Great Purge facts for kids

The Great Purge or the Great Terror (Russian: Большой террор) was a campaign of political repression in the Soviet Union which occurred from 1936 to 1938. It involved a large-scale purge of the Communist Party and government officials, repression of kulaks (relatively affluent peasants) and the Red Army leadership, widespread police surveillance, suspicion of saboteurs, counter-revolutionaries, imprisonment, and arbitrary executions. Historians estimate the total number of deaths due to Stalinist repression in 1937–38 to be between 680,000 and 1,200,000.

In the Western world, Robert Conquest's 1968 book The Great Terror popularized that phrase. Conquest's title was in turn an allusion to the period called the Reign of Terror during the French Revolution (French: la Terreur, and, from June to July 1794, la Grande Terreur, the Great Terror).

Images for kids

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  Excerpt of NKVD Order No. 00447

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  Politburo decision to extend the time limits of the "national line" (ethnic-based) purge operations signed by Stalin, Molotov, Kaganovich, Voroshilov, Mikoyan, and Chubar.

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  Leon Trotsky, in 1929, shortly before being driven out of the Soviet Union.

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  Leningrad party leader Sergei Kirov with Stalin (and his daughter Svetlana) in 1934.

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  Bolshevik revolutionaries Leon Trotsky, Lev Kamenev and Grigory Zinoviev

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  NKVD chiefs responsible for conducting mass repressions (left to right): Yakov Agranov; Genrikh Yagoda; unknown; Stanislav Redens. All three were themselves eventually arrested and executed.

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  Nikolai Bukharin, Russian Bolshevik revolutionary executed in 1938

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  Yevgeny-Ludvig Karlovich Miller, one of the remaining leaders of the White movement, was kidnapped by the NKVD in 1937 and executed 19 months later.

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  Israil Pliner; (1896–1939) chief of Gulag NKVD (1937–1938), later arrested and executed in 1939

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  The first five Marshals of the Soviet Union in November 1935. (l-r): Mikhail Tukhachevsky, Semyon Budyonny, Kliment Voroshilov, Vasily Blyukher, Aleksandr Yegorov. Only Budyonny and Voroshilov survived the Great Purge.

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  1938 NKVD arrest photo of the poet Osip Mandelstam, who died in a labor camp.

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  The NKVD photo of writer Isaac Babel made after his arrest.

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  Theatre director Vsevolod Meyerhold at the time of his arrest.

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  Botanist Nikolai Vavilov's photo, taken at the time of his arrest.

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  Pianist Khadija Gayibova, executed in 1938.

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  Aino Forsten; (1885–1937) Finnish educator and Social Democratic politician, later arrested and executed.

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  Paleontologist and geologist Dmitrii Mushketov, executed in 1938.

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  Polish-born Soviet politician Stanislav Kosior, a contributor to the 1932–33 famine in Ukraine, was executed in 1939.

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  Posthumously rehabilitated, Tukhachevsky on a 1963 postage stamp of the Soviet Union

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  Memorial events in Bykovnya Graves reserve.

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  A list from the Great Purge signed by Molotov, Stalin, Voroshilov, Kaganovich, and Zhdanov

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  Kuropaty mass grave site near Minsk, Belarus

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  Memorial cemetery Krasny Bor near Petrozavodsk, Russia

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  The monumental slab at the entrance to the Sandarmokh burial grounds reads: "People! do not kill one another", Russia

See also

In Spanish: Gran Purga para niños