Great Purge facts

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A Soviet soccer player was so popular that when he was sent to the Siberian gulags during Stalin's Great Purge in the 1930s, he was treated rather well as the gulag commanders were also his fans, who gave him better quarters and food rations, and was even asked to coach the local teams.

how did the great purge affect russia?

The Soviets used mobile gas chamber vans to execute groups of counter-revolutionaries during The Great Purge of the 1930's

What happened during the great purge?

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what was the great purge?

1. According to declassified Soviet archives, during Stalin’s great purge of 1937/1938 over 1.5 million people were detained, of whom 681,692 were shot (an average of 1,000 executions a day). In comparison, the Tsarists executed 3,932 persons for political crimes from 1825 to 1910.

2. During the "Great Purge" (1936-1938), Joseph Stalin had 3 of 5 Red Army Marshals (equal to 4-star generals), 13 of 15 Army Commanders (equal to 3-star generals), and 8 of 9 Admirals all executed, on the basis of false allegations that they were conspiring with foreign governments.

3. The brilliant agricultural scientist and founder of the world's premier seed bank, Nikolai Ivanovich Vavilov, ironically died from starvation in the Great Purge of the USSR. He advocated crossbreeding to create plants that would yield a secure food system.

4. Jamaican-American engineer Robert Robinson who was recruited to work in the Soviet Union in 1929 and was not allowed to leave the country for decades. He survived Stalin's Great Purge during which many foreigners disappeared and almost starved to death during World War 2.

5. Joseph Stalin did not attend his mother's funeral because she died in the middle of the Great Purge

6. During the Great Purge, Marshal Mikhail Tukhachevsky, known as the "Red Napoleon", was falsely accused of treason and sentenced to death. Five of the eight officers serving as judges in that court martial were later executed themselves.

7. In 1937 soviet general Konstantin Rokossovsky was falsely accused of being a polish spy during Stalin's great purge, instead of signing a false statement he decided to stick through the torture, he was later given back his rank as general, becoming one of the best red army generals to have lived

8. Nikolai Yezhov, head of the NKVD and in charge of the Great Purge, after which he was then ironically arrested, tortured, tried for anti-soviet activity and executed.