Stalin’s Soviet Union · CHAPTER 6 ·
Great Terror (Great Purge)
Chapter 6 of The Soviet Union under Stalin, 1924–1953: “The Great Terror”
In 1937–38 the NKVD arrested about 1.5 million people and shot roughly 680,000 to 750,000 of them. Moscow show trials condemned Lenin’s old comrades, purges struck the party leadership and the officer corps, and quota-driven “mass operations” targeted former kulaks, priests and national minorities.
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The map above is the world of The Soviet Union, August 1937 — The Great Terror; the Axis forms.
Every state on the map that year: The world in 1938 · Europe in 1938.
Part of IB History: The Soviet Union under Stalin →
SHORT EXPLANATION
In 1937–38 the Soviet state arrested about 1.5 million people and shot roughly 680,000 to 750,000. The Great Terror had a public face and a hidden one. In Moscow, show trials presented Lenin’s old comrades confessing to plots with Trotsky and foreign spies. A purge expelled and arrested members accused of disloyalty, destroying much of the party leadership and officer corps.
The largest killing took place away from the courtrooms. The NKVD, the political police and a forerunner of the KGB, organised ‘mass operations’ against former kulaks, the better-off peasants dispossessed during collectivisation, as well as criminals, priests and whole national minorities. Regional quotas made sentences targets to be met. The diamonds on the map mark forests where victims were buried. The campaign reached from famous Bolsheviks to anonymous peasants, treating people across society as potential resistance to the regime.
Stalin approved the operations, signed execution lists and pressed for more arrests. Nikolai Yezhov’s NKVD organised them, and three-person panels called troikas sentenced thousands without trial. Regional officials sought higher quotas; neighbours, colleagues and rivals denounced people, sometimes in fear and sometimes for gain. In November 1938 Stalin halted the mass operations, and Yezhov was later shot. A frightened, renewed elite now depended on Stalin, and no possible rival remained. Historians regard the Terror as the moment his personal dictatorship became complete.
The full story
Sergei Kirov, the party leader in Leningrad, was shot on 1 December 1934 by Leonid Nikolaev, a disgruntled party member. The murder gave Stalin an opportunity to act against former oppositionists. A decree allowed rapid trials without defence, and Stalin blamed his old opponents. Whether he arranged the killing remains disputed; most historians who have worked in the archives, including Matthew Lenoe, find no evidence that he did.
The accusation grew into a public account of conspiracy. In August 1936 the first great show trial, a courtroom performance following a script, convicted Zinoviev, Kamenev and fourteen others of organising Kirov’s murder for Trotsky. All were shot. The next month Stalin replaced Genrikh Yagoda as head of the NKVD, the political police and a forerunner of the KGB, with Nikolai Yezhov. He complained that the police were “four years behind” in unmasking enemies. The pretext supplied by Kirov’s murder had become a model for further accusations.
Two more show trials accused Lenin’s former comrades of spying and sabotage. The second took place in January 1937; the third, in March 1938, condemned Bukharin and Rykov. Meanwhile the purge, expelling and arresting members branded disloyal, reached institutions throughout the state. In June 1937 Marshal Mikhail Tukhachevsky and seven other senior commanders were shot. About 35,000 officers were discharged during 1937–38, many of them arrested.
The party’s own governing body suffered devastating losses. Of the 139 members and candidates elected to the Central Committee at the Seventeenth Congress in 1934, 98 were arrested and shot. This committee of senior figures resembled a company’s board of directors. Factory managers, engineers, scientists, writers and officials were also seized, and younger men rose from below into their posts. Much of the elite that had built the system was destroyed by it; power became concentrated in Stalin’s hands.
The deadliest operations were concealed from the public. Order No. 00447, issued by the NKVD on 30 July 1937, assigned each region a “limit” for shootings and another for camp sentences. The initial totals were about 76,000 shootings and 186,500 camp sentences. Regional chiefs were judged by their results and requested higher limits. A figure set on paper became a target that officials had reason to meet or exceed.
National operations treated Poles, Germans, Latvians, Finns, Greeks and others as presumed spies. The Polish operation alone sentenced about 140,000 people and shot about 111,000. Troikas—three-person panels acting as judge and jury—could pass sentences in minutes. Executions followed at night in prison cellars and forests.
