The Great Terror which engulfed the USSR in the second half of the 1930s at the cost of possibly millions of lives is shorthand for a complex and chaotic series of events involving party purges (chistki), attacks on engineers and administrative personnel, the persecution of the intelligentsia and church, the show trials of leading party figures, and the hounding of ordinary citizens. The number of victims is a matter of long-running historical controversy. What does seem likely is that vulnerability to the terror was greatest amongst highstatus groups, and that in relative terms ordinary workers and peasants suffered less than others. Fitzpatrick suggests that the terror was probably not as traumatic for peasants as the famines of 1932–3 and 1936–7: ‘the available sources give no indication that “the year 1937” ever possessed the sinister resonance for peasants that it had for the urban educated population’. Workers too were generally ‘just part of the popular audience for the terror that Stalin unleashed against the elites in 1937–8’, and, as was suggested in chapter I, they may have even been more adversely affected by the repercussions of the 1940 labour decree.

It seems plausible that the terror was in part a populist strategy designed to mobilise subordinate groups against those in positions of responsibility, thereby deflecting discontent away from the regime itself. The strategy appears to have enjoyed some success.