Great Purge
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The Great Purge or Great Terror (Template:Langx), also known as the Year of '37 (Template:Langx) and the Yezhovshchina (Template:Lang Template:IPA, Template:Lit), was a political purge in the Soviet Union from 1936 to 1938. After the assassination of Sergei Kirov by Leonid Nikolaev in 1934, Joseph Stalin launched a series of show trials known as the Moscow trials to remove suspected dissenters from the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (especially those aligned with the Bolshevik party). The term "great purge" was popularized by historian Robert Conquest in his 1968 book, The Great Terror, whose title alluded to the French Revolution's Reign of Terror.<ref>Template:Cite web</ref><ref name="Rappaport">Template:Cite book</ref>
The purges were largely conducted by the NKVD (People's Commissariat for Internal Affairs), which functioned as the interior ministry and secret police of the USSR. In 1936, the NKVD under Genrikh Yagoda began the removal of the central party leadership, Old Bolsheviks, government officials, and regional party bosses.<ref>Template:Cite web</ref> Soviet politicians who opposed or criticized Stalin were removed from office and imprisoned, or executed, by the NKVD. The purges were eventually expanded to the Red Army high command, which had a disastrous effect on the military.<ref>Template:Cite web</ref><ref>Template:Cite journal</ref> The campaigns also affected many other segments of society: the intelligentsia, wealthy peasants—especially those lending money or other wealth (kulaks)—and professionals.Template:Sfn As the scope of the purge widened, the omnipresent suspicion of saboteurs and counter-revolutionaries (known collectively as wreckers) began affecting civilian life.
The purge reached its peak between September 1936 and August 1938, when the NKVD was under chief Nikolai Yezhov (hence the name Yezhovshchina). The campaigns were carried out according to the general line of the party, often by direct orders by the Politburo headed by Stalin.<ref>Goldman, W. (2005). "Stalinist Terror and Democracy: The 1937 Union Campaign". The American Historical Review, 110(5), 1427–1453</ref> Hundreds of thousands of people were accused of political crimes, including espionage, wrecking, sabotage, anti-Soviet agitation, and conspiracies to prepare uprisings and coups. They were executed by shooting, or sent to Gulag labor camps. The NKVD targeted certain ethnic minorities with particular force (such as Volga Germans or Soviet citizens of Polish origin), who were subjected to forced deportation and extreme repression. Throughout the purge, the NKVD sought to strengthen control over civilians through fear and frequently used imprisonment, torture, violent interrogation, and executions during its mass operations.Template:Sfn
Stalin reversed his stance on the purges in 1938, criticizing the NKVD for carrying out mass executions and overseeing the execution of NKVD chiefs Yagoda and Yezhov. Scholars estimate the death toll of the Great Purge at 700,000 to 1.2 million.<ref>Template:Cite journal</ref><ref>Template:Cite journal</ref><ref>Template:Cite book</ref><ref>Template:Cite book</ref> Despite the end of the purge, widespread surveillance and an atmosphere of mistrust continued for decades. Similar purges took place in Mongolia and Xinjiang. The Soviet government wanted to put Leon Trotsky on trial during the purge, but his exile prevented this. Trotsky survived the purge, although he was assassinated in 1940 by the NKVD in Mexico on orders from Stalin.<ref>Template:Cite encyclopedia</ref><ref>Template:Cite book</ref>
Background
A power vacuum developed in the Communist Party, the ruling party in the Soviet Union (USSR), after the 1924 death of Vladimir Lenin; established figures in Lenin's government attempted to succeed him. Joseph Stalin, the party's general secretary, triumphed over his opponents by 1928 and gained control of the party.<ref>Template:Cite web</ref> Initially, Stalin's leadership was widely accepted; Trotsky, his main political adversary, was forced into exile in 1929 and Stalin's doctrine of "socialism in one country" became party policy. Party officials began to lose faith in his leadership in the early 1930s, however, largely due to the human cost of the first five-year plan and the collectivization of agriculture (including the Holodomor famine in Ukraine).
In 1930, the party and police officials feared the "social disorder" caused by the upheavals of forced collectivization of peasants, the resulting famine of 1930–1933 and the massive, uncontrolled migration of millions of peasants to cities. The threat of war heightened Stalin's (and Soviet) perception of marginal and politically-suspect populations as potential sources of an uprising during a possible invasion. Stalin began to plan for the preventive elimination of potential recruits for a mythical "fifth column of wreckers, terrorists and spies."<ref>Hagenloh, Paul. 2000. "Socially Harmful Elements and the Great Terror." pp. 286–307 in Stalinism: New Directions, edited by S. Fitzpatrick. London: Routledge.</ref><ref>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.</ref><ref name="werth" />
The term "purge" in Soviet political slang was an abbreviation of the expression "purge from the party ranks"; in 1933, for example, the party expelled about 400,000 people. The term changed its meaning between 1936 and 1953, and being expelled from the party came to mean almost-certain arrest, imprisonment, and (often) execution.
