticisms of the trial One observer noted that after disproving several charges against him Bukharin proceeded to demolish or rather showed he could very easily demolish the whole case 68 He continued by saying that the confession of the accused is not essential The confession of the accused is a medieval principle of jurisprudence in a trial that was based solely on confessions He finished his last plea with the words 69 T he monstrousness of my crime is immeasurable especially in the new stage of struggle of the U S S R May this trial be the last severe lesson and may the great might of the U S S R become clear to all Romain Rolland and others wrote to Stalin seeking clemency for Bukharin but all the leading defendants were executed except Rakovsky and two others who were killed in NKVD prisoner massacres in 1941 Despite the promise to spare his family Bukharin s wife Anna Larina was sent to a labor camp but she survived to see her husband posthumously rehabilitated a half century later by the Soviet state under Mikhail Gorbachev in 1988 citation needed Ex kulaks and other anti Soviet elements EditOn 2 July 1937 in a top secret order to regional Party and NKVD chiefs Stalin instructed them to produce the estimated number of kulaks and criminals in their districts These individuals were to be arrested and executed or sent to the gulag camps The party chiefs complied and produced these lists within days with figures which roughly corresponded to the individuals who were already under secret police surveillance 34 On 30 July 1937 the NKVD Order no 00447 was issued directed against ex kulaks and other anti Soviet elements such as former officials of the Tsarist regime former members of political parties other than the communist party etc They were to be executed or sent to Gulag prison camps extrajudicially under the decisions of NKVD troikas The following categories appear to have been on index cards catalogues of suspects assembled over the years by the NKVD and were systematically tracked down ex kulaks previously deported to special settlements in inhospitable parts of the country Siberia Urals Kazakhstan Far North former tsarist civil servants former officers of the White Army participants in peasant rebellions members of the clergy persons deprived of voting rights former members of non Bolshevik parties ordinary criminals like thieves known to the police and various other socially harmful elements 70 However a large number of people were arrested at random in sweeps on the basis of denunciations or because they were related to were friends with or knew people already arrested Engineers peasants railwaymen and other types of workers were arrested during the Kulak Operation based on the fact that they worked for or near important strategic sites and factories where work accidents had occurred due to frantic rhythms and plans During this period the NKVD reopened these cases and relabeled them as sabotage or wrecking 71 Yevgeny Ludvig Karlovich Miller one of the remaining leaders of the White movement was kidnapped by the NKVD in 1937 and executed 19 months later The Orthodox clergy including active parishioners was nearly annihilated 85 of the 35 000 members of the clergy were arrested Particularly vulnerable to repression were also the so called special settlers spetzpereselentsy who were under permanent police surveillance and constituted a huge pool of potential enemies to draw on At least 100 000 of them were arrested in the course of the Great Terror 72 Common criminals such as thieves violators of the passport regime etc were also dealt with in a summary way In Moscow for example nearly one third of the 20 765 persons executed on the Butovo firing range were charged with a non political criminal offence 72 To carry out the mass arrests the 25 000 officers of the State Security personnel of NKVD were complemented with units of ordinary police and Komsomol Young Communist League and civilian Communist Party members Seeking to fulfill the quotas the police rounded up people in markets and train stations with the purpose of arresting social outcasts 34 Local units of the NKVD in order to meet their casework minimums and force confessions out of arrestees worked long uninterrupted shifts during which they interrogated tortured and beat the prisoners In many cases those arrested were forced to sign blank pages which were later filled in with a fabricated confession by the interrogators 34 After the interrogations the files were submitted to NKVD troikas which pronounced the verdicts in the absence of the accused During a half day long session a troika went through several hundred cases delivering either a death sentence or a sentence to the Gulag labor camps Death sentences were immediately enforceable The executions were carried out at night either in prisons or in secluded areas run by the NKVD and located as a rule on the outskirts of major cities 70 The Kulak Operation was the largest single campaign of repression in 1937 38 with 669 929 people arrested and 376 202 executed more than half the total of known executions 73 Campaigns targeting nationalities EditMain article Mass operations of the NKVD Israil Pliner 1896 1939 chief of Gulag NKVD 1937 1938 later himself arrested and executed in 1939 A series of mass operations of the NKVD was carried out from 1937 through 1938 targeting specific nationalities within the Soviet Union on the order of Nikolai Yezhov The Polish operation of the NKVD was the largest of this kind 74 The Polish operation claimed the largest number of the NKVD victims 143 810 arrests and 111 091 executions according to records Snyder estimates that at least eighty five thousand of them were ethnic Poles 74 The remainder were suspected of being Polish without further inquiry 75 Poles comprised 12 5 of those who were killed during the Great Terror while comprising only 0 4 of the population Overall national minorities targeted in these campaigns composed 36 76 of the victims of the Great Purge despite being only 1 6 76 of the Soviet Union s population 74 76 of ethnic minorities arrested during the Great Purge were executed while those sentenced during the Kulak Operation had only a 50 chance of being executed 76 though this may have been due to the Gulag camp s lack of space in the late stages of the Purge rather than deliberate discrimination in sentencing 76 The wives and children of those arrested and executed were dealt with by the NKVD Order No 00486 The women were sentenced to forced labour for 5 or 10 years 77 Their minor children were put in orphanages All possessions were confiscated Extended families were purposely left with nothing to live on which usually sealed their fate as well affecting up to 200 000 250 000 people of Polish background depending on the size of their families 77 The NKVD national operations were conducted on a quota system using album procedure The officials were mandated to arrest and execute a specific number of so called counter revolutionaries compiled by administration using various statistics but also telephone books with names sounding non Russian 78 The Polish Operation of the NKVD served as a model for a series of similar NKVD secret decrees targeting a number of the Soviet Union s diaspora nationalities the Finnish Latvian Estonian Bulgarian Afghan Iranian Greek and Chinese 79 Of the operations against national minorities it was the largest one second only to the Kulak Operation in terms of the number of victims According to Timothy Snyder ethnic Poles constituted the largest group of victims in the Great Terror comprising less than 0 5 of the country s population but comprising 12 5 of those executed 80 Timothy Snyder attributes 300 000 deaths during the Great Purge to national terror including ethnic minorities and Ukrainian Kulaks who survived the early 1930s 81 Concerning diaspora minorities the vast majority of whom were Soviet citizens and whose ancestors had resided for decades and sometimes centuries in the Soviet Union and Russian Empire this designation absolutized their cross border ethnicities as the only salient aspect of their identity sufficient proof of their disloyalty and sufficient justification for their arrest and execution Martin 2001 338 82 Some scholars have called the National Operations of the NKVD genocidal 83 84 85 86 Norman Naimark called Stalin s policy towards Poles in the 1930s genocidal 86 however he doesn t consider the Great Purge entirely genocidal because it also targeted political opponents 86 Most scholars however focus on the security dilemma in the border areas suggesting the need to secure the ethnic integrity of Soviet space