Stalin's Great Purge (Great Terror)
- Date
- 1936–1938
- Category
- Politics & governance
- Region
- Eastern Europe / Eurasia (USSR)
- Era
- Modern
- Significance
Between 1936 and 1938 Stalin unleashed a campaign of political repression across the Soviet Union.
Triggered in part by the 1934 assassination of Leningrad party boss Sergei Kirov, it featured three Moscow show trials (1936, 1937, 1938) at which prominent Old Bolsheviks — among them Zinoviev, Kamenev, and Bukharin — confessed under torture to fabricated charges before being executed. The terror reached far beyond the party elite. NKVD Order No. 00447 of 30 July 1937 set regional quotas for the arrest and execution of 'anti-Soviet elements', and the army's officer corps was decimated. Declassified archives indicate roughly 700,000 to one million executions in 1937–38, with millions more arrested and consigned to the Gulag, where many died. The purge eliminated potential opposition and concentrated absolute power in Stalin's hands, but it also gutted Soviet administrative, scientific, and military leadership on the eve of World War II. The NKVD chief Yezhov, who oversaw its peak, was himself dismissed in late 1938 and later shot.
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Empires active in 1936–1938
- Soviet Union1922 CE – 1991 CE
- Empire of Japan1868 CE – 1947 CE
- French Colonial Empire (Second)1830 CE – 1962 CE
- British Empire1583 CE – 1997 CE
- Spanish Empire1492 CE – 1976 CE
- Portuguese Empire1415 CE – 1999 CE
Related politics & governance events
- The Munich Agreement Cedes the Sudetenland1938
- Hitler's appointment and Nazi consolidation of power30 January 1933 – August 1934
- Founding of the United Nations26 June 1945 (in force 24 October 1945)
- Treaty of Versailles and the founding of the League of Nations28 June 1919 (in force 10 January 1920)
- Russian Revolutions of 1917March & November 1917 (February & October Revolutions, O.S.)
- Sykes-Picot Agreement partitions the Ottoman Middle East16 May 1916
Further reading
The wider story
Conquerors: How Portugal Forged the First Global Empire
Fast-paced narrative of Portugal's seaborne empire.
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