The political purge was primarily an effort by Stalin to eliminate challenges from past and potential opposition groups, including the party's left and right wings (led by Trotsky and Nikolai Bukharin, respectively). After the Civil War and the late-1920s reconstruction of the Soviet economy, veteran Bolsheviks thought that the "temporary" wartime dictatorship (which had passed from Lenin to Stalin) was no longer necessary. Stalin's opponents in the Communist Party chided him as undemocratic and lax about bureaucratic corruption.<ref>Template:Cite web</ref>
Opposition to the leadership may have accumulated substantial support from the working class by attacking the privileges and luxuries the state offered its highly-paid elite, and the Ryutin affair seemed to vindicate Stalin's suspicions. Martemyan Ryutin was working with a large, secret Opposition Bloc with Trotsky and Grigory Zinoviev,<ref name="Broué">Template:Cite web</ref><ref>Template:Citation</ref> which led to their deaths. Stalin enforced a ban on party factions and demoted party members who had opposed him, ending democratic centralism.Template:Citation needed
In the new 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 the prestigious "old guard" of revolutionaries. As the purges began, the government (through the NKVD) shot Bolshevik heroes—including Mikhail Tukhachevsky and Béla Kun—and most of Lenin's Politburo for disagreements about policy. The NKVD attacked the supporters, friends, and family of these "heretical" Marxists, in Russia and abroad. It nearly annihilated Trotsky's family before killing him in Mexico; NKVD agent Ramón Mercader was part of an assassination task force assembled by special agent Pavel Sudoplatov under Stalin's orders.Template:Sfn
By 1934, several of Stalin's rivals (such as Trotsky) began calling for Stalin's removal and attempted to break his control of the party.<ref>Template:Cite web</ref> In an atmosphere of doubt and suspicion, the popular high-ranking official Sergei Kirov was assassinated. The December 1934 assassination led to an investigation that revealed a network of party members supposedly working against Stalin, including several of his rivals.<ref>Template:Cite web</ref> Many of those arrested after Kirov's murder, high-ranking party officials among them, also admitted (often under duress) plans to kill Stalin themselves.<ref>Template:Cite book</ref> The confessions' validity is debated by historians, but consensus exists that Kirov's death was the flashpoint when Stalin decided to take action and begin the purges.<ref>Template:Cite book</ref><ref>Template:Cite book</ref> Some later historians came to believe that Stalin arranged Kirov's murder, or that sufficient evidence existed to reach such a conclusion.Template:Sfn Kirov was a staunch Stalin loyalist, but Stalin may have viewed him as a potential rival because of his emerging popularity among moderates. The 1934 Party Congress elected Kirov to the central committee with only three opposing votes against, the fewest of any candidate; Stalin received 292 opposing votes. After Kirov's assassination, the NKVD charged the increasingly-large group of former Stalin opponents with Kirov's murder and a growing list of other offenses which included treason, terrorism, sabotage, and espionage.
Another justification for the purge was to remove any possible "fifth column" in case of war. Vyacheslav Molotov and Lazar Kaganovich, participants in the repression as members of the Politburo, maintained this justification throughout the purge and each signed many death lists.Template:Sfn Stalin believed that war was imminent, threatened by an explicitly-hostile Germany and an expansionist Japan. The Soviet press portrayed the USSR as threatened from within by fascist spies.Template:Sfn
During and after the October RevolutionTemplate:Sfn,<ref>Robert Gellately, Lenin, Stalin, and Hitler: The Age of Social Catastrophe, 2007, Knopf, 720 pp. Template:ISBN</ref> Lenin used repression against perceived (and legitimate) enemies of the Bolsheviks as a systematic method of instilling fear and facilitating control of the population in a campaign known as the Red Terror. The campaign was relaxed as the Russian Civil War drew to a close, although the secret police remained active. From 1924 to 1928, mass repression—including incarceration in the Gulag system—fell significantly.<ref>Template:Cite web</ref>
Stalin had defeated his political opponents and gained full control of the party by 1929, and organized a committee to begin the process of industrializing the Soviet Union. Backlash against industrialization and the collectivization of agriculture escalated, which prompted Stalin to increase police presence in rural areas. Soviet authorities increased repression against the kulaks (wealthy peasants who owned farmland) in a policy known as dekulakization. The kulaks responded by destroying crops and other acts of sabotage against the Soviet government.<ref>Template:Cite web</ref> The resulting food shortage led to a mass famine across the USSR and slowed the Five Year Plan.
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 of the purges.Template:Sfn The purge of the party was accompanied by a purge of society. Soviet historians divide the Great Purge into three corresponding trials, and the following events are used for demarcation:
- 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<ref>Template:Cite journal</ref>
- 1938: the third Moscow trial.
Moscow trials
First and second Moscow trials
Between 1936 and 1938, three 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. The trials were highly publicized and extensively covered by the outside world. In the Moscow trials, which Stalin used to eliminate his opponents, forced confessions helped to obtain convictions. Trotsky was tried in absentia, and was sentenced to death for treason. Historians have found no evidence to support the charge.<ref>Template:Cite web</ref>
The first trial, of 16 members of the "Trotskyite-Kamenevite-Zinovievite-Leftist-Counter-Revolutionary Bloc", was held in August 1936.<ref>Rogovin (1998), pp. 17–18</ref> The chief defendants were Grigory Zinoviev and Lev Kamenev, two of the most prominent former party leaders who had been members of an opposition bloc that opposed Stalin (although its activities were exaggerated).<ref name="Broué"/> Among other accusations, they were charged with the assassination of Kirov and plotting to kill Stalin. After confessing to the charges, all were sentenced to death and executed.<ref>Rogovin (1998), pp. 36–38</ref> The second trial, in January 1937, involved 17 lesser figures known as the "anti-Soviet Trotskyite-centre". The group (which included Karl Radek, Yuri Piatakov and Grigory Sokolnikov) was accused of plotting with Trotsky, who was said to be conspiring with Germany. Thirteen of the defendants were eventually shot; the rest received sentences in labor camps, where they soon died.Template:Sfn There was also a secret military tribunal of a group of Red Army commanders, including Mikhail Tukhachevsky, in June 1937.Template:Sfn
It is now known that the confessions were obtained only after great psychological pressure and torture.Template:Sfn The methods used to extract the confessions are known from the accounts of former OGPU officer Alexander Orlov and others, and included repeated beatings, simulated drownings, making prisoners stand or go without sleep for days on end, and threats to arrest and execute the prisoners' families; Kamenev's teenage son was arrested and charged with terrorism. After months of such interrogation, the defendants were driven to despair and exhaustion.<ref name="Redman">Template:Cite journal</ref>
Zinoviev and Kamenev demanded, as a condition for "confessing", a guarantee from the Politburo that their lives and that of their families and followers would be spared. The offer was accepted, but only Stalin, Kliment Voroshilov, and Yezhov were present at the Politburo meeting. Stalin said that they were a "commission" authorized by the Politburo, and gave assurances that death sentences would not be carried out. After the trial, Stalin broke his promise to spare the defendants and had most of their relatives arrested and shot.Template:Sfn
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 American philosopher and educator John Dewey. Although the hearings were conducted to prove Trotsky's innocence, they brought to light evidence which established that some of the charges made at the trials could not be true.Template:Sfn
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 took place.<ref>Template:Cite book</ref> Another defendant, Ivan Smirnov, admitted taking part in the assassination of Sergei Kirov in December 1934 (when Smirnov had been in prison for a year).
