The Great Terror
1936–1938
The Great Terror
Public show trials for the famous, secret quotas for everyone else.
Three Moscow trials (August 1936, January 1937, March 1938) exhibited Zinoviev, Kamenev, Bukharin, Yagoda, Radek, and others confessing to impossible conspiracies with foreign powers. The confessions were the product of interrogation, threats to families, and, from 1937, centrally authorized beatings. Almost all were shot.
The larger killing was bureaucratic. NKVD Order 00447 (30 July 1937) set regional quotas. National operations ran in parallel: the “Polish operation” alone killed over a hundred thousand people. NKVD statistics opened after 1991 show roughly 680,000 to 700,000 executions in 1937–38. Camps absorbed many more. Yezhov was then shot for the excesses. The quotas had been Politburo policy.
Where to check it · Order 00447; J. Arch Getty and Oleg V. Naumov, The Road to Terror; Robert Conquest, The Great Terror (read with later archival corrections); Memorial’s execution books.