Stalin’s 1936–38 terror emptied the party with show trials
The Great Purge—or Great Terror, Year of ’37, Yezhovshchina—was a Soviet political purge from nineteen thirty-six to nineteen thirty-eight. After Sergei Kirov’s nineteen thirty-four assassination by Leonid Nikolaev, Joseph Stalin used the Moscow show trials to clear suspected dissenters from the Communist Party.
The NKVD, interior ministry and secret police, ran the machinery. Under Genrikh Yagoda in nineteen thirty-six it began cutting central leaders, Old Bolsheviks, officials, and regional bosses; critics such as Nikolai Bukharin and Lev Kamenev were imprisoned or shot. Peak intensity came September nineteen thirty-six to August nineteen thirty-eight under Nikolai Yezhov—hence Yezhovshchina—often on Politburo orders headed by Stalin. Hundreds of thousands faced charges of espionage, wrecking, sabotage, anti-Soviet agitation, or coup plots.
In nineteen thirty-eight Stalin flipped, blaming the NKVD for excesses and having Yagoda and Yezhov executed. Scholars estimate seven hundred thousand to one point two million dead. Surveillance and mistrust outlasted the peak; similar purges hit Mongolia and Xinjiang. Trotsky, already exiled, remained a wanted symbol.
Roots traced to the post-Lenin power vacuum; Stalin dominated by nineteen twenty-eight and drove Trotsky out in nineteen twenty-nine. Forced collectivization, the nineteen thirty–thirty-three famine, and peasant floods into cities, plus war fears, primed preventive elimination of “suspect” populations. The Purge thus fused succession politics with social panic—turning party loyalty into a lethal lottery.
The word itself changed meaning. In party slang a purge had once simply meant expulsion from the ranks; about 400,000 members were thrown out in 1933 alone. After 1936, losing a party card usually meant arrest and often death. Three staged Moscow trials put former leaders in the dock: in August 1936 sixteen defendants headed by Grigory Zinoviev and Kamenev confessed and were all shot, and in January 1937 seventeen lesser figures, Karl Radek and Yuri Piatakov among them, followed. The terror reached the Red Army high command, including Marshal Mikhail Tukhachevsky, and fell hard on minorities such as Volga Germans. Trotsky, condemned in absentia, was killed by the NKVD in Mexico in 1940. Historian Robert Conquest's 1968 book The Great Terror popularised the label.
Source: Great Purge
