Eighty years ago, Josef Stalin ended the Great Terror, citing as his reason “local excesses” that had “come to his attention.” His Nov. 17, 1938 decree ordered extra-judicial tribunals, called troikas, to stop their sentencing of political prisoners. The troikas lay at the heart of political terror. They provided a thin veneer of “socialist legality” to what was mass murder and wanton incarceration. Stalin’s November 1938 action stopped in its tracks a killing machine that had been executing an unfathomable average of 1,400 victims per day. It wasn’t until two decades later that an obscure intelligence officer tallied the victims of the sixteen-month reign of terror at 1,334,360. Of these, half were shot, and the rest sentenced to the Gulag.
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Paul Gregory: Russia’s re-Stalinization
A photo taken on Sept. 28, 2018, shows pictures of missing people in the forested area near Moscow known as Kommunarka where historians belive Stalin's NKVD secret police killed and burried more than 6000 people in 1937-41.
