# Great Terror The campaign of mass political repression in the [[Soviet Union]] from 1936 to 1938, directed by [[Joseph Stalin]] and executed by the [[NKVD]], in which an estimated 750,000–1.2 million people were executed and millions more imprisoned, exiled, or sent to gulag labor camps. The purges targeted Communist Party officials, military officers, intelligentsia, ethnic minorities, and ordinary citizens in escalating waves of show trials, denunciations, and summary executions. The Great Terror eliminated virtually the entire original Bolshevik leadership, decimated the Red Army officer corps (contributing to early Soviet defeats in World War II), and established the template for totalitarian state terror that remains the reference point in Western political thought. [[Nikita Khrushchev]]'s 1956 "Secret Speech" partially exposed the scale of the purges, but full historical accounting came only with glasnost in the late 1980s. ## See Also - [[Joseph Stalin]] — architect of the purges - [[NKVD]] — the security apparatus that executed them - [[Nikita Khrushchev]] — the successor who exposed them - [[Soviet Union]] — the state that produced them - [[Political Repression]] — the broader concept