A one minute of silence was held in Ukraine today, commemorating the Great Purge victims.
The Great Purge (also the Great Terror) was a campaign of political repression in the Soviet Union which occurred in 1937- 1938. It involved a large-scale purge of those in whom Joseph Stalin and his power saw threat, widespread police surveillance, suspicion of "saboteurs", "counter-revolutionaries", imprisonment, and arbitrary executions. Many people were executed without a trial.
The consequence of the Great Purge in Ukraine was elimination of the political, cultural and scientific elite, deformation of public relations, annihilation of traditional values, spreading of depression and anti-national attitudes.
By the estimates, 198,918 people were found guilty of being traitors on Ukrainian territory in the Great Purge times, and two thirds of them were sentenced to death. The others were sent to prisons and forced-labour camps.
The illegality of the Great Purge was admitted in the Soviet Union times, after Stalin’s death, when during the Khrushchev Thaw some of the repressed were rehabilitated, often posthumously. However, most citizens accused of being political traitors weren’t fully rehabilitated and their rights weren’t restored up until the independent Ukraine times. In 1991-2001 248,810 victims of the terror were rehabilitated.