What began as Stalin’s vengeance against political enemies (real or—as is more frequently the case—imagined) is spilling over into the civilian population. They are dragged into forests and shot. Over forty thousand residents of Leningrad are murdered in 1937—a number that reaches sixty thousand in 1938. More than half a century later, their bones will be exhumed from a mass grave, nearly all bearing a single bullet hole in the back of the skull.
