An important event to consider when looking at the Great Purge were the Moscow trials. These trials had all the old Bolshevik leaders excluding Trotsky and Stalin. Stalin wanted, not merely to kill his old opponents, but to destroy them morally and politically. There were three trials, Trial of the sixteen, Trial of the Anti-Soviet Trotskyist Center, and the Trail of the Twenty-One. These trials focused on different people being accused for certain crimes.Stalin had Nikoli Yezhov, head of the NKVD or the secret police at the time, take control of the trials and to get confessions out of the defendants by any means necessary.  

1. Trial of the Sixteen
2. Trial of the Anti-Soviet Trotskyist Center
3. Trial of the Twenty-One