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The Great Purge: Understanding Stalin's Terror

This quiz explores key figures, events, and concepts related to the Great Purge, a significant period of political repression in the Soviet Union under Joseph Stalin during the 1930s.

#Great Purge #Stalin #Soviet history #political repression #historical events #20th century history

1 ________: The Great Terror: Stalin's Purge of the Thirties.

2 ________, Darkness at Noon, 1940.

3 Another defendant, Ivan Smirnov, confessed to taking part in the assassination of ________ in December 1934, at a time when he had already been in prison for a year.

4 They were turned away by embassy officials, only to be arrested on the pavement outside by lurking ________ agents.

5 There was also a secret trial before a military tribunal of a group of Red Army generals, including ________, in June 1937.

6 This offer was accepted, but when they were taken to the alleged Politburo meeting, only Stalin, ________, and Yezhov were present.

7 Jan Sten, philosopher and deputy head of the Marx-Engels Institute was Stalin's private tutor when Stalin was trying hard to study Hegel's ________.

8 Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn, ________ 1918-1956.

9 This was a justification maintained to the very end by Vyacheslav Molotov and ________, participants in the repression as members of the Politburo, who both signed many death lists.

10 The campaigns also affected many other categories of the society: intelligentsia, peasants and especially those branded as "too rich for a peasant" (________), and professionals.

💡 Interesting Facts

  • the official death date of the Soviet statesman Nikolai Bryukhanov (1878-1938) was changed to 1943 as part of Khruschev's policy to minimize the scope of the Great Purge by falsifying the dates of its victims' deaths.
  • the remains of the Azerbaijani poet Huseyn Javid, who became a victim of the Stalin purges, were moved from Magadan to his homeland of Nakhichevan in 1982 and reburied in a mausoleum built in his honor.
  • after being sent to the GULAG, Ukrainian writer Hryhorii Epik continued to write and sent one of his works to the NKVD in Moscow before his execution during the Great Purge in 1937.
  • a Soviet and former Russian Imperial and Azerbaijani military commander, combrig Jamshid Nakhichevanski, became a victim of the Great Purge and was executed in 1938 after his third arrest by NKVD.
  • Joseph Zack Kornfeder, a founding member of the Communist Party of America in 1919, became a vigorous anti-Communist after his wife was arrested by the NKVD during the Great Purge of 1937–38.
  • Matvei Muranov was one of the few Old Bolsheviks to survive the Great Purge.
  • Abani Mukherji, co-founder of the Communist Party of India, was executed by the Soviet Union as part of the Great Purge.
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