Armenian victims of the Great Purge

Armenian victims of the Great Purge included Armenian intellectuals, writers, artists, Bolshevik and later Soviet statesmen, military commanders, and religious figures. Orchestrated by Joseph Stalin, the Great Purge was a campaign of political repression and persecution in the Soviet Union against supposed "enemies of the people," including members of the Communist Party, the peasantry, writers and intellectuals, and other unaffiliated persons. The worst period, under NKVD head Nikolay Yezhov, was known as the Yezhovschina ('period of Yezhov'). In the years from 1936 to 1938, thousands of people suffered from Stalinist repressions in Soviet Armenia.