document_title: Captain Marvel (film)

question_text: who plays captain marvel in the new avengers movie

text: Captain Marvel (film)

text: Premise

text: Set in the mid-1990s, Captain Marvel follows Carol Danvers, a former U.S. Air Force fighter pilot, as she turns into one of the galaxy's mightiest heroes and joins Starforce, an elite Kree military team, before returning home with new questions about her past and identity when the Earth is caught in the center of an intergalactic conflict between two alien worlds.[2][3]

text: Cast

text:
Brie Larson as Carol Danvers / Captain Marvel: An ex-U.S. Air Force fighter pilot and member of an elite Kree military team called Starforce, whose DNA was fused with that of a Kree during an accident, which imbued her with superhuman strength, energy projection, and flight.[4][5][3] Larson described Danvers as a "believer in truth and justice" and a "bridge between Earth and space. She's fighting between the flaws that are within her and all this good that she wants to try and spread and make the world a better place."[6] Marvel Studios President Kevin Feige stated that Larson was cast because she has the ability to balance the character's vast powers with her humanity and relatable flaws.[7] Larson called Danvers aggressive, quick tempered, and invasive, but said while those characteristics can be great in battle, they are also character flaws.[8]  Speaking more to Danvers' flaws and her Kree and human halves "warring against each other", Larson noted that her Kree half is "unemotional... an amazing fighter and competitive," while her human half "is flawed but is also the thing that she ends up leading by. It’s the thing that gets her in trouble, but it’s also the thing that makes her great."[3] Regarding concern that Larson was too young to portray Danvers, an accomplished airman, initial screenwriter Nicole Perlman consulted with the Air Force, who said it was not out of the realm of possibility for someone "to go very far" between the ages of 28 and 34.[9] Larson trained for nine months, learning judo, boxing, and wrestling.[10][3] She also visited Nellis Air Force Base and met with active duty airmen, including Brigadier General Jeannie Leavitt and Thunderbirds pilot Major Stephen Del Bagno to prepare for the role.[2][11][12]
Samuel L. Jackson as Nick Fury: The future director of S.H.I.E.L.D., who at this time is a low level bureaucrat.[13] Fury appears without his signature eye patch as the film is set in the 1990s, before he loses his eye.[14] Feige stated that the film explores a period of Fury's life when he has no idea about superheroes and that Carol Danvers is the first superhero that he comes across,[15] elaborating that Fury "has reached a point in his career where he thought the Cold War is over and the best days are behind him. And when he encounters certain things in this movie, it sets him on a path that leads us to where we are 19 films later."[16] Jackson said, "This is a mind-changing, attitude-changing moment... He [now] understands that there are these other things out there. He understands that they're not all enemies, and we do need to find allies who have specific kinds of skills that humans don't have." Jackson described Fury at this point in time as a desk jockey, who has not yet become cynical towards bureaucracy.[17] Jackson was digitally de-aged by 25 years, the first time Marvel has done this for an entire film.[18]
Ben Mendelsohn as Talos: The shape-shifting leader of the Skrull invasion of Earth, who is working undercover within S.H.I.E.L.D. as Fury's boss.[19] Mendelsohn described Talos’ human persona as "buttoned up" and his natural Skrull persona as "more laid back, a bit tougher, [and] a little bit nastier." Mendelsohn elaborated, "The thing is, when you’re Skrullin’, there’s a kind of take-no-prisoners vibe about it, which is more relaxed. [As a human] This guy’s got to follow protocol because it’s S.H.I.E.L.D." When portraying Talos, Mendelsohn uses his native Australian accent, and an American accent when he is in his S.H.I.E.L.D. disguise, which Mendelsohn compared to that of American politician Donald Rumsfeld. Mendelsohn noted there was "a very lengthy discussion" regarding the accent for the Skrulls, adding "There’s a certain kind of earthy correctness to an Australian delivery". It took Mendelson a "couple of hours" to have his makeup and prosthetics applied to portray Talos.[19]
Djimon Hounsou as Korath: A Kree mercenary and member of Starforce.[20][21] Hounsou explained that Korath was "at his infancy" in the film compared to his appearance in Guardians of the Galaxy, but was "still a humorless machine".[22]
Lee Pace as Ronan the Accuser: A high-ranking Kree official who is fanatical about their culture and practices.[20][23]
Lashana Lynch as Maria Rambeau: One of Danvers’ oldest friends and fellow Air Force pilot, who goes by the call sign "Photon", and is a single mother to daughter Monica. Lynch described Rambeau as "resilient" and "strong" saying, "Maria’s got a strength that’s undeniable, in that you don’t feel like you need to help her. She is thrown into many a situation in this movie that she’s never been a part of, never seen, never experienced — and she just learns it, immediately." Like Larson, Lynch met with active duty airmen in preparation for the role. In particular, she met with pilots who are also mothers, as her character is also both. Lynch was excited to portray a character the audience would be proud of and could relate to, especially mothers and members of the black community, helping to continue "a real through-line" for African-American characters in the MCU after Black Panther.[24]
Gemma Chan as Minn-Erva: A Kree sniper and member of Starforce.[25][22] Chan noted Minn-Erva was "the star of Starforce" before Danvers joined the team and is "slightly threatened by someone else who has come in and is also very talented."[22]
Algenis Pérez Soto as Att-Lass: A member of Starforce.[2][21]
Rune Temte as Bron-Char: A member of Starforce.[2][21]
Mckenna Grace as young Carol Danvers[2][26]
Clark Gregg as Phil Coulson: A rookie agent of S.H.I.E.L.D. who works closely with Fury.[13] Gregg stated that Coulson would be younger in the film and "a bit of a new guy in S.H.I.E.L.D. ... It's the earliest we will have seen him [in the MCU], so when he says, 'Mr. Stark, this isn’t my first rodeo' in Iron Man, this is maybe the rodeo he's talking about."[27] He felt "there was something really special about going back to the early days when [Coulson] was just kind of coming up the ranks" and had to work to portray Coulson "a little less crusty and jaded" as he is in the present of the MCU.[13] Like Jackson, Gregg was digitally de-aged by 25 years, the first time Marvel has done this for an entire film.[18]
Jude Law as Mar-Vell / Walter Lawson: Danvers' mentor and commander in Starforce, who trains her to use her new powers.[28][29][8] Law said that his character is "driven by a belief in the divine leadership of the Kree people. So he's almost a devout warrior — unquestioning, conservative, but inspirational." Law also stated that his character has a special relationship with Danvers, whom he views as a mentee, which becomes a source of tension in the film with the other members of Starforce. Robert Downey Jr., who portrays Tony Stark in other MCU films and who co-starred with Law in Sherlock Holmes and its sequel, counseled him on working with Marvel, before Law took the part.[25]

text: Additionally, Robert Kazinsky,[30] Annette Bening,[31] Vik Sahay,[32] Colin Ford,[33] Chuku Modu,[34] and Kenneth Mitchell have been cast in undisclosed roles.[35]

text: Production

text: Development

text: By May 2013, a script for Ms. Marvel, the moniker Carol Danvers used in the comics before she took the mantle Captain Marvel, had been written for Marvel Studios through the studio's writing program.[36] Producer Louis D'Esposito stated later that year that the studio was interested in a female-driven superhero film, saying that they have plenty of "strong female characters" from which to choose and suggested Captain Marvel, Black Widow, Pepper Potts, or Peggy Carter as possible candidates.[37] Kevin Feige, President of Production at Marvel Studios, said that if Marvel was to make a female-led film, he would prefer it to be a new character to the Marvel Cinematic Universe like Captain Marvel, who could receive an origin story.[38] In August 2014, Feige stated that Black Panther and Captain Marvel were "both characters that we like, that development work has been done on and is continuing to be done on" and that the studio is often asked about it by the public, "more than Iron Man 4, more than Avengers 3 ... I think that's something that we have to pay attention to."[39]

text:
We've been talking a lot about archetypes and what we want this movie to be about and just how to write a strong female superhero without making it Superman with boobs ... we'll catch ourselves and say, 'Wait a minute, what are we saying [here] about women in power?' Then we have to say, 'Why are we getting so hung up on that? We should just tell the best story and build the best character.' And then we have this constant back-and-forth about how to tell a story that is compelling, entertaining, moving, kick-ass, and fun, and also be aware of what those larger implications might be.
—Co-screenwriter Nicole Perlman[40]

tag: div

text: In October 2014, Feige announced that Captain Marvel would be released on July 6, 2018, as part of the studio's Phase Three slate of films,[41] making it Marvel's first female-led film.[42] He said the film would be based on the Carol Danvers version of the character and that the film "has been in the works almost as long as Doctor Strange or Guardians of the Galaxy before it came out, and one of the key things was figuring out what we wanted to do with it. Her adventures are very earthbound, but her powers are based in the cosmic realm."[41] Feige added that a writer and director would be announced "quite soon", and female filmmakers were being considered, though he could not promise that Marvel would "hire from any one demographic".[43]

