The Great Terror and the Gulag consume Soviet society
Show trials, quotas for arrest, and forced labor camps kill and imprison millions in 1936-38
Quick facts
- Years of the Great Terror
- 1936-1938
- NKVD chief
- Nikolai Ezhov (appointed Sept. 1936)
- Executions, 1937-1938
- At least 680,000 (estimate)
- Key Gulag account
- Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago (1973)
What happened
The assassination of Leningrad party boss Sergei Kirov in December 1934 became the pretext for a campaign of repression that escalated into what historians call the Great Terror or Great Purge of 1936-1938. Three staged show trials convicted former high-ranking Communists, including Kamenev, Zinoviev, and later Bukharin, of fantastical conspiracies; NKVD chief Nikolai Ezhov, appointed in September 1936 and himself later executed, oversaw a July 1937 order that set arrest quotas dividing suspects into categories for execution or camp sentences decided by local three-person tribunals. At least 680,000 people were executed in 1937 and 1938 alone, and more than a million survivors were sent to the Gulag, the Soviet system of forced labor camps that had existed since shortly after the 1917 revolution and grew enormously during Stalin's industrialization drive. Gulag camps stretched from the Arctic north to Siberia and Central Asia, and combined violence, extreme climate, hard labor, and meager rations produced extremely high death rates among prisoners.
Why it matters
The Terror devastated the Communist Party's own ranks and the Red Army's officer corps on the eve of a war with Germany, while the Gulag system continued in reduced form until the Gorbachev era of the 1980s. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, who survived eight years in the Gulag, gave the system its lasting international name with his 1973 book The Gulag Archipelago.
How we know
Post-Soviet access to NKVD archives, including Ezhov's own signed operational orders, has allowed historians to document arrest quotas and execution figures with far more precision than was possible before 1991; Solzhenitsyn's own account, drawn from his imprisonment and testimony gathered from other survivors, remains a key literary and documentary source for conditions inside the camps.
Sources
- Lewis Siegelbaum, Seventeen Moments in Soviet History (Michigan State University). The Great Terror · Reputable sourcesoviethistory.msu.edu · The domain "soviethistory.msu.edu" is on our Reputable source registry. · Link is live and its text matches the event's key terms (Jul 2026)
- Center for History and New Media, George Mason University. Gulag: Soviet Forced Labor Camps and the Struggle for Freedom · General sourcegulaghistory.org · Cited as a "reference" source (no stronger domain match).
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