70 Years Since the Great Terror

Oh, how I yearn for the "Golden Age".

YahooNews: Gorbachev warned Russians on Wednesday of the risk of a rebirth of Stalinism, saying the country was in danger of forgetting its tragic past. "We should remember those who suffered, because this a lesson for all of us," Gorbachev told a conference marking 70 yrs since the start of Stalin's Great Terror. "We must squeeze Stalinism out of ourselves, not in single drops but by the glass or bucket," Gorbachev added. "There are those saying Stalin's rule was the Golden Age, while Khrushchev's thaw was sheer utopia and Brezhnev's neo-Stalinism was the continuation of the Golden Age."

During the Great Terror, 1.7 million Soviet citizens were arrested between August 1937 and November 1938, of whom 818,000 were executed, the human rights group Memorial said. Historians estimate that up to 13 million people were killed or sent to labor camps in the former Soviet Union between 1921 and 1953, the year Stalin died.