The Dewey Commission published its findings in a 422-page book entitled Not Guilty. Its conclusions asserted the innocence of all those condemned in the Moscow trials. In its summary, the commission wrote:Template:Blockquote
The commission concluded: "We therefore find the Moscow Trials to be frame-ups."<ref>Template:Cite web</ref>
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",<ref name="ReferenceA">British Embassy Report: Viscount Chilston to Mr. Eden, 6 February 1937</ref> and "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".Template:Sfn
By the "third organization", he meant the Rightists led by Bukharin (whom he implicated):
Third Moscow trial
The third and final trial, in March 1938, known as the Trial of the Twenty-One, is the best-known of the Soviet show trials because of the people involved and the scope of the charges (which tied up the loose ends from earlier trials). It included 21 defendants alleged to belong to the "Bloc of Rightists and Trotskyites" reportedly led by Nikolai Bukharin, former chairman of the Communist International; former premier Alexei Rykov; Christian Rakovsky; Nikolai Krestinsky and Genrikh Yagoda, the recently-disgraced head of the NKVD.<ref name="Broué"/>
Although an opposition bloc led by Trotsky with Zinovievites existed, Pierre Broué says that Bukharin was not involved.<ref name="Broué"/> Jules Humbert-Droz, a former Broué ally,<ref>Template:Cite book</ref> said in his memoirs that Bukharin told him he formed a secret bloc with Zinoviev and Kamenev to remove Stalin from leadership.<ref>Template:Cite book</ref>
The fact that Yagoda was one of the accused indicated the speed at which the purges were consuming their own. No other crime of the Stalin era captivated Western intellectuals as much as the trial and execution of Bukharin, who was a Marxist theorist of international standing.<ref name="Corey Robin, Fear, Page 96">Corey Robin, "Fear", p. 96</ref> For prominent communists such as Bertram Wolfe, Jay Lovestone, Arthur Koestler, and Heinrich Brandler, the Bukharin trial was their final break with communism; the first three became fervent anti-communists.<ref>Bertram David Wolfe, "Breaking with communism", p. 10</ref>Template:Sfn Bukharin's confession symbolized communism's depredations, which destroyed its sons and also enlisted them in self-destruction and denial.<ref name="Corey Robin, Fear, Page 96"/>
Bukharin's confession
On the first day of the trial, Krestinsky caused a sensation when he repudiated his written confession and pleaded not guilty to all charges. He changed his plea the next day, however, after "special measures" which dislocated his left shoulder and caused other injuries.Template:Sfn
Anastas Mikoyan and Vyacheslav Molotov later said that Bukharin was never tortured, but his interrogators were told "beating permitted" and were pressured to extract a confession from the "star" defendant. Bukharin held out for three months, but threats to his young wife and infant son and "methods of physical influence" wore him down. When he read his confession (amended and corrected by Stalin), he withdrew it. The examination began again, with a double team of interrogators.Template:Sfn
Bukharin's confession was a subject of debate among Western observers, inspiring Arthur Koestler's novel Darkness at Noon and a philosophical essay by Maurice Merleau-Ponty in Humanism and Terror. It was a combination of fulsome confessions (of being a "degenerate fascist" working for the "restoration of capitalism") and subtle criticisms of the trial. An observer noted that after disproving several charges against him, Bukharin "proceeded to demolish or rather showed he could very easily demolish the whole case."<ref>Report by Viscount Chilston (British ambassador) to Viscount Halifax, No. 141, Moscow, 21 March 1938</ref> The observer said 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 by saying:<ref>Tucker, Robert. "Block of Rights and Trotskyites." Report of Court Proceedings in the Case of the Anti-Soviet. pp. 667–668.</ref>
[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).
"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 estimate the number of "kulaks" and "criminals" in their districts. These individuals were to be arrested and executed, or sent to Gulag camps. The party chiefs produced the lists within days, with figures roughly corresponding to the number of individuals already under secret-police surveillance.<ref name=werth/>
NKVD Order No. 00447 was issued on 30 July 1937, directed against "ex-kulaks" and other "anti-Soviet elements" such as former officials of the Tsarist regime and former members of political parties other than the Communist Party. They were to be executed or sent to Gulag prison camps extrajudicially, following decisions by NKVD troikas. The following categories appear to have been on index cards, catalogues of suspects assembled over the years by the NKVD and systematically tracked down: "ex-kulaks" previously deported to "special settlements" in inhospitable parts of the country (Siberia, the Urals, Kazakhstan, and the Far North), former tsarist civil servants, former officers of the White Army, participants in peasant rebellions, members of the clergy, people deprived of voting rights, former members of non-Bolshevik parties, criminals (such as thieves) known to the police, and other "socially harmful elements".<ref name="werth2-6"/>
Many 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, railway and other types of workers were arrested during the "Kulak Operation" based on the fact that they worked for (or near) 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."<ref>Werth, Nicolas. 2009. L'ivrogne et la marchande de fleurs. Autopsie d'un meurtre de masse, 1937–1938. Paris: Tallandier.</ref>
The Orthodox clergy, including active parishioners, was nearly annihilated; eighty-five percent of the 35,000 clergy members were arrested. Also particularly vulnerable to repression were the "special settlers" (spetzpereselentsy), who were under permanent police surveillance and were a large pool of potential "enemies". At least 100,000 of them were arrested during the Great Purge.<ref name="sciencespo.fr"/>
Common criminals, such as thieves and "violators of the passport regime", were also dealt with summarily. In Moscow, nearly one third of the 20,765 people executed on the Butovo firing range were charged with a non-political criminal offence.<ref name="sciencespo.fr"/>
To carry out the mass arrests, the 25,000 officers of the NKVD were supplemented with police units and Komsomol (Young Communist League) and civilian Communist Party members. To meet quotas, the police rounded up people in markets and train stations to arrest "social outcasts".<ref name=werth/> Local NKVD units, to meet "casework minimums" and force confessions from arrestees, worked long shifts during which they interrogated, tortured and beat prisoners. In many cases, those arrested were forced to sign blank pages which were later filled in with a fabricated confession by interrogators.<ref name=werth/>
After the interrogations, the files were submitted to NKVD troikas which pronounced verdicts without those accused. A troika went through several hundred cases during a half-day-long session, delivering a death sentence or a sentence to the Gulag labor camps. Death sentences were immediately enforceable. Executions were carried out at night in prisons or in secluded areas run by the NKVD on the outskirts of major cities.<ref name="werth2-6">Template:Cite web</ref> The "Kulak Operation" was the largest single campaign of repression in 1937–38, with 669,929 people arrested and 376,202 executed (over half the total of known executions).Template:Sfn
Campaigns targeting nationalities
On Yezhov's order, a series of mass operations of the NKVD was carried out from 1937 through 1938 targeting nationalities in the Soviet Union. The Polish Operation of the NKVD was the largest of this kind,Template:Sfn with the largest number of victims: 143,810 arrests and 111,091 executions. Timothy Snyder estimates that at least eighty-five thousand were ethnic Poles.Template:Sfn The remainder were "suspected" of being Polish.<ref name="Russian1">Template:Cite web</ref>
Poles were 12.5 percent of those killed during the Great Purge, although they were 0.4 percent of the population. Overall, national minorities targeted in the campaigns were 36 percent<ref name="snyvic">Template:Cite book</ref> of the victims of the Great Purge, but were 1.6 percent<ref name="snyvic"/> of the Soviet population. Seventy-four percent<ref name="snyvic"/> of ethnic minorities arrested during the Great Purge were executed; those sentenced during the Kulak Operation had a 50-percent chance of being executed,<ref name="snyvic"/> although this may have been due to lack of space in the Gulag camps late in the purge.<ref name="snyvic"/>
The wives and children of those arrested and executed were dealt with by NKVD Order No. 00486. Women were sentenced to forced labour for five or 10 years,<ref name="fronda"/> and their minor children were placed in orphanages. All possessions were confiscated. Extended families had nothing to live on, which usually sealed their fate as well; this affected 200,000 to 250,000 people of Polish background, depending on family size.<ref name="fronda">Template:Cite web</ref> National operations of the NKVD were conducted with a quota system using the album procedure.