vis a vis neighboring capitalistic enemy states 79 They stress the role of international relations and believe that representatives of these minorities were killed not because of their ethnicity but because of their possible relations to countries hostile to the USSR and fear of disloyalty in the case of an invasion 79 Nevertheless little proof exists to suggest that Russia s and Stalin s alleged prejudices played a central causal role in the Great Purge 87 Purge of the army EditFurther information Case of the Trotskyist Anti Soviet Military Organization The first five Marshals of the Soviet Union in November 1935 l r Mikhail Tukhachevsky Semyon Budyonny Kliment Voroshilov Vasily Blyukher Alexander Yegorov Only Budyonny and Voroshilov survived the Great Purge The purge of the Red Army and Military Maritime Fleet removed three of five marshals then equivalent to four star generals 13 of 15 army commanders then equivalent to three star generals 88 eight of nine admirals the purge fell heavily on the Navy who were suspected of exploiting their opportunities for foreign contacts 89 50 of 57 army corps commanders 154 out of 186 division commanders 16 of 16 army commissars and 25 of 28 army corps commissars 90 At first it was thought 25 50 of Red Army officers had been purged the true figure is now known to be in the area of 3 7 7 7 This discrepancy was the result of a systematic underestimation of the true size of the Red Army officer corps and it was overlooked that most of those purged were merely expelled from the Party Thirty percent of officers purged in 1937 1939 were allowed to return to service 91 The purge of the army was claimed to be supported by German forged documents said to have been correspondence between Marshal Tukhachevsky and members of the German high command 92 The claim is unsupported by facts as by the time the documents were supposedly created two people from the eight in the Tukhachevsky group were already imprisoned and by the time the document was said to reach Stalin the purging process was already underway However the actual evidence introduced at trial was obtained from forced confessions 93 The purge had a significant effect on German decision making in World War II many German generals opposed an invasion of Russia but Hitler disagreed arguing that the Red Army was less effective after its intellectual leadership had been eliminated in the purge 94 Wider purge EditExternal video Soviet woman speech during the Great purge Nikita Khrushchev speech during Great purgeThis section needs additional citations for verification Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources Unsourced material may be challenged and removed February 2022 Learn how and when to remove this template message This section possibly contains original research Please improve it by verifying the claims made and adding inline citations Statements consisting only of original research should be removed February 2022 Learn how and when to remove this template message Eventually almost all of the Bolsheviks who had played prominent roles during the Russian Revolution of 1917 or in Lenin s Soviet government were executed original research Out of six members of the original Politburo during the 1917 October Revolution who lived until the Great Purge Stalin himself was the only one who remained in the Soviet Union alive 42 Four of the other five were executed the fifth Leon Trotsky had been forced into exile outside the Soviet Union in 1929 but was assassinated in Mexico by Soviet agent Ramon Mercader in 1940 Of the seven members elected to the Politburo between the October Revolution and Lenin s death in 1924 four were executed one Tomsky committed suicide and two Molotov and Kalinin lived citation needed While being the most visible part the trials and executions of the former Bolshevik leaders were only a minor aspect of the purges original research A series of documents discovered in the Central Committee archives in 1992 by Vladimir Bukovsky demonstrate that there were limits for arrests and executions as for all other activities in the planned economy 95 The victims were convicted in absentia and in camera by extrajudicial organs the NKVD troikas sentenced indigenous enemies under NKVD Order no 00447 and the two man dvoiki NKVD Commissar Nikolai Yezhov and Main State Prosecutor Andrey Vyshinsky or their deputies those arrested along national lines citation needed 96 A characteristic of all the mass operations of the NKVD was flexibility first the numbers the so called limit could be easily increased second it was left entirely to the NKVD officers whether a particular prisoner was to be shot or sent to the prison camps third the time limits set for the completion of single operations were extended time and again original research The victims were executed at night either in prisons in the cellars of NKVD headquarters or in a secluded area usually a forest The NKVD officers shot prisoners in the head using pistols 72 97 Intelligentsia Edit See also Executed Renaissance 1938 NKVD arrest photo of the poet Osip Mandelstam who died in a labor camp The NKVD photo of writer Isaac Babel made after his arrest Theatre director Vsevolod Meyerhold at the time of his arrest Botanist Nikolai Vavilov s photo taken at the time of his arrest In the 1920s and 1930s 2 000 writers intellectuals and artists were imprisoned and 1 500 died in prisons and concentration camps citation needed After sunspot development research was judged un Marxist 27 astronomers disappeared between 1936 and 1938 The Meteorological Office was violently purged as early as 1933 for failing to predict weather harmful to the crops 98 However the toll was especially high among writers original research Those who perished during the Great Purge include Pianist Khadija Gayibova executed in 1938 Aino Forsten 1885 1937 Finnish educator and Social Democratic politician 99 later arrested and executed Paleontologist and geologist Dmitrii Mushketov executed in 1938 Vasili Oshchepkov who popularized judo in the USSR and co invented sambo He was accused of being a Japanese spy and extrajudicially executed in the Butyrka in 1938 Poet Osip Mandelstam was arrested for reciting his famous anti Stalin poem Stalin Epigram to his circle of friends in 1934 After intervention by Nikolai Bukharin and Boris Pasternak Stalin jotted down in Bukharin s letter with feigned according to whom indignation Who gave them the right to arrest Mandelstam Stalin instructed NKVD to isolate but preserve him and Mandelstam was merely exiled to Cherdyn for three years but this proved to be a temporary reprieve In May 1938 he was arrested again for counter revolutionary activities 100 On 2 August 1938 Mandelstam was sentenced to five years in correction camps and died on 27 December 1938 at a transit camp near Vladivostok 101 Pasternak himself was nearly purged but Stalin is said to have crossed Pasternak s name off the list saying Don t touch this cloud dweller 102 Writer Isaac Babel was arrested in May 1939 and according to his confession paper which contained a blood stain he confessed to being a member of a Trotskyist organization and being recruited by French writer Andre Malraux to spy for France In the final interrogation he retracted his confession and wrote letters to the prosecutor s office stating that he had implicated innocent people but to no avail Babel was tried before an NKVD troika and convicted of simultaneously spying for the French Austrians and Trotsky as well as membership in a terrorist organization On 27 January 1940 he was shot in Butyrka prison 103 Writer Boris Pilnyak was arrested on 28 October 1937 for counter revolutionary activities spying and terrorism One report alleged that he held secret meetings with Andre Gide and supplied him with information about the situation in the USSR There is no doubt that Gide used this information in his book attacking the USSR Pilnyak was tried on 21 April 1938 In the proceeding that lasted 15 minutes he was condemned to death and executed shortly afterward 103 Theatre director Vsevolod Meyerhold was arrested in 1939 and shot in February 1940 for spying for Japanese and British intelligence His wife the actress Zinaida Raikh was murdered in her apartment 104 In a letter to Molotov dated 13 January 1940 Meyerhold wrote The investigators began to use force on me a sick 65 year old man I was made to lie face down and beaten on the soles of my feet and my spine with a rubber strap For the next few days when those parts of my legs were covered with extensive internal hemorrhaging they again beat the red blue and yellow bruises with the strap and the