In 1989, its first year in existence, the Rehabilitation Commission reviewed about 280,000 court cases and cleared 367,690 names.10 This was, by Alexander Nikolaevich’s estimate, about 2 percent of the job. From what he could tell now that he had full access to existing documents, casualties of mass terror numbered about twenty million. That was just Stalin’s part of it: more people had died in the collectivization campaign that preceded his rise to power, and the punishment machine had continued to work, albeit at a greatly reduced pace, after Stalin’s death.11 Even if the group continued to
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