The Polish Operation of the NKVD was a model for a series of similar NKVD secret decrees targeting a number of the Soviet Union's diaspora nationalities: Finns, Latvians, Estonians, Bulgarians, Afghans, Iranians, Greeks, and Chinese.<ref name="Sundström-2017">Template:Cite book</ref> The operations against national minorities were second only to the Kulak Operation in their number of victims. According to Timothy Snyder, ethnic Poles were the largest group of victims of the Great Purge; less than 0.5 percent of the country's population, they were 12.5 percent of those executed.<ref>Snyder, Timothy. 2010. Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin. Basic Books. Template:ISBN. pp. 102, 107.</ref>
Snyder attributes 300,000 deaths during the Great Purge to "national terror", including ethnic minorities and Ukrainian kulaks who had survived dekulakization and the Holodomor famine which killed millions during the early 1930s.<ref>Timothy Snyder, Bloodlands, Basic Books, 2010, pp. 411–412 Template:ISBN?</ref> Lev Kopelev wrote "In Ukraine, 1937 began in 1933", referring to earlier Soviet political repression.<ref>Template:Cite book</ref>Template:Rp Ukrainian cultural elites were known as the Executed Renaissance, and statistics from Ukraine's Ministry of Foreign Affairs indicate that about 200,000 victims of the Great Purge were Ukrainians.<ref>Template:Cite book</ref>
Most of the diaspora minorities were Soviet citizens and whose ancestors had lived for decades (sometimes centuries) in the Soviet Union and Russian Empire, but "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".<ref>Martin, 2001: 338.</ref><ref>Template:Cite webTemplate:Dead link</ref> The national operations of the NKVD have been called genocidal;<ref>"The Crime of Genocide Committed against the Poles by the USSR before and during World War II: An International Legal Study" by Karol Karski, Case Western Reserve Journal of International Law, Vol. 45, 2013</ref><ref>Template:Cite journal</ref><ref>Template:Cite web</ref><ref name=stalpol>Template:Cite book</ref> Norman Naimark called Stalin's policy towards Poles in the 1930s "genocidal",<ref name="stalpol"/> but he did not consider the Great Purge entirely genocidal because it also targeted political opponents.<ref name="stalpol"/>
Security issues in border areas have been cited as a need to secure the ethnic integrity of Soviet space vis-à-vis neighboring capitalist states.<ref name="Sundström-2017" /> Adherents of this theory believe that representatives of minorities were killed not because of their ethnicity, but because of their possible relationship to countries hostile to the USSR and fear of disloyalty in case of an invasion.<ref name="Sundström-2017" /> Little proof exists, however, to suggest that Russia's and Stalin's reported prejudices played a central role in the Great Purge.<ref>Template:Cite journal</ref>
Purge of the army
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 (equivalent to three-star generals),<ref>Template:Cite web</ref> eight of nine admirals (the purge fell heavily on the Navy, who were suspected of exploiting opportunities for foreign contacts),Template:Sfn 50 of 57 army corps commanders, 154 out of 186 division commanders, all 16 army commissars, and 25 of 28 army corps commissars.Template:Sfn It was first thought that 25 to 50 percent of Red Army officers had been purged, but the true figure is 3.7 to 7.7 percent. The discrepancy resulted from 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 the officers purged from 1937 to 1939 were allowed to return to service.<ref>Stephen Lee, European Dictatorships 1918–1945, p. 56.</ref>
The purge of the army was said to be supported by German-forged documents (alleged correspondence between Marshal Tukhachevsky and members of the German high command).Template:Sfn The claim is unsupported by facts; by the time the documents were reportedly created, two of Tukhachevsky's group were already imprisoned, and by the time the document was said to have reached Stalin the purge was already underway. Evidence introduced at trial was obtained from forced confessions.Template:Sfn
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, calling the Red Army less effective after its intellectual leadership was eliminated in the purge.<ref>"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, Field Marshal Keitel testified that many German generals had warned Hitler not to attack Russia, arguing that the Red Army was a formidable opponent. Rejecting this opposition, Hitler gave Keitel his main reason for invading: 'The first-class high-ranking officers were wiped out by Stalin in 1937, and the new generation cannot yet provide the brains they need.Template:'" Roy Medvedev, Let History Judge, p. 214 Template:ISBN?</ref>
Wider purge
Template:External media Russian Trotskyist historian Vadim Rogovin said that Stalin had destroyed thousands of foreign communists capable of leading socialist change in their respective countries, citing 600 active Bulgarian communists who died in his prison camps and the thousands of German communists handed over from Stalin to the Gestapo after the signing of the Nazi-Soviet Pact. Rogovin also noted that sixteen members of the central committee of the Communist Party of Germany were victims of Stalinist terror. Repressive measures were also imposed on the Hungarian, Yugoslav and other Polish Communist parties.<ref>Template:Cite book</ref>
According to historian Eric D. Weitz, 60 percent of German exiles in the Soviet Union were liquidated during the Stalinist terror and a greater proportion of the KPD Politburo membership died in the Soviet Union than in Nazi Germany. Weitz noted that hundreds of German citizens, most of whom were communists, were handed over to the Gestapo from Stalin's administration.<ref>Template:Cite book</ref> Many Jews, including Alexander Weissberg-Cybulski and Fritz Houtermans, were arrested in 1937 by the NKVD and turned over to the Gestapo.<ref>Template:Cite book</ref> Joseph Berger-Barzilai, co-founder of the Communist Party of Palestine, spent twenty years in Stalin's prisons and concentration camps after the purges in 1937.<ref>Template:Cite book</ref><ref>Template:Cite book</ref>
In Spain, the NKVD oversaw purges of anti-Stalinist elements of the Republican forces (including Trotskyist and anarchist factions).<ref>Template:Cite book</ref> Notable were the execution of Andreu Nin, Spanish POUM and former government minister, Jose Robles, a left-wing academic and translator, and many members of the POUM.<ref>Template:Cite book</ref><ref>Template:Cite book</ref><ref>Template:Cite book</ref>
Of six members of the original Politburo during the October Revolution who lived until the Great Purge, Stalin was the only one who survived in the Soviet Union.Template:Sfn Four of the other five were executed; the fifth, Trotsky, was forced into exile in 1929 and was assassinated in Mexico by Soviet agent Ramón Mercader in 1940.
