From Richard Pipes’ incredible book Communism: A History
The Great Terror struck at the party membership as well as ordinary citizens. At its height, in 1937 and 1938, at le one and a half million people, the vast majority of them in nocent of any wrongdoing even by Communist criteria, were hauled before troikas, tribunals made up of the first secretary of the regional party, the procurator, and the local security police chief. After summary proceedings often lasting no more than a few minutes and from which there was no appeal, the defendant would be sentenced to death, hard labor, or exile. Abstention from politics offered no security, nor did wholehearted commitment to the regime. At the pinnacle of the Great Terror, the Politburo issued “quotas” to the police authorities, instructing them as to what percentage of the population in their district was to be shot and what percentage sent to camps.
For example, on June 2, 1937, it set a quota of 35,000 persons to be “repressed” in Moscow city and Moscow province, of which number 5,000 were to be shot.” One month later, the Politburo provided each region with quotas of persons to be “rounded up” nationwide; 70,000 of them were to be executed without trial. A high proportion of the victims of the Great Terror were persons with a higher education considered difficult to control and prone to engage in “sabotage.”
How much the purge affected the party elite can be seen from the fact that of the 139 members and candidate members of the Central Committee elected at the Seventeenth Party Congress in 1934, 70 percent were executed. ”