text: In February 2015, Marvel pushed back the release date to November 2, 2018.[44] In early April, Feige revealed that Captain Marvel appeared in an early draft of the Avengers: Age of Ultron screenplay, but was removed as "it didn't feel like the time. We didn't want to introduce her fully formed flying in a costume before you knew who she was or how she came to be."[45] He also said that Marvel would be ready to announce writers for the film "hopefully in the next week or two",[46] and by mid-April, Guardians of the Galaxy co-screenwriter Nicole Perlman and Inside Out co-screenwriter Meg LeFauve were announced to be writing the screenplay.[47] The duo were put together as a writing team after impressing Feige with separate takes on the character,[48] and began work on the film within a month.[49] LeFauve found the character being a female superhero to be both "wonderful" and a challenge, particularly because of how powerful the character is which could lead to the "Superman curse. 'What's her vulnerability?' is what we have to figure out."[50]

text: By May, Marvel had discussions with Ava DuVernay about directing Captain Marvel or Black Panther,[51] which Feige confirmed a month later, saying that he had met with DuVernay amongst a number of other directors and expected a decision to be made by mid- to late 2015.[52] That September, Feige said that the casting process would not begin until 2016, as "we're scripting the film, figuring out who we want Carol Danvers to be, and really what the structure of the movie will be and what her part will be in some of our other Phase 3 films." Producer Jeremy Latcham elaborated that "getting the character right first is going to lead the charge. We want to make sure we know who it is before we can start figuring out who should play it."[53] In October 2015, Marvel changed the release date once again, moving it back to March 8, 2019.[54]

text: Feige stated in April 2016 that a director would be announced "in the next month or two" and that the first cast members would be announced in mid-2016. He also mentioned that the film would be about Carol Danvers' journey to become Captain Marvel.[55] The next month, indie filmmaker Emily Carmichael's name surfaced as a possible contender to direct the film,[56] and by June, Brie Larson emerged as the frontrunner to play Captain Marvel.[57] Larson was confirmed for the role at San Diego Comic-Con International 2016,[5] for which she will earn $5 million.[58] Larson was initially hesitant to accept the role, but "couldn't deny the fact that this movie is everything I care about, everything that's progressive and important and meaningful, and a symbol I wished I would've had growing up."[59] She was able to bring "some of those [deep emotional] things" she had used in more "dramatic roles" for the part, which she felt helped set Captain Marvel apart from other superhero films.[3] Also at Comic-Con, Feige said the search for a director had been narrowed down to "a short list of 10", and was hoping to be able to announce the choice "by the end of the summer".[60]

text: Perlman revealed in August that the character's origin story had been changed for the film due to similarities with Green Lantern's,[61] with Feige expanding by saying, "I think we have a very cool and unique way of telling" her story, centered on Danvers finding her limitations and vulnerabilities; he added that the character would be "by far the most powerful character" in the MCU films, and would be a "very important character in our universe".[62] Producer Nate Moore later explained that they sought to break away from the traditional structure of many MCU origin stories, "which is you meet the character, they have a problem, they get powers at the end of the first act, and the end of the second act they learn about the powers, the third act they probably fight a villain who has a function of the same powers," in order to give audiences a new experience;[63] Danvers starts the films with her powers already.[8]

text: In October 2016, Feige admitted that the announcement for a director was taking longer than he previously expected, and explained that the studio was now waiting for "a little more of the story [to be] set" so they could talk to potential directors about it. Once again talking about hiring a female filmmaker to direct the film, Feige said that he did not think it would be a requirement "to make a great version of Captain Marvel, but it's something we think is important," even if that female filmmaker does not know a lot about the comics, as "they just have to fall in love with it once they are presented with it. It's amazing to see all of the filmmakers read through [the source material] and know, 'Oh, a female's writing it now'", speaking in particular to Kelly Sue DeConnick's run in the comics.[62] Feige expected a director to be announced by the end of 2016;[64] however, Perlman and LeFauve turned in a script treatment around December, pushing additional meetings with director candidates into early 2017.[65]

text: In February 2017, Perlman stated that despite her and LeFauve being hired almost a year previously, the duo had only recently gotten their "marching orders" for the script, stating one of the reasons for the delay was figuring out where the film would fit within the MCU. Perlman also discussed the character's femininity, feeling that it was important to make sure she is not "somebody who is a hero in spite of her femininity ... being a woman is part of [her] strength." The writers were also considerate of tropes that could be diminishing to a female character but not for male characters, "things you wouldn't think twice about for Iron Man but you would think twice about for Captain Marvel."[9]

text: Pre-production

text:
This is not a superhero who's perfect or otherworldly or has some godlike connection... what makes her special is just how human she is. She's funny, but doesn't always tell good jokes. And she can be headstrong and reckless and doesn't always make the perfect decisions for herself. But at her core, she has so much heart and so much humanity — and all of its messiness.
—Co-director Anna Boden[8]

text: Marvel hired Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck to direct Captain Marvel in April 2017, after the duo impressed Marvel "time and time again" over numerous meetings with their vision for the character, and because of their experience working in both television and film.[66] Feige noted that he and Marvel were impressed with Boden and Fleck's ability to create character-driven stories in all of their works. He added, "The stories they've told have been so diverse, but regardless of the subject matter, they can dive into it and hone in on that character's journey." Ultimately, Feige felt the film "needs to be about the three-dimensional, multilayered Carol Danvers character. You have to be able to track her and follow her and relate to her at all points of the movie, regardless of how many visual effects and spaceships and bad guys are filling the frame."[67] Filming was scheduled to begin in January 2018, at Pinewood Atlanta Studios in Fayette County, Georgia,[68] but Feige was expecting it to not begin until February 2018.[69]

text: By July 2017, Samuel L. Jackson was set to appear in the film, reprising his role as Nick Fury.[70] At the 2017 San Diego Comic-Con, Feige revealed that the film would take place in the 1990s and the Skrulls would act as the film's villains, allowing elements from the "Kree–Skrull War" storyline to appear.[14][71] By setting the film in the 1990s, Feige noted it would allow Danvers to "be the singular hero, but place it within timing of the MCU."[15] In response to this announcement, Graeme McMillan of The Hollywood Reporter compared the film to Captain America: The First Avenger and the DC Extended Universe film Wonder Woman, as they were also set decades before present day. By setting the film in the 1990s, McMillan felt it would create the question of "what happened to Captain Marvel to take her off the playing field ahead of the Marvel movies that we've seen to date?", and noted Danvers' story might echo the "Captain America narrative", where "a hero from the past... disappears from the world before re-emerging".[72] Also in July, the California Film Commission awarded a $20.7 million tax credit to the production,[73] going towards the first $100 million spent on qualified in-state expenditures,[74] making California the main filming location for Captain Marvel. D'Esposito called this "very exciting" given Marvel Studios' headquarters and post-production facilities are also in the state, allowing them to streamline the production process for this film and others.[73] Awarding of the tax credit was dependent on filming beginning within 180 days.[75] Marvel planned to spend $118.6 million filming in the state, for a net of $97.8 million after the tax credit was applied.[76]

text: Geneva Robertson-Dworet was hired by Marvel by mid-August to take over the scripting duties for Captain Marvel after LeFauve left the project to co-direct Gigantic for Disney Animation.[77] Perlman confirmed her departure from the project as well, and said that the story she and LeFauve worked on in earlier drafts would be retained in the final screenplay.[78] Robertson-Dworet described the film as an action-comedy, and likened her script to an initial one she wrote for Tomb Raider (2018) before that film took a more dramatic tone. She added that it was important to the entire creative team to keep the comedic elements of the film and the "very funny voice" of the character, since Danvers "is one of the funniest comic book characters. She's so sassy, she's such a smartass, she won’t take shit from anyone". Robertson-Dworet also credited Boden for helping to shape Danvers' voice in the film and the desire "to carve our own path and make sure we weren’t retreading the same territory [after the release of Wonder Woman], and showing all facets of what women are capable of."[79] Feige added that Captain Marvel would have "homages to our favorite '90s action films", such as the action from Terminator 2, "cool street level fights, street level car chases, and fun stuff like that", since the 1990s action genre was one Marvel Studios had yet to explore. He also stated much of the film would take place in outer space.[15] Quantum physicist Spyridon Michalakis from the Institute for Quantum Information and Matter at the California Institute of Technology consulted on the film.[80]