pain was so intense that it felt as if boiling water was being poured on these sensitive areas I howled and wept from the pain I incriminated myself in the hope that by telling them lies I could end the ordeal When I lay down on the cot and fell asleep after 18 hours of interrogation in order to go back in an hour s time for more I was woken up by my own groaning and because I was jerking about like a patient in the last stages of typhoid fever 103 Georgian poet Titsian Tabidze was arrested on 10 October 1937 on a charge of treason and was tortured in prison In a bitter humor he named only the 18th century Georgian poet Besiki as his accomplice in anti Soviet activities 105 He was executed on 16 December 1937 Tabidze s lifelong friend and fellow poet Paolo Iashvili having earlier been forced to denounce several of his associates as the enemies of the people shot himself with a hunting gun in the building of the Writers Union 106 He witnessed and was even forced to participate in public trials that ousted many of his associates from the Writers Union effectively condemning them to death When Lavrentiy Beria chief of the Soviet security and secret police apparatus under Stalin and subsequently head of the NKVD further pressured Iashvili with the alternatives of denouncing Tabidze or being arrested and tortured by the NKVD Iashvili killed himself 107 In early 1937 poet Pavel Nikolayevich Vasiliev is said to have defended Nikolai Bukharin as a man of the highest nobility and the conscience of peasant Russia at the time of his denunciation at the Pyatakov Trial Second Moscow Trial and damned other writers then signing the routine condemnations as pornographic scrawls on the margins of Russian literature He was promptly shot on 16 July 1937 108 Jan Sten philosopher and deputy head of the Marx Engels Institute was Stalin s private tutor when Stalin was trying hard to study Hegel s dialectic Stalin received lessons twice a week from 1925 to 1928 but he found it difficult to master even some of the basic ideas Stalin developed enduring hostility toward German idealistic philosophy which he called the aristocratic reaction to the French Revolution Sten eventually became a member of an underground opposition group and this group later joined the Bloc of Soviet Oppositions which was led by Leon Trotsky 37 In 1937 Sten was seized on the direct order of Stalin who declared him one of the chiefs of Menshevizing idealists On 19 June 1937 Sten was put to death in Lefortovo prison 109 Poet Nikolai Klyuev was arrested in 1933 for contradicting Soviet ideology He was shot in October 1937 Russian linguist Nikolai Durnovo born into the Durnovo noble family was executed on 27 October 1937 He created a classification of Russian dialects that served as a base for modern scientific linguistic nomenclature 110 Mari poet and playwright Sergei Chavain was executed in Yoshkar Ola on 11 November 1937 The State prize of Mari El is named after Chavain Ukrainian theater and movie director Les Kurbas considered by many to be the most important Ukrainian theater director of the 20th century was shot on 3 November 1937 Russian writer and explorer Maximilian Kravkov was arrested on a charge of his alleged participation in the Japanese SR Terrorist Subversive Espionage Organization He was executed on 12 October 1937 Russian Esperanto writer and translator Nikolai Nekrasov was arrested in 1938 and accused of being an organizer and leader of a fascist espionage terrorist organization of Esperantists He was executed on 4 October 1938 Another Esperanto writer Vladimir Varankin was executed on 3 October 1938 Playwright and avant garde poet Nikolay Oleynikov was arrested and executed for subversive writing on 24 November 1937 Yakut writer Platon Oyunsky seen as one of the founders of modern Yakut literature died in prison in 1939 Russian dramaturge Adrian Piotrovsky responsible for creating the synopsis for Sergei Prokofiev s ballet Romeo and Juliet was executed on 21 November 1937 Boris Shumyatsky de facto executive producer for the Soviet film monopoly from 1930 to 1937 was executed as a traitor in 1938 following a purge of the Soviet film industry Sinologist Julian Shchutsky was convicted as a Japanese spy and executed on 2 February 1938 Russian linguist Nikolai Nevsky an expert on East Asian languages was arrested by the NKVD on the charge of being a Japanese spy On 27 November 1937 he was executed along with his Japanese wife Isoko Mantani Nevsky Ukrainian drama writer Mykola Kulish was executed on 3 November 1937 He is considered to be one of the lead figures of Executed Renaissance Western emigre victims Edit Victims of the terror included American immigrants to the Soviet Union who had emigrated at the height of the Great Depression to find work At the height of the Terror American immigrants besieged the US embassy begging for passports so they could leave the Soviet Union They were turned away by embassy officials only to be arrested on the pavement outside by lurking NKVD agents Many quantify were subsequently shot dead at Butovo firing range 111 In addition 141 American Communists of Finnish origin were executed and buried at Sandarmokh 112 127 Finnish Canadians were also shot and buried there 113 Executions of Gulag inmates Edit Political prisoners already serving a sentence in the Gulag camps were also executed in large numbers NKVD Order no 00447 also targeted the most vicious and stubborn anti Soviet elements in camps they were all to be put into the first category that is shot NKVD Order no 00447 decreed 10 000 executions for this contingent but at least three times more were shot in the course of the secret mass operation the majority in March April 1938 72 Mongolian Great Purge Edit Main article Stalinist repressions in Mongolia Statue of Khorloogiin Choibalsan in front of the National University of Mongolia and portrait of Sheng Shicai who both organized large scale murderous purges in Mongolia and Xinjiang During the late 1930s Stalin dispatched NKVD operatives to the Mongolian People s Republic established a Mongolian version of the NKVD troika and proceeded to execute tens of thousands of people accused of having ties to pro Japanese spy rings 114 Buddhist lamas made up the majority of victims with 18 000 being killed in the terror Other victims were nobility and political and academic figures along with some ordinary workers and herders 115 Mass graves containing hundreds of executed Buddhist monks and civilians have been discovered as recently as 2003 116 Xinjiang Great Purge Edit Main articles Xinjiang War 1937 and Sheng Shicai The pro Soviet leader Sheng Shicai of Xinjiang province in China launched his own purge in 1937 to coincide with Stalin s Great Purge The Xinjiang War 1937 broke out amid the purge 117 Sheng received assistance from the NKVD Sheng and the Soviets alleged a massive Trotskyist conspiracy and a Fascist Trotskyite plot to destroy the Soviet Union The Soviet Consul General Garegin Apresoff General Ma Hushan Ma Shaowu Mahmud Sijan the official leader of the Xinjiang province Huang Han chang and Hoja Niyaz were among the 435 alleged conspirators in the plot Xinjiang came under virtual Soviet control 118 Timeline EditMain article Timeline of the Great Purge The Great Purge of 1936 1938 can be roughly divided into four periods 119 October 1936 February 1937 Reforming the security organizations adopting official plans on purging the elites March 1937 June 1937 Purging the elites adopting plans for the mass repressions against the social base of the potential aggressors starting of purging the elites from opposition July 1937 October 1938 Mass repressions against kulaks dangerous ethnic minorities family members of oppositionists military officers saboteurs in agriculture and industry November 1938 1939 Stopping of mass operations abolishing of many organs of extrajudicial executions repressions against some organizers of mass repressions End Edit Damnatio memoriae of Nikolai Yezhov He was posthumously removed from pictures such as here where he stood next to Joseph Stalin In the summer of 1938 Yezhov was relieved from his post as head of the NKVD and was eventually tried and executed Lavrentiy Beria succeeded him as head On 17 November 1938 a joint decree of Sovnarkom USSR and Central Committee of VKP b Decree about Arrests Prosecutor Supervision and Course of Investigation and the subsequent order of the NKVD undersigned by Beria cancelled most of the NKVD orders of systematic repression and suspended implementation of death sentences The decree signaled the end of massive Soviet purges 120 When Yezhov was executed Stalin claimed in a