Some burial sites found after 1988 are marked on the map: Levashovo near Leningrad, Bykivnia near Kyiv, Kurapaty near Minsk, Vinnytsia and Sandarmokh in Karelia. The arrow follows prisoners taken from Solovki to be shot in Karelia. The show trials offered a public spectacle; these places reveal the much wider killing conducted out of sight.
FULL EXPLANATION
Who drove the Terror?
For decades historians argued over whether Stalin planned the Terror or whether conflicts within the system drove it beyond Moscow’s control. Robert Conquest’s The Great Terror (1968) presented a plan conceived and directed by Stalin. In the 1980s J. Arch Getty and other “revisionists” drew on regional records to describe chaotic conflicts between Moscow and provincial bosses, with purges gaining momentum from below. Archives opened after 1991 settled much of the dispute. Stalin approved the mass operations, edited interrogation records and signed hundreds of lists sentencing about 44,000 people, mostly party members and officials, to death or camp. Getty and Oleg Naumov’s The Road to Terror (1999) and Oleg Khlevniuk’s research accept his direction while tracing the part played by regional chiefs, the NKVD and ordinary denouncers. Wendy Goldman shows how denunciations carried arrests sideways through factories and party cells. Direction from above and pressure from below belong in the same explanation: Stalin ordered the Terror, and a system rewarding the discovery of enemies amplified it.
Why 1937? The fifth-column argument
Stalin faced no organised opposition in 1937. Why, then, launch mass operations? An influential answer connects the choice of targets to the approach of war. Oleg Khlevniuk, Stephen Kotkin and James Harris in The Great Fear (2016) connect the Terror to that threat. In the Spanish Civil War, Franco’s supporters were said to form a “fifth column” inside Madrid. Stalin feared that former oppositionists, kulaks, priests and diaspora minorities might support Germany or Japan in a war. The mass and national operations can be read as an attempt to remove possible enemies before they acted. Other explanations stress Stalin’s personality—Robert Tucker interpreted it through a need for vindication—or the momentum of a police state that measured success by arrests. Fear of a fifth column fits the selection of targets, while Stalin’s suspicion and NKVD quotas help account for the scale. None excuses the killing. It destroyed many officers and experts the Soviet Union would need in the coming war.
Why did they confess?
The Moscow trials presented famous revolutionaries confessing to plots with Hitler and Japan. Observers disagreed about what they were watching. The American ambassador Joseph Davies found the evidence convincing; the Dewey Commission, which heard Trotsky in Mexico in 1937, judged the trials frame-ups. Archives and survivors’ testimony help explain the confessions. Interrogators used sleep deprivation, beatings and threats to families. In January 1939 Stalin confirmed that “methods of physical pressure” had been authorised since 1937. Some defendants, including Bukharin, also bargained for relatives’ lives or believed confession served the party. The performances could falter: Nikolai Krestinsky withdrew his confession on the first day of the 1938 trial and repeated it the next morning; Bukharin accepted general responsibility while denying specific crimes. Arthur Koestler’s Darkness at Noon (1940) proposed that loyal communists confessed from faith in the party, but the records point more strongly to torture and coercion. The spectacle addressed two audiences. Soviet citizens were shown enemies everywhere; the world was shown an opposition presented as traitors.
Key places on the map
On this day
Why it happened
The Kirov murder supplied a pretext. Stalin used Kirov’s murder in December 1934 to connect opposition with assassination. The emergency decree passed that day allowed trials within ten days, without defence lawyers, followed by immediate execution. Stalin went to Leningrad to direct the investigation, and former oppositionists there were arrested. By the 1936 trials of Zinoviev and Kamenev, the murder had become a supposed Trotskyist plot: past dissent was made to appear a form of terrorism.
Fear of war and a “fifth column”. Nazi Germany in the west and Japan in the east confronted Stalin with hostile powers from 1933. The Spanish Civil War suggested how enemies inside a country might help an invader. Stalin feared such disloyalty among kulaks, former oppositionists, priests and minorities with links abroad. Those groups became targets of the 1937–38 mass and national operations, suggesting a purge intended to forestall actions its victims had not yet taken.