text: By October, filming was slated to begin in March 2018. Feige described the film then as "a big part of heading towards" the then untitled Avengers film, set for release after Captain Marvel, and concluding the story being told across the first three phases of the MCU.[81] Ben Mendelsohn entered negotiations to join the film as the main villain,[82] having previously worked with Boden and Fleck on their film Mississippi Grind. They had him in mind for the Captain Marvel villain when they first began working on this film's story, and once they had met with him about the role, Mendelsohn "quickly agreed to pursue" it.[83] By November, Jude Law was in negotiations for the role of Walter Lawson / Mar-Vell in the film.[28] In January 2018, DeWanda Wise was cast as Maria Rambeau,[84][24] and Mendelsohn and Law were confirmed to have been cast.[84] Feige stated that Law was an actor Marvel had "admired for a long time and have wanted to find a role for in our movies", feeling his part in Captain Marvel was "extraordinary". For Law, he felt Marvel was "an interesting party to join in with at an interesting time in their ascendancy. That to me is an interesting playground to work in," noting Marvel's "effort [in recent years] to hire independent directors with distinct voices".[25]

text: Filming

text: Location shooting occurred at the end of January 2018.[85][86] Set photos taken at that time showed Larson in a green and black uniform instead of the character's familiar red and blue suit. Feige responded by saying that Marvel accepts the risk of set photos being leaked as a consequence of location shooting, and felt that "most people are savvy enough to know they're looking at a behind-the-scenes photo, completely out of context." He added that a large amount of scenes in the film would be shot on location.[86]

text: A month later, Gemma Chan joined the cast as Minn-Erva.[87] In mid-March, Wise withdrew from the film due to a scheduling conflict with her television series She's Gotta Have It.[88] The following day, Lashana Lynch entered into negotiations to replace Wise.[89] By the end of the month, Lynch was confirmed while Djimon Hounsou, Lee Pace, and Clark Gregg were set to reprise their roles as Korath, Ronan the Accuser, and Phil Coulson, respectively, from earlier MCU films. Algenis Perez Soto, Rune Temte, and Mckenna Grace were also set to star.[2][20] At the same time, Marvel credited Boden and Fleck and the writing team of Liz Flahive and Carly Mensch with writing the screenplay along with LeFauve, Perlman and Robertson-Dworet.[2] With the inclusion of Korath, Ronan, and Coulson (characters established and killed in earlier films), Richard Newby of The Hollywood Reporter felt the film "provide[d] the MCU with another unique opportunity to strengthen the presence of some characters who may not have lived up to their potential and to give great actors, particularly those who portrayed ill-fated villains, a chance to bring more to their roles than their initial opportunities allowed... Captain Marvel allows these characters to become more prominent, and while their fates are sealed for now, their pasts and the stories that reside there can entirely change our perception of them."[90]

text: Principal photography began on March 19 in Los Angeles,[91] under the working title Warbird,[92] with Ben Davis serving as director of photography, marking his fourth time working as a cinematographer in the MCU following Guardians of the Galaxy, Avengers: Age of Ultron, and Doctor Strange.[2] A carnival scene, set in 1986 and featuring Danvers and Fury, was filmed later that week at the Jim Hall Racing Club in Oxnard, California.[93] Filming of Captain Marvel in Los Angeles, along with other big-budget films that took advantage of California's improved tax credit program, helped raise on-location feature film production in the area by 11.7% in the first quarter of 2018, compared to the same period in 2017; it was the first two-figure increase in production since the fourth quarter of 2015.[94] Filming at Shaver Lake outside Fresno, California was set to take place in April under the working title Open World,[95] but was pushed back to mid-May.[96][97] In late April, Feige stated that filming was a little less than halfway completed.[16] The following month, Annette Bening joined the cast in an undisclosed role.[31] In late June, principal photography moved to Baton Rouge, Louisiana and New Orleans for two weeks,[2][98] also using the working title Open World,[1] before concluding on July 6.[99]

text: Post-production

text: Visual effects were created by Lola VFX, with the company working on the de-aging of Jackson and Gregg.[100]

text: Music

text: In May 2018, Clark Gregg indicated the film's soundtrack would include songs from the 1990s.[27] Pinar Toprak signed on to compose the film's score by the following month, making her the first woman to score an MCU film.[101]

text: Marketing

text: Concept art from the film was shown at the 2017 San Diego Comic-Con.[14] In June 2018, Feige revealed a look at Larson as Danvers at CineEurope.[102] Larson debuted the first trailer in September 2018 at the National Air and Space Museum on Good Morning America.[103] Petrana Radulovic of Polygon felt the trailer showed "large-scale action and intergalactic mayhem that reaches for Infinity War's heights."[104] Ben Kuchera, also of Polygon, felt opening the trailer with Blockbuster Video was "fitting" and an "anchoring shot" since its logo "remains instantly identifiable to a large audience", and pointed out that the scenes of Danvers as an Airforce pilot "appear to nod at the famously sun-drenched Top Gun" that calls back "to the golden era of films about fighter pilots."[105] Devan Coogan of Entertainment Weekly called the trailer "a powerful introduction to the MCU’s first solo female hero."[106] Graeme McMillian of The Hollywood Reporter noted that Nick Fury's narration dominates the first half of the trailer which "grounds the trailer in something — someone — familiar for the Marvel faithful, and lays the groundwork for Carol Danvers’ first words." He also noted that the film's apparent departure from its' comic book origins removes "the self-determination and agency of Carol Danvers", which was "a risky proposition" to long-time fans of the character.[107] Richard Newby, also of The Hollywood Reporter, felt the trailer "waste[d] no time in not only establishing Captain Marvel’s tremendous power set, but also distinguishing her from the heroes that have come before." Newby also noted, that since Captain Marvel's powers are not as recognizable for the general audience, Marvel does not use their "unfamiliarity to present the character as a joke" as they did with Guardians of the Galaxy and Ant-Man, but "[r]ather it makes a statement that Captain Marvel means business, and if you don’t know her, well buckle up because she’s about to change the universe." Newby commended cinematographer Ben Davis from the trailer for making the film's identity "distinct" from the other MCU films he worked on, noting Captain Marvel seemed "more grounded" than Davis' work on Guardians of the Galaxy or Doctor Strange and appeared to be inspired by the films of Tony Scott, Roland Emmerich, and Richard Donner.[29] The trailer was viewed 109 million times in its first 24 hours, becoming the 11th most viewed trailer in that time period.[108]

text: Release

text: Theatrical

text: Captain Marvel is scheduled to be released in the United States on March 8, 2019,[54] in IMAX and 3D.[109][110] It was originally scheduled for release on July 6, 2018,[41] before moving in February 2015 to November 2, 2018, to accommodate Spider-Man: Homecoming.[44] In October 2015, it moved again to accommodate Ant-Man and the Wasp.[54]

text: Home media

text: Captain Marvel will be the first Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures-distributed film not to stream on Netflix, after Disney decided to let their licensing deal with Netflix expire. Disney plans on releasing Captain Marvel on their own streaming service.[111]


document_title: Great Purge

question_text: in what year did the russian revolution draw to a close

question_tokens: in what year did the russian revolution draw to a close

root

text: Great Purge

text: Introduction[edit]

text: The term "repression" was officially used to describe the prosecution of people considered counter-revolutionaries and enemies of the people by the leadership of the Soviet Union. The purge was motivated by the desire to remove dissenters from the Communist Party and to consolidate the authority of Joseph Stalin. Most public attention was focused on the purge of the leadership of the Communist Party, as well as of government bureaucrats and leaders of the armed forces, most of whom were Party members. The campaigns also affected many other categories of the society: intelligentsia, peasants and especially those branded as "too rich for a peasant" (kulaks), and professionals.[11] A series of NKVD operations affected a number of national minorities, accused of being "fifth column" communities. A number of purges were officially explained as an elimination of the possibilities of sabotage and espionage, mostly by a fictitious "Polish Military Organisation" and, consequently, many victims of the purge were ordinary Soviet citizens of Polish origin.

tag: p

text: According to Nikita Khrushchev's 1956 speech, "On the Cult of Personality and its Consequences," and more recent findings, a great number of accusations, notably those presented at the Moscow show trials, were based on forced confessions, often obtained through torture,[12] and on loose interpretations of Article 58 of the RSFSR Penal Code, which dealt with counter-revolutionary crimes. Due legal process, as defined by Soviet law in force at the time, was often largely replaced with summary proceedings by NKVD troikas.[13]

text: Hundreds of thousands of victims were accused of various political crimes (espionage, wrecking, sabotage, anti-Soviet agitation, conspiracies to prepare uprisings and coups); they were quickly executed by shooting, or sent to the Gulag labor camps. Many died at the penal labor camps of starvation, disease, exposure, and overwork. Other methods of dispatching victims were used on an experimental basis. One secret policeman, for example, gassed people to death in batches in the back of a specially adapted airtight van.[14][15]

text: The Great Purge was started under the NKVD chief Genrikh Yagoda, but the height of the campaigns occurred while the NKVD was headed by Nikolai Yezhov, from September 1936 to August 1938, hence the name Yezhovshchina. The campaigns were carried out according to the general line, and often by direct orders, of the Party Politburo headed by Stalin.