private conversation with Aleksandr Yakovlev that it was because he had killed many innocent people 121 Michael Parrish argues that while the Great Terror ended in 1938 a lesser terror continued in the 1940s 122 Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn a Soviet Army officer who became a prisoner for a decade in the Gulag system presents in The Gulag Archipelago the most holistic view of the timeline of all the Leninist and Stalinist purges 1918 1956 in which the 1936 1938 purge may have been simply the one that got the most attention from people in a position to record its magnitude for posterity the intelligentsia by directly targeting them whereas several other waves of the ongoing flow of purges such as the First five year plan of 1928 1933 s collectivization and dekulakization were just as huge and just as devoid of justice but were more successfully swallowed into oblivion in the popular memory of the surviving Soviet public 123 In some cases high military command arrested under Yezhov were later executed under Beria Some examples include Marshal of the Soviet Union Alexander Yegorov arrested in April 1938 and shot or died from torture in February 1939 his wife G A Yegorova was shot in August 1938 Army Commander Ivan Fedko arrested July 1938 and shot February 1939 Flagman Konstantin Dushenov ru arrested May 1938 and shot February 1940 Komkor G I Bondar arrested August 1938 and shot March 1939 All the aforementioned have been posthumously rehabilitated 124 Polish born Soviet politician Stanislav Kosior a contributor to the 1932 33 famine in Ukraine was executed in 1939 When the relatives of those who had been executed in 1937 38 inquired about their fate they were told by NKVD that their arrested relatives had been sentenced to ten years without the right of correspondence desyat let bez prava perepiski When these ten year periods elapsed in 1947 48 but the arrested did not appear the relatives asked MGB about their fate again and this time were told that the arrested died in imprisonment 125 Western reactions EditAlthough the trials of former Soviet leaders were widely publicized the hundreds of thousands of other arrests and executions were not These became known in the West only as a few former gulag inmates reached the West with their stories 126 Not only did foreign correspondents from the West fail to report on the purges but in many Western nations especially France attempts were made to silence or discredit these witnesses 127 according to Robert Conquest Jean Paul Sartre took the position that evidence of the camps should be ignored so the French proletariat would not be discouraged 127 A series of legal actions ensued at which definitive evidence was presented that established the validity of the former labor camp inmates testimony 128 According to Robert Conquest in his 1968 book The Great Terror Stalin s Purge of the Thirties with respect to the trials of former leaders some Western observers were unintentionally or intentionally ignorant of the fraudulent nature of the charges and evidence notably Walter Duranty of The New York Times a Russian speaker the American Ambassador Joseph E Davies who reported proof beyond reasonable doubt to justify the verdict of treason 129 and Beatrice and Sidney Webb authors of Soviet Communism A New Civilization 130 While Communist Parties everywhere simply transmitted the Soviet line some of the most critical reporting also came from the left notably The Manchester Guardian 131 The American journalist H R Knickerbocker also reported on the executions He called them in 1941 the great purges and described how over four years they affected the top fourth or fifth to estimate it conservatively of the Party itself of the Army Navy and Air Force leaders and then of the new Bolshevik intelligentsia the foremost technicians managers supervisors scientists Knickerbocker also wrote about dekulakization It is a conservative estimate to say that some 5 000 000 kulaks died at once or within a few years 132 Evidence and the results of research began to appear after Stalin s death This revealed the full enormity of the Purges The first of these sources were the revelations of Nikita Khrushchev which particularly affected the American editors of the Communist Party USA newspaper the Daily Worker who following the lead of The New York Times published the Secret Speech in full 133 Rehabilitation EditMain article Rehabilitation Soviet Posthumously rehabilitated Tukhachevsky on a 1963 postage stamp of the Soviet Union Monument to victims of the repressions in Ulaanbaatar Mongolia The Great Purge was denounced by Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev following Stalin s death In his secret speech to the 20th CPSU congress in February 1956 which was made public a month later Khrushchev referred to the purges as an abuse of power by Stalin which resulted in enormous harm to the country In the same speech he recognized that many of the victims were innocent and were convicted on the basis of false confessions extracted by torture Khrushchev later claimed in his memoirs that he had initiated the process overcoming objections and protests from the rest of Party leadership but the transcripts belie this although they show differences of opinion regarding the contents 134 Starting from 1954 some of the convictions were overturned Mikhail Tukhachevsky and other generals convicted in the Trial of Red Army Generals were declared innocent rehabilitated in 1957 The former Politburo members Yan Rudzutak and Stanislav Kosior and many lower level victims were also declared innocent in the 1950s Nikolai Bukharin and others convicted in the Moscow Trials were not rehabilitated until as late as 1988 Leon Trotsky considered a major player in the Russian Revolution and a major contributor to Marxist theory was never rehabilitated by the USSR The book Rehabilitation The Political Processes of the 1930s 50s Reabilitaciya Politicheskie processy 30 50 h godov 1991 contains a large amount of newly presented original archive material transcripts of interrogations letters of convicts and photos The material demonstrates in detail how numerous show trials were fabricated citation needed Number of people executed EditOfficial figures put the total number of documentable executions during the years 1937 and 1938 at 681 692 135 136 in addition to 116 000 deaths in the Gulag 3 and 2 000 unofficially killed in non article 58 shootings 3 whereas the total estimate of deaths brought about by Soviet repression during the Great Purge ranges from 950 000 to 1 2 million which includes executions deaths in detention and those who died shortly after being released from the Gulag as a result of their treatment therein 3 According to Robert Conquest a practice of falsification for lowering the execution numbers was disguising executions with the sentence ten years without the right of correspondence which almost always meant execution All of the bodies identified from the mass graves at Vinnitsa and Kuropaty were of individuals who had received this sentence 137 Despite this the lower figure did roughly confirm Conquest s original 1968 estimate of 700 000 legal executions and in the preface to the 40th anniversary edition of The Great Terror Conquest claimed that he had been correct on the vital matter the numbers put to death about one million 138 According to J Arch Getty and Oleg V Naumov popular estimates of executions in the great purges vary from 500 000 to 7 million However according to them the archival evidence from the secret police rejects the astronomically high estimates often given for the number of terror victims and the data available at this point make it clear that the number shot in the two worst purge years 1937 38 was more likely in the hundreds of thousands than in the millions 139 According to historian Corrina Kuhr 700 000 people were executed during the Great Purge out of the 2 5 million who were arrested 1 Professor Nerard Francois Xavier estimates the same number of people who were sentenced to death however he states that 1 3 million people were arrested 2 The Soviets themselves made their own estimates with Vyacheslav Molotov saying The report written by that commission member says that 1 370 000 arrests were made in the 1930s That s too many I responded that the figures should be thoroughly reviewed 140 Memorial events in Bykovnya Graves reserve Stalin s role Edit A list from the Great Purge signed by Molotov Stalin Voroshilov Kaganovich and Zhdanov Historians with archival access have confirmed that Stalin was intimately involved in the purge Russian historian Oleg V Khlevniuk