Stalin himself who instilled the terror. When Soviet survivors returned to the motherland after years of suffering in German camps, Stalin proved true to his word and treated his own soldiers as traitors simply because they had been captured and hadn’t fought to the death. This also affected many of the 800,000 Soviet women who had volunteered or been mobilised to work in intelligence units, as signallers or as doctors and nurses. The very fact that they had been in a foreign country and mixed with foreigners – albeit foreign prisoners – meant they were contaminated by fascism.