The victims were convicted in absentia and in camera by extrajudicial bodies. NKVD troikas sentenced indigenous "enemies" under NKVD Order No. 00447, and a two-man dvoiki (NKVD Commissar Yezhov and main state prosecutor Andrey Vyshinsky or their deputies) sentenced those arrested for national reasons.<ref>Template:Cite book</ref>
Victims were executed at night in prisons, in the cellars of NKVD headquarters or in a secluded area, usually a forest. NKVD officers shot prisoners in the head with pistols.<ref name="sciencespo.fr">Template:Cite webTemplate:Dead link</ref><ref>Template:Cite webTemplate:Dead link</ref> Other methods of killing were used on an experimental basis; in Moscow, the use of gas vans to kill victims during transportation to the Butovo firing range has been documented.<ref>Komsomolskaya Pravda, 28 October 1990, p. 2. Later cited by:
- Albats, Yevgenia. 1995. KGB: The State Within a State. p. 101.
- Gellately, Robert. 2007. Lenin, Stalin, and Hitler: The Age of Social Catastrophe. Knopf. Template:ISBN. p. 460.
- Merridale, Catherine. 2002. Night of Stone: Death and Memory in Twentieth-Century Russia. Penguin Books. Template:ISBN. p. 200.
- Colton, Timothy J. 1998. Moscow: Governing the Socialist Metropolis. Harvard University Press. Template:ISBN. p. 286.
- Alexandr Solzhenitsyn. Two Hundred Years Together.</ref>
Intelligentsia
Those who perished during the Great Purge include: Template:Unordered list Template:Multiple image
Western émigré victims
Victims of the purge included American immigrants to the Soviet Union who had emigrated from the U.S. at the height of the Great Depression to find work. At the height of the purge, American immigrants begged the U.S. embassy for passports to leave the Soviet Union. Turned away by embassy officials, they were arrested outside by the NKVD. Several were shot dead at the Butovo firing range.<ref>Template:Cite news</ref> One hundred forty-one American Communists of Finnish origin were executed and buried at Sandarmokh,<ref> 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).</ref> and 127 Finnish Canadians were shot and buried there.Template:Sfn
Execution of Gulag inmates
Political prisoners sentenced to the Gulag camps were also executed in large numbers. NKVD Order No. 00447 targeted "the most vicious and stubborn anti-Soviet elements in camps", all "to be put into the first category" (shot). The order specified 10,000 executions, but at least three times that number were shot (most in March and April 1938).<ref name="sciencespo.fr"/>
Mongolian purge
During the late 1930s, Stalin dispatched NKVD operatives to the Mongolian People's Republic, established a Mongolian version of the NKVD troika, and executed tens of thousands of people accused of ties to "pro-Japanese spy rings".Template:Sfn Buddhist lamas made up most of the victims, with 18,000 killed. Other victims were nobility and political and academic figures; some were ordinary workers and herders.<ref>Christopher Kaplonski, "Thirty thousand bullets", in: Historical Injustice and Democratic Transition in Eastern Asia and Northern Europe, London, 2002, pp. 155–168</ref> Mass graves containing hundreds of executed Buddhist monks and civilians have been discovered as recently as 2003.<ref>Template:Cite web</ref>
Xinjiang purge
Pro-Soviet leader Sheng Shicai, from Xinjiang province in China, launched his own purge in 1937 to coincide with Stalin's Great Purge. The Xinjiang War broke out during the purge.<ref>Allen S. Whiting and General Sheng Shicai. "Sinkiang: Pawn or Pivot?" Michigan State University Press, 1958</ref> Sheng received assistance from the NKVD, and he and the Soviets alleged a massive Trotskyist conspiracy and a "Fascist Trotskyite plot" to destroy the Soviet Union. Soviet Consul General Garegin Apresoff, General Ma Hushan, Ma Shaowu, Mahmud Sijan, Xinjiang provincial leader Huang Han-chang and Hoja-Niyaz were among the 435 alleged conspirators in the plot, and Xinjiang came under virtual Soviet control.<ref>Template:Cite book</ref>
Timeline
The Great Purge of 1936–1938 can be divided into four periods:<ref name="OR">Template:Cite web</ref>
- October 1936 – February 1937: Reforming the security organizations, adopting official plans to purge the elite
- March – June 1937: Purging the elites; adopting plans for mass repressions against the "social base" of the potential aggressors, starting with purging the "elites" from the opposition
- July 1937 – October 1938: Mass repressions against "kulaks", "dangerous" ethnic minorities, family members of opponents, military officers, and saboteurs in agriculture and industry
- November 1938 – 1939: Halting mass operations, abolishing many organs of extrajudicial executions, reining in some organizers of mass repressions
End
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 by the Council of People's Commissars and the Communist Party central committee (the Decree about Arrests, Prosecutor Supervision and Course of Investigation) and a subsequent NKVD order signed by Beria cancelled most of the NKVD orders of systematic repression and suspended the implementation of death sentences.Template:Full citation
Michael Parrish wrote that although the Great Purge ended in 1938, a lesser purge continued during the 1940s.Template:Sfn Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (a Soviet Army officer who became a prisoner for a decade in the Gulag system) wrote in The Gulag Archipelago a timeline of all Leninist and Stalinist purges (1918–1956); the 1936–1938 purge may have attracted the most attention from the intelligentsia, but several others (such as the first five-year plan of 1928–1933 collectivization and dekulakization) were equally large and devoid of justice.Template:Sfn
High military commanders arrested under Yezhov were later executed under Beria. Examples include Marshal of the Soviet Union Alexander Yegorov, arrested in April 1938 and shot (or died after torture) in February 1939 (his wife, G. A. Yegorova, was shot in August 1938); Army Commander Ivan Fedko, arrested in July 1938 and shot in February 1939; Flagman Konstantin Dushenov, arrested in May 1938 and shot in February 1940; Komkor G. I. Bondar, arrested in August 1938 and shot in March 1939. All were posthumously rehabilitated.Template:Sfn
When the relatives of those who had been executed in 1937–1938 inquired about their fate, they were told by the NKVD that their arrested relatives had been sentenced to "10 years without the right of correspondence" (десять лет без права переписки). When the ten-year periods elapsed in 1947–1948 and those arrested did not appear, relatives asked the MGB about their fate again and were told that they died in prison.<ref>Template:Cite web</ref>