states theories about the elemental spontaneous nature of the terror about a loss of central control over the course of mass repression and about the role of regional leaders in initiating the terror are simply not supported by the historical record 141 Besides signing Yezhov s lists Stalin sometimes gave instructions concerning certain individuals In one instance he told Yezhov Isn t it time to squeeze this gentleman and force him to report on his dirty little business Where is he in a prison or a hotel In another while reviewing one of Yezhov s lists he added to M I Baranov s name beat beat 142 Stalin also signed 357 lists in 1937 and 1938 authorizing executions of some 40 000 people and about 90 of these are confirmed to have been shot 143 this was 7 4 of those executed legally 144 While reviewing one such list Stalin reportedly muttered to no one in particular Who s going to remember all this riff raff in ten or twenty years time No one Who remembers the names now of the boyars Ivan the Terrible got rid of No one 145 It is quite possible that Yezhov misled Stalin about the aspects of the purge process 146 Many people at the time and also a few subsequent commentators surmised that the Great Purge wasn t started by Stalin s initiative so the idea got about that the process was entirely out of control once it had begun 146 Stalin may have failed to anticipate the catastrophic excesses of the NKVD under Yezhov 146 Stalin also objected to the large numbers of people that Yezhov was purging For example when Yezhov announced that 200 000 party members were expelled Stalin interrupted him said that they were very many and suggested instead to only expel 30 000 and 600 former Trotskyists and Zinovievists which would be a bigger victory 147 Stephen G Wheatcroft posits that while the purposive deaths caused by Hitler constitute murder those caused under Stalin fall into the category of execution although in terms of causing death by criminal neglect and ruthlessness Stalin probably exceeded Hitler 148 Wheatcroft elaborates Stalin undoubtedly caused many innocent people to be executed but it seems likely that he thought many of them guilty of crimes against the state and felt that the execution of others would act as a deterrent to the guilty He signed the papers and insisted on documentation Hitler by contrast wanted to be rid of the Jews and communists simply because they were Jews and communists He was not concerned about making any pretence at legality He was careful not to sign anything on this matter and was equally insistent on no documentation 148 Soviet investigation commissions Edit Opening of monument to victims of political repressions Moscow 1990 At least two Soviet commissions investigated the show trials after Stalin s death The first was headed by Molotov and included Voroshilov Kaganovich Suslov Furtseva Shvernik Aristov Pospelov and Rudenko They were given the task to investigate the materials concerning Bukharin Rykov Zinoviev Tukhachevsky and others The commission worked in 1956 1957 While stating that the accusations against Tukhachevsky et al should be abandoned it failed to fully rehabilitate the victims of the three Moscow trials although the final report does contain an admission that the accusations have not been proven during the trials and evidence had been produced by lies blackmail and use of physical influence Bukharin Rykov Zinoviev and others were still seen as political opponents and though the charges against them were obviously false they could not have been rehabilitated because for many years they headed the anti Soviet struggle against the building of socialism in USSR citation needed The second commission largely worked from 1961 to 1963 and was headed by Shvernik Shvernik Commission It included Shelepin Serdyuk Mironov Rudenko and Semichastny The hard work resulted in two massive reports which detailed the mechanism of falsification of the show trials against Bukharin Zinoviev Tukhachevsky and many others The commission based its findings in large part on eyewitness testimonies of former NKVD workers and victims of repressions and on many documents The commission recommended rehabilitating every accused with the exceptions of Radek and Yagoda because Radek s materials required some further checking and Yagoda was a criminal and one of the falsifiers of the trials though most of the charges against him had to be dropped too he was not a spy etc The commission stated Stalin committed a very grave crime against the Communist party the socialist state Soviet people and worldwide revolutionary movement Together with Stalin the responsibility for the abuse of law mass unwarranted repressions and death of many thousands of wholly innocent people also lies on Molotov Kaganovich Malenkov Molotov stated We would have been complete idiots if we had taken the reports at their face value We were not idiots and that the cases were reviewed and some people were released 149 150 Wall of sorrow at the first exhibition of the victims of Stalinism in Moscow 19 November 1988Mass graves and memorials EditMain article Mass graves in the Soviet Union In the late 1980s with the formation of the Memorial Society and similar organisations across the Soviet Union at a time of Gorbachev s glasnost openness and transparency it became possible not only to speak about the Great Terror but to begin locating the killing grounds of 1937 1938 and identifying those who lay buried there In 1988 for instance the mass graves at Kurapaty in Belarus were the site of a clash between demonstrators and the police In 1990 a boulder stone was brought from the former Solovki prison camp in the White Sea and erected next to KGB headquarters in Moscow as a memorial to all the victims of political repression since 1917 Following the collapse of the Soviet Union many more mass graves filled with executed victims of the terror were discovered and turned into memorial sites 151 152 153 154 Some such as the Bykivnia killing fields near Kyiv are said to contain up to 200 000 corpses 155 156 157 better source needed In 2007 one such site the Butovo firing range near Moscow was turned into a shrine to the victims of Stalinism Between August 1937 and October 1938 more than 20 000 people were shot and buried there 158 On 30 October 2017 President Vladimir Putin opened the Wall of Sorrow an official but controversial recognition of the crimes of the Soviet regime 159 In August 2021 a mass grave containing between 5 000 and 8 000 skeletons was discovered in Odessa Ukraine during exploration works for a planned expansion of Odesa International Airport The graves are believed to date back to the late 1930s during the purge 160 The Kuropaty mass grave site near Minsk Belarus The Krasny Bor memorial cemetery near Petrozavodsk Russia A memorial to Polish victims of Stalinist repression Tomsk Russia A monument to victims of political repressions in Rutchenkove settlement part of Donetsk Ukraine A memorial to victims of Stalinist repression in Tomsk Russia The monumental slab at the entrance to the Sandarmokh burial grounds reads People do not kill one another RussiaHistorical interpretations EditThe Great Purge has provoked numerous debates about its purpose scale and mechanisms According to one interpretation Stalin s regime had to maintain its citizens in a state of fear and uncertainty to stay in power Brzezinski 1958 Robert Conquest emphasized Stalin s paranoia focused on the Moscow show trial of Old Bolsheviks and analyzed the carefully planned and systematic destruction of the Communist Party Some others view the Great Purge as a crucial moment or rather the culmination of a vast social engineering campaign started at the beginning of the 1930s Hagenloh 2000 Shearer 2003 Werth 2003 34 According to historian James Harris contemporary archival research pokes rather large holes in the traditional story weaved by Conquest and others 161 His findings while not exonerating Stalin or the Soviet state dispel the notion that the bloodletting was merely the result of Stalin attempting to establish his own personal dictatorship evidence suggests he was committed to building the socialist state envisioned by Lenin The real motivation for the terror according to Harris was an exaggerated fear of counterrevolution 6 So what was the motivation behind the Terror The answers required a lot more digging but it gradually became clearer that the violence of the late 1930s was driven by fear Most Bolsheviks Stalin among them believed that the revolutions of 1789 1848 and 1871 had failed because their leaders hadn t adequately anticipated the ferocity of the counter revolutionary