Karime Arguilez

Stalin – The Master. Every night, long after midnight, the same scene in the Kremlin. A man with a pipe at his desk, a stack of typed lists, a blue pencil. A tick. A note in the margin. A name crossed out, a name added. Hundreds of lists. Tens of thousands of names. Death sentences approved in his own hand. On December 12, 1937, he and Molotov approved more than three thousand death sentences – and then went to watch a film. His inner circle called him Khozyain – the Master. Every man in this series worked for him, or died by his hand. And the lists were only one part of his work. The famine. In 1932–33, grain was seized from the villages of Ukraine and Kazakhstan while their people starved. Under a Soviet law introduced in 1932, even taking a few ears of wheat from a collective farm could result in execution or years in a labour camp. Starving villagers were forbidden to leave Ukraine and other affected regions in search of food. Millions died. Grain continued to be procured for the state, and some was exported. The purges. In 1937 and 1938, the black vans came at night. People slept half-dressed, with a small suitcase packed by the door. Lenin’s old comrades confessed to absurd crimes in show trials and were shot. Then came the engineers, the scientists, the writers, the officers, and the ordinary workers denounced by a neighbour. Each region received quotas for arrests and executions. Some officials asked Moscow for permission to execute even more people. In two years, around 700,000 people were shot. The Poles. Within the purges, one group was hunted in a campaign of its own. NKVD Order 00485 targeted an alleged Polish Military Organization that Soviet investigators claimed was conspiring against the state. Its supposed network became a pretext for mass arrests. A Polish name, a Polish birthplace, a connection to Poland: any of these could attract suspicion. When Yezhov reported the results of the campaign, Stalin wrote in the margin: "Good job! Keep digging and removing the Polish filth!" Over 111,000 people were executed in the Polish Operation alone. The army. Three of the five marshals appointed in 1935 were killed during Stalin’s purges. Thousands of officers were arrested or executed alongside them. When Hitler attacked in 1941, the Red Army was missing many of its most experienced commanders. The officers who remained had learned a deadly lesson: showing initiative could be fatal. The nations. Whole peoples were loaded into cattle trucks and deported to Central Asia and other remote regions of the Soviet Union: Chechens, Crimean Tatars, Volga Germans. And Poles again: after the Soviet invasion of Poland in September 1939, hundreds of thousands of Polish citizens from the occupied eastern territories were deported in successive waves. Families were torn apart. Many never returned. Katyn. In March 1940, Beria proposed executing the Polish officers, policemen and other prisoners held by the NKVD. The first signature on the approval document was Stalin’s. Thousands of Polish prisoners were murdered on his orders. Katyn became one of the enduring symbols of Soviet terror – and of the attempt to erase its crimes. And the end. On March 1, 1953, Stalin collapsed at his dacha. His guards were too afraid to enter his room without orders. For hours, the man who had ruled the Soviet Union for decades lay incapacitated while those around him hesitated. His own doctor was in prison, arrested during Stalin’s campaign against the supposed conspirators among the Kremlin’s doctors. The fear he had spent thirty years building kept everyone away – even from him.