The Great Purge and Moscow Show Trials
The Great Purge (Great Terror) of 1936–1938 was the most extensive political repression in Soviet history and one of the most consequential acts of political self-destruction by a ruling regime in modern times. Directed by Stalin through the NKVD under Nikolai Yezhov (whose name gives the period its Russian name, Yezhovshchina), the purge killed an estimated 750,000 people and imprisoned 1.3 million in the Gulag labour camp system. The purge proceeded through several phases and targets. The three Moscow Show Trials (August 1936, January 1937, March 1938) were public spectacles in which surviving Old Bolsheviks — the founders of the Soviet state — confessed to impossible conspiracies: working for the Nazis, planning Trotsky's restoration, sabotaging industry. Zinoviev and Kamenev were tried and shot in 1936; Bukharin and Rykov in 1938. The confessions were extracted through sleep deprivation, psychological pressure, and threats against families; they served the political function of retroactively eliminating potential rivals. The military purge was separately catastrophic. Marshal Tukhachevsky — the Red Army's most innovative strategic thinker — was arrested in May 1937, tried on fabricated espionage charges (the NKVD used forged German documents, possibly planted by the SD), and shot within a week. Three of five marshals, 13 of 15 army commanders, 50 of 57 army corps commanders, and between 30,000 and 35,000 officers were killed or imprisoned. The effect on military capability was devastating: when Germany attacked in June 1941, the Red Army was commanded by officers promoted far beyond their experience to fill posts vacated by executions. The purge also targeted national minorities (Poles, Germans, Latvians, Koreans), clergy, engineers, economists, and virtually every institution in Soviet society. In August 1937 the NKVD was given operational targets (limits) specifying how many people in each region were to be shot or imprisoned — a bureaucratisation of terror unique in its explicit quantification of political killing.
- Year: 1936 CE
- Category: Political
