Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin

In November 1929 Stalin published an editorial in Pravda titled "The Year of the Great Break." The headline was no exaggeration. In that single year, every decision that would define the Soviet trajectory was taken.

NEP was dead. Bukharin's 'gradualist' line was denounced as 'Right Deviation.' The forced collectivisation of agriculture began in earnest, and the First Five-Year Plan's targets were doubled. Stalin declared that the USSR must close 'a gap of a hundred years' in ten: 'The backward are beaten.'

1929 was also the year Stalin turned fifty: at the peak of power, he began rewriting his own biography. Until then a 'party functionary,' he now became co-founder of the revolution, draped in Civil War heroism.

The consequences were staggering. By 1933 over 24 million peasant households were herded into 200,000 collective farms. Grain requisitioning triggered famine. Industrial output soared. And so did the Gulag population. The 'Great Break' made the Soviet Union an industrial power, at a cost of millions of lives.

The assassination of Sergei Kirov by Leonid Nikolaev in December 1934 is conventionally taken as the starting point of the Great Terror. The validity of the confessions is debated, but historians broadly agree that Kirov's death was the flashpoint at which Stalin decided to act. Between 1936 and 1938 Stalin staged three public Moscow trials aimed at the old party leadership: August 1936, January 1937 and March 1938. The defendants were accused of conspiring with fascist and capitalist powers to assassinate Stalin and dismember the USSR; historians have found no evidence for the charges, and confessions obtained under psychological pressure and torture produced convictions. The 1937 Dewey Commission concluded the trials were frame-ups, and Trotsky was sentenced to death in absentia.

The repression was carried out through extrajudicial mass machinery. On 2 July 1937 Stalin instructed regional party and NKVD chiefs, in a top-secret order, to estimate the numbers to be arrested, executed or sent to camps, and NKVD Order No. 00447 of 30 July 1937 designated ex-kulaks and other "anti-Soviet elements" for extrajudicial execution or the camps by NKVD troikas. Former tsarist officials and White Army officers, participants in peasant rebellions, clergy, people deprived of voting rights and former members of non-Bolshevik parties were also targeted. Arrests were made at random on denunciations or mere acquaintance with the already-arrested, and engineers, peasants and railway workers were swept up as alleged saboteurs. People were rounded up in markets and train stations to meet quotas and forced to confess, while troikas that pronounced verdicts without the accused processed several hundred cases in a half-day session. The largest single campaign, the "Kulak Operation" of 1937–38, produced 669,929 arrests and 376,202 executions; the Polish Operation was the largest nationality-based campaign, with 143,810 arrests and 111,091 executions.

The Red Army and Navy were purged as well: 3 of 5 marshals, 13 of 15 army commanders, 8 of 9 admirals, 50 of 57 army corps commanders and 154 of 186 division commanders were removed. A view once spread that 25–50% of officers had been purged, but the true figure is estimated at 3.7–7.7%, and about 30% of purged officers had been restored to service by 1939. The claim that the army purge rested on German-forged documents is unsupported by the facts.

Responsibility is not reducible to Stalin alone. The campaigns were carried out according to the general line of the party, often by direct orders of the Politburo he headed, and he decided matters such as whether death sentences would be carried out. He broke a Politburo assurance to spare Zinoviev and Kamenev, had them shot and their relatives with them.

Official statistics record 681,692 executions in 1937–38 plus about 116,000 deaths in the Gulag. Total deaths for the Great Purge are estimated at 700,000 to 1.2 million. Executions were carried out secretly, mostly at night in prisons, NKVD cellars or secluded forests by a pistol shot to the head.

In 1938 Stalin reversed course, criticising the NKVD for mass executions. Yezhov was relieved as NKVD head in the summer of 1938 and was executed, and Beria succeeded him. On 17 November 1938 a joint Sovnarkom and Central Committee decree, together with a Beria-signed NKVD order, cancelled most repressive orders and suspended death sentences. Khrushchev's "secret speech" of 25 February 1956 attributed the purges to Stalin's "abuse of power" and noted that 98 of the 139 Central Committee members and candidates elected at the 17th Congress, 70%, were arrested and shot. Rehabilitation began in 1954; Tukhachevsky and other generals were rehabilitated in 1957, while Bukharin and others convicted in the Moscow Trials were not rehabilitated until 1988 and Trotsky never was.