text: Background[edit]

text: From 1930 onwards, the Party and police officials feared the "social disorder" caused by the upheavals of forced collectivization of peasants and the resulting famine of 1932–1933, as well as the massive and uncontrolled migration of millions of peasants into cities. The threat of war heightened Stalin's perception of marginal and politically suspect populations as the potential source of an uprising in case of invasion. He began to plan for the preventive elimination of such potential recruits for a mythical "fifth column of wreckers, terrorists and spies." (Hagenloh, 2000; Shearer, 2003).[16]

text: The term "purge" in Soviet political slang was an abbreviation of the expression purge of the Party ranks. In 1933, for example, the Party expelled some 400,000 people. But from 1936 until 1953, the term changed its meaning, because being expelled from the Party came to mean almost certain arrest, imprisonment, and often execution.

text: The political purge was primarily an effort by Stalin to eliminate challenge from past and potential opposition groups, including the left and right wings led by Leon Trotsky and Nikolai Bukharin, respectively. Following the Civil War and reconstruction of the Soviet economy in the late 1920s, veteran Bolsheviks no longer thought necessary the "temporary" wartime dictatorship, which had passed from Lenin to Stalin. Stalin's opponents on both sides of the political spectrum chided him as undemocratic and lax on bureaucratic corruption. This opposition to current leadership may have accumulated substantial support among the working class by attacking the privileges and luxuries the state offered to its high-paid elite. The Ryutin Affair seemed to vindicate Stalin's suspicions. He enforced a ban on party factions and banned those party members who had opposed him, effectively ending democratic centralism.

text: In the new form of Party organization, the Politburo, and Stalin in particular, were the sole dispensers of ideology. This required the elimination of all Marxists with different views, especially those among the prestigious "old guard" of revolutionaries. As the purges began, the government (through the NKVD) shot Bolshevik heroes, including Mikhail Tukhachevsky and Béla Kun, as well as the majority of Lenin's Politburo, for disagreements in policy. The NKVD attacked the supporters, friends, and family of these "heretical" Marxists, whether they lived in Russia or not. The NKVD nearly annihilated Trotsky's family before killing him in Mexico; the NKVD agent Ramón Mercader was part of an assassination task force put together by Special Agent Pavel Sudoplatov, under the personal orders of Stalin.[17]

text: In 1934, Stalin used the murder of Sergey Kirov as a pretext to launch the Great Purge, in which about a million people perished (see § Number of people executed). Some later historians came to believe that Stalin arranged the murder, or at least that there was sufficient evidence to reach such a conclusion.[18] Kirov was a staunch Stalin loyalist, but Stalin may have viewed him as a potential rival because of his emerging popularity among the moderates. The 1934 Party Congress elected Kirov to the central committee with only three votes against, the fewest of any candidate, while Stalin received 292 votes against. After Kirov's assassination, the NKVD charged the former oppositionists, an ever-growing group according to their determination, with Kirov's murder as well as a growing list of other offences, including treason, terrorism, sabotage, and espionage.

text: Another justification for the purge was to remove any possible "fifth column" in case of a war. Vyacheslav Molotov and Lazar Kaganovich, participants in the repression as members of the Politburo, maintained this justification throughout the purge; they each signed many death lists.[19] Stalin believed war was imminent, threatened both by an explicitly hostile Germany and an expansionist Japan. The Soviet press portrayed the country as threatened from within by fascist spies.[20]

text: From the October Revolution[1] onward,[21] Lenin had used repression against perceived enemies of the Bolsheviks as a systematic method of instilling fear and facilitating social control, especially during the campaign commonly referred to as the Red Terror. This policy continued and intensified under Stalin, periods of heightened repression including the deportation of kulaks who opposed collectivization, and a severe famine in Ukraine. A distinctive feature of the Great Purge was that, for the first time, members of the ruling party were included on a massive scale as victims of the repression. Due to the scale of the terror, the substantial victims of the purges were Communist Party members and office-holders.[22] The purge of the Party was accompanied by the purge of the whole society. The following events are used for the demarcation of the period.

text:
The first Moscow Trial, 1936.
1937, introduction of NKVD troikas for implementation of "revolutionary justice".
1937, passage of Article 58-14 about "counter-revolutionary sabotage".

tag: ul

text: Moscow Trials[edit]

text: First and Second Moscow Trials[edit]

text: Between 1936 and 1938, three very large Moscow Trials of former senior Communist Party leaders were held, in which they were accused of conspiring with fascist and capitalist powers to assassinate Stalin and other Soviet leaders, dismember the Soviet Union and restore capitalism. These trials were highly publicized and extensively covered by the outside world, which was mesmerized by the spectacle of Lenin's closest associates confessing to most outrageous crimes and begging for death sentences.

text:
The first trial was of 16 members of the so-called "Trotskyite-Kamenevite-Zinovievite-Leftist-Counter-Revolutionary Bloc",[citation needed] held in August 1936,[23] at which the chief defendants were Grigory Zinoviev and Lev Kamenev, two of the most prominent former party leaders. Among other accusations, they were incriminated with the assassination of Sergey Kirov and plotting to kill Stalin.[citation needed] After confessing to the charges, all were sentenced to death and executed.[24]
The second trial in January 1937 involved 17 lesser figures known as the "anti-Soviet Trotskyite-centre" which included Karl Radek, Yuri Piatakov and Grigory Sokolnikov, and were accused of plotting with Trotsky, who was said to be conspiring with Germany. Thirteen of the defendants were eventually executed by shooting. The rest received sentences in labor camps where they soon died.
There was also a secret trial before a military tribunal of a group of Red Army commanders, including Mikhail Tukhachevsky, in June 1937.

text: Some Western observers who attended the trials said that they were fair and that the guilt of the accused had been established. They based this assessment on the confessions of the accused, which were freely given in open court, without any apparent evidence that they had been extracted by torture or drugging. The British lawyer and Member of Parliament D. N. Pritt, for example, wrote: "Once again the more faint-hearted socialists are beset with doubts and anxieties", but "once again we can feel confident that when the smoke has rolled away from the battlefield of controversy it will be realized that the charge was true, the confessions correct and the prosecution fairly conducted".

text: It is now known that the confessions were given only after great psychological pressure and torture had been applied to the defendants. From the accounts of former OGPU officer Alexander Orlov and others, the methods used to extract the confessions are known: such tortures as repeated beatings, simulated drownings, making prisoners stand or go without sleep for days on end, and threats to arrest and execute the prisoners' families. For example, Kamenev's teenage son was arrested and charged with terrorism. After months of such interrogation, the defendants were driven to despair and exhaustion.

text: Zinoviev and Kamenev demanded, as a condition for "confessing", a direct guarantee from the Politburo that their lives and that of their families and followers would be spared. This offer was accepted, but when they were taken to the alleged Politburo meeting, only Stalin, Kliment Voroshilov, and Yezhov were present. Stalin claimed that they were the "commission" authorized by the Politburo and gave assurances that death sentences would not be carried out. After the trial, Stalin not only broke his promise to spare the defendants, he had most of their relatives arrested and shot.[25]

text: Dewey Commission[edit]

text: In May 1937, the Commission of Inquiry into the Charges Made against Leon Trotsky in the Moscow Trials, commonly known as the Dewey Commission, was set up in the United States by supporters of Trotsky, to establish the truth about the trials. The commission was headed by the noted American philosopher and educator John Dewey. Although the hearings were obviously conducted with a view to proving Trotsky's innocence, they brought to light evidence which established that some of the specific charges made at the trials could not be true.[27]

text: For example, Georgy Pyatakov testified that he had flown to Oslo in December 1935 to "receive terrorist instructions" from Trotsky. The Dewey Commission established that no such flight had taken place.[citation needed] Another defendant, Ivan Smirnov, confessed to taking part in the assassination of Sergei Kirov in December 1934, at a time when he had already been in prison for a year.

