Michael Malice

And if you're arrested and tortured, you're like, okay, who are your accomplices?

And now you just got to name names, people you knew.

And then it becomes this whole chain.

And it's like, how am I going to protest my innocence if Lex just said, you know, I worked with Michael and we were working with Trotskyists and we were plotting to overthrow Stalin.

Lex testified to this.

He signed a confession.

What am I supposed to do now, right?

So it worked its way in a most viral fashion through the whole society.

There was this

amazing moment where these poor people, peasants, because obviously the powerless are often going to be caught in the web.

They were going to jail for being Trotskyites, and they had to ask themselves, what's a Tractorist?

They didn't even know who Trotsky was.

And the other thing is, ethnicity was a problem, right?

If you were an ethnicity, you have more power with

other members of that ethnicity than you have with this kind of broader soviet culture so he would just deport entire populations from their ancestral lands to other parts a to spread the population around but also to break that link between the peoples and their lands there was this 1937 nkvd order against polish people where it's just like if you had come from poland or had a

just this whole list.

And basically people were being arrested because they had Polish last names.

And I think it was a million people were killed, like some astronomical number.

So there was this, anything that was a bond was,

was a threat to him.