The old elite still remembered alternatives. The older generation of senior communists had known Lenin and remembered choices other than Stalin. In the 1920s some had supported Trotsky, Zinoviev or Bukharin; some privately criticised collectivisation and the famine. Martemian Ryutin’s 1932 platform called Stalin the “evil genius” of the revolution. Later testimony suggests that Stalin may have received votes against him in the secret Central Committee ballot at the 1934 Seventeenth Congress, though historians dispute it. Destroying this generation removed people able to imagine the party without him.
A police state measured success by arrests. The NKVD expanded through collectivisation and the camps, and its officers were rewarded for uncovering plots. Regional chiefs received quotas to fulfil and exceed; finding too few enemies could itself make a chief suspect. Fear reinforced ambition, especially as Yezhov’s NKVD arrested and shot many of its own officers. Confessions naming new accomplices supplied further targets, giving the operations a momentum of their own.
THE TURNING POINT
The Lubyanka, 30 July 1937. Yezhov signed Order No. 00447 at NKVD headquarters on the Lubyanka on 30 July 1937; the Politburo approved it the next day. Its significance lies in who would now be pursued. Arrests had previously concentrated on party members, officials and former oppositionists. Regional quotas under the order sent hundreds of thousands of peasants, workers, believers and former kulaks before troikas. National operations followed, adding whole minorities. Most Terror victims died under orders issued after this date, which marks the shift from political purge to mass social cleansing.
What it changed
A personal dictatorship without rivals. By 1939 no one in the leadership had known Stalin as an equal or could challenge him. The Politburo met less often; Stalin made decisions with small groups he selected. Molotov, Kaganovich, Voroshilov and other surviving colleagues depended on his favour. The late-1930s cult celebrated a leader who had removed those able to contradict him.
A weakened army on the eve of war. Experienced commanders were removed shortly before the Red Army’s poor performance against Finland in 1939–40 and Germany’s invasion in 1941. How much did the purge contribute to the disasters of 1941? Historians disagree: many discharged officers were reinstated, and other failures also mattered. The purge nevertheless damaged initiative and trust throughout the army.
A new generation in power. The arrests left posts open to young officials, engineers and managers trained in the 1930s, the vydvizhentsy. Leonid Brezhnev, Alexei Kosygin and Andrei Gromyko rose rapidly into vacancies. Brezhnev was a factory engineer in 1935 and secretary of the Dnipropetrovsk regional party committee by 1939. Loyal to Stalin and marked by fear, this generation would govern the Soviet Union until the 1980s.
Fear in everyday life. The Terror entered family life in every town and many villages. Children of “enemies of the people” faced stigma or orphanages, and wives were sent to special camps. People guarded their words, avoided strangers and burned letters. These habits of silence protected the regime after the operations ended and help explain why the Terror was discussed openly only after 1956.
DISCUSSION QUESTION — Was the Great Terror the result of Stalin’s personal decisions or of pressures within the Soviet system?
Stalin’s decisions explain the Terror’s origin, purpose and timing. He initiated the show trials, approved Order No. 00447 and the national operations, signed lists sentencing tens of thousands and stopped the mass operations in November 1938. His fear of a fifth column before war helps explain the people selected as targets. The orders acquired their extraordinary reach through a system in which others had reasons to extend them. Regional chiefs sought higher quotas, NKVD officers competed to uncover plots, and denunciations by neighbours and colleagues brought in more victims, as Getty and Goldman show. Stalin could start and stop the killing, but he depended on people below him to carry it out. Mass repression in a modern state requires both a decision at the top and participants who see reasons to take part.
An interesting fact
On 5 December 1936 the Soviet Union adopted the “Stalin Constitution”, which Stalin praised as the most democratic in the world. Article 127 promised that arrest required a court decision or a prosecutor’s sanction. Nikolai Bukharin and Karl Radek had served in drafting groups of the commission that prepared it. Within weeks Radek stood as a defendant at the second Moscow show trial; fifteen months later Bukharin appeared at the third. The treatment of two men who helped draft the guarantees showed how little those guarantees meant.
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