text: The Dewey Commission later published its findings in a 422-page book titled Not Guilty. Its conclusions asserted the innocence of all those condemned in the Moscow Trials. In its summary, the commission wrote: "Independent of extrinsic evidence, the Commission finds:

text:
That the conduct of the Moscow Trials was such as to convince any unprejudiced person that no attempt was made to ascertain the truth.
That while confessions are necessarily entitled to the most serious consideration, the confessions themselves contain such inherent improbabilities as to convince the Commission that they do not represent the truth, irrespective of any means used to obtain them.
That Trotsky never instructed any of the accused or witnesses in the Moscow trials to enter into agreements with foreign powers against the Soviet Union [and] that Trotsky never recommended, plotted, or attempted the restoration of capitalism in the USSR.

text: The commission concluded: "We therefore find the Moscow Trials to be frame-ups."

text: Implication of the Rightists[edit]

text: In the second trial, Karl Radek provided (or more accurately was forced to provide)[citation needed] the pretext for greater purge to come on a massive scale with his testimony that there was a "third organization separate from the cadres which had passed through [Trotsky's] school"[28] as well as "semi-Trotskyites, quarter-Trotskyites, one-eighth-Trotskyites, people who helped us, not knowing of the terrorist organization but sympathizing with us, people who from liberalism, from a Fronde against the Party, gave us this help."[29]

text: By the "third organization", he meant the last remaining former opposition group called the Rightists, led by Bukharin, whom he implicated by saying:

text: I feel guilty of one thing more: even after admitting my guilt and exposing the organisation, I stubbornly refused to give evidence about Bukharin. I knew that Bukharin's situation was just as hopeless as my own, because our guilt, if not juridically, then in essence, was the same. But we are close friends, and intellectual friendship is stronger than other friendships. I knew that Bukharin was in the same state of upheaval as myself. That is why I did not want to deliver him bound hand and foot to the People's Commissariat of Home Affairs. Just as in relation to our other cadres, I wanted Bukharin himself to lay down his arms.[28]

text: Third Moscow Trial[edit]

text: The third and final trial, in March 1938, known as The Trial of the Twenty-One, is the most famous of the Soviet show trials, because of persons involved and the scope of charges which tied together all loose threads from earlier trials. Meant to be the culmination of previous trials, it included 21 defendants alleged to belong to the so-called "Bloc of Rightists and Trotskyites", led by Nikolai Bukharin, the former chairman of the Communist International, former premier Alexei Rykov, Christian Rakovsky, Nikolai Krestinsky and Genrikh Yagoda, recently disgraced head of the NKVD.

text: The fact that Yagoda was one of the accused showed the speed at which the purges were consuming their own. It was now alleged that Bukharin and others sought to assassinate Lenin and Stalin from 1918, murder Maxim Gorky by poison, partition the U.S.S.R and hand her territories to Germany, Japan, and Great Britain, and other preposterous charges.

text: Even previously sympathetic observers who had stomached the earlier trials found it harder to swallow these new allegations as they became ever more absurd, and the purge expanded to include almost every living Old Bolshevik leader except Stalin. No other crime of the Stalin years so captivated Western intellectuals as the trial and execution of Bukharin, who was a Marxist theorist of international standing.[30] For some prominent communists such as Bertram Wolfe, Jay Lovestone, Arthur Koestler, and Heinrich Brandler, the Bukharin trial marked their final break with communism, and even turned the first three into fervent anti-Communists eventually.[31][32] To them, Bukharin's confession symbolized the depredations of communism, which not only destroyed its sons but also conscripted them in self-destruction and individual abnegation.[30]

text: The preparation for this trial, which took over a year, was delayed in its early stages due to the reluctance of some party members to denounce their comrades. It was at this time that Stalin personally intervened to speed up the process and replaced Yagoda with Nikolai Yezhov.

text: Bukharin's confession[edit]

text: On the first day of trial, Krestinsky caused a sensation when he repudiated his written confession and pleaded not guilty to all the charges. However, he changed his plea the next day after "special measures", which dislocated his left shoulder among other things.[33]

text: Anastas Mikoyan and Vyacheslav Molotov later claimed that Bukharin was never tortured, but it is now known that his interrogators were given the order, "beating permitted," and were under great pressure to extract confession out of the "star" defendant. Bukharin initially held out for three months, but threats to his young wife and infant son, combined with "methods of physical influence" wore him down. But when he read his confession amended and corrected personally by Stalin, he withdrew his whole confession. The examination started all over again, with a double team of interrogators.[34]

text: Bukharin's confession in particular became subject of much debate among Western observers, inspiring Koestler's acclaimed novel Darkness at Noon and philosophical essay by Maurice Merleau-Ponty in Humanism and Terror. His confessions were somewhat different from others in that while he pleaded guilty to "sum total of crimes", he denied knowledge when it came to specific crimes. Some astute observers noted that he would allow only what was in written confession and refuse to go any further.

text: The result was a curious mix of fulsome confessions (of being a "degenerate fascist" working for "restoration of capitalism") and subtle criticisms of the trial. After disproving several charges against him, one observer noted that Bukharin "proceeded to demolish or rather showed he could very easily demolish the whole case."[35] He continued by saying that "the confession of the accused is not essential. The confession of the accused is a medieval principle of jurisprudence" in a trial that was solely based on confessions, he finished his last plea with the words: "the monstrousness of my crime is immeasurable especially in the new stage of struggle of the U.S.S.R. May this trial be the last severe lesson, and may the great might of the U.S.S.R. become clear to all."[36]

text: Romain Rolland and others wrote to Stalin seeking clemency for Nikolai Bukharin, but all the leading defendants were executed except Rakovsky and two others (who were killed in NKVD prisoner massacres in 1941). Despite the promise to spare his family, Bukharin's wife, Anna Larina, was sent to a labor camp, but she survived to see her husband rehabilitated by the Soviet state under Mikhail Gorbachev in 1988.

text: Purge of the army[edit]

text: The purge of the Red Army and Military Maritime Fleet removed three of five marshals (then equivalent to five-star generals), 13 of 15 army commanders (then equivalent to three- and four-star generals), eight of nine admirals (the purge fell heavily on the Navy, who were suspected of exploiting their opportunities for foreign contacts),[37] 50 of 57 army corps commanders, 154 out of 186 division commanders, 16 of 16 army commissars, and 25 of 28 army corps commissars.[38]

text: At first it was thought 25–50% of Red Army officers had been purged; the true figure is now known to be in the area of 3.7–7.7%. This discrepancy was the result of a systematic underestimation of the true size of the Red Army officer corps, and it was overlooked that most of those purged were merely expelled from the Party. Thirty percent of officers purged in 1937–39 were allowed to return to service.[39]

text: The purge of the army was claimed to be supported by German-forged documents (said to have been correspondence between Marshal Tukhachevsky and members of the German high command).[40] The claim is unsupported by facts, as by the time the documents were supposedly created, two people from the eight in the Tukhachevsky group were already imprisoned, and by the time the document was said to reach Stalin the purging process was already underway. However the actual evidence introduced at trial was obtained from forced confessions.[41]

text: The wider purge[edit]

text: Eventually almost all of the Bolsheviks who had played prominent roles during the Russian Revolution of 1917, or in Lenin's Soviet government, were executed. Out of six members of the original Politburo during the 1917 October Revolution who lived until the Great Purge, Stalin himself was the only one who remained in the Soviet Union, alive.[1] Four of the other five were executed. The fifth, Leon Trotsky, had been forced into exile outside the Soviet Union in 1929, but was assassinated in Mexico by Soviet agent Ramón Mercader in 1940. Of the seven members elected to the Politburo between the October Revolution and Lenin's death in 1924, four were executed, one (Tomsky) committed suicide and two (Molotov and Kalinin) lived.

