Terror, Purges and the Cult of Stalin

Between 1936 and 1938 Stalin systematically destroyed his own party, his army officer corps, and millions of ordinary citizens. The peak years of the Great Terror — sometimes called the ‘Yezhovshchina’ — saw roughly 750,000 people shot and over a million sent to forced-labour camps. Why this happened, and how much was Stalin’s personal will, is one of the most contested questions in Soviet history.

The Trigger: the Murder of Kirov

On 1 December 1934, Sergei Kirov, the popular Leningrad party chief, was shot dead at the Smolny Institute by a young dissident, Leonid Nikolaev. Stalin used the murder as proof that hidden enemies were active inside the party. The same day, a decree authorised summary trials and execution of suspected terrorists. Whether Stalin himself ordered the killing remains debated — the totalitarian school argues yes, revisionists say a deranged loner is sufficient. Either way, Kirov’s death triggered the wave of arrests that culminated in the Great Terror.

The Show Trials of the Old Bolsheviks, 1936-1938

Between August 1936 and March 1938, three great Moscow show trials destroyed the surviving leadership of the October Revolution.

• August 1936 — the ‘Trial of the Sixteen’: Zinoviev, Kamenev and 14 others confessed to plotting with Trotsky to murder Stalin and Kirov. All were shot.
• January 1937 — the ‘Trial of the Seventeen’: Karl Radek and Yuri Pyatakov among them. Most shot.
• March 1938 — the ‘Trial of the Twenty-One’: Bukharin, the leading Bolshevik intellectual and former defender of the NEP, confessed and was executed. So was Yagoda, the former NKVD chief.

Confessions were extracted by sleep deprivation, threats to families and prolonged interrogation. The trials were a public theatre: foreign journalists were allowed in to watch defendants admit to fantastic crimes. Western observers split — some accepted the confessions, others (including the philosopher John Dewey’s commission) denounced them as fabrications. Modern historians treat the confessions as forced.

Purge of the Red Army

In June 1937, Marshal Mikhail Tukhachevsky and seven other senior generals were tried in secret and shot, accused of plotting with Nazi Germany. The purge then ran through the officer corps. Of the Red Army’s five marshals, three were shot. Of 80 senior army commanders, 75 were executed or imprisoned. Around 35,000 officers in total — perhaps a third of the corps — were removed. The damage was visible four years later: the early disasters of Operation Barbarossa in 1941 partly reflected an army shorn of its experienced leadership.

The NKVD, Yezhov and the Gulag

The institutional driver was the NKVD (the People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs), heir to the Cheka. From September 1936 it was led by Nikolai Yezhov — the ‘Yezhovshchina’ takes its name from him. Yezhov set quotas for arrests by region: each NKVD office had a target number of ‘enemies’ to find. Quotas drove denunciations as ordinary Soviets accused colleagues, neighbours and rivals to deflect attention from themselves.

Most arrested were sent to the gulag: a network of forced-labour camps stretching from Solovki to Kolyma in the Soviet Far East. Conditions were brutal — mining gold or felling timber on starvation rations in Arctic temperatures. Estimates of camp deaths in the late 1930s vary; perhaps a million died of cold, hunger and overwork. By 1939 the gulag held around 1.6 million prisoners and was a significant economic asset, building canals, railways and mines.

Yezhov himself was removed from the NKVD in November 1938, arrested the following April, and shot in 1940. Lavrenti Beria replaced him and wound the Terror down somewhat, though arrests and shootings continued. The pattern — Stalin discarding his own enforcers when they became too associated with the violence — would repeat.

Censorship, Socialist Realism and the Cult of Personality

A controlled culture sat alongside the violence. Socialist Realism became the only permitted style in 1934: novels, paintings, films and music had to portray heroic workers, wise leaders and a glorious socialist future. Modernist and experimental art was condemned as ‘formalist’. Photographs were retouched to remove disgraced figures — Trotsky was airbrushed out of a famous photograph of Lenin addressing troops in Moscow in 1920; Yezhov was airbrushed out alongside Stalin once he too was purged. School textbooks rewrote the history of the revolution to put Stalin alongside Lenin.

The cult of personality reached its peak. Stalin’s portraits hung in every classroom, factory and kolkhoz. Streets, cities and a tank model bore his name. The 1936 Constitution proclaimed the most democratic political system in the world — a paper document, since real power lay with Stalin and the Politburo. The cult was not just imposed: ordinary Soviets, including many who lost relatives in the Terror, often genuinely believed Stalin was being deceived by NKVD officials acting on their own authority.

Why? The Historiography

Why did the Terror happen? The two main schools clash sharply.