Welcome to Russian History Retold.

Episode 311 The Great Purge, part two.

Last time, we covered the basis for the Great Purge of 1937 to 1939.

Today we will cover the people who are caught up in this tragedy.

Historically we tend to focus who were caught up in this tragedy.

Historically, we tend to focus on the broad effects

of decisions made by leaders.

While researching this topic, in older works, they talk about the purges being a monolithic event, and not a human

tragedy on a person-by-person basis. The later works do focus on those individuals who are scooped up in the vortex of the purge.

In his book though, The Great Terror Robert Conquest writes, quote, Stalin's terror, in fact, begins to show a more rational pattern

if it is considered as a statistical matter,

a mass phenomenon, rather than in terms of individuals.

Last episode, we talked about the life, arrest, and subsequent execution of Alexander Tival.

There are one million stories similar to his.

Obviously, we don't have that kind of time to discuss each and every one of them. On top of that, there isn't

documentation of each life taken during the Purge. I will try to share the experiences of those who were not in the top positions of the Bolshevik party,

like Kaminev Bhuhan, Rikov, or Zunoviev.

They were direct threats to Stalin, so they were logical choices for the purge.

Others like Tival or Aisip Mandelstam were no threat at all, but they lost their lives for off-the-cuff comments, beliefs or associations.

Let's start with Matveich-Bronstein.

Born in 1906, he, quote, was a Soviet theoretical physicist, a pioneer

of quantum gravity, author of works in astrophysics, semiconductors, quantum electrodynamics and cosmology.

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