text: However, the trials and executions of the former Bolshevik leaders, while being the most visible part, were only a minor part of the purges. A series of documents discovered in the Central Committee archives in 1992 by Vladimir Bukovsky demonstrate that there were quotas for arrests and executions as for all other activities in the planned economy.[42]

text: Intelligentsia[edit]

text: In the 1920s and 1930s, 2,000 writers, intellectuals, and artists were imprisoned and 1,500 died in prisons and concentration camps. After sunspot development research was judged un-Marxist, twenty-seven astronomers disappeared between 1936 and 1938. The Meteorological Office was violently purged as early as 1933 for failing to predict weather harmful to the crops.[43] But the toll was especially high among writers. Those who perished during the Great Purge include:

text:
Poet Osip Mandelstam was arrested for reciting his famous anti-Stalin poem Stalin Epigram to his circle of friends in 1934. After intervention by Nikolai Bukharin and Boris Pasternak (Stalin jotted down in Bukharin's letter with feigned indignation: “Who gave them the right to arrest Mandelstam?”), Stalin instructed NKVD to "isolate but preserve" him, and Mandelstam was "merely" exiled to Cherdyn for three years. But this proved to be a temporary reprieve. In May 1938, he was promptly arrested again for "counter-revolutionary activities".[44] On 2 August 1938, Mandelstam was sentenced to five years in correction camps and died on 27 December 1938 at a transit camp near Vladivostok.[45] Pasternak himself was nearly purged, but Stalin is said to have crossed Pasternak's name off the list, saying "Don't touch this cloud dweller."[46]
Writer Isaac Babel was arrested in May 1939, and according to his confession paper (which contained a blood stain) he "confessed" to being a member of Trotskyist organization and being recruited by French writer André Malraux to spy for France. In the final interrogation, he retracted his confession and wrote letters to the prosecutor's office stating that he had implicated innocent people, but to no avail. Babel was tried before an NKVD troika and convicted of simultaneously spying for the French, Austrians, and Leon Trotsky, as well as "membership in a terrorist organization." On 27 January 1940, he was shot in Butyrka prison.[47]
Writer Boris Pilnyak was arrested on 28 October 1937 for counter-revolutionary activities, spying and terrorism. One report alleged that "he held secret meetings with (André) Gide, and supplied him with information about the situation in the USSR. There is no doubt that Gide used this information in his book attacking the USSR." Pilnyak was tried on 21 April 1938. In the proceeding that lasted 15 minutes, he was condemned to death and executed shortly afterward.[47]
Theatre director Vsevolod Meyerhold was arrested in 1939 and shot in February 1940 for "spying" for Japanese and British intelligence. His wife, the actress Zinaida Raikh, was murdered in her apartment.[48] In a letter to Vyacheslav Molotov dated 13 January 1940, Meyerhold wrote:

text: The investigators began to use force on me, a sick 65-year-old man. I was made to lie face down and beaten on the soles of my feet and my spine with a rubber strap ... For the next few days, when those parts of my legs were covered with extensive internal hemorrhaging, they again beat the red-blue-and-yellow bruises with the strap and the pain was so intense that it felt as if boiling water was being poured on these sensitive areas. I howled and wept from the pain. I incriminated myself in the hope that by telling them lies I could end the ordeal. When I lay down on the cot and fell asleep, after 18 hours of interrogation, in order to go back in an hour's time for more, I was woken up by my own groaning and because I was jerking about like a patient in the last stages of typhoid fever.[47]

text:
Georgian poet Titsian Tabidze was arrested on 10 October 1937 on a charge of treason and was tortured in prison. In a bitter humor, he named only the 18th-century Georgian poet Besiki as his accomplice in anti-Soviet activities.[49] He was executed on 16 December 1937.
Tabidze's lifelong friend and fellow poet, Paolo Iashvili, having earlier been forced to denounce several of his associates as the enemies of the people, shot himself with a hunting gun in the building of the Writers' Union.[50] He witnessed and was even forced to participate in public trials that ousted many of his associates from the Writers' Union, effectively condemning them to death. When Lavrenty Beria, chief of the Soviet security and secret police apparatus under Stalin and subsequently head of the NKVD, further pressured Iashvili with the alternatives of denouncing Tabidze or being arrested and tortured by the NKVD, Iashvili killed himself.[51]
In early 1937, poet Pavel Nikolayevich Vasiliev is said to have defended Nikolai Bukharin as "a man of the highest nobility and the conscience of peasant Russia" at the time of his denunciation at the Pyatakov Trial (Second Moscow Trial) and damned other writers then signing the routine condemnations as "pornographic scrawls on the margins of Russian literature". He was promptly shot on 16 July 1937.[52]
Jan Sten, philosopher and deputy head of the Marx-Engels Institute, was Stalin's private tutor when Stalin was trying hard to study Hegel's dialectic. (Stalin received lessons twice a week from 1925 to 1928, but he found it difficult to master even some of the basic ideas. Stalin developed enduring hostility toward German idealistic philosophy, which he called "the aristocratic reaction to the French Revolution".) In 1937, Sten was seized on the direct order of Stalin, who declared him one of the chiefs of "Menshevizing idealists". On 19 June 1937, Sten was put to death in Lefortovo prison.[53]
Poet Nikolai Klyuev was arrested in 1933 for contradicting Soviet ideology. He was shot in October 1937.
Russian linguist Nikolai Durnovo, born into the Durnovo noble family, was executed on 27 October 1937. He created a classification of Russian dialects that served as a base for modern scientific linguistic nomenclature.[54]
Mari poet and playwright Sergei Chavain was executed in Yoshkar-Ola on 11 November 1937. The State prize of Mari El is named after Chavain.
Ukrainian theater and movie director Les Kurbas, considered by many to be the most important Ukrainian theater director of the 20th century, was shot on 3 November 1937.
Russian writer and explorer Maximilian Kravkov was arrested on a charge of his alleged participation in the "Japanese-SR Terrorist Subversive Espionage Organization". He was executed on 12 October 1937.
Russian Esperanto writer and translator Nikolai Nekrasov was arrested in 1938, and accused of being "an organizer and leader of a fascist, espionage, terrorist organization of Esperantists". He was executed on 4 October 1938.
Playwright and avant-garde poet Nikolay Oleynikov was arrested and executed for "subversive writing" on 24 November 1937.
Yakut writer Platon Oyunsky, seen as one of the founders of modern Yakut literature, died in prison in 1939.
Russian dramaturge Adrian Piotrovsky, responsible for creating the synopsis for Sergei Prokofiev's ballet Romeo and Juliet, was executed on 21 November 1937.
Boris Shumyatsky, de facto executive producer for the Soviet film monopoly from 1930 to 1937, was executed as a "traitor" in 1938, following a purge of the Soviet film industry.
Sinologist Julian Shchutsky was convicted as a "Japanese spy" and executed on 2 February 1938.
Russian linguist Nikolai Nevsky, an expert on a number of East Asian languages, was arrested by the NKVD on the charge of being a "Japanese spy". On November 24, 1937 he was executed, along with his Japanese wife Isoko Mantani-Nevsky.
Ukrainian drama writer Mykola Kulish was executed on 3 November 1937. He is considered to be one of the lead figures of Executed Renaissance.

text: Ex-kulaks and other "anti-Soviet elements"[edit]

text: On 2 July 1937, Stalin sent a top-secret letter to all regional Party chiefs (with a copy to NKVD regional chiefs) ordering them to present, within five days, estimates of the number of kulaks and "criminals" that should be arrested, executed, or sent to camps. Produced in a matter of days, these figures roughly matched those of "suspect" individuals already under police surveillance, although the criteria used to distribute the "kulak and criminal elements" among the two categories are not clear.

text: On 30 July 1937 the NKVD Order no. 00447 was issued, directed against "ex-kulaks" and other "anti-Soviet elements" (such as former officials of the Tsarist regime, former members of political parties other than the communist party, etc.). They were to be executed or sent to Gulag prison camps extrajudicially, under the decisions of NKVD troikas.

text: The following categories were systematically tracked down: "ex-kulaks" previously deported to "special settlements" in inhospitable parts of the country (Siberia, Urals, Kazakhstan, Far North), former tsarist civil servants, former officers of the White Army, participants in peasant rebellions, members of the clergy, persons deprived of voting rights, former members of non-bolshevik parties, ordinary criminals, like thieves, known to the police and various other "socially harmful elements". However, many were also arrested at random in police sweeps, or as a result of denunciations or simply because they happened to be relatives, friends or just acquaintances of people already arrested. Many railwaymen, workers, kolkhoz peasants, and engineers were arrested in the course of the Kulak Operation just because they had the misfortune of working in, or near, important strategic factories, railway or building sites, where, as a result of frantic rhythms and plans, many work accidents had occurred in previous years. In 1937–1938, the NKVD reopened these cases and systematically ascribed them to "sabotage" or "wrecking" (Werth, 2009).

text: The orthodox clergy, including active parishioners, was nearly annihilated: 85% of the 35,000 members of the clergy were arrested. Particularly vulnerable to repression were also the so-called "special settlers" (spetzpereselentsy) who were under permanent police surveillance and constituted a huge pool of potential "enemies" to draw on. At least 100,000 of them were arrested in the course of the Great Terror.

text: One "sub-operation" targeted "the most vicious and stubborn anti-Soviet elements" in Gulag prison camps; they were all "to be put into the first category" – that is shot. Order no. 00447 decreed 10,000 executions for this contingent, but at least three times more were shot in the course of the secret mass operation, the majority in March–April 1938 (Junge and Binner, 2003).