After Stalin's death, the truth about the purges began to emerge within the party. On 25 February 1956, Nikita Khrushchev delivered a speech ("On the Cult of Personality and Its Consequences", also known as the "secret speech") to a closed session of the 20th Party Congress. In his speech, Khrushchev said that Stalin "acted not through persuasion, explanation, and patient cooperation with people, but by imposing his concepts and demanding absolute submission to his opinion. Whoever opposed this concept or tried to prove his viewpoint, and the correctness of his position, was doomed to removal from the leading collective and to subsequent moral and physical annihilation." Of the 139 members and candidates of the Central Committee elected at the 17th Congress, "98 persons, i.e., 70 percent, were arrested and shot (mostly in 1937-1938)," which he attributed to "the abuse of power by Stalin, who began to use mass terror against the Party cadres." About the trials, Khrushchev said: "The confessions of guilt of many arrested and charged with enemy activity were gained with the help of cruel and inhuman tortures."<ref>Template:Cite web</ref>
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.Template:Sfn Western correspondents failed to report the purges, and in many Western nations (especially France) attempts were made to silence or discredit witnesses.Template:Sfn According to Robert Conquest, Jean-Paul Sartre said that the evidence of the camps should be ignored so the French proletariat would not be discouraged.Template:Sfn A series of legal actions ensued, at which definitive evidence was presented that established the validity of the former labor-camp inmates' testimony.Template:Sfn
Conquest wrote in his 1968 book, The Great Terror: Stalin's Purge of the Thirties, some Western observers were unintentionally (or intentionally) ignorant of the fraudulent nature of the charges and evidence; they included Walter Duranty of The New York Times, a Russian speaker; the American ambassador Joseph E. Davies, who noted "proof ... beyond reasonable doubt to justify the verdict of treason";Template:Sfn and Beatrice and Sidney Webb, authors of Soviet Communism: A New Civilization.Template:Sfn "Communist parties everywhere simply transmitted the Soviet line" but some of the most critical reporting came from the left, notably The Manchester Guardian.Template:Sfn American journalist H. R. Knickerbocker reported the executions, calling them "the great purges" in 1941 and describing 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 wrote about dekulakization, "It is a conservative estimate to say that some 5,000,000 [kulaks] ... died at once, or within a few years."<ref name="knickerbocker1941">Template:Cite book</ref>
Khrushchev's revelations in 1956 had a profound impact on Western communist parties. The Daily Worker (the Communist Party USA newspaper) published the Secret Speech in full, following the lead of The New York Times.<ref>Template:Cite web</ref>
Rehabilitation
The Great Purge was denounced by Nikita Khrushchev after 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 speech, he acknowledged that many of the victims were innocent and were convicted on the basis of confessions obtained by torture. Khrushchev later wrote in his memoirs that he had initiated the process, overcoming objections from the rest of the party leadership; the transcripts belie this, although they indicate differences of opinion about the speech.<ref>Template:Cite book</ref>
In 1954, some of the convictions began to be overturned. Mikhail Tukhachevsky and other generals convicted in the trial of Red Army generals were declared innocent (rehabilitated) in 1957. Former Politburo members Yan Rudzutak and Stanislav Kosior and many lower-level victims were also declared innocent during 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. Rehabilitation: The Political Processes of the 1930s–50s (Реабилитация. Политические процессы 30–50-х годов), published in 1991, contains a large amount of new archive material (transcripts of interrogations, letters of convicts, and photos) demonstrating in detail how a number of show trials were fabricated.Template:Full citation needed
Number of people executed
Official figures give the total number of verifiable executions in 1937 and 1938 at 681,692.Template:Sfn<ref>Template:Cite journal</ref> in addition to 116,000 deaths in the Gulag,<ref name="EllmanComment">Template:Cite journal</ref> Two thousand were unofficially killed in non-Article-58 shootings.<ref name="EllmanComment"/> The total estimate of deaths during the Great Purge ranges from 950,000 to 1.2 million, including executions, deaths in detention and those who died shortly after being released from the Gulag.<ref name="EllmanComment"/> There were 16,500 to 50,000 deaths in the deportation of Soviet Koreans which correspond to the purge. According to Robert Conquest, a practice to lower execution numbers was to disguise executions with the sentence "10 years without the right of correspondence"; this almost always meant execution. All the bodies identified from mass graves at Vinnitsa and Kuropaty were of individuals who had received this sentence.<ref>Robert Conquest, The Great Terror: A Reassessment: 40th Anniversary Edition, Oxford University Press, US, 2007. p. 287</ref> Despite this, the lower figure roughly confirmed Conquest's 1968 estimate of 700,000 "legal" executions; in the preface to the 40th anniversary edition of The Great Terror, Conquest wrote that he had been "correct on the vital matter—the numbers put to death: about one million".<ref>Robert Conquest, Preface, The Great Terror: A Reassessment: 40th Anniversary Edition, Oxford University Press, US, 2007. p. xvi</ref>
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, "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."<ref>Template:Cite book</ref> Historian Corrina Kuhr wrote that 700,000 people were executed during the Great Purge, out of the 2.5 million who were arrested.<ref name="Kuhr">Template:Cite journal</ref> Nérard François-Xavier estimates the same number of people who were sentenced to death, but said that 1.3 million people were arrested.<ref name="Xavier">Template:Cite web</ref> The Soviets made their own estimates; Vyacheslav Molotov said, "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".<ref>Chuev, Feliks. Molotov Remembers. Chicago: I. R. Dee, 1993, p. 285</ref>
