Great Purge (1936–1938): Stalin's Terror and the Show Trials

The Great Purge, also known as the Great Terror, was a campaign of mass repression in the Soviet Union under Joseph Stalin, at its height from 1936 to 1938. It began with public show trials of leading Bolsheviks and grew into mass arrests and executions of officials, army officers and ordinary citizens. Soviet records show that around 1.5 million people were arrested by the secret police in 1937–1938 alone, and roughly 680,000 were shot.

Background

By the mid-1930s Stalin had defeated his rivals in the Communist Party, including Leon Trotsky, who had been expelled from the country in 1929. Forced collectivisation of agriculture and rapid industrialisation had caused vast suffering, including the famine of 1932–1933 that devastated Ukraine, known as the Holodomor. Party members and officials who had doubts about these policies were viewed with suspicion.

On 1 December 1934 Sergei Kirov, the popular party chief of Leningrad, was shot dead in the city’s party headquarters. Stalin used the murder as a pretext for emergency laws allowing fast trials and immediate executions. Former opposition leaders Grigory Zinoviev and Lev Kamenev were arrested and given prison sentences. Whether Stalin had any role in Kirov’s killing remains disputed.

The Moscow show trials

The first of three great public trials, the “Trial of the Sixteen”, was held from 19 to 24 August 1936. Zinoviev, Kamenev and others confessed to plotting with the exiled Trotsky to kill Soviet leaders. All were sentenced to death and shot. In September 1936 Nikolai Yezhov replaced Genrikh Yagoda as head of the NKVD, the secret police.

The second trial, in January 1937, targeted Georgy Pyatakov, Karl Radek and others accused of sabotage and spying for Germany and Japan. The third and largest, in March 1938, put Nikolai Bukharin, the former head of the Communist International, alongside ex-premier Alexei Rykov and the former police chief Yagoda himself. Bukharin and most others were shot.

The confessions were obtained through threats to families, sleep deprivation, beatings and promises of leniency. Chief prosecutor Andrei Vyshinsky denounced the accused in violent language. Some foreign observers accepted the trials as genuine, but others, including the commission chaired by the American philosopher John Dewey in 1937, rejected the charges.

The purge of the Red Army

In June 1937 Marshal Mikhail Tukhachevsky, the Red Army’s leading modernising strategist, and seven other senior commanders were secretly tried for treason and conspiracy with Germany and shot on 12 June. Three of the Soviet Union’s five marshals died in the purge, along with most army commanders and many corps and divisional commanders.

Tens of thousands of officers were dismissed in 1937–1938; a substantial share were later reinstated, but many were shot or imprisoned. The losses at the top damaged the Red Army’s leadership and contributed to its poor performance in the Winter War with Finland in 1939–1940 and in the first months of the German invasion of 1941.

The mass operations

The terror then spread far beyond the elite. NKVD Order No. 00447 of 30 July 1937 launched an operation against former kulaks (better-off peasants), criminals and other “anti-Soviet elements”. It set quotas for each region of people to be shot or sent to camps, and regional officials often asked for the quotas to be raised. Cases were decided by three-person panels called troikas without trial.

Parallel “national operations” targeted ethnic groups seen as potentially disloyal, especially Poles, Germans, Latvians and others with links to foreign states. The Polish operation alone led to more than 100,000 executions. Family members of “enemies of the people” were also arrested and sent to camps or orphanages.

Executions were carried out at night at sites such as Butovo and Kommunarka near Moscow and Levashovo near Leningrad. At Butovo alone more than 20,000 people were shot between August 1937 and October 1938.

The end of the terror

By 1938 the purge was disrupting industry, the party and the army. On 17 November 1938 a decree of the Politburo and the Soviet government ordered an end to the mass operations and the troikas. Yezhov was removed and replaced by Lavrentiy Beria; he was arrested in 1939 and shot in February 1940. The terror was blamed on his “excesses”, the period becoming known as the Yezhovshchina. Trotsky was murdered by an NKVD agent in Mexico in August 1940.

By the numbers

Historians note that these figures exclude deaths in camps and during transit, and some researchers argue the true toll was higher.

Why did it happen?

Historians have long argued over the causes of the terror. Writers of the “totalitarian” school, such as Robert Conquest, emphasised Stalin’s personal direction and his determination to destroy all potential opposition. In the 1980s “revisionist” historians such as J. Arch Getty stressed chaos in the party, conflicts between the centre and regional officials, and pressures from below, arguing that the terror spiralled beyond any single plan.

The opening of Soviet archives after 1991 settled some questions. Documents show that Stalin personally signed long lists of people to be shot, approved the quotas of the mass operations and read interrogation records closely. Most historians now accept that the terror was directed from the top, while recognising that local officials, informers and the NKVD’s own momentum widened it. Many scholars link the timing to fear of war with Germany and Japan and a wish to eliminate any possible “fifth column” in advance.

Consequences and legacy

The purge destroyed much of the generation of revolutionaries who had made the 1917 revolution and replaced them with younger officials loyal to Stalin. It left a population used to fear and denunciation, and it weakened Soviet defences on the eve of war. In Spain, the NKVD also pursued Trotskyists and other leftists during the Spanish Civil War.

After Stalin’s death in 1953, Nikita Khrushchev condemned some of the purges in his “Secret Speech” of 25 February 1956, and many victims were posthumously rehabilitated. The British historian Robert Conquest’s book The Great Terror (1968) brought the subject to wide attention in the West. When Soviet archives opened after 1991, researchers confirmed the scale of the killing from the NKVD’s own records. The human rights society Memorial, founded in the late 1980s, documented victims until Russian courts ordered its closure in 2021.

Timeline

• 1934, 1 December: Sergei Kirov is assassinated in Leningrad.
• 1936, 19–24 August: First Moscow show trial; Zinoviev and Kamenev are shot.
• 1936, 26 September: Nikolai Yezhov becomes head of the NKVD.
• 1937, 23–30 January: Second Moscow show trial.
• 1937, 12 June: Marshal Tukhachevsky and other commanders are shot.
• 1937, 30 July: NKVD Order No. 00447 launches the mass operations.
• 1938, 2–13 March: Third Moscow show trial; Bukharin is shot on 15 March.
• 1938, 17 November: Decree ends the mass operations; Beria soon replaces Yezhov.

Why it matters

The Great Purge is one of the clearest examples of a modern state turning its police and courts against its own people on a vast scale. It shaped the Soviet Union’s politics, army and society for decades and remains central to understanding Stalinism and dictatorship in the twentieth century.