The Great Terror
Order 00447, quotas for arrests, and a correction that came only from a rival faction.
Contested figures. Archival figures released after 1991 (Getty, Rittersporn and Zemskov) put executions in 1937–38 at roughly 680,000–750,000. Conquest's pre-archival estimates were higher. The archival range is now the scholarly baseline, and is still argued at the margins.
What happened
NKVD Order No. 00447 (July 1937) set numerical quotas for arrests and executions, region by region — quotas that local officers then petitioned Moscow to raise, competing to over-fulfil a plan for killing. Roughly 1.5 million people were arrested in 1937–38 and around 700,000 shot, including most of the Party and army leadership that had made the revolution. The show trials of Old Bolsheviks were only the visible tip; the mass "operations" against alleged anti-Soviet elements and national minorities did the bulk of the killing.
The results
An entire generation of officials, officers, writers and engineers was destroyed on confessions extracted by torture. The Soviet archives opened after 1991 recorded on the order of 681,000 executions for those two years alone — a figure that, remarkably, confirmed the ~700,000 estimate Robert Conquest had made in 1968 from fragmentary evidence and been attacked for inflating. Counting camp and transit deaths pushes the toll higher still. The terror stopped only when Stalin decided it had done its work.
Why it happened
This was terror as a tool of personal power. The quotas, the show trials and the forced confessions were aimed at making the leader unchallengeable — by killing anyone who might one day challenge him, and binding everyone else through complicity and fear. There was no court to appeal to and no faction that gained by exposing it, so it ran until the man who ordered it chose to end it.
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