Text taken from the description of the video, which is posted on rutube.ru, all in Russian. But this duo also has a series of videos about Russian history on youtube.com (probably likely also in Russian, but translatable)
Commentary by Russian military journalist Boris Rozhin is in italics.
[ColonelCassad] Historians Kirill Naazrenko and Yegor Yakovlev discuss the mythology surrounding the Stalinist repressions of the 1930s.
1937–1938 is one of the most tragic and simultaneously mythologized periods in Soviet history. How many people were actually repressed? Who was imprisoned for political crimes, and who was a common criminal? And why did the peak of the repressions occur precisely in the years after the adoption of Stalin's constitution?
In the new issue of the "History of Russia: The Main Thing," Yegor Yakovlev and Kirill Nazarenko provide a balanced picture of the repressions of the 1930s, drawing on modern research.
In this video:
- - Facts and figures: how many people were sentenced from 1921 to 1954
- Criminals in political cases: why many of those convicted under Article 58 were actually criminals
- Comparison with other countries: the prison population in the USSR, the USA, and modern Russia
- Mass operations: how the "troikas" worked and what are "execution limits"
- Repressions in the army: how many commanders the Red Army lost and why
- Causes of terror: the proximity of war, discontent among the elites, and the NKVD getting out of control
- Stalin's responsibility: did the leader direct the repressions or fail to cope with them
- The fate of prisoners of war: filtration, mistrust, and Sholokhov's story "The Fate of a Man"
It is worth noting once again that many reassessed their attitude to the repressions after the start of the Special Military Operation and active sabotage and terrorist activities against our country, as well as as a result of the large-scale corruption that was revealed in the leadership The Ministry of Defense and other government agencies. And the mass exodus of anti-Stalinists (who turned out to be, for the most part, foreign agents, pedophiles, and accomplices of extremists and terrorists) somewhat cleared the discourse.