Great Purge: Difference between revisions

Revision as of 16:55, 30 September 2004

Revision as of 18:08, 30 September 2004

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By the summer of [[1938]], everyone in power realized that the purges had gone too far, and Yezhov was relieved from his head of [[NKVD]] post (remaining People's Commissar of Water Transport) and eventually purged. [[Lavrenty Beria]] succeeded him as head of the NKVD. This signaled the end of the Great Purge, although the practice of mass arrest and exile was continued until Stalin's death in [[1953]].

The term ''Great Terror'' was first used by [[Robert Conquest]] in his book ''The Great Terror: Stalin's Purge of the Thirties'', the only full historical account of the period. Due to the difficulties of obtaining accurate information from the secretive Soviet Union, "Great Terror" contains a number of errors, some of which are corrected in ''The Great Terror: A Assessment'', published in 1990, after additional information became available. The ''Great Terror'', according to an 1989 article in ''[[The Moscow News]]'', circulated widely among the intelligensia in the Soviet Union and "was valued by them as one of the most significant of foreign researches into Soviet history."<!--Page ''vii'', ''The Great Terror: A Reassessment'', ISBN 0195071328, citing ''Moscow News'', No. 13, 1989-->

The term ''Great Terror'' was first used by [[Robert Conquest]] in his hotly disputed book ''The Great Terror: Stalin's Purge of the Thirties''.

One of [[Russia]]'s leading [[human rights]] groups, the [[Memorial (society)|Memorial]] human rights group, released a list of 1,345,796 names of people who fell victim to Stalin's purges.