Born Then1936–1938
Life during the Great Purge
Be born in a place it hit, a few years before it began, and see what it did to five ordinary lives.
What it meant for ordinary people
Stalin's secret police arrested about 1.5 million people in two years under quotas, shooting about half. Party members, officers, engineers, national minorities and anyone with foreign ties were at highest risk.
Deaths: about 680,000–750,000 executed, and hundreds of thousands more died in the camps.
How hard it hits each person in the game (risk of death, of being conscripted, of leaving) comes from scholarly estimates.
Around the same time
- Indian indenture system 1834–1917
- Third plague pandemic 1855–1930
- Sixth cholera pandemic 1899–1923
- Korea under Japanese rule 1910–1945
- Mexican Revolution 1910–1920
- World War I in Europe 1914–1918
- World War I in the Ottoman Empire 1914–1918
- World War I for the United States, Canada and Australia 1914–1918
- Armenian genocide 1915–1917
- Great Migration of Black Americans 1916–1970
- Russian Revolution and Civil War 1917–1922
- 1918 influenza pandemic 1918–1920
- Turkish War of Independence and population exchange 1919–1923
- Irish War of Independence and Civil War 1919–1923
- Great Depression 1929–1939
- Dust Bowl 1930–1939
- Holodomor 1932–1933
- Italian invasion and occupation of Ethiopia 1935–1941
- Great Purge 1936–1938
- Spanish Civil War 1936–1939
- Second Sino-Japanese War 1937–1945
- World War II on the Eastern Front 1939–1945
- World War II in Western Europe 1939–1945
- World War II for the United States, Canada and Australia 1939–1945
- The Holocaust 1941–1945
- World War II in Japan 1941–1945
- Japanese occupation of the Philippines 1941–1945
- Japanese occupation of Indonesia, Burma and Vietnam 1942–1945
- Bracero program and Mexican migration to the United States 1942–2007
- Bengal famine of 1943 1943–1944