reaction from the establishment They were determined not to make the same mistake 162 Two major lines of interpretation have emerged among historians One argues that the purges reflected Stalin s ambitions his paranoia and his inner drive to increase his power and eliminate potential rivals Revisionist historians explain the purges by theorizing that rival factions exploited Stalin s paranoia and used terror to enhance their own position Peter Whitewood examines the first purge directed at the Army and comes up with a third interpretation that Stalin and other top leaders believing that they were always surrounded by capitalist enemies always worried about the vulnerability and loyalty of the Red Army 7 It was not a ploy Stalin truly believed it Stalin attacked the Red Army because he seriously misperceived a serious security threat thus Stalin seems to have genuinely believed that foreign backed enemies had infiltrated the ranks and managed to organize a conspiracy at the very heart of the Red Army The purge hit deeply from June 1937 and November 1938 removing 35 000 many were executed Experience in carrying out the purge facilitated purging other key elements in the wider Soviet polity 163 164 165 Historians often cite the disruption as factors in the Red Army s disastrous military performance during the German invasion 166 Robert W Thurston reports that the purge was not intended to subdue the Soviet masses many of whom helped enact the purge but to deal with opposition to Stalin s rule among the Soviet elites 167 See also EditExcess mortality in the Soviet Union under Joseph Stalin Index of Soviet Union related articles Timeline of the Great Purge History of the Soviet Union 1927 1953 Armenian victims of the Great Purge Family members of traitors to the Motherland Orphans in the Soviet Union Children of enemies of the people 1937 1945 Mass killings under communist regimes LustrationReferences EditCitations Edit a b Kuhr Corinna 1998 Children of Enemies of The People as Victims of the Great Purges Cahiers du Monde russe 39 1 2 209 220 doi 10 3406 cmr 1998 2520 ISSN 1252 6576 JSTOR 20171081 via JSTOR According to latest estimates 2 5 million people were arrested and 700 000 of them shot These figures are based on reliable archival materials a b Francois Xavier Nerard 27 February 2009 The Levashovo cemetery and the Great Terror in the Leningrad region Paris Institute of Political Studies The Yezhovshchina or Stalin s Great Terror The precise end result of these operations is difficult to establish but the total of the condemnations is estimated at roughly 1 300 000 of which 700 000 were sentenced to death most of the others were sentenced to ten years in the camps document translated in Werth 2006 143 a href Template Cite web html title Template Cite web cite web a CS1 maint url status link a b c d e Ellman Michael 2002 Soviet Repression Statistics Some Comments PDF Europe Asia Studies 54 7 1151 1172 doi 10 1080 0966813022000017177 S2CID 43510161 The best estimate that can currently be made of the number of repression deaths in 1937 38 is the range 950 000 1 2 million i e about a million This is the estimate which should be used by historians teachers and journalists concerned with twentieth century Russian and world history Conquest 2008 p 53 Brett Homkes 2004 Certainty Probability and Stalin s Great Party Purge McNair Scholars Journal 8 1 13 a b Harris 2017 p 16 a b James Harris Encircled by Enemies Stalin s Perceptions of the Capitalist World 1918 1941 Journal of Strategic Studies 30 3 2007 513 545 In Russian historiography the period of the most intense purge 1937 1938 is called Yezhovshchina lit Yezhov phenomenon after Nikolai Yezhov the head of the NKVD Great Purge Encyclopedia Britannica 20 July 1998 a href Template Cite web html title Template Cite web cite web a CS1 maint url status link Joseph Stalin HISTORY Retrieved 2 December 2021 Trotsky s Struggle against Stalin The National WWII Museum New Orleans Retrieved 22 August 2022 Who Killed Kirov The Crime of the Century www wilsoncenter org Retrieved 3 December 2021 People s Comissariat Of Justice Of The U S S R 1 January 1938 Anti Soviet Bloc of Rights and Trotskyites Heard before the Military Collegium of the Supreme Court of the U S S R Verbatim Report People s Comissariat of Justice of the U S S R ASIN B0711N78KN Knight Amy 1999 Who Killed Kirov Hill amp Wang Getty John Arch Getty John Archibald 30 January 1987 Origins of the Great Purges The Soviet Communist Party Reconsidered 1933 1938 Cambridge University Press ISBN 978 0 521 33570 6 Tokaev Comrade X 1956 Whitewood Peter 13 June 2016 Rethinking Stalin s Purge of the Red Army 1937 38 University Press of Kansas Blog Retrieved 3 December 2021 Uldricks Teddy J 1977 The Impact of the Great Purges on the People s Commissariat of Foreign Affairs PDF Slavic Review 36 2 187 204 doi 10 2307 2495035 JSTOR 2495035 S2CID 163664533 a b Schatman Max 1938 Behind the Moscow Trials Figes 2007 pp 227 315 Introduction the Great Purges as history Origins of the Great Purges Cambridge University Press pp 1 9 26 April 1985 doi 10 1017 cbo9780511572616 002 ISBN 9780521259217 retrieved 2 December 2021 Homkes Brett 2004 Certainty Probability and Stalin s Great Purge McNair Scholars Journal Helen Rappaport 1999 Joseph Stalin A Biographical Companion ABC CLIO p 110 ISBN 978 1576070840 Retrieved 29 September 2015 Leon Trotsky Exile and assassination Britannica www britannica com Retrieved 27 April 2022 Whitewood Peter 2015 The Purge of the Red Army and the Soviet Mass Operations 1937 38 Slavonic amp East European Review 93 2 286 314 Conquest 2008 pp 250 257 258 Conquest 2008 p 121 which cites his secret speech Conquest 2008 p 286 This information was published first in 1990 in a Komsomolskaya Pravda article October 28 1990 p 2 Later it was cited by several sources including Albats Yevgenia 1995 KGB The State Within a State p 101 Gellately Robert 2007 Lenin Stalin and Hitler The Age of Social Catastrophe Knopf ISBN 1 4000 4005 1 p 460 Merridale Catherine 2002 Night of Stone Death and Memory in Twentieth Century Russia Penguin Books ISBN 0 14 200063 9 p 200 Colton Timothy J 1998 Moscow Governing the Socialist Metropolis Harvard University Press ISBN 0674587499 9780674587496 p 286 and Alexandr Solzhenitsyn Two Hundred Years Together Goldman W 2005 Stalinist Terror and Democracy The 1937 Union Campaign The American Historical Review 110 5 1427 1453 Murphy Austin 2000 The triumph of evil the reality of the USA s cold war victory Fucecchio Firenze Italy European Press Academic Publishing pp 76 78 ISBN 88 8398 002 6 OCLC 45434980 Hagenloh Paul 2000 Socially Harmful Elements and the Great Terror Pp 286 307 in Stalinism New Directions edited by S Fitzpatrick London Routledge Shearer David 2003 Social Disorder Mass Repression and the NKVD During the 1930s Pp 85 117 in Stalin s Terror High Politics and Mass Repression in the Soviet Union edited by B McLaughlin and K McDermott Basingstoke Palgrave MacMillan a b c d e Werth Nicolas 15 April 2019 Case Study The NKVD Mass Secret Operation n 00447 August 1937 November 1938 Mass Violence and Resistance Research Network Getty J Arch Rittersporn Gabor T Zemskov Viktor N October 1993 Victims of the Soviet Penal System in the Pre War Years A First Approach on the Basis of Archival Evidence The American Historical Review 98 4 1030 1035 doi 10 2307 2166597 JSTOR 2166597 Great Terror www marxists org a b c d e Broue Pierre The Bloc of the Oppositions against Stalin January 1980 www marxists org Retrieved 19 December 2020 Kotkin Stephen Stalin Paradoxes of Power 1878 1928 Andrew amp Mitrokhin 2000 pp 86 7 a b Conquest 1987 pp 122 38 Figes 2007 p 239 a b Gellately 2007 Robert Gellately Lenin Stalin and Hitler The Age of Social Catastrophe 2007 Knopf 720 pages ISBN 1 4000 4005 1 Gulag History Structure and Size A View From the Secret Archives uh edu Retrieved 24 August 2022 The First Five Year Plan 1928 1932 Special Collections amp Archives 7 October 2015 Retrieved 24 August 2022 Subtelny Orest 2009 1988 Ukraine A History 4th revised ed Toronto University of Toronto Press ISBN 978 1 4426 0991 4 McLoughlin amp McDermott 2002 p 6 Harward Grant 2 July 2016 Whitewood Peter The Red Army and the Great Terror Stalin s Purge of the Soviet Military The Journal of Slavic Military Studies 29 3 524 526 doi 10 1080 13518046 2016 1200397 ISSN 1351 8046 S2CID 151381912 Rogovin 1998 pp 17 18 Rogovin 1998 pp 36 38 Conquest 2008 p 142 Conquest 2008 p 182 Conquest 2008 p 121 Redman Joseph March April 1958 The British Stalinists and the Moscow Trials Labour Review 3 2 Conquest 2008 p 87 Snyder 2010 p 137 Dewey John 2008 Not guilty report