Stalin's role
Template:Joseph Stalin series Historians with archive access have confirmed that Stalin was intimately involved in the purge. Russian historian Oleg V. Khlevniuk says, "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".<ref>Oleg V. Khlevniuk. Master of the House: Stalin and His Inner Circle. Yale University Press, 2008. Template:ISBN p. xix</ref> In addition to signing Yezhov's lists, Stalin issued instructions about certain individuals; he once 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?" Reviewing one of Yezhov's lists, he added "beat, beat!" to M. I. Baranov's name.<ref>Marc Jansen, Nikita Vasilʹevich Petrov. Stalin's Loyal Executioner: People's Commissar Nikolai Ezhov, 1895–1940. Hoover Institution Press, 2002. Template:ISBN p. 111</ref> Stalin signed 357 lists in 1937 and 1938 authorizing the execution of about 40,000 people; around 90 percent of these are confirmed to have been shot,<ref>Michael Ellman, Stalin and the Soviet Famine of 1932–33 Revisited Template:Webarchive Europe–Asia Studies, Routledge. Vol. 59, No. 4, June 2007, 663–693. PDF file</ref> 7.4 percent of those executed legally.<ref>Getty & Naumov, The Road to Terror. New Haven, Conn.: Yale Univ. Press, 1999, p. 470</ref> While reviewing one 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."<ref>Quoted in Dmitri Volkogonov, Stalin: Triumph and Tragedy (New York, 1991), p. 210.</ref> He ordered 100,000 Buddhist lamas in Mongolia to be liquidated, but political leader Peljidiin Genden resisted the order.<ref>Template:Cite book</ref><ref>Template:Cite book</ref><ref>Template:Cite book</ref>
Yezhov may have misled Stalin about aspects of the purge.<ref name="Service-2005">Template:Cite book</ref> Contemporary and some subsequent commentators surmised that the Great Purge had not begun at Stalin's initiative, and the idea circulated that the process was out of control after it began.<ref name="Service-2005" /> Stalin may have failed to anticipate NKVD excesses under Yezhov,<ref name="Service-2005" /> and objected to the large numbers of people Yezhov was purging. He interrupted Yezhov when he announced that 200,000 party members were expelled, saying that they were "very many" and suggesting that the expulsion of 30,000 former Trotskyists and 600 Zinovievists "would be a bigger victory".<ref>Template:Cite book</ref>
Stephen G. Wheatcroft wrote that although the "purposive deaths" caused by Hitler constitute "murder", those under Stalin fall into the category of "execution"; however, in "causing death by criminal neglect and ruthlessness (...) Stalin probably exceeded Hitler":Template:Sfn
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.Template:Sfn
Soviet investigative commissions
At least two Soviet commissions investigated Stalin's show trials after his death. The first, in 1956–1957 and headed by Molotov, included Voroshilov, Kaganovich, Mikhail Suslov, Yekaterina Furtseva, Nikolai Shvernik, Averky Aristov, Pyotr Pospelov and Roman Rudenko, and was tasked with investigating materials about Bukharin, Rykov, Zinoviev, Tukhachevsky and others. Saying that accusations against Tukhachevsky et al. should be dropped, it failed to fully rehabilitate the victims of the three Moscow trials; its final report, however, admits that the accusations were not proven during the trials and "evidence" was obtained by lies, blackmail, and "use of physical influence".Template:Full citation needed
The second, Shvernik Commission worked primarily from 1961 to 1963 and included Alexander Shelepin, Serdyuk, Mironov, Rudenko, and Semichastny. It resulted in two large reports detailing falsifications in the show trials of Bukharin, Zinoviev, Tukhachevsky, and many others. The commission based its findings largely on documents and eyewitness testimony by former NKVD workers and victims of repression. It recommended rehabilitating everyone accused except for Radek and Yagoda; Radek's materials required further checking, and Yagoda was one of the falsifiers at the trials. According to the commission,
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 ....Template:Full citation needed
Molotov said, "We would have been complete idiots if we had taken the reports at their face value. We were not idiots." He added, "[T]he cases were reviewed and some people were released."<ref>Chuev, Feliks. Molotov Remembers. Chicago: I. R. Dee, 1993, pp. 276, 294</ref>
Mass graves and memorials
During the late 1980s, with the formation of Memorial and similar organisations across the Soviet Union at a time of Gorbachev's glasnost ("openness and transparency") it became possible to speak about the Great Purge and to begin locating the 1937–1938 killing grounds and identifying those buried there. In 1988, the mass graves at Kurapaty in Belarus were the site of a clash between demonstrators and police. A stone was brought in 1990 from the former White Sea Solovki prison camp and installed next to KGB headquarters in Moscow as a memorial to all victims of political repression since 1917.Template:Cn
After the collapse of the Soviet Union, many more mass graves of purge victims were discovered and turned into memorial sites.<ref>Template:Cite web</ref><ref>Template:Cite news</ref><ref>Template:Cite news</ref><ref>Template:Cite news</ref> Some, such as the Bykivnia graves near Kyiv, reportedly contain up to 200,000 bodies.<ref>Template:Cite web</ref><ref>Template:Cite web</ref> In 2007, the Butovo firing range near Moscow was turned into a shrine to victims of Stalinism. Between August 1937 and October 1938, more than 20,000 people were shot and buried there.<ref>Template:Cite news</ref>
The Joffe Foundation in Saint Petersburg launched a Map of Memory website in 2016, which recorded the location and current use of 411 burial grounds and commemorative sites across Russia linked to forced resettlement, deportation, the Gulag, and 149 secret execution and burial sites.<ref>Template:Cite web</ref> President Vladimir Putin opened the Wall of Grief, an official (but controversial) recognition of Soviet crimes, on 30 October 2017.<ref name="nyt">Template:Cite news</ref>
A mass grave containing 5,000 to 8,000 skeletons was discovered in Odesa, Ukraine, during an August 2021 exploration for a planned expansion of Odesa International Airport. The graves are believed to date back to the late 1930s, during the purge.<ref>Template:Cite news</ref>
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"Week of Conscience", the first exhibition of victims of Stalinism in Moscow, 19 November 1988 -
