The Kirov Regional Drama Theater

The Great Purge or the Great Terror 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 wealthy peasants and the Red Army leadership, widespread police surveillance, suspicion of saboteurs, counter-revolutionaries, imprisonment, and arbitrary executions. In Russian historiography, the period of the most intense purge, 1937–1938, is called Yezhovshchina , after Nikolai Yezhov, the head of the Soviet secret police, the NKVD, who was executed a year after the purge. Mobile gas vans were used to execute people without trial. Modern historical studies estimate a total number of Stalinism repression deaths in 1937–38 as 950,000–1,200,000.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 .
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