The
Great Purge or the
Great Terror was a campaign of
political repression in the Soviet Union which occurred from 1936 to 1938. It involved a large-scale
purge of the Communist Party and government officials, repression of
peasants and the
Red Army leadership, and widespread police surveillance, suspicion of "saboteurs", imprisonment, and arbitrary executions. In Russian historiography, the period of the most intense purge, 1937–1938, is called
Yezhovshchina (; literally, "Yezhov phenomenon", commonly translated as "times of Yezhov" or "doings of Yezhov"), after
Nikolai Yezhov, the head of the
Soviet secret police,
NKVD.