The Great Terror, 1936–1938
What happened
The Great Terror was a campaign of state repression in the Soviet Union that reached its greatest intensity in 1937 and 1938. Under Joseph Stalin’s leadership, the NKVD secret police carried out mass arrests and executions through centrally authorized operations, while public show trials removed prominent former Bolsheviks. The campaign grew from earlier institutions and political conflicts rather than from a single spontaneous incident.
Origins: revolution, civil war & one-party rule
The Bolsheviks seized power in October 1917 and fought a civil war against competing armies and political opponents. The new government created the Cheka, a political police organization, in December 1917. During the civil war, arrests, executions and coercive requisitioning became instruments of government. The Soviet security apparatus was reorganized repeatedly, but its ability to detain people outside ordinary judicial protections survived. After Vladimir Lenin died in January 1924, Joseph Stalin used his position as Communist Party general secretary, control of appointments and alliances within the party to overcome rivals. By the end of the 1920s, opposition factions had been defeated and political power was concentrated around Stalin.
Collectivization, resistance & earlier repression, 1928–1934
Beginning in 1928, Stalin’s leadership pursued accelerated industrialization and forced agricultural collectivization. Officials confiscated property, deported families classified as kulaks and pressured peasants into collective farms. Requisitioning, resistance, disruption and state policy contributed to catastrophic famines in 1932–1933, particularly in Soviet Ukraine and Kazakhstan. These events preceded the Great Terror but established practices of identifying social groups as enemies, imposing numerical targets and punishing people through administrative orders. The regime also expanded forced-labor camps administered by the Gulag. In 1934, the assassination of Leningrad party leader Sergei Kirov became a pretext for further arrests and emergency procedures. Historians disagree about Stalin’s precise role in Kirov’s murder; his government indisputably used the killing to widen repression.
The Moscow trials & destruction of the old party leadership
The first major Moscow show trial opened in August 1936. Former Bolshevik leaders Grigory Zinoviev and Lev Kamenev were convicted and executed after proceedings featuring confessions obtained in a coercive political environment. A second trial followed in January 1937, and a third in March 1938 included Nikolai Bukharin and former security chief Genrikh Yagoda. Prosecutors alleged elaborate conspiracies involving sabotage, foreign espionage and plots against Soviet leaders. The trials were public demonstrations of guilt, not independent examinations of reliable evidence. Many defendants were executed. Party officials, military officers, engineers and ordinary citizens were also arrested in proceedings that never received public attention.
How the mass operations worked, 1937–1938
The central escalation came in 1937. NKVD Order No. 00447, approved in July and implemented from August, directed the arrest of people described as former kulaks, criminals and other anti-Soviet elements. Its categories divided targets into people to be executed and people to be sent to camps or prisons. Regional authorities received quotas that were subsequently increased. Three-person commissions, commonly called troikas, processed cases without ordinary public trials, defense counsel or meaningful appeals. Other NKVD operations targeted people identified with particular national origins or supposed foreign connections, including the Polish operation under Order No. 00485. Denunciation, fabricated evidence, forced confessions and pressure to produce arrests made accusations difficult to contest. The secret police arrested many of its own officers as leadership and political priorities shifted.
Who was targeted & what happened to families
Victims included peasants, workers, teachers, scientists, clergy, party members, military officers, ethnic minorities and people with no organized political activity. The charges could concern a family relationship, a past occupation, contact with a foreigner or an alleged hostile remark. Arrest often led to interrogation, torture, a summary decision and execution or transport to forced-labor camps. Relatives could lose employment and housing, and some wives of alleged traitors were arrested under special orders. Children were separated from parents or placed with relatives and institutions. Fear encouraged silence and self-censorship; it also weakened trust between neighbors and colleagues because accusations could carry fatal consequences.
Scale, evidence & limits of estimates
Soviet archival summaries commonly cited for 1937–1938 record approximately 1.5 million arrests on political or related charges and about 681,000 executions. These figures describe particular recorded NKVD operations and should not be treated as a complete count of every death connected with Stalinist repression. Additional people died in detention, during deportations and through earlier or later policies. Researchers use arrest registers, execution lists, camp records, regional archives and testimony; estimates differ according to the years and categories counted. Mass graves and execution sites, including Butovo near Moscow and Sandarmokh in Karelia, provide physical evidence of the killings.
Why Stalin and the leadership intensified the terror
Stalin and senior officials presented repression as a defense against spies, wreckers and enemies allegedly operating inside the Soviet Union. International tensions, the rise of Nazi Germany, fears of war and the leadership’s suspicion of dissent formed part of the political setting. Those concerns do not establish the truth of the accusations brought against the victims. The structure of the operations also served domestic political ends: it destroyed competing networks, enforced obedience in the party and state, and made independent criticism dangerous. Stalin approved major directives and execution lists, while NKVD chief Nikolai Yezhov and regional party and security officials organized much of the campaign. Responsibility extended through the institutions that authorized, administered and carried out the arrests.
The end of the mass operations & their aftermath
In November 1938, the Soviet leadership ordered a halt to the principal mass operations and criticized abuses in investigative practice. Yezhov lost control of the NKVD and was replaced by Lavrentiy Beria; Yezhov himself was arrested in 1939 and executed in 1940. Ending the 1937–1938 campaign did not end Soviet political imprisonment, deportation or censorship. Many surviving prisoners remained in camps for years. After Stalin’s death in 1953, official investigations revisited some cases. Nikita Khrushchev’s 1956 speech condemned parts of Stalin’s repression, and later rehabilitation measures overturned many convictions. Families and researchers continued seeking records and identifying burial places as archives became more accessible.
Consequences for Soviet institutions & neighboring societies
The purges removed experienced military commanders, administrators and specialists, damaging institutional knowledge and discouraging candid reporting. The effect on Soviet military performance is debated because other factors also shaped the Red Army’s capabilities before and during the Second World War. The Great Terror was primarily a campaign within the Soviet Union, but its national operations struck communities with cross-border ties and foreign citizenship or ancestry. In later decades, Soviet-backed governments in parts of Eastern Europe developed their own systems of political policing and show trials; these histories have connections to Stalinist practices but should not be treated as a single uninterrupted operation. The Great Terror remains central to understanding how a state can combine centralized political authority, secret-police powers and procedures that deny accused people an effective defense.
Documentary record & further research
The principal evidence includes NKVD operational orders, Politburo approvals, regional arrest and execution records, surviving prisoner files, rehabilitation decisions and testimony from survivors and families. Useful starting points are the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum’s material on Stalin-era persecution, the Library of Congress collections on Soviet history, Memorial’s historical documentation and published research based on Soviet archives. When comparing published totals, check whether an author is counting arrests, executions, camp deaths or the broader history of Soviet repression; those measures are not interchangeable.