Stalinistické čistky - Scény z Velkého teroru na sovětské Ukrajině – Viola Lynne (2019)

The Stalinist regime from the summer of 1937 to November 1938 imprisoned more than one and a half million people for alleged "counter-revolutionary" and "anti-Soviet" activities, and partly executed them en masse or sent them into exile in the infamous "gulag" camps. While we now know quite a bit about the experiences of the victims of the Great Terror, we know almost nothing about the lower and mid-level NKVD cadres, or secret state police, who carried out Stalin's murderous policies. Unlike the post-war trials of Nazi war criminals, the executive members of the NKVD were tried in secret. Until today, practically no one knew what happened behind the closed doors of the courtrooms. In a matter referred to as the "purge among the executors of the purges," Soviet military tribunals condemned nearly a thousand NKVD officers. The representatives of the Soviet Union needed to find a scapegoat. They allowed them to be accused of multiple instances of fabricating false evidence and falsifying interrogation protocols, using torture to extract "confessions," and also for the murders of "suspects" during preliminary detention before trial. Many of them were sentenced to death. The documentation created during the trials, including records of interrogations, written confessions signed...