Introduction: Joseph Stalin's Great Terror

Categorized as one of the worst offenses against human rights in the 20^th century, Stalinist Russia’s “Great Purge” and political repressions of the era mark a dark stain on the country’s Soviet government regime. The USSR’s series of biased trials and executions were initiated by the country’s fierce leader Joseph Stalin in order to consolidate supreme political power. The “Great Purge” era began in 1934 in reaction to the murder of Communist Revolution leader and Stalin’s confidant Sergey Kirov. Historians believe the murder was instigated by Stalin himself in response to party congress committee disagreements and concern that he was surrounded by traitors in his own party. Stalin capitalized on Kirov’s murder to justify the elimination of all “opponents” of the Communist party and prominent Soviet figures, instituting a new decree that speed up the process of dealing with arrested prisoners and depriving defendants a right to appeal (1). Stalin would promote a veneer of legality by hosting large public trials, where major figures confessed their own ambitions to destroy the party.

The original goal of the movement was to remove opposition, thus the purge started by targeting high-level officials allegedly affiliated with Kirov’s murder. However, the friends and family of political threats to Stalin were soon labeled as dissidents by association, and the effectiveness of community suspicious surveillance spiraled the movement to extend its suppressive reach. The massive initial witch hunt came to arrest 1,108 delegates of the communist party, and execute a third in Leningrad alone (2). Another wave of mass terror began in 1937 when the commander-in-chief of the Red Army and several generals were shot. Convicted individuals were sentenced to incarnation, gulag labor camps, and many times, execution. The victim’s of Stalin’s paranoia totaled up to an estimated 10 million, including innocent civilians, politicians, army veterans and NKVD officers themselves across all Soviet territories (3).

However, the number of Moscow memorials and commemorations for the atrocities committed are remarkably not to scale with the incredibly vast scar that Stalin’s Great Terror left on the country. Moscow, the headquarters of the Kremlin and center of power during Stalin’s regime, only has one official memorial for fallen victims. Current President Vladimir Putin stated that sorrow over causalities should be tempered since “in other countries, even worse things [have] happened.” (4) Thus, the schism between public collective memory about Stalin’s terror and the governments reluctance to accept blame is indicative of the tension between competing social narratives. Sites of civilian attempts to memorialize victims can be found all over Moscow, filling in the void of the government’s lack of recognition for the event. The spectrum of commemoration sites, from grassroot led to government sponsored, speak of constant tension in Moscow between creating, preserving and destroying a city’s historical memories.