Obyknovennyĭ terror

Another excellent regional history book in Rosspen's History of Stalinism series. The author emphasizes repression as an integral part of Bolshevik policies, with a particular emphasis on repression against workers and peasants. He claims that the authorities saw repression as an only possible means of control and thus, while initially the goal of the terror was to 'clear' the Soviet society from all these groups Stalin's considered potentially disloyal (including replacing all the party apparatus), eventually the terror was massively used against industrial workers in order to keep them under control under poor employment conditions, not just immediately before and during WWII, but also later.