Great Purge
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The Great Purge, or the Great Terror, also known as the Year of '37 and the Yezhovshchina, was Soviet General Secretary Joseph Stalin's campaign to consolidate power over the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and Soviet state. The purges also sought to remove the remaining influence of Leon Trotsky. The term great purge, an allusion to the French Revolution's Reign of Terror, was popularized by the historian Robert Conquest in his 1968 book The Great Terror.
People of Vinnytsia searching through the exhumed victims of the Vinnytsia massacre, 1943
An excerpt of NKVD Order No. 00447
The politburo decision to extend the time limits of the "national line" (ethnic-based) purge operations signed by Stalin, Molotov, Kaganovich, Voroshilov, Mikoyan, and Chubar
Leon Trotsky, in 1929, shortly before being driven out of the Soviet Union
Nikolai Yezhov
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Nikolai Ivanovich Yezhov was a Soviet secret police official under Joseph Stalin who was head of the NKVD from 1936 to 1938, during the height of the Great Purge. Yezhov organized mass arrests, torture and executions during the Great Purge, but he fell from Stalin's favour and was arrested, subsequently admitting in a confession to a range of anti-Soviet activity including "unfounded arrests" during the Purge. He was executed in 1940 along with others who were blamed for the Purge.
Yezhov in 1938
Yezhov's wife Yevgenia with their adopted daughter Natalia
The Gulag newspaper, Perekovka ("Reforging"), front page announcing the replacement of Genrikh Yagoda by Nikolai Yezhov
Yezhov was posthumously removed from pictures, such as here where he stood next to Joseph Stalin.