Stalin's Great Purge (aug 1, 1936 – nov 17, 1938)

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Aug '36 to Nov 17, 1939 (no date for Aug)

The Great Purge or the Great Terror (Russian: Большой террор), also known as the Year of '37 (37-ой год, Tridtsat sedmoi god) and the Yezhovschina ('period of Yezhov'), was Joseph Stalin's campaign of political repression in the Soviet Union that occurred from 1936 to 1938. It involved large-scale repression of the peasantry; ethnic cleansing; purges of the Communist Party, government officials, and the Red Army; widespread police surveillance, suspicion of saboteurs and counter-revolutionaries, imprisonment, and arbitrary executions. Historians estimate the total number of deaths due to Stalinist repression in 1937–38 to be between 950,000 and 1.2 million.


In the Western world, Robert Conquest's 1968 book The Great Terror popularized the phrase. Conquest's title itself was an allusion to the period from the French Revolution known as the Reign of Terror.

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