Before moving on to directly considering the issue of the Great Terror, it is necessary to clarify two important points. First. The very fact of the Great Terror, the execution of 656 thousand people by verdicts of a non-judicial illegal body and the imprisonment of approximately 500 thousand more people in camps for 10 years, i.e. the most serious crime against the people of the USSR, does not exist as a fact by definition. Some especially frostbitten human rights activists are still toying with the idea of holding a trial of the CPSU (more correctly, the All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks)) similar to Nuremberg. I support this idea, I vote for it with both hands. I passionately wish that evidence of the repressions of 1937–1938, which our professional and not so professional historians consider evidence of mass executions and sentences to 10 years in prison for more than one million hundred thousand citizens of the USSR, would be presented in an open trial. Even for the trial that will be conducted by the judges of our current state. But my wish will never come true. There had already been an attempt to conduct such a trial; evidence had already been prepared that the party accusing the CPSU of crimes wanted to present to the court. Yes, I didn’t want something. Until such a process has taken place, until a legal assessment has been given to the evidence that testifies to the large-scale repressions of 1937–38, any competent historian can consider the fact of the Great Terror only in the form of the existence of this fact as a political statement of the CPSU Central Committee made in 1988 We do not have the historical fact of the Great Terror, but the historical fact of a political statement about it. Do you feel the difference? Second. When arguing with me, historians use one argument that is lethal in their opinion: they work in archives, so they know the whole truth about BT, and I am an “armchair expert”, I don’t go to archives, so my judgments are amateurish. Actually, I work at a desk, not on a sofa - once and twice - assessing the evidence of crimes committed, and BT is a crime, should not be historians, but criminologists. By dealing with the issue of BT before a legal assessment has been given to the evidence of its existence, historians have gone beyond their sphere of competence. I have never considered myself a professional historian and never do, but I have sufficient experience as a criminologist. It is precisely the wrong side in this matter that acts as an amateur. Precisely because I have sufficient experience as a criminologist, I categorically avoid working in archives on the issue under consideration. For several reasons. I am an interested party, I act as a lawyer, and I am not ashamed of this, the Stalinist regime. An interested party should enter the archive and study the documents in it only in a situation close to the conditions of the procedural action, i.e. in the presence of uninterested persons, with the drawing up of the appropriate act. (P. G. Balaev, February 18, 2020. “Excerpts from “The Great Terror”. Draft version of the preface”) -