Great Purge

• 1. Introduction

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  The Great Purge began with a single murder. In 1934, Sergei Kirov, a popular and high-ranking Soviet official, was assassinated by Leonid Nikolaev. Joseph Stalin treated that death as a flashpoint. He launched a series of show trials, the Moscow trials, to strip suspected dissenters from the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. What followed, from 1936 to 1938, consumed hundreds of thousands of lives. Scholars estimate the death toll at 700,000 to 1.2 million. The campaign carried many names. Russians called it the Year of '37 and the Yezhovshchina. In 1968, the historian Robert Conquest popularized the phrase "great purge" in his book The Great Terror, borrowing the shadow of the French Revolution's Reign of Terror. Who decided who would die, and how were confessions wrung from the accused? Why did the killing reach into the army, the clergy, entire ethnic minorities, and even the secret police itself? And how did a state turn its own founders into traitors? The answers run from forced confessions in Moscow courtrooms to mass graves still being uncovered.

• 2. The Old Bolsheviks

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  Nikolai Bukharin was a Marxist theorist of international standing, and the trial that destroyed him captivated Western intellectuals more than any other crime of the Stalin era. He had once chaired the Communist International. By March 1938 he stood among 21 defendants in the Trial of the Twenty-One, accused of belonging to a "Bloc of Rightists and Trotskyites." Beside him sat the former premier Alexei Rykov and Genrikh Yagoda, the recently disgraced head of the secret police. The presence of a fallen police chief showed how the purges were consuming their own. Lev Kamenev and Grigory Zinoviev opened the cycle of show trials in August 1936. They led a group of 16 charged as a "Trotskyite-Kamenevite-Zinovievite-Leftist-Counter-Revolutionary Bloc." They were accused of killing Kirov and plotting to kill Stalin. After confessing, all were sentenced to death and executed. A second trial in January 1937 sent 17 lesser figures, including Karl Radek and Yuri Piatakov, to the firing squad or to camps where they soon died. The purge struck the heart of the revolution itself. Of six members of the original Politburo from the October Revolution who lived to see the Great Purge, only Stalin survived in the Soviet Union. Four of the other five were executed. The bloodletting reached the families of the dead. Kamenev's teenage son was arrested and charged with terrorism.

• 3. Manufacturing Confessions

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  Zinoviev and Kamenev would only confess on one condition. They demanded a guarantee from the Politburo that their lives, and the lives of their families and followers, would be spared. Only Stalin, Kliment Voroshilov, and Yezhov were present at the meeting that accepted the offer. Stalin called them a "commission" authorized by the Politburo. He gave assurances the death sentences would not be carried out. After the trial he broke that promise and had most of their relatives arrested and shot. The methods behind these confessions came to light through the accounts of former OGPU officer Alexander Orlov and others. Interrogators used repeated beatings, simulated drownings, and forced prisoners to stand or go without sleep for days. They threatened to arrest and execute the prisoners' families. After months, the defendants were driven to despair and exhaustion. Bukharin resisted longer than most. He held out for three months until threats to his young wife and infant son wore him down. He read a confession amended and corrected by Stalin, then withdrew it, and the interrogation began again with a double team. Even in court he fought. One observer noted that after disproving several charges, Bukharin "proceeded to demolish or rather showed he could very easily demolish the whole case." His confession would later inspire Arthur Koestler's novel Darkness at Noon.

• 4. The View From Abroad

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  In May 1937, supporters of Leon Trotsky set up a commission in the United States to test the Moscow trials against fact. The Commission of Inquiry into the Charges Made against Leon Trotsky was headed by the American philosopher and educator John Dewey. Its work exposed the trials as fiction. Georgy Pyatakov had testified that he flew 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 killing Kirov in December 1934, though Smirnov had been in prison for a year by then. The commission published its findings in a 422-page book entitled Not Guilty. It declared the innocence of all those condemned in the Moscow trials. Its verdict was blunt: "We therefore find the Moscow Trials to be frame-ups." Western reactions were divided. Some observers swallowed the charges whole. Robert Conquest later named Walter Duranty of The New York Times and the American ambassador Joseph E. Davies, who saw "proof... beyond reasonable doubt to justify the verdict of treason." Yet some of the sharpest criticism came from the left, including socialist and communist contributors to the British newspaper The Manchester Guardian. For communists like Bertram Wolfe, Jay Lovestone, and Arthur Koestler, the Bukharin trial marked their final break with the movement.