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Krasny Bor memorial cemetery, near Petrozavodsk -
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Monument to victims of political repression in Rutchenkove, near Donetsk, Ukraine -
Memorial to victims of Stalinist repression in Tomsk -
Monument at entrance to the Sandarmokh burial grounds reading, "People! Do not kill one another"
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Historical interpretations
The Great Purge has sparked a number of 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 the Old Bolsheviks, and analyzed the carefully-planned and systematic destruction of the Communist Party. Others view the purge as the culmination of a social-engineering campaign which started at the beginning of the 1930s (Hagenloh, 2000; Shearer, 2003; Werth, 2003).<ref name=werth>Template:Cite web</ref> According to an October 1993 study in The American Historical Review, much of the Great Purge was directed against widespread banditry and criminal activity in the Soviet Union at the time.<ref>Template:Cite journal</ref>
Historian Isaac Deutscher regarded the Moscow trials "as the prelude to the destruction of an entire generation of revolutionaries".<ref>Template:Cite book</ref> Trotsky viewed the violence characteristic of the purge as an ideological difference between Stalinism and Bolshevism:<ref name="www.marxists.org">Template:Cite web</ref>
The present purge draws between Bolshevism and Stalinism not simply a bloody line but a whole river of blood. The annihilation of all the older generation of Bolsheviks, an important part of the middle generation which participated in the civil war, and that part of the youth that took up most seriously the Bolshevik traditions, shows not only a political but a thoroughly physical incompatibility between Bolshevism and Stalinism. How can this not be seen?<ref name="www.marxists.org"/>
According to Nikita Khrushchev's 1956 speech "On the Cult of Personality and Its Consequences" and Robert Conquest, many accusations (notably those presented at the Moscow show trials) were based on forced confessions obtained through tortureTemplate:Sfn and on a loose interpretation of Article 58 of the RSFSR Penal Code dealing with counter-revolutionary crimes. Due process, as defined by Soviet law in force at the time, was often largely replaced with summary proceedings by NKVD troikas.Template:Sfn
In his memoir, Valentin Berezhkov (Stalin's interpreter in 1941) suggests parallels between Hitler's inner-party purge and Stalin's mass repression of Old Bolsheviks, military commanders and intellectuals.<ref>Template:Cite book</ref> According to historian James Harris, contemporary archival research pokes "rather large holes in the traditional story" woven by Conquest and others.Template:Sfn 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 was an exaggerated fear of counterrevolution:Template:Sfn
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.<ref>Template:Cite web</ref>
Two major lines of interpretation have emerged among historians. One says that the purges reflected Stalin's ambitions, paranoia, and 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 positions. Peter Whitewood examines the first purge (directed at the army) and suggests a third interpretation: Stalin and other top leaders believing that they were surrounded by capitalist enemies and worried about the vulnerability and loyalty of the Red Army.<ref name="James Harris 1941"/> "Stalin attacked the Red Army because he seriously misperceived a serious security threat", and "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 to November 1938, removing 35,000; many were executed. Experience in carrying out the purge facilitated purging other elements of the Soviet polity.<ref>Peter Whitewood, The Red Army and the Great Terror: Stalin's Purge of the Soviet Military (2015) Quoting pp. 12, 276.</ref><ref>Ronald Grigor Suny, review, Historian (2018) 80#1: 177–179.</ref><ref>For a critique of Whitewood see Alexander Hill, review, American Historical Review (2017) 122#5 pp. 1713–1714.</ref> Historians cite the disruption as a factor in the Red Army's disastrous military performance during the German invasion.<ref>Roger R. Reese, "Stalin Attacks the Red Army." Military History Quarterly 27.1 (2014): 38–45.</ref> Robert W. Thurston wrote that the purge was not intended to subdue the Soviet masses (many of whom helped implement it), but to deal with opposition to Stalin's rule by the Soviet elites.Template:Sfn
See also
- Leningrad affair
- Anti-Rightist Campaign
- Excess 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 a traitor to the Motherland
- Orphans in the Soviet Union#Children of "enemies of the people", 1937–1945
- Mass killings under communist regimes
- Lustration
- Stalinist repressions in Azerbaijan
- Holodomor
- The Commissar Vanishes
Similar events
- Cultural Revolution and the Great Leap Forward (China)
- Hungarian Revolution
- Khmer Rouge genocide (Cambodia)
- 30 September killings (Indonesia)
- Prague Spring (Czechoslovakia)
Similar political purges
- 1979 Ba'ath Party Purge (Iraq)
- Indonesian mass killings of 1965–66 (Indonesia)
- Dirty War (Argentina)
- White Terror (Spain)
- Bodo League massacre (South Korea)
References
Citations
Sources
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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.
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- 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.
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- 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.
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Film
- Pultz, David, dir. 1997. Eternal Memory: Voices from the Great Terror [81:00, documentary film]. Narrated by Meryl Streep. US
External links
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- The Case of BukharinTemplate:SndTranscript of Nikolai Bukharin's testimonies and last plea; from "The Case of the Anti-Soviet Block of Rights and Trotskyites", Red Star Press, 1973, pp. 369–439, 767–779
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- 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
- "The Great Terror in Karelia, 1937-1938", Map of Memory (2016)
- "The Map of Memory. Russia's Necropolis of Terror and the Gulag: A select directory of burial grounds and commemorative sites". Joffe Foundation. Retrieved 16 August 2025. 411 sites within Russia from the Civil War to the 1950s.
- Pages with broken file links
- Great Purge
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