Alexander Sedyakin was executed during a campaign that occurred during what years?
Great Purge The Great Purge or the Great Terror (Russian: Большо́й терро́р ) was a campaign of political repression in the Soviet Union which occurred from 1936 to 1938. It involved a large-scale purge of the Communist Party and government officials, repression of peasants and the Red Army leadership, widespread police surveillance, suspicion of "saboteurs", "counter-revolutionaries", imprisonment, and arbitrary executions. Mobile gas vans were invented to execute people without trial. In Russian historiography, the period of the most intense purge, 1937–1938, is called Yezhovshchina (Russian: Ежовщина ; literally, "Yezhov phenomenon", commonly translated as "times of Yezhov" or "doings of Yezhov"), after Nikolai Yezhov, the head of the Soviet secret police, the NKVD, who was later killed in the purge. It has been estimated that 600,000 people died at the hands of the Soviet government during the Purge.
Siege of Smolensk (1654) The Siege of Smolensk was one of the first great events of the Russo-Polish War (1654–67). Smolensk (pl. "Smoleńsk"), which had been under the rule of the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth during 1404–1514 and since 1611, was besieged by a Russian army in June 1654. The Polish garrison of the city (under the chairmanship of Smolensk Voivode Filip Obuchowicz) hoped to get reinforcements from the army of Janusz Radziwiłł (1612–55), stationed in Orsha. Its situation worsened when Radziwiłł suffered a defeat from Prince Yakov Cherkassky in the Battle of Shklow. In September, the Polish garrison agreed to leave the city after it was promised a free retreat. The garrison left Smolensk and handed over its weapons and ensigns to the Russians before retreating to Commonwealth-controlled territory. A significant number of landowners, however, preferred to stay and keep their estates, becoming subjects of the Russian Tsardom.