Richard Feidler

And I think about that a lot because it's partly we don't know how many because there's just so many.

It's such a vast country.

But partly we don't know how many because once you destroy records or make them secret, it's very, very difficult to know what happened.

And so I'm particularly obsessed with archives and preserving records because of what happened in the Soviet Union.

My grandfather was a deputy editor at a newspaper, and everybody got arrested.

His boss got arrested, his colleagues got arrested, and he kept waiting for them to come and get him, and they didn't.

And he lost his mind.

Well, imagine what...

it would be like to just sit at home every night waiting for the police to take you away, knowing that it's probably to take you away to be executed.

And so he eventually checked himself into a psychiatric institution, and he ended up volunteering for the front once World War II began from the psychiatric institution.

But the reason that I was thinking about what happened to him was precisely because that's sort of the corollary, right, of the effect of terror.

Some of us say to ourselves, that's not going to happen to me because blank.

And we make up stories about why it's not going to happen to me.

And sometimes when it's so clear that it's going to happen to you, you just wait for it to happen.

In fact, as we found out decades and decades later, these arrests were driven primarily by quotas.

the secret police were told that they had to, in every region, arrest a round number.

So different round numbers were handed down to different regions.

Here you had to get 100,000, here you had to get 300,000, and then declare them to be enemies of the people and send them to the Golag or to be executed.

And those quotas, that randomness, right, that's the back end, and that we know is happening.

in Trump's America.