The Great Terror in Leningrad: Further Evidence from the Leningradskii martirolog

Melanie Ilic’s research is concerned both with the numbers of people executed as a result of the purges and with profiling the victims of the mass repressions as they rolled out in Leningrad. The use of currently available statistical data and the various regional handbooks of martyrs now allow us to map more accurately the extent of the terror, its waves and trajectories, how it operated in separate geographic regions of the Soviet Union and the impact it had on different socio-economic and national groups. The chapter does not set out to challenge the accuracy of statistical data or to highlight any internal consistencies. Instead, the data is used here to determine the outcomes of the Great Terror. Ilic uses the statistical data and newly-available documentary evidence in the ten volumes of the Leningradskii martirolog published so far to expand the study she first published over a decade ago. The analysis of these sources of evidence allows a profile to emerge of the victims of mass repression during the Yezhovshchina