The Soviet Union was to be a political and economic vehicle to propel humanity into a new future,

a future unencumbered by the old hierarchies and old repressions and old injustices, after

so many generations being corrupted by the old ways,

by the capital system and its bourgeois morals, or by the old aristocratic orders, or the old

religious traditions, it would take enormous spiritual and political energy to fit society for

its dialectical evolution. But evolve it would if its leaders had enough

determination for the cause. In the service of that cause, and of course I've consciously stated

it very ideologically, in the service of that cause, Soviet leaders imprisoned, immiscerated,

and murdered millions of people. Just one dramatic example. In the period

between 1936 and 1938, now known to historians as the Great Terror, Joseph Stalin

oversaw the murder of hundreds of thousands, over 700,000 Soviet subjects. Some of them were

political rivals, some of them held heterodox views,

some of them were merely accused of holding heterodox views. If you were to add to this number,

the additional number of Soviets sent to their imprisonment in the gulag, many of whom were to die there,

Stalin probably killed over one million of his countrymen in these

couple of years. Nearly 30,000 of these murdered Soviet victims were executed at the mass

gravesites Comunarka and Butovo, and today's guest recently journeyed to Komenarka to pay homage to

one of these victims, his great-grandfather. Welcome to the Tikva podcast. I'm

your host, Jonathan Silver. My guest is David Margolin, senior editor at Hibbad.org, and the author

of a new essay that interprets Stalin's great terror through the lens of his family's legacy.

You see, David is, as he explains in our conversation, Al-Ubavachar Khashid, and the very fact

that under so much pressure to assimilate, even pressure to the point of persecution and death,

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