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Comic Book Brain by Erik Weems. Business site is here.
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THINGS TO CLICK
ONLINE COMICS
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 The Great Purges have puzzled scholars because they seemed to be directed at no particular group; local officials were given arrest quotas to fill as they saw fit. But precisely because of their senselessness, the Purges served the function of letting everyone know that no law would ever protect them. One usually thinks of a repressive regime as one that deals ruthlessly with dissenters, but in Soviet Russia no one was ever safe.
During his last years, Stalin invented the “doctors’ plot.” Supposedly, a group of Jewish doctors had conspired to murder Kremlin officials. When the doctors did not confess, Stalin threatened the investigators with torture if they did not get the doctors to say what was wanted. Of course, they could have just shot the doctors and made up confessions, but the regime needed constantly to prove to itself that its enemies acknowledged their wrongdoing and that lawlessness was all-powerful. From the book review article The lingering stench: airing Stalin’s archives by Gary Saul Morson, in which he reviews Inside the Stalin Archives by Jonathan Brent, at New Criterion Magazine online.
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