ABSTRACT
During 1937 and 1938 alone, Yezhov submitted for Stalin’s signature 383 lists of party members selected for liquidation. These lists were usually signed, ‘Approved: J.Stalin, V.Molotov’.1 Sometimes Stalin and Molotov sanctioned the execution of more than 3,000 people a day.2 The surviving Old Bolsheviks, most in prison camps, were frightened and kept silent when Stalin began to rewrite his biography in 1937. He published A Short Course of Party History, a book that bore little resemblance to the party’s actual past. In rewriting his past, Stalin as usual did not replace the facts with complete inventions, but a distorted version of the mutilated truth.