text: As soon as the Kulak Operation was launched (5 August 1937), regional party and NKVD bosses, eager to show their zeal, demanded an increase in the quotas. Accordingly, the quotas were increased. But this was not only the result of demands from below. The largest new allowances were distributed by Stalin and Yezhov on their own initiative: on 15 October 1937, for example, the Politburo passed a secret resolution increasing the number of people "to be repressed" by 120,000 (63,000 "in the first category" and 57,000 "in the second category"); on 31 January 1938, Stalin ordered a further increase of 57,200, 48,000 of whom were to be executed.

text: The police organized sweeps and round-ups of markets or railway stations where marginals and other social outcasts were likely to be found. To carry out a growing number of arrests, the State Security personnel of NKVD – approximately 25,000 officers – were supplemented by ordinary policemen, sometimes by civilian Party or Komsomol (Young Communist League) members.

text: Every NKVD local unit had a "casework minimum" of arrests to perform, and also of confessions to extract to "unmask conspiracies." The NKVD used uninterrupted interrogation for days on end and merciless beatings to force prisoners to confess their alleged "counter-revolutionary" crimes. To speed up the procedure, prisoners were often even forced to sign blank pages of the pre-printed interrogation folios on which the interrogator later typed up the confession.

text: After the interrogations the files were submitted to NKVD troikas, which pronounced the verdicts in the absence of the accused. During a half-day-long session a troika went through several hundred cases, delivering either a death sentence or a sentence to the Gulag labor camps. Death sentences were immediately enforceable. The executions were carried out at night, either in prisons or in a secluded area run by the NKVD and located as a rule on the outskirts of major cities.[55][56]

text: The Kulak Operation was largest single campaign of repression in 1937–38, with 669,929 people arrested and 376,202 executed, more than half the total of known executions.[57]

text: Campaigns targeting nationalities[edit]

text: A series of mass operations of the NKVD was carried out from 1937 through 1938 until the Soviet invasion of Poland in 1939 targeting specific nationalities within the Soviet Union, based on NKVD directives against the so-called diversionist element, according to the notion of the "hostile capitalist surrounding" as defined by Nikolai Yezhov. The Polish operation of the NKVD was the largest of this kind.[58] Over 111,000 of arrested Poles were executed. Their wives and children were dealt with by the NKVD Order № 00486. The women were sentenced to forced labour for 5 or 10 years.[59] Their minor children were put in orphanages. All possessions were confiscated. Extended families were purposely left with nothing to live on, which usually sealed their fate as well, affecting up to 200–250,000 people of Polish background depending on size of their families.[59]

text: The NKVD national operations were conducted on a quota system using album procedure. The officials were mandated to arrest and execute a specific number of so-called "counter-revolutionaries," compiled by administration using various statistics but also telephone books with names sounding non-Russian.[60] The Polish operation claimed the largest number of the NKVD victims: 143,810 arrests and 111,091 executions according to records. Snyder estimates that at least eighty-five thousand of them were ethnic Poles.[58] The remainder were 'suspected' of being Polish, without further inquiry.[61]

text: Western émigré victims[edit]

text: Some victims of the terror were American immigrants to the Soviet Union, who had emigrated at the height of the Great Depression to find work. At the height of the Terror, American immigrants besieged the US embassy, begging for passports so they could leave the Soviet Union. They were turned away by embassy officials, only to be arrested on the pavement outside by lurking NKVD agents. Many were subsequently shot dead at Butovo Field near Scherbinka, south of Moscow.[62] In addition, 141 American Communists of Finnish origin were executed and buried at Sandarmokh.[63] 127 Finnish Canadians were also shot and buried there.[64]

text: Mongolian Great Purge[edit]

text: During the late 1930s, Stalin dispatched NKVD operatives to the Mongolian People's Republic, established a Mongolian version of the NKVD troika, and proceeded to execute tens of thousands of people accused of having ties to "pro-Japanese spy rings."[65] Buddhist lamas made up the majority of victims, with 18,000 being killed in the terror. Other victims were nobility and political and academic figures, along with some ordinary workers and herders.[66] Mass graves containing hundreds of executed Buddhist monks and civilians have been discovered as recently as 2003.[67]

text: Xinjiang Great Purge[edit]

text: The pro-Soviet leader Sheng Shicai of Xinjiang province in China launched his own purge in 1937 to coincide with Stalin's Great Purge. The Xinjiang War (1937) broke out amid the purge.[68] Sheng received assistance from the NKVD. Sheng and the Soviets alleged a massive Trotskyist conspiracy and a "Fascist Trotskyite plot" to destroy the Soviet Union. The Soviet Consul General Garegin Apresoff, General Ma Hushan, Ma Shaowu, Mahmud Sijan, the official leader of the Xinjiang province Huang Han-chang and Hoja-Niyaz were among the 435 alleged conspirators in the plot. Xinjiang became under virtual Soviet control. Stalin opposed the Chinese Communist Party.[69]

text: Timeline of the Great Purge[edit]

text: The Great Purge of 1936–1938 can be roughly divided into four periods:[70]

text: End of The Great Purge[edit]

text: In the summer of 1938 Yezhov was relieved from his post as head of the NKVD and was eventually tried and executed. Lavrentiy Beria, a fellow Georgian and Stalin confidant, succeeded him as head of NKVD. On 17 November 1938 a joint decree of Sovnarkom USSR and Central Committee of VKP(b) (Decree about Arrests, Prosecutor Supervision and Course of Investigation) and the subsequent order of NKVD undersigned by Beria, cancelled most of the NKVD orders of systematic repression and suspended implementation of death sentences. The decree signaled the end of massive Soviet purges.[citation needed]

text: Nevertheless, the practice of mass arrest and exile continued until Stalin's death in 1953. Political executions also continued, but, with the exception of Katyn and other NKVD massacres during World War II, on a vastly smaller scale. One notorious example is the "Night of the Murdered Poets", in which at least thirteen prominent Yiddish writers were executed on 12 August 1952. Historians such as Michael Parrish have argued that while the Great Terror ended in 1938, a lesser terror continued in the 1940s.[71]

text: In some cases, high military command arrested under Yezhov were later executed under Beria. Some examples include Marshal of the Soviet Union Alexander Yegorov, arrested in April 1938 and shot (or died from torture) in February 1939 (his wife, G. A. Yegorova, was shot in August 1938); Army Commander Ivan Fedko, arrested July 1938 and shot February 1939; Flagman Konstantin Dushenov (ru), arrested May 1938 and shot February 1940; Komkor G. I. Bondar, arrested August 1938 and shot March 1939. All the aforementioned have been posthumously rehabilitated.[72]

text: When the relatives of those who had been executed in 1937–38 inquired about their fate, they were told by NKVD that their arrested relatives had been sentenced to "ten years without the right of correspondence" (десять лет без права переписки). When these ten-year periods elapsed in 1947–48 but the arrested did not appear, the relatives asked MGB about their fate again and this time were told that the arrested died in imprisonment.[73]

text: Western reactions[edit]

text: Although the trials of former Soviet leaders were widely publicized, the hundreds of thousands of other arrests and executions were not. These became known in the West only as a few former gulag inmates reached the West with their stories.[74] Not only did foreign correspondents from the West fail to report on the purges, but in many Western nations (especially France), attempts were made to silence or discredit these witnesses; according to Robert Conquest, Jean-Paul Sartre took the position that evidence of the camps should be ignored so the French proletariat would not be discouraged.[75] A series of legal actions ensued at which definitive evidence was presented that established the validity of the former labor camp inmates' testimony.[76]

text: According to Robert Conquest in his 1968 book The Great Terror: Stalin's Purge of the Thirties, with respect to the trials of former leaders, some Western observers were unable to see through the fraudulent nature of the charges and evidence, notably Walter Duranty of The New York Times, a Russian speaker; the American Ambassador, Joseph E. Davies, who reported, "proof...beyond reasonable doubt to justify the verdict of treason"[77] and Beatrice and Sidney Webb, authors of Soviet Communism: A New Civilization.[78] While "Communist Parties everywhere simply transmitted the Soviet line", some of the most critical reporting also came from the left, notably The Manchester Guardian.[79] The American journalist H. R. Knickerbocker also reported on the executions. He called them in 1941 "the great purges", and described how over four years they affected "the top fourth or fifth, to estimate it conservatively, of the Party itself, of the Army, Navy, and Air Force leaders and then of the new Bolshevik intelligentsia, the foremost technicians, managers, supervisors, scientists". Knickerbocker also wrote about dekulakization: "It is a conservative estimate to say that some 5,000,000 [kulaks] ... died at once, or within a few years."[80]

text: Evidence and the results of research began to appear after Stalin's death. This revealed the full enormity of the Purges. The first of these sources were the revelations of Nikita Khrushchev, which particularly affected the American editors of the Communist Party USA newspaper, the Daily Worker, who, following the lead of The New York Times, published the Secret Speech in full.[81]

