Stalin's Great Purge Begins

The Great Purge or Great Terror, also known as the Year of '37 and the Yezhovshchina, was a political purge in the Soviet Union from 1936 to 1938.^¹ After the assassination of Sergei Kirov by Leonid Nikolaev in 1934, Joseph Stalin launched a series of show trials known as the Moscow trials to remove suspected dissenters from the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.^¹ The term "great purge" was popularized by historian Robert Conquest in his 1968 book, The Great Terror, whose title alluded to the French Revolution's Reign of Terror.^¹