When planning an attack on the USSR, Hitler and his Western customers considered Stalin’s Russia “a colossus with feet of clay” that would collapse at the first blow. Indeed, in the 1930s, the Soviet government was experiencing a serious crisis - conspiracies of the opposition, sabotage, “degeneration” of the party, bureaucratic lawlessness, “Bonapartism” and the low combat capability of the Red Army, decay of the special services, nationalism of the local “elites”, remnants of state Russophobia... Not surprising that Hitler was confident of an easy victory over Russia - but was faced with desperate resistance and the indestructible fortitude of the Soviet people, welded together by the steel will of the Leader, who in just two pre-war years accomplished the impossible, clearing the party, army, state security agencies of the “fifth column” and internal enemies, tempering the country, like a damask blade, in the blood of “Stalinist repressions,” turning the USSR into an industrial Superpower capable of winning the most brutal war in human history. For this “Stalinist miracle” they had to pay a terrible price (“they cut down the forest - the chips fly”), but if there had not been the Great Purge of 1937 - 1939, there would have been no Great Victory. A new book from the author of the bestsellers “Why do they hate Stalin” and “If if it weren’t for Stalin’s repressions” completes the study of this tragic and salutary era, revealing the true meaning of the cleansing 37th.