On June 11, 1937, by order of Joseph Stalin, Marshal Mikhail Tukhachevsky and seven other senior military officers were sentenced to death. They were convicted on trumped-up charges of anti-Soviet activity.
The case against Tukhachevsky is part of the process of beheading the Red Army, part of Stalin's terror against society in the USSR.
The Great Purge or "The Great Terror" were political repressions and persecutions in the Soviet Union, directed by Joseph Stalin in the 1930s with the aim of consolidating his rule in the Soviet Union, centralizing power, and eliminating any possible resistance to power, whether real or feigned.
Some authors describe these repressions as the “Soviet Holocaust“. In Russian historiography, the period of the most intense purges (1937-1938) is called Yezhovshchina after Nikolai Yezhov, head of the Soviet secret police — NKVD.
The secret NKVD order under number 00447 of July 30, 1937 determined the “limit of terror”, i.e. the total number of those scheduled for arrest in all regions, divided into different categories. The “First Category“ included persons who were to be shot immediately. The “Second Category“ included persons who were to be sentenced to long terms and sent to camps.
The Great Terror claimed 3 million direct victims, i.e. through the so-called “rapid destruction of suspects”, and another 7.5 million people died in the Gulag.
State terrorism was aimed primarily at political and military leaders. Red Army generals were killed, writers, artists and scientists were victims of the purges, along with ordinary citizens suspected of questioning Stalin's rule.
If until 1937 the repressions affected individual groups and social circles, then the whole society became the object of terror.
During the 470-day period of the Great Terror in the USSR, 1,600 people were shot per day, which is an average of one person per minute. The shootings continued for 15 months and 12 days, without a "day off", day and night. This is what Tomasz Kizny - a photographer and journalist who has been working on an album about one of Stalin's most brutal crimes for years.