The Great Terror, the NKVD and the Show Trials
A Bullet in Leningrad
On 1 December 1934 Sergei Kirov, the popular Leningrad party boss and a member of the Politburo, was shot dead in the corridor of the Smolny Institute by a young party member, Leonid Nikolayev. Stalin took the night train to Leningrad, conducted his own interrogation of the killer, and within days a decree had stripped the accused of the right to defend themselves and ordered their immediate execution. Whether Stalin ordered the murder is still debated — the post-Soviet historian Oleg Khlevniuk concludes there is no archival proof — but its political use is not in doubt. The murder of Kirov became the pretext for the Great Terror, the wave of arrests, executions and Gulag sentences that swept the Soviet Union from 1936 to 1938.
The Soviet secret police was not one fixed body. Genrikh Yagoda ran the NKVD until 1936 and oversaw the first Show Trial; Nikolai Yezhov took over in September 1936 and gave his name to the ‘Yezhovshchina’ of mass arrests in 1937–38; Lavrenti Beria replaced Yezhov in late 1938 and ran the system through the war and into the post-war Gulag.
The Three Moscow Show Trials, 1936–38
The most public face of the Terror was the Moscow Show Trials. In August 1936 Lev Kamenev, Grigory Zinoviev and fourteen other Old Bolsheviks were paraded in the October Hall, accused of plotting Kirov’s murder and of conspiring with the exiled Trotsky to assassinate Stalin. All sixteen confessed; all sixteen were shot. The second trial in January 1937 condemned Yuri Pyatakov and other industrial managers as ‘saboteurs’ and ‘Trotskyite wreckers’. The third in March 1938 broke Nikolai Bukharin, the architect of the NEP and Lenin’s own choice as the party’s ‘valuable theoretician’, who confessed to spying for Germany, Japan and Britain before being shot.
The confessions were not spontaneous. Defendants were beaten, denied sleep, and threatened with the arrest of their wives and children. Some were promised that a confession would save their families; in almost every case the families were arrested anyway. The diplomatic corps and Western journalists were invited to the trials precisely so that they could be reported abroad as proof of the regime’s impartiality. The trials were also retrospective revenge on the men who had defeated Stalin’s rivals in the 1920s — Kamenev and Zinoviev had been Stalin’s allies in 1923–25, Bukharin in 1926–27. The Old Bolshevik generation that had made the October Revolution was being publicly liquidated.
Students sometimes treat the confessions as evidence that the defendants were guilty, or as a free choice to die a Bolshevik death. The archives opened in the 1990s make the coercion plain. Defendants endured the ‘conveyor’ — rotating teams of interrogators questioning the prisoner without sleep for days — and the threat of arrest of their families. Bukharin’s prison letters to Stalin, published after 1991, alternate between protestations of innocence and rehearsed confessions. Strong answers explain that the confessions were a stage-managed performance and weigh both Robert Conquest’s totalitarian reading and Sheila Fitzpatrick’s revisionist insistence that local denouncers and bureaucratic dynamics also drove the process.
The Yezhovshchina, 1937–38
Beneath the public trials ran the deeper terror. From the summer of 1937 NKVD chief Yezhov ran a quota system: each region was assigned a target for arrests in ‘Category 1’ (execution) and ‘Category 2’ (eight to ten years in the camps). NKVD Order 00447 of July 1937 set initial figures of nearly 73,000 to be shot and 186,000 to be camped, but local NKVD chiefs petitioned for higher quotas to prove their zeal, and the totals climbed. The atmosphere was sustained by denunciations: ordinary citizens reporting neighbours, colleagues and even relatives, often to settle private scores or to claim the apartment of a deported family. The historian Sheila Fitzpatrick has shown that denunciation was not only a top-down weapon; ordinary Soviets used it to negotiate the system. Estimates of the dead vary — Conquest’s 1968 figures were higher than the post-1991 archival numbers — but Khlevniuk reckons around 750,000 people were shot in 1937–38 alone, with a further 1.5 million sent to the camps.
NKVD Order 00447, issued in July 1937, formalised the mass operation: regional quotas for ‘Category 1’ (execution) and ‘Category 2’ (eight to ten years in the labour camps), targeting former kulaks, returning émigrés, clergy and ‘anti-Soviet elements’. Local NKVD chiefs routinely petitioned upward to raise their own quotas to demonstrate vigilance.
Purging the Red Army, 1937
In June 1937 Marshal Mikhail Tukhachevsky, the most accomplished commander in the Red Army and architect of its mechanised deep-battle doctrine, was tried in secret with seven other generals and shot the same night. Over the following eighteen months three of the five Soviet marshals, thirteen of fifteen full generals, fifty of fifty-seven corps commanders, and the majority of the officer corps were arrested or executed. Some of the ‘evidence’ against Tukhachevsky was said to be a forgery prepared by German intelligence and passed to Stalin through Czechoslovakia, but the forged papers were never used at the trial and historians now doubt that Stalin needed them. The cost was paid in 1941: when Operation Barbarossa hit, the Red Army was being commanded by hastily promoted survivors with little senior experience, and its early disasters owed much to the purge.
The Gulag System
Those who escaped execution went to the Gulag. The camp system, run by the NKVD’s Main Camp Administration, was vast: by 1939 around 1.6 million prisoners were in camps and labour colonies. Kolyma in the Russian Far East was a winter death-zone where prisoners panned for gold in temperatures of minus forty. Vorkuta in the Arctic produced coal. The White Sea–Baltic Canal had been dug by prisoners between 1931 and 1933; thousands died on it, and it was promptly silted up. The economic logic was as much a fiction as the trials — Gulag labour was inefficient and the prisoners died — but the camps gave a hard edge to every denunciation. The line between citizen and prisoner was a knock at the door.
The Show Trials made the Old Bolsheviks famous victims, but they were a small fraction of the total. Order 00447 targeted former kulaks, clergy, returning émigrés, ethnic minorities and ordinary ‘anti-Soviet elements’. National operations against Soviet Poles, Germans and Koreans accounted for around a third of the executions. Most victims were factory workers, peasants and clerks denounced by neighbours or caught by quota-hungry NKVD officers. Strong answers move beyond the famous defendants to the wider sweep of the Yezhovshchina, and engage with the post-Soviet archival school (Khlevniuk) on numbers as well as the older totalitarian school (Conquest) on intent.
Beria, the End of the Yezhovshchina, and 1941
By the autumn of 1938 the Terror had become unmanageable: factories were missing managers, ministries had been thinned out, and the NKVD itself was riddled with arrests as Yezhov turned on his own subordinates. In November 1938 Stalin replaced Yezhov with Lavrenti Beria. Yezhov was quietly arrested, tried in secret and shot in 1940. The mass quotas were dropped, some camp sentences were reviewed, and the regime presented a partial ‘return to normality’ while keeping the Gulag system intact. The Terror had killed roughly three quarters of a million Soviet citizens, broken every potential alternative leadership, and left Stalin’s personal authority absolute on the eve of the German invasion of June 1941. The cost — in officer corps, in technical experts, in social trust — would shape Soviet performance throughout the early stages of the Second World War.