In the early years of the Gorbachev period, writers in the Soviet Union sought the origins of Stalinist terror in the person of the deranged dictator, the “administrative system” of the time, or the very nature of Leninism. As engaging as these hypotheses may be, they had little empirical evidence to support them. As more hard evidence has become available, attention and debate have shifted to the quantitative impact of the terror. In the former USSR, several new studies have sharply narrowed the range of estimates of aggregate numbers of victims and generally invalidated the highest Western guesses. But the emphasis in the scholarly discourse on elaborating the overall dimensions of the terror has provided little new insight into the impact of the mass repression on particular groups.

Central to an understanding of the Ezhovshchina is an analysis of the terror's victims: What types of people were repressed? Although we have made great progress recently in positing aggregate totals, we have only begun to study the flip side of the quantitative coin: the statistical question of risk or vulnerability of various individuals to repression. Implicitly and explicitly, those who have studied the terror have argued that the political and social composition of the victims provides crucial insight into the reasons behind the repression.