The Great Purge or Great Terror (Russian: Большой террор, romanized: Bol'shoy terror), also known as the Year of '37 (37-й год, Tridtsat' sed'moy god) and the Yezhovshchina (ежовщина [(j)ɪˈʐofɕːɪnə], lit. 'period of Yezhov'), 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.
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. Soviet politicians who opposed or criticized Stalin were removed from office and imprisoned, or executed, by the NKVD, including Nikolai Bukharin, Lev Kamenev, and Grigory Zinoviev. The purges were eventually expanded to the Red Army high command, which had a disastrous effect on the military, including Marshal of the Soviet Union Mikhail Tukhachevsky. The campaigns also affected many other segments of society: the intelligentsia, wealthy peasants—especially those lending money or other wealth (kulaks)—and professionals sometimes in the form of specialist-baiting. 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. 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.
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. 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.
Background
A power vacuum developed in the Communist Party, the ruling party in the Soviet Union (USSR), after Vladimir Lenin's death in 1924; 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. 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."
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.
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, which led to their deaths. Stalin enforced a ban on party factions and demoted party members who had opposed him, ending democratic centralism.
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.
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. In an atmosphere of doubt and suspicion, the popular high-ranking official Sergei Kirov was assassinated. The NKVD initially did not want to help investigate the December 1934 assassination, however Yagoda eventually led an investigation that revealed a network of party members supposedly working against Stalin, including several of his rivals. Many of those arrested after Kirov's murder, high-ranking party officials among them, also admitted (often under duress) plans to kill Stalin themselves. 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. Some later historians came to believe that Stalin arranged Kirov's murder, or that sufficient evidence existed to reach such a conclusion. 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. 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.
During and after the October Revolution, 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.
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. 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. 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
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.
The first trial, of 16 members of the "Trotskyite-Kamenevite-Zinovievite-Leftist-Counter-Revolutionary Bloc", was held in August 1936. 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). 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. 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. There was also a secret military tribunal of a group of Red Army commanders, including Mikhail Tukhachevsky, in June 1937.
It is now known that the confessions were obtained only after great psychological pressure and torture. 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.
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.
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.
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. 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: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."
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", 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".
By the "third organization", he meant the Rightists led by Bukharin (whom he implicated):
I feel guilty of one thing more: even after admitting my guilt and exposing the organization, 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.
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.
Although an opposition bloc led by Trotsky with Zinovievites existed, Pierre Broué says that Bukharin was not involved. Jules Humbert-Droz, a former Broué ally, said in his memoirs that Bukharin told him he formed a secret bloc with Zinoviev and Kamenev to remove Stalin from leadership.
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. 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. Bukharin's confession symbolized communism's depredations, which destroyed its sons and also enlisted them in self-destruction and denial.
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.
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.
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." 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:[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.
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".
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."
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.
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.
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". 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.
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. 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).
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, 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. The remainder were "suspected" of being Polish.
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 of the victims of the Great Purge, but were 1.6 percent of the Soviet population. Seventy-four percent of ethnic minorities arrested during the Great Purge were executed; those sentenced during the Kulak Operation had a 50-percent chance of being executed, although this may have been due to lack of space in the Gulag camps late in the purge.