• 5. The Kulak Operation

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  On the 2nd of July 1937, in a top-secret order, Stalin told regional party and NKVD chiefs to count the "kulaks" and "criminals" in their districts. These people were to be arrested and executed, or sent to Gulag camps. The chiefs produced lists within days, with figures matching those already under secret-police surveillance. NKVD Order No. 00447 followed on the 30th of July 1937. It targeted "ex-kulaks" and other "anti-Soviet elements": former tsarist officials, former White Army officers, clergy, members of non-Bolshevik parties, and common criminals. They were to be executed or sent to camps extrajudicially, by decisions of NKVD troikas. A troika could move through several hundred cases in a half-day session, delivering death or the Gulag. Many people were swept up at random, on denunciations, or because they knew someone already arrested. To meet quotas, police rounded up people in markets and train stations. Prisoners were often forced to sign blank pages later filled with fabricated confessions. The Orthodox clergy was nearly annihilated, with 85 percent of its 35,000 members arrested. In Moscow, nearly a third of the 20,765 people executed at the Butovo firing range were charged with non-political crimes. The Kulak Operation was the largest single campaign of repression in 1937-38, with 669,929 people arrested and 376,202 executed. That figure was over half of all known executions.

• 6. Hunting Nationalities

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  Ethnic Poles made up 12.5 percent of those killed during the Great Purge, though they were only 0.4 percent of the population. On Yezhov's order, the NKVD ran mass operations against Soviet nationalities from 1937 through 1938. The Polish Operation was the largest, with 143,810 arrests and 111,091 executions. Timothy Snyder estimates at least 85,000 of those killed were ethnic Poles. The rest were merely suspected of being Polish. The arithmetic of these campaigns was stark. National minorities were 36 percent of the purge's victims but only 1.6 percent of the Soviet population. Seventy-four percent of ethnic minorities arrested were executed. The Polish model spread to other diaspora communities: Finns, Latvians, Estonians, Bulgarians, Afghans, Iranians, Greeks, and Chinese. Families were destroyed alongside the accused. NKVD Order No. 00486 sent women to five or ten years of forced labor and placed their children in orphanages. All possessions were confiscated. The repression of Polish families touched 200,000 to 250,000 people. Snyder attributes 300,000 deaths during the purge to "national terror," including Ukrainian kulaks who had survived the Holodomor famine. Lev Kopelev captured the continuity of that suffering in a single line: "In Ukraine, 1937 began in 1933."

• 7. Breaking The Army

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  Mikhail Tukhachevsky was a Marshal of the Soviet Union, and a secret military tribunal tried him with a group of Red Army commanders in June 1937. The purge of the army and navy stripped the high command bare. It removed three of five marshals, 13 of 15 army commanders, eight of nine admirals, and 154 of 186 division commanders. The navy suffered heavily, suspected of exploiting chances for foreign contacts. Early estimates claimed a quarter to half of Red Army officers were purged, but the true figure was 3.7 to 7.7 percent. The lower number came with a caveat: most of those purged were merely expelled from the party, and 30 percent of officers purged from 1937 to 1939 were allowed to return to service. The case against the army rested on fabrication. German-forged documents, supposed correspondence between Tukhachevsky and the German high command, were said to support it. The claim collapses under scrutiny. By the time those documents were reportedly created, two of Tukhachevsky's group were already imprisoned. The consequences reached the battlefield. Many German generals opposed invading Russia, but Hitler disagreed, calling the Red Army less effective after its intellectual leadership was destroyed. Historians cite that disruption as a factor in the Red Army's disastrous performance during the German invasion.

• 8. The Purgers Purged

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  Stalin reversed course in 1938. He criticized the NKVD for carrying out mass executions and oversaw the execution of two of its chiefs, Genrikh Yagoda and Nikolai Yezhov, the man whose name the terror still carries. In the summer of 1938, Yezhov was relieved of his post and replaced by Lavrentiy Beria. On the 17th of November 1938, a joint decree of the Council of People's Commissars and the party central committee cancelled most NKVD orders of systematic repression and suspended death sentences. The killing did not simply stop. High commanders arrested under Yezhov were executed under Beria. Marshal Alexander Yegorov was arrested in April 1938 and shot in February 1939. His wife was shot in August 1938. Families who asked about the vanished were lied to. The NKVD told them their relatives had been sentenced to "10 years without the right of correspondence." When the ten years passed in 1947-48 and no one returned, the families were told their relatives had died in prison. The truth surfaced slowly. On the 25th of February 1956, Nikita Khrushchev delivered his secret speech to the 20th Party Congress. He revealed that of the 139 members and candidates elected at the 17th Congress, 98 people, 70 percent, were arrested and shot. The graves are still being found. During an August 2021 dig for an airport expansion in Odesa, Ukraine, workers uncovered a mass grave of 5,000 to 8,000 skeletons, believed to date to the late 1930s.