What Was Stalin's Great Terror

Stalin’s Great Terror was a campaign of political repression lasting from 1936-1938. The height of the Great Terror was in 1937 - 1938. During this time Stalin had an estimated 1,500 Soviet citizens killed everyday. It took place in the Soviet Union and began following the assassination of Sergey Kirov, a close associate to Stalin and the Leningrad party boss, on December 1, 1934 in Leningrad's Bolshevik headquarters. This was used by Joseph Stalin as a way to try and execute many people whom Stalin accused to be a part of a conspiracy run by Trotsky. The alleged goal of Trotsky’s conspiracy was to kill Stalin in order to overthrow communism and reinstate capitalism in the Soviet Union. The exact number of deaths caused by the Great Terror

The reason that they may have believed this is because of the major political benefits that Stalin got from Kirov’s death. Similar suspicions were even used in anti-Stalin propaganda by Khrushchev and Gorbachev in their own respective rises to power. Robert Conquest stated that “The removal of Kirov was the action Stalin had needed to break the deadlock and go forward to the achievement and consolidation of complete autocracy.” The ordered assassination of Kirov allowed Stalin the opportunity to remove people with beliefs that were opposed to his. He used the excuse that he was searching for Kirov’s assassin to bring his enemies to a fixed trial, get them to falsely admit to committing a crime, and execute them without drawing too much attention to himself. This resulted in a more power consolidated government but this also hurt the Soviet Union in the long run. When Stalin killed 767 high ranking officials in the Soviet military, he severely diminished the strength of the Soviet military because those positions were oftentimes filled

Stalin felt threatened by Japan and Germany and wanted to remove any anti-soviet people that might weaken the Soviet Union’s war effort. In 1937 Stalin said that the USSR was “Encircled by hostile powers whose agents...had penetrated all party governmental and economic organizations, and were engaged in wrecking and espionage.” This shows Stalin's belief that there were people within his own government that were working to weaken Stalin and the Soviet Union. The Spanish Civil War (1936-1939) convinced Stalin that a purge of unreliable people within the Soviet Union was needed to prepare for war. He was afraid that spies or other people who didn’t support the state could act against the USSR to aide the Americans, French, and British in a future war against him. He concluded that political repression was necessary to crush all potential opposition before war broke out. Stalin once said that in order “To win a battle in wartime several corps of soldiers are needed. And to subvert this victory on the front, all that is needed are a few spies.” This shows how much influence Stalin believed a few spies could have on a country’s war effort. He felt the need to wipe out any and all threats so he was not concerned with killing innocent people. He said that if only 5 percent of those arrested turned out to be truly