Nowadays there is a lot of talk about the repressions of the 37th. However, often, intentionally or not, there is a substitution in the concepts of “victims” and “executioners.” The beginning of this confusion was the so-called Khrushchev Thaw. But the executed Zinoviev, Kamenev, Bukharin and many other leaders of the party elite, repressed then, themselves played the role of executioners. It was they who unleashed the bloody massacre of the Civil War in 1918 and created a political climate in the country that gave rise to merciless terror. It is also deliberately forgotten that in 1934–1938. people died tens of times less than in 1918–1922. In the book of the famous writer Nikolai Konyaev, based on strictly classified materials from the murders of M. Volodarsky and M. Uritsky, leaders of the revolution, little-studied cases of the “Camorra of People’s Retribution”, the first peasant uprisings and soldier unrest the mechanism for promoting terror in Russia, its origins and consequences are revealed.