text: Rehabilitation[edit]

text: The Great Purge was denounced by Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev following Stalin's death. In his secret speech to the 20th CPSU congress in February 1956 (which was made public a month later), Khrushchev referred to the purges as an "abuse of power" by Stalin which resulted in enormous harm to the country. In the same speech, he recognized that many of the victims were innocent and were convicted on the basis of false confessions extracted by torture. To take that position was politically useful to Khrushchev, as he was at that time engaged in a power struggle with rivals who had been associated with the Purge, the so-called Anti-Party Group. The new line on the Great Purges undermined their power, and helped propel him to the Chairmanship of the Council of Ministers. Starting from 1954, some of the convictions were overturned. Mikhail Tukhachevsky and other generals convicted in the Trial of Red Army Generals were declared innocent ("rehabilitated") in 1957. The former Politburo members Yan Rudzutak and Stanislav Kosior and many lower-level victims were also declared innocent in the 1950s. Nikolai Bukharin and others convicted in the Moscow Trials were not rehabilitated until as late as 1988. Leon Trotsky, considered a major player in the Russian Revolution and a major contributor to Marxist Theory was never rehabilitated by the USSR. The book Rehabilitation: The Political Processes of the 1930s–50s (Реабилитация. Политические процессы 30-50-х годов) (1991) contains a large amount of newly presented original archive material: transcripts of interrogations, letters of convicts, and photos. The material demonstrates in detail how numerous show trials were fabricated.

text: Number of people executed[edit]

text: According to the declassified Soviet archives, during 1937 and 1938, the NKVD detained 1,548,366 persons, of whom 681,692 were shot – an average of 1,000 executions a day (in comparison, the Tsarists executed 3,932 persons for political crimes from 1825 to 1910 – an average of less than 1 execution per week).[6]

text: Several experts believe the evidence released from the Soviet archives is understated, incomplete, or unreliable.[6][82][83][84] For example, Robert Conquest claimed that the probable figure for executions during the years of the Great Purge is not 681,692, but some two and a half times as high and cited a figure of 1,750,000 given by both the Head of the Russian Archives and a spokesman for the Security Ministry. He believes that the KGB was covering its tracks by falsifying the dates and causes of death of rehabilitated victims.[7][85] A common practice of falsification for lowering the execution numbers was disguising executions with the sentence ten years without the right of correspondence. All of the bodies identified from the mass graves at Vinnitsa and Kuropaty were of individuals who had received this sentence.[86] However, the lower figure did roughly confirm Conquest's original 1968 estimate of 700,000 "legal" executions and in the preface to the 40th anniversary edition of The Great Terror, Conquest claimed that he had been "correct on the vital matter—the numbers put to death: about one million"."[87]

text: Historian Michael Ellman claims the best estimate of deaths brought about by Soviet repression during these two years ranges from 950,000 to 1.2 million, which includes deaths in detention and those who died shortly after being released from the Gulag, as a result of their treatment therein. He also states that this is the estimate historians and teachers of Russian history should use.[8] Soviet Professor Iosif G. Dyadkin estimated 1.42 million unnatural deaths were brought about by the Great Purge during 1937-1938 in his demographic study on unnatural deaths in the Soviet Union under Stalin.[88] Jonathan Brent and Vladimir P. Naumov were less specific simply saying "Millions perished in the Yezhovshchina."[89]

text: The extent of the Great Purge has been questioned by revisionist scholars in the West, especially after the (partial) opening of the relevant Soviet files of the period in the early 1990s.[90][91][92] Jerry F. Hough claims, regarding the numbers executed in the Great Purge, "a figure in the low hundreds of thousands seems much more probable than one in the high hundreds" and that a lower figure of only "tens of thousands" was "even probable".[93] Sheila Fitzpatrick also placed the numbers executed in the "low hundreds of thousands."[93] Robert W. Thurston allows for 681,692 executions.[94]

text: Olga Shatounovskaya, a member of the Central Grace Commission, declared in 1963 that between 1934 and 1941 the Soviet Union arrested 19 million 600 000 men and women.[citation needed]

text: Stalin's role[edit]

text: Historians with archival access have confirmed that Stalin was intimately involved in the terror. Russian historian Oleg V. Khlevniuk states "…theories about the elemental, spontaneous nature of the terror, about a loss of central control over the course of mass repression, and about the role of regional leaders in initiating the terror are simply not supported by the historical record."[95] Stalin personally directed Yezhov to torture those who were not making proper confessions. In one instance, he told Yezhov "Isn't it time to squeeze this gentleman and force him to report on his dirty little business? Where is he: in a prison or a hotel?" In another, while reviewing one of Yezhov's lists, he added to M. I. Baranov’s name, "beat, beat!"[96] In some cases Stalin would personally help Yezhov torture prisoners[96]. Witnesses say his hands were often stained with blood [24]

text: In addition to authorizing torture, Stalin also signed 357 lists in 1937 and 1938 authorizing executions of some 40,000 people, and about 90% of these are confirmed to have been shot.[97] While reviewing one such list, Stalin reportedly muttered to no one in particular: "Who's going to remember all this riff-raff in ten or twenty years time? No one. Who remembers the names now of the boyars Ivan the Terrible got rid of? No one."[98] Stalin's alleged remark may be compared with Hitler's famous admonition to his generals in 1939: "Who, after all, speaks today of the annihilation of the Armenians?"[99]

text: Soviet investigation commissions[edit]

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text: At least two Soviet commissions investigated the show-trials after Stalin's death.[citation needed] The first was headed by Molotov and included Voroshilov, Kaganovich, Suslov, Furtseva, Shvernik, Aristov, Pospelov, and Rudenko. They were given the task to investigate the materials concerning Bukharin, Rykov, Zinoviev, Tukhachevsky, and others. The commission worked in 1956–1957. While stating that the accusations against Tukhachevsky et al. should be abandoned, it failed to fully rehabilitate the victims of the three Moscow trials, although the final report does contain an admission that the accusations have not been proven during the trials and "evidence" had been produced by lies, blackmail, and "use of physical influence". Bukharin, Rykov, Zinoviev, and others were still seen as political opponents, and though the charges against them were obviously false, they could not have been rehabilitated because "for many years they headed the anti-Soviet struggle against the building of socialism in USSR".

text: The second commission largely worked from 1961 to 1963 and was headed by Shvernik ("Shvernik Commission"). It included Shelepin, Serdyuk, Mironov, Rudenko, and Semichastny. The hard work resulted in two massive reports, which detailed the mechanism of falsification of the show-trials against Bukharin, Zinoviev, Tukhachevsky, and many others. The commission based its findings in large part on eyewitness testimonies of former NKVD workers and victims of repressions, and on many documents. The commission recommended rehabilitating every accused with the exceptions of Radek and Yagoda, because Radek's materials required some further checking, and Yagoda was a criminal and one of the falsifiers of the trials (though most of the charges against him had to be dropped too, he was not a "spy", etc.). The commission stated:

text: Stalin committed a very grave crime against the Communist party, the socialist state, Soviet people and worldwide revolutionary movement... Together with Stalin, the responsibility for the abuse of law, mass unwarranted repressions and death of many thousands of wholly innocent people also lies on Molotov, Kaganovich, Malenkov....[citation needed]

text: Mass graves and memorials[edit]

text: Following the collapse of the Soviet Union, numerous mass graves filled with executed victims of the terror were discovered.[100][101][102][103] Some, such as the killing fields at Kurapaty near Minsk and Bykivnia near Kiev, are believed to contain up to 200,000 corpses.[104][better source needed]

text: In 2007, one such site, the Butovo firing range near Moscow, was turned into a shrine to the victims of Stalinism. Between August 1937 and October 1938, more than 20,000 people were shot and buried there.[105]

text:
Kuropaty mass grave site near Minsk, Belarus

Memorial cemetery Krasny Bor near Petrozavodsk, Russia

Memorial to Polish victims of Stalinist repression, Tomsk, Russia

Monument to victims of political repressions in Donetsk, Ukraine

Memorial to victims of Stalinist repression in Tomsk, Russia

text: Historical Interpretations[edit]

text: The Great Purge has provoked numerous debates about its purpose, scale and mechanisms. According to one interpretation, Stalin’s regime had to maintain its citizens in a state of fear and uncertainty to stay in power (Brzezinski, 1958). Robert Conquest emphasized Stalin's paranoia, focused on the Moscow show trial of "Old Bolsheviks", and analyzed the carefully planned and systematic destruction of the Communist Party. Some others view the Great Purge as a crucial moment – or rather the culmination – of a vast social engineering campaign started at the beginning of the 1930s (Hagenloh, 2000; Shearer, 2003; Werth, 2003).[16]