Great Purge

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Great Purge

Soviet history

Also known as: purge trials

Written and fact-checked by The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica

Last Updated: Mar 6, 2024 • Article History

Joseph Stalin

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Category: History & Society

Also called:: purge trials

Date:: August 1936 - March 13, 1938

Location:: Moscow; Russia

Key People:: Lev Kamenev; Karl Radek; Aleksey Ivanovich Rykov; Leon Trotsky; Genrikh Grigoryevich Yagoda

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Great Purge, three widely publicized show trials and a series of closed, unpublicized trials held in the Soviet Union during the late 1930s, in which many prominent Old Bolsheviks were found guilty of treason and executed or imprisoned. All the evidence presented in court was derived from preliminary examinations of the defendants and from their confessions. It was subsequently established that the accused were innocent, that the cases were fabricated by the secret police (NKVD), and that the confessions were made under pressure of intensive torture and intimidation. (Read Leon Trotsky’s 1926 Britannica essay on Lenin.) The trials successfully eliminated ...(100 of 641 words)

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