Great Purge

The Great Purge, or Great Terror, also called the Yezhovshchina, was a political purge in the Soviet Union from 1936 to 1939. After the assassination of Sergei Kirov in 1934, Joseph Stalin launched the show trials known as the Moscow trials, and the NKVD removed Old Bolsheviks such as Nikolai Bukharin, Lev Kamenev and Grigory Zinoviev, officials, party bosses and the Red Army high command. At its peak, from September 1936 to August 1938 under NKVD chief Nikolai Yezhov, hundreds of thousands were accused of political crimes and shot or sent to Gulag labour camps, and minorities such as the Volga Germans were deported. Scholars estimate the death toll at 700,000 to 1.2 million.