Eighty years ago, Joseph Stalin’s Great Terror (to use Robert Conquest’s term) was well into its first month. In towns and cities throughout the Soviet Union, the headquarters of the NKVD – the secret police – were filled with screams, the sounds of beatings and the clacking of typewriters. In the Kremlin, Stalin signed “shooting lists” of prominent Bolsheviks to be executed. Extrajudicial troikas provided a thin veneer of “socialist legality” as they rubber stamped death sentences.
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Paul Roderick Gregory: What the ‘Great Terror’ taught autocrats
A man examines the stand presenting the history of Soviet dictator Josef Stalin's NKVD secret police at an exhibition dedicated to the 205th anniversary of the foundation of Russias Interior Ministry troops in the State Duma in Moscow, on March 25, 2016.
