The first major public show trial of the Great Purge began in Moscow, targeting prominent former oppositionists (including Grigory Zinoviev and Lev Kamenev). The proceedings helped establish the model for later staged trials based largely on coerced confessions.
The court found the defendants guilty and ordered their executions, signaling that earlier party conflicts would now be settled through lethal criminal prosecution and public spectacle.
Nikolai Yezhov became People’s Commissar for Internal Affairs (NKVD), a leadership change closely associated with the escalation of mass arrests and executions later termed the Yezhovshchina.
The USSR adopted the 1936 Constitution (the “Stalin Constitution”). While it formally expanded rights and restructured institutions, the state simultaneously intensified political policing and coercive justice during the Purge period.
The second show trial began, prosecuting alleged members of a “Parallel Anti-Soviet Trotskyist Center.” It broadened the purge narrative to include more senior figures and supplied pretexts for wider repression.
Defendants were convicted at the end of the second show trial; several were executed while a few received labor-camp sentences. The trial reinforced the use of forced confessions to validate expanding terror campaigns.
Following a closed military proceeding (often associated with the Tukhachevsky case), Marshal Mikhail Tukhachevsky and other top commanders were executed, accelerating a sweeping purge of the Soviet armed forces’ leadership.
NKVD Order No. 00447 mandated a large-scale operation against “former kulaks, criminals, and other anti-Soviet elements,” using quotas and NKVD troikas to impose rapid extrajudicial sentences. The operation was set to begin on 1937-08-05.
Implementation of Order 00447 began, greatly expanding arrests, camp sentences, and executions through streamlined procedures and troika verdicts, and becoming one of the central mechanisms of the 1937–1938 terror peak.
The NKVD’s secret order initiating the “Polish Operation” was signed, launching one of the largest “national operations” of 1937–1938 and targeting Poles and those alleged to be linked to Polish intelligence or organizations.
Order No. 00486 institutionalized collective punishment by authorizing repression of wives and children of those convicted as “traitors,” widening the terror to family members and increasing pressure on defendants and communities.
The third and most expansive show trial opened, accusing Nikolai Bukharin, Aleksey Rykov, Genrikh Yagoda, and others of conspiracy, sabotage, and treason. It served to eliminate remaining prominent “Old Bolsheviks” outside Stalin’s circle.
The third show trial concluded with most defendants sentenced to death, marking the culmination of the public courtroom phase of the Great Purge’s elite prosecutions.
Lavrenty Beria was moved to Moscow and installed as deputy to NKVD chief Yezhov, positioning him to oversee a transition that would soon include a rollback of some mass operations and an internal purge of NKVD personnel.
As repression began to be moderated, NKVD Order No. 00689 narrowed the automatic arrest of wives under Order 00486, requiring stronger grounds than mere association in at least some categories of cases.
A joint Sovnarkom–Party Central Committee decree (“Decree about Arrests, Prosecutor Supervision and Course of Investigation”) formally banned NKVD mass operations and required stricter prosecutorial oversight, widely treated as the official endpoint of the Great Purge period.
Yezhov was officially relieved as People’s Commissar for Internal Affairs, and Beria assumed leadership of the NKVD—an institutional turning point often associated with ending troika-driven mass operations and shifting blame for “excesses” onto Yezhov.
The Great Purge and Political Repression (1936–1938)