of the Commission of Inquiry Into the Charges Made Against Leon Trotsky in the Moscow Trials 1859 1952 New York Sam Sloan and Ishi Press International pp 154 155 ISBN 978 0923891312 OCLC 843206645 The Case of Leon Trotsky Report of Dewey Commission 1937 www marxists org a b British Embassy Report Viscount Chilston to Mr Eden 6 February 1937 Conquest 2008 p 164 Cohen Stephen Bukharin and the Bolshevik Revolution Humbert Droz Jules De Lenine a Staline Dix ans au service de l Internationale communiste 1921 1931 a b Corey Robin Fear Page 96 Bertram David Wolfe Breaking with communism p 10 Koestler 1940 p 258 Conquest 2008 p 352 Conquest 2008 p 364 5 Report by Viscount Chilston British ambassador to Viscount Halifax No 141 Moscow 21 March 1938 Tucker Robert Block of Rights and Trotskyites Report of Court Proceedings in the Case of the Anti Soviet pp 667 68 a b Werth Nicolas Case Study The NKVD Mass Secret Operation n 00447 August 1937 November 1938 Werth Nicolas 2009 L ivrogne et la marchande de fleurs Autopsie d un meurtre de masse 1937 1938 Paris Tallandier a b c d The NKVD Mass Secret Operation n 00447 August 1937 November 1938 Sciences Po Mass Violence and Resistance Research Network nkvd mass secret operation n 00447 august 1937 november 1938 html 19 January 2016 Figes 2007 p 240 a b Snyder 2010 pp 103 104 N V Petrov A B Roginskij Polskaya operaciya NKVD 1937 1938 gg The Polish operation NKVD 1937 1938 in Russian NIPC Memorial Archived from the original on 15 February 2017 Retrieved 27 May 2012 Original title O fashistsko povstancheskoj shpionskoj diversionnoj porazhencheskoj i terroristicheskoj deyatelnosti polskoj razvedki v SSSR a b c d e Snyder Timothy 2010 Bloodlands Europe Between Hitler and Stalin Basic Books p 104 a b Michal Jasinski 27 October 2010 Zapomniane ludobojstwo stalinowskie The forgotten Stalinist genocide Gliwicki klub Fondy Czytelnia Archived from the original on 23 March 2012 via Internet Archive a href Template Cite web html title Template Cite web cite web a CS1 maint unfit URL link Courtois 1999 a b c Sundstrom Olle Kotljarchuk Andrej 2017 Introduction the problem of ethnic and religious minorities in Stalin s Soviet Union Ethnic and Religious Minorities in Stalin s Soviet Union New Dimensions of Research PDF Sodertorn Academic Studies p 16 ISBN 9789176017777 Snyder Timothy 2010 Bloodlands Europe Between Hitler and Stalin Basic Books ISBN 0 465 00239 0 pp 102 107 Timothy Snyder Bloodlands Basic Books 2010 Page 411 412 The NKVD Mass Secret National Operations August 1937 November 1938 Sciences Po Mass Violence and Resistance Research Network nkvd mass secret national operations august 1937 november 1938 html 15 April 2019 permanent dead link The Crime of Genocide Committed against the Poles by the USSR before and during World War II An International Legal Study by Karol Karski Cas eWestern Reserve Journal of International Law Vol 45 2013 Martin Terry The origins of Soviet ethnic cleansing The Journal of Modern History 70 4 1998 813 861 PDF Snyder Timothy 5 October 2010 The fatal fact of the Nazi Soviet pact the Guardian Retrieved 6 August 2018 a b c Naimark Norman M 1 November 2016 Genocide A World History Oxford University Press ISBN 978 0 19 063772 9 Kuromiya Hiroaki Peplonski Andrzej 2009 The Great Terror Cahiers du monde russe Russie Empire russe Union sovietique et Etats independants 50 50 2 3 647 670 doi 10 4000 monderusse 9736 ISSN 1252 6576 Ranks goarmy com Retrieved 18 December 2018 Conquest 2008 p 211 Courtois 1999 p 198 Stephen Lee European Dictatorships 1918 1945 page 56 Conquest 2008 pp 198 189 a Soviet book Marshal Tukhachevskiy by Nikulin pp 189 194 is cited Conquest 2008 p 200 202 Despite the fact that the combined firepower of the Red Army was greater than that of the Germans the Purges had effectively crippled it by destroying the officer corps This was the decisive element which persuaded Hitler to attack in 1941 At the Nuremberg trial Marshal Keitel testified that many German generals had warned Hitler not to attack Russia arguing that the Red Army was a formidable opponent Rejecting these Hitler gave Keitel his main reason The first class high ranking officers were wiped out by Stalin in 1937 and the new generation cannot yet provide the brains they need Roy Medvedev Let History Judge p 214 The Bukovsky Archives A Quota for Killings Archived from the original on 25 November 2017 Retrieved 6 July 2016 Freeze Gregory 2009 Russia A History United States Oxford University Press pp 364 372 ISBN 978 0 19 956041 7 Kurapaty 1937 1941 NKVD Mass Killings in Soviet Belarus Sciences Po Mass Violence and Resistance Research Network kurapaty 1937 1941 nkvd mass killings soviet belarus html 29 April 2019 Conquest 2008 p 295 Aino Forsten in Finnish Parliament of Finland Retrieved 21 June 2016 Osip Emilevich Mandelstam Biography Biography of Osip Emilevich Mandelstam Poem Hunter Retrieved 23 February 2023 Caxtonian Collecting Mandelstam November 2006 Robert C Tucker Stalin in Power Page 445 a b c The Independent The History of Hell 8 January 1995 Kern Gary A Death in Washington Walter G Krivitsky and the Stalin Terror Enigma Books 2003 ISBN 1 929631 14 6 p 111 70 years of Soviet Georgia CURZON rolfgross dreamhosters com Retrieved 23 February 2023 Suny Ronald Grigor 1994 The Making of the Georgian Nation 2nd edition p 272 Indiana University Press ISBN 0 253 20915 3 70 years of Soviet Georgia CURZON rolfgross dreamhosters com Retrieved 23 February 2023 Conquest 2008 p 301 Roy Medvedev Let history judge p 438 In memory of the scientist DURNOVO Nikolai Nikolayevich National academy of Science of Belarus Nightmare in the workers paradise 2 August 2008 Retrieved 23 February 2023 John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr American Communists and Radicals Executed by Soviet Political Police and Buried at Sandarmokh appendix to In Denial Historians Communism and Espionage Haynes amp Klehr 2003 p 117 Kuromiya 2007 p 2 Christopher Kaplonski Thirty thousand bullets in Historical Injustice and Democratic Transition in Eastern Asia and Northern Europe London 2002 pp 155 168 RTE News Mass grave uncovered in Mongolia RTE ie 14 June 2003 Archived from the original on 14 June 2003 Retrieved 23 February 2023 Allen S Whiting and General Sheng Shicai Sinkiang Pawn or Pivot Michigan State University Press 1958 Andrew D W Forbes 1986 Warlords and Muslims in Chinese Central Asia a political history of Republican Sinkiang 1911 1949 Cambridge England CUP Archive pp 151 376 ISBN 978 0 521 25514 1 Retrieved 31 December 2010 Bolshoj terror 1937 1938 Kratkaya hronika old memo ru Retrieved 23 February 2023 Hedeler Wladislaw amp Rosenblum Nadja 2001 p 23 sfn error no target CITEREFHedeler WladislawRosenblum Nadja 2001 help Holmstrom Sven Eric 2012 Khrushchev Lied Socialism and Democracy 26 2 119 124 doi 10 1080 08854300 2012 686278 ISSN 0885 4300 S2CID 219692705 It is worth noting that the vast majority of the death sentences occurred during the so called yezhovshina in 1937 38 and there is now good evidence that NKVD head Nikolai Yezhov acted behind the back of the Soviet government in order to turn people against the regime See Mark Jansen amp Nikita Petrov Stalinskii pitomets Nikolai Yezhov Moscow 2008 367 79 When Yezhov himself was executed Stalin claimed in a private conversation with aircraft designer Aleksandr Yakovlev that it was because he had killed a lot of innocent people Aleksandr Yakovlev Tsel Zhizni Zapiski Aviakonstruktora Moscow 1973 267 Parrish 1996 p 32 Solzhenitsyn 1973 Parrish 1996 p 33 Moskovskij martirolog memo ru Conquest 2008 pp 472 3 a b Conquest 2008 p 472 Conquest 2008 p 472 4 Conquest 2008 p 468 Conquest 2008 p 469 Conquest 2008 p 465 467 Knickerbocker H R 1941 Is Tomorrow Hitler s 200 Questions on the Battle of Mankind Reynal amp Hitchcock pp 133 134 ISBN 9781417992775 Howard Fast On Leaving the Communist Party www trussel com Retrieved 23 February 2023 Fitzpatrick Sheila 2017 On Stalin s Team The years of Living Dangerously in Soviet Politics Princeton Princeton University Press pp 244 245 ISBN 978 0 691 17577 5 Thurston 1998 p 139 Getty J Arch Rittersporn Gabor Zemskov Viktor 1993 Victims of the Soviet penal system in the pre war years a first approach on the basis of archival evidence PDF American Historical Review 98 4 1022 doi 10 2307 2166597 JSTOR 2166597 Robert Conquest The Great Terror A Reassessment 40th Anniversary Edition Oxford University Press USA 2007 p 287 Robert Conquest Preface The Great Terror A Reassessment 40th Anniversary Edition Oxford University Press USA 2007 p xvi Getty J Arch Naumov Oleg V 2010 The Road to Terror Stalin and the Self Destruction of the Bolsheviks 