Great Purge
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
|
Related e |
|
Featured: |
Great Purge was a series of campaigns of political repression and persecution in the Soviet Union orchestrated by Joseph Stalin in 1937-1938. Also described as a "Soviet holocaust" by several authors, it involved the purge of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, repression of peasants, deportations of ethnic minorities, and the persecution of unaffiliated persons, characterized by widespread police surveillance, widespread suspicion of "saboteurs", imprisonment, and killings. Estimates of the number of deaths associated with the Great Purge run from the official figure of 681,692 to nearly 2 million.
In the Western World the term "the Great Terror" was popularized after the title of Robert Conquest's The Great Terror, which in its turn is inspired by the period of the Great Terror (French: la Grande Terreur) at the end of the Reign of Terror during the French Revolution.
See also
- Index of Soviet Union-related articles
- History of the Soviet Union (1927–53)
- Alexander Samoylovich
- Armenian victims of the Great Purge
- Campaign to Suppress Counterrevolutionaries
- Doctors' plot, a 1952–53 purge directed against mostly Jewish doctors, officials and others.
- Night of the Murdered Poets, the 1952 execution of thirteen Soviet Jews arrested in 1948–49.
- Soviet repression in Belarus
