All events · The World Wars
The Great Terror: Mass and National Operations of the NKVD
1937–1938 · Europe & Northern Eurasia
Confinement
Mass Killing
Abduction (Children)
Killing was the defining act
Confined
1.5 million
About 1.5 million people were arrested in the sixteen months from August 1937, of whom roughly 800,000 were sentenced to death and most of the remainder to camp terms. Operational order 00447 against 'former kulaks, criminals and other anti-Soviet elements' accounted for 767,000 sentences and 387,000 executions. The national operations produced their own totals: the Polish operation under order 00485 saw about 140,000 arrested and 111,000 shot, the German operation about 55,000 arrested and 42,000 shot, the Chinese Eastern Railway operation 33,108 condemned and 21,200 shot, and the Latvian operation 22,360 condemned and 16,573 shot. Under order 00486 some 40,000 wives of 'traitors to the motherland' were arrested and about 20,000 of their children placed in orphanages. All figures come from NKVD statistical returns opened after 1991 and compiled by Memorial and by Nicolas Werth.
Share of the population affected
0.93%
of the population of the Soviet Union at the suppressed census of January 1937, 1937
Killed
680,000–800,000
direct killing
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What happened
Between July 1937 and November 1938 the NKVD carried out centrally planned mass arrests under numbered operational orders that set regional quotas for execution and for camp sentences. Order 00447 targeted former kulaks, returning deportees, clergy and people with criminal records; a parallel series of 'national operations' targeted Soviet citizens of Polish, German, Latvian, Finnish, Greek, Korean, Chinese and other diaspora origins on the presumption that they were foreign agents. Sentences were passed in absentia by two- and three-man boards on the basis of lists. The Polish operation was proportionally the deadliest, with about four in five of those arrested shot. Wives of executed men were arrested under a separate order and their children placed in institutions. The operations were halted in November 1938 and Yezhov himself was shot in 1940; the Soviet state did not publish the statistics, which emerged from the archives after 1991 and are now maintained in the databases of the Memorial society.
Parties
The NKVD under Nikolai Yezhov arrested, shot or sent to camps quotas of 'anti-Soviet elements' and members of diaspora nationalities on Politburo authority
Disputed
Totals rest on NKVD statistical returns whose completeness is debated, and burial sites for many of the executed have still not been identified.
The denominator
The 1937 census counted about 162 million people; Stalin rejected the result, had the organisers arrested, and ordered a new census in 1939 which returned 170.6 million. Modern demographers regard the 1937 figure as the more accurate of the two.
The 'national operations' fell overwhelmingly on small diaspora nationalities — Poles, Germans, Koreans, Latvians and others — for whom the arrest rate ran to several per cent of the group, so a share of the whole Soviet population conceals how concentrated the targeting was.
Where the baseline comes from
On the death toll
NKVD returns record 681,692 executions for counter-revolutionary and state crimes in 1937-38; Werth gives about 800,000 death sentences over the sixteen months of the operations. The difference reflects sentences carried out in early 1939, deaths under interrogation and executions recorded under other headings.
Documented forms of violence
Mass KillingSummary ExecutionArbitrary DetentionTortureForced LabourAbduction of Children
Quota-based execution, sentencing by extrajudicial boards, the authorised use of physical pressure in interrogation, the arrest of wives and the placement of their children in orphanages are recorded in the NKVD operational orders themselves, published from the archives and catalogued by Memorial.
Movements mapped
- Sentenced survivors of the mass operations -> northern camps
Countries touched, on present-day borders
Russia, Ukraine
Sources
This entry rests only on reference, press or open-edited sources. Treat its figures as indicative and follow the links before relying on them.