08-15-2017 (Photo: 17th Party Congress, Moscow, January 1934) http://JohnBatchelorShow.com/contact http://JohnBatchelorShow.com/schedules Twitter: @BatchelorShow

Russia and memory of Stalin's Great Terror. Stephen F. Cohen @NYU @Princeton PART 1 of 2.

The Great Purge or the Great Terror (Russian: Большо́й терро́р) was a campaign of political repression in the Soviet Union which occurred from 1936 to 1938.[1] It involved a large-scale purge of the Communist Party and government officials, repression of peasants and the Red Army leadership, widespread police surveillance, suspicion of "saboteurs", "counter-revolutionaries", imprisonment, and arbitrary executions.[2] Mobile gas vans were invented to execute people without trial.[3][4][5] In Russian historiography, the period of the most intense purge, 1937–1938, is called Yezhovshchina (Russian: Ежовщина; literally, "Yezhov phenomenon",[note 1] commonly translated as "times of Yezhov" or "doings of Yezhov"), after Nikolai Yezhov, the head of the Soviet secret police, NKVD. It has been estimated that 600,000 people died at the hands of the Soviet government during the Purge.[6][7][8][9]

In the Western world, Robert Conquest's 1968 book The Great Terror popularized that phrase. Conquest's title was in turn an allusion to the period called the Reign of Terror during the French Revolution (French: la Terreur, and, from June to July 1794, la Grande Terreur, the Great Terror).[10]..."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Purge