Eighty years ago, Josef Stalin ended the Great Terror, citing as his reason “local excesses” that had “come to his attention.” His November 17, 1938 decree ordered extra-judicial tribunals, called troikas, to stop their sentencing of political prisoners. The troikas lay at the heart of political terror. They provided a thin veneer of “socialist legality” to what was mass murder and wanton incarceration. Stalin's November 1938 action stopped in its tracks a killing machine that had been executing an unfathomable average of 1,400 victims per day. It wasn't until two decades later that an obscure intelligence officer tallied the victims of the sixteen-month reign of terror at 1,334,360. Of these, half were shot, and the rest sentenced to the Gulag.
Political terror continued after November of 1938, but at a less breakneck pace. World War II fed Stalin's camps with POWs, foreign nationals, residents of occupied territories, and returning Soviet soldiers. The Gulag continued to grow until it reached its peak of 2.5 million prisoners shortly before Stalin's death.
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