The great terror; Stalin’s purge of the thirties

Dramatic history of Stalin’s horrific purges of the 1930s, beginning with the Stalin-instigated murder of his perceived rival Leningrad Party chief Sergei Kirov. On Kirov’s death Stalin and his NKVD fabricated elaborate plots that triggered the arrest and execution of millions of Russians. The infamous Zinoviev “show trial” was followed by the slaughter of Red Army senior commanders, the liquidation of Communist Party hierarchy, and the bizarre show trial of Old Bolshevik Nikolai Bukharin, a close colleague of Lenin. After Bukharin’s forced confession he and many of the other Old Bolsheviks were executed despite international pleas for mercy. This resulted in several prominent communists such as Arthur Koestler disavowing the communist cause. Great Terror casualty figures reported by the author are 7-8 million for the 1930s purges and a minimum of 20 million deaths for the twenty-three years of the Stalin regime, although “this might require an increase or 50 per cent or so.” Robert Conquest based much of his research on sources that became available after Khrushchev revealed secrets of Stalin’s murderous regime, but before the Glasnost period opened the archives.