The Great Terror: Stalin's Purges and Reign of Fear

What had begun as a manifestation of Stalin's personal paranoia takes on the aspect of a moral panic, a witch hunt for enemies within. Most victims are innocent, but coerced or tortured into confessions, then executed or exiled to the Gulag, a network of labor camps so brutal that many perish. For the most prominent victims, there are show trials in Moscow. Old Bolsheviks, including Stalin's former allies, confess to wildly improbable crimes about their double lives as secret foreign agents and are then taken away to be shot. The victims include thousands of Red Army officers and the man regarded as Russia's most brilliant military theorist, Marshall Mikail Tukachevski. The death toll is estimated at between 600 and 700,000, though no precise figure is possible. Beyond the incalculable human suffering, it is an act of staggering self harm, depriving the Soviet Union of many of its best minds and swavs of its most experienced military commanders in Ethiopia, forcibly incorporated into the colony of Italian East Africa. the previous year. Resistance continues.