His father, Vasyl Nikolishin, was a victim of Joseph Stalin's Great Purge, and was exiled from Ukraine to a Gulag forced labor coal mine in Vorkuta, the largest center of the camps in European Russia, for a period of 25 years.
During the purge of 1938, both of his sons were arrested by the Soviet NKVD and Gerzel was executed.
In 1936, Volkoff's father returned to Russia but was exiled to the arctic camps as part of the Great Purge where he would die.
In 1938, at the height of the Great Purge, Aleksandrov was made deputy head of the Publishing Department of the Executive Committee of the Comintern.
The Great Purge (1936–1938), a campaign of political repression in the Soviet Union
That same year he founded the first Georgian Institute for the Study of Tuberculosis and directed it until 1938 when he was arrested and executed (shot) by Joseph Stalin during the Great Purge.
Because his father wrote an autobiography in which he tried to clear his friends who had become victims of the Great Purge and was removed from office because of that, Sturua could not enter a diplomatic career and so he eventually became a journalist, with the aid of Deputy Prime Minister Anastas Mikoyan.
In 1938 Rutgers left the Soviet Union fearing that he might otherwise become a victim of the Great Purge (secret police terror) which was sweeping the USSR.
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According to Botvinnik and official sources he died in a Nazi air raid on Lake Ladoga on a ship during the siege of Leningrad, but it is believed by some that he fell victim to the Great Purge along with the majority of the Old Guard of revolutionists.
A number of Armenian intellectuals, Bolshevik and later Communist statesmen, military and religious figures were killed during the Great Purge in 1930s by the Stalinist regime in an attempt to wipe out all political opposition in the Soviet Union.
Nevertheless, in the purge of 1937, Nadiradze was arrested along with the fellow symbolist writer Sergo Kldiashvili, but both of them were saved only by chance: their NKVD interrogator was himself arrested and the files mislaid.
In 1937, during the Xinjiang War (1937), Ma Shaowu was accused by the Soviet puppet Sheng Shicai of being part of a "Fascist-Trotskyite" network, including Khoja Niyas Hajji, Ma Hushan, along with other totally ridiculous claims, which Sheng Shicai used as an excuse to conduct his own purge in Xinjiang along with Joseph Stalin's Great Purge.
This purports to be a memoir by the 1025th Red to penetrate Catholic seminaries, but it is manifestly a feeble example of radical traditionalist propaganda that even fails to factor in the Russian purges.
After the infamous February–March (1937) Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union Plenum, which escalated the Great Purge, both "Romanizators" and "autochthonists" were declared "imperialist spies": "autochthonists", because they sabotaged the Latinization, and "Romanizators", because they were "agents of boyar Romania" ("Боярская Румыния"), i.e. anti-Soviet.
In his book of 1955 (Against the Law) Peter Wildeblood refers to Nott-Bower's role in the 'Great Purge' quoting an article written by Donald Horne for the Sydney Morning Telegraph printed on 25 October 1953.