“THIS DAY IN HISTORY”: JUNE 11

   The Great Purge (or Great Horror) begins in the Soviet Union under Joseph Stalin's order. 

The Great Purge 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 after Nikolai Yezhov, the head of the Soviet secret police, NKVD. It has been estimated between 600,000 and 1.2 million people were murdered by the Soviet government.