1932 1939 Yale University Press pp xiv 243 590 591 ISBN 978 0300104073 Chuev Feliks Molotov Remembers Chicago I R Dee 1993 p 285 Oleg V Khlevniuk Master of the House Stalin and His Inner Circle Yale University Press 2008 ISBN 0 300 11066 9 p xix Marc Jansen Nikita Vasilʹevich Petrov Stalin s Loyal Executioner People s Commissar Nikolai Ezhov 1895 1940 Hoover Institution Press 2002 ISBN 0 8179 2902 9 p 111 Wayback Machine 14 October 2007 Archived from the original on 14 October 2007 Retrieved 23 February 2023 Getty amp Naumov The Road to Terror New Haven Conn Yale Univ Press c1999 p 470 Quoted in Dmitri Volkogonov Stalin Triumph and Tragedy New York 1991 pg 210 a b c Service Robert 2005 Stalin A Biography Harvard University Press p 369 ISBN 978 0 674 01697 2 Getty John Archibald 1993 Stalinist Terror New Perspectives Cambridge University Press p 51 ISBN 978 0 521 44670 9 a b Wheatcroft 1996 p 1348 huev Feliks Molotov Remembers Chicago I R Dee 1993 p 276 Chuev Feliks Molotov Remembers Chicago I R Dee 1993 p 294 CNN Pictorial essay Death trenches bear witness to Stalin s purges July 17 1997 www cnn com Retrieved 23 February 2023 Mass grave found at Ukrainian monastery 16 July 2002 Retrieved 23 February 2023 Wary of its past Russia ignores mass grave site Christian Science Monitor ISSN 0882 7729 Retrieved 23 February 2023 Stalin era mass grave yields tons of bones Reuters 9 June 2010 Retrieved 23 February 2023 Jewish Cemeteries Synagogues and Mass Grave Sites in Ukraine Archived from the original on 23 September 2020 Bykivnia between Hitler and Stalin Archived from the original on 23 September 2020 WAR STATS REDIRECT erols com Kishkovsky Sophia 8 June 2007 Former Killing Ground Becomes Shrine to Stalin s Victims The New York Times ISSN 0362 4331 Retrieved 23 February 2023 MacFarquhar Neil 30 October 2017 Critics Scoff as Kremlin Erects Monument to the Repressed The New York Times Retrieved 6 November 2017 Stalin era mass grave found in Ukraine BBC 26 August 2021 Harris 2017 pp 2 4 Harris James 26 July 2016 Historian James Harris says Russian archives show we ve misunderstood Stalin History News Network Retrieved 1 December 2018 Peter Whitewood The Red Army and the Great Terror Stalin s Purge of the Soviet Military 2015 Quoting pp 12 276 Ronald Grigor Suny review Historian 2018 80 1 177 79 For a critique of Whitewood see Alexander Hill review American Historical Review 2017 122 5 pp 1713 1714 Roger R Reese Stalin Attacks the Red Army Military History Quarterly 27 1 2014 38 45 Thurston 1998 p xx Sources Edit Andrew Christopher Mitrokhin Vasili 2000 1999 The Sword and the Shield The Mitrokhin Archive and the Secret History of the KGB New York Basic Books ISBN 978 0 465 00312 9 1987 Stalin and the Kirov Murder New York Oxford University Press ISBN 978 0 19 505579 5 2008 1990 The Great Terror A Reassessment Oxford Oxford University Press ISBN 978 0 19 531700 8 Courtois Stephane 1999 The Black Book of Communism Crimes Terror Repression Cambridge MA Harvard University Press ISBN 978 0 674 07608 2 Figes Orlando 2007 The Whisperers Private Life in Stalin s Russia London Allen Lane ISBN 978 0 7139 9702 6 Fitzpatrick Sheila 2017 On Stalin s Team The years of Living Dangerously in Soviet Politics Princeton Princeton University Press ISBN 978 0 691 17577 5 Gellately Robert 2007 Lenin Stalin and Hitler The Age of Social Catastrophe Knopf ISBN 978 1 4000 4005 6 Harris James 2017 The Great Fear Stalin s Terror of the 1930s Oxford University Press ISBN 978 0198797869 Haynes John Earl Klehr Harvey 2003 In Denial Historians Communism and Espionage Encounter Books ISBN 978 1 893554 72 6 Koestler Arthur 1940 Darkness at Noon Kuromiya Hiroaki 2007 The Voices of the Dead Stalin s Great Terror in the 1930s New Haven CT Yale University Press ISBN 978 0 300 12389 0 McLoughlin Barry McDermott Kevin 2002 Stalin s Terror High Politics and Mass Repression in the Soviet Union Basingstoke Palgrave Macmillan ISBN 978 1 4039 0119 4 Parrish Michael 1996 The Lesser Terror Soviet state security 1939 1953 Westport CT Praeger Press ISBN 978 0 275 95113 9 Solzhenitsyn Aleksandr I 1973 The Gulag Archipelago 1918 1956 In Three Volumes New York Harper and Row Thurston Robert 1998 1996 Life and Terror in Stalin s Russia 1934 1941 New Haven CT Yale University Press ISBN 978 0 300 07442 0 2000 The Scale and Nature of Stalinist Repression and its Demographic Significance On Comments by Keep and Conquest PDF Europe Asia Studies 52 6 1143 1159 doi 10 1080 09668130050143860 PMID 19326595 S2CID 205667754 Further reading EditSee also Bibliography of Stalinism and the Soviet Union Terror famine and the Gulag A Artizov Yu Sigachev I Shevchuk V Khlopov under editorship of acad A N Yakovlev Rehabilitation As It Happened Documents of the CPSU CC Presidium and Other Materials Vol 2 February 1956 Early 1980s Moscow 2003 Chase William J 2001 Enemies within the Gates The Comintern and the Stalinist Repression 1934 1939 New Haven CT Yale University Press ISBN 978 0 300 08242 5 Colton Timothy J 1998 Moscow Governing the Socialist Metropolis Belknap Press ISBN 978 0 674 58749 6 Conquest Robert 1973 1968 The Great Terror Stalin s Purge of the Thirties Revised ed London Macmillan ISBN 978 0 02 527560 7 Hill Alexander 2017 The Red Army and the Second World War Cambridge University Press ISBN 978 1 1070 2079 5 Hoffman David L ed 2003 Stalinism The Essential Readings Oxford Blackwell Publishers ISBN 978 0 631 22890 5 Ilic Melanie ed 2006 Stalin s Terror Revisited Basingstoke Palgrave Macmillan Karlsson Klas Goran Schoenhals Michael 2008 Crimes against humanity under communist regimes Research review PDF Forum for Living History ISBN 978 91 977487 2 8 Archived from the original PDF on 24 August 2010 Lyons Eugene 1937 Assignment in Utopia Harcourt Brace and Company Merridale Catherine 2002 Night of Stone Death and Memory in Twentieth Century Russia London Penguin ISBN 978 0 14 200063 2 Naimark Norman M 2010 Stalin s Genocides Human Rights and Crimes against Humanity Princeton NJ Princeton University Press ISBN 978 0 691 14784 0 Rogovin Vadim 1996 Two Lectures Stalin s Great Terror Origins and Consequences Leon Trotsky and the Fate of Marxism in the USSR Mehring books ISBN 978 0 929087 83 2 1998 1937 Stalin s Year of Terror Mehring Books ISBN 978 0 929087 77 1 Rosefielde Steven 2009 Red Holocaust London Routledge ISBN 978 0 415 77757 5 Snyder Timothy 2005 Sketches from a Secret War A Polish Artist s Mission to Liberate Soviet Ukraine New Haven CT Yale University Press ISBN 978 0 300 10670 1 2010 Bloodlands Europe Between Hitler and Stalin New York Basic Books ISBN 978 0 465 00239 9 via Google Books Tzouliadis Tim 2008 The Forsaken An American Tragedy in Stalin s Russia London Penguin ISBN 978 1 59420 168 4 Watt Donald Cameron Who plotted against whom Stalin s purge of the soviet high command revisited Journal of Soviet Military Studies 3 1 1990 46 65 Wheatcroft Stephen 1996 The Scale and Nature of German and Soviet Repression and Mass Killings 1930 45 PDF Europe Asia Studies 48 8 1319 1353 doi 10 1080 09668139608412415 JSTOR 152781 Whitewood Peter The Red Army and the Great Terror Stalin s Purge of the Soviet Military 2015 Whitewood Peter The Purge of the Red Army and the Soviet Mass Operations 1937 38 Slavonic amp East European Review 93 2 2015 286 314 online Subversion in the Red Army and the Military Purge of 1937 1938 Europe Asia Studies 67 1 2015 102 122 In the shadow of the war Bolshevik perceptions of polish subversive and military threats to the Soviet Union 1920 32 Journal of Strategic Studies 2019 1 24 Yakovlev Alexander N ed 1991 Reabilitaciya Politicheskie processy 30 50 h godov Rehabilitation Political Trials of the 1930s 50s Moscow ROSSPEN 2004 2002 A Century of Violence in Soviet Russia New Haven CT Yale University Press ISBN 978 0 300 10322 9 Film Edit Pultz David dir 1997 Eternal Memory Voices from the Great Terror 81 00 documentary film Narrated by Meryl Streep USA External links Edit Media related to Great Purge at Wikimedia Commons The Case of Bukharin Transcript of Nikolai Bukharin s testimonies and last plea from The Case of the Anti Soviet Block of Rights and Trotskyites Red Star Press 1973 pages 369 439 767 779 Actual video footage from Third Moscow Trial on YouTube Nicolas Werth Case Study The NKVD Mass Secret Operation n 00447 August 1937 November 1938 Documenting the Death Toll Research into the Mass Murder of Foreigners in Moscow 1937 38 by Barry McLoughlin American Historical Association 1999 Retrieved from https en wikipedia org w index php title Great Purge amp oldid 1142527991, wikipedia, wiki, book, books, library,

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