In this particular case, ethnic Ingrian near Leningrad. (Ingrians were the Finnish-speaking population in Leningrad oblast, i.e. people who had stayed there since Sweden ceded the area to Russia in the Treaty of Nystad ending the Great Northern War in 1721, and Peter the Great started to build St. Petersburg.)
Speaks a language other than Russian, confesses a minority religion, could quite easily be a spy and get information and then slip across the border. No real evidence was needed to put people in camps, kill them, or declare them enemies of the people. Stalin's repression killed hundreds of thousands in extermination camps where, by the way, Nazi officials visited to learn the trade of killing by hunger.
Today, the ethnic cleansing of Ingrians is all but complete; it was finalized by Finland allowing the Finnish-speaking population to immigrate in 1990s, leaving only some old people who are all soon dead.
To clarify, of course also ordinary Russians were thrown into this machinery of destruction. Another ethnicity just increased the likelihood quite a lot. Stalin himself was Georgian, not Russian.
The joking advice given to people eaten up by this machinery of killing was:
1. Do not confess anything.
2. If you confess, do not sign anything.
3. If you confess and sign, do not be surprised.
This may be more modern, but one that I love is, "Once you've been in the military, the circus isn't funny anymore."
Now that I read it in translation, I can see the second meaning. What I thought originally:
- You get so dumb after being in the military, you cannot appreciate that circus is funny anymore.
Another possibility:
- Military is so ridiculous, circus is not funny at all in comparison.
The best jokes defy explanation to some degree. A good example: the de facto definition of 'chutzpah' is, "To kill your parents and then ask the judge for clemency because you're an orphan." Not only is it funny, it's also the best available definition.
This had two meanings: ostensibly "Hurrah Vaino Väljas!", but also "Hurrah, (Karl) Vaino is out!"
(Vaino is a name that can be either a first or last name in Estonian, but in Finnish it means "persecution". Karl Vaino's grandson Anton Vaino was recently nominated the Chief of Staff of the Presidential Executive Office of Russia.)
There's an saying from the time "Был бы человек, а статья найдётся" (lit. "If we have the man, we'll find the law paragraph [necessary for a conviction]" attributed to either Beria or Stalin, but considered illustrative of the applied law.
Shostakovich Symphony No.13 (Babi Yar) and the poem there used, Yevtushenko's Babiyy Yar was a protest of both soviet antisemitism and the government's refusal to recognise the site as a holocaust location (Jewish identity of the victims being denied; they were generalized as Soviet instead), even in the early 60s.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Germans_in_Russia,_...
i believe there were two different concepts. the first one — an enemy of the state, or enemy of the people (враг народа) — is not about ethnicity. it's about "criminals" who deed horrible things to Soviet state and Soviet people.
some of these people were indeed criminals (although someone could argue that their crimes are usually not so horrible, i.e. banal theft), some of them — a lot, I think — were innocent.
enemy of the state/people was a working concept in 1930-1950s.
the second concept is about ethnicity. i don't know is there a name for it though. all of the ethnicities in Soviet Russia were declared equal, USSR was extremely anti-racist and anti-nationalist.
at the same time there were some nuances. for example, it was very hard to go to the top university if you are a jew (or jewish? I don't want to cause offence here). no one will tell you that you are not qualified because you are jewish, but you won't be there anyway.
there were two reasons behind that. the first one: it was too dangerous to give a good education to someone who could leave USSR for Israel later. the second one is quite obvious, i think.
I don't know when it began but it was relatively difficult for jewish kids to get to the top faculties of top universities even in 1980s. the same could be said about top-secret research and some other areas.
Declarations and actual policy were very different things in USSR (should I tell anything about Constitution of 1936?).
There were very brutal deportations of some Caucasian nations, of Germans, of Crimean Tatars based solely on ethnicity in 1940s. Many people died from cold and hunger, many children lost their parents. The forced labor (Labor Army) and movement restrictions were in place until mid-1950s and even children upon reaching age of 16 were required to report to local authorities as "special settlers" (I have archive documents from NKVD of such reports for my family). The practice of oppression was in place until end of 1980s: for example, Crimean Tatars were not allowed to return to their homes and were able to do so only in 1990s. Restoration of Autonomous Volga German Republic or creation of German autonomy within USSR in any other form was never allowed despite public demands.
These historical events are well-documented and recognized by government of Russian Federation, which rehabilitated the victims and in 1990s even paid small compensations (in form of increased pension) for these crimes.
Any of these would make someone think that you might be disloyal to the Soviet state and loyal to something else, and therefore increase your likelihood of being arbitrarily picked up for espionage, treason or sabotage charges. And once picked up, the guilty one had been arrested, because the system does not make mistakes. At this point, it's only the crime that needs to be found.
(It is attributed to Stalin that he said "there are no innocent people, only people who haven't been properly investigated yet." Not sure if he actually said this anywhere.)
The risk of Jewish people having shared loyalties to Israel is mostly a post-1948 thing of course so it was in a different form during the Great Purges.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polish_Operation_of_the_NKVD_(...
Don't tell me just "Some of them" out of 111,091 executed Poles were innocent.
So were all the people, but I'll wager the General Secretary of the Party had a nicer apartment.
However, that's not the real problem. A society cannot work without some economic and social inequality.
Taking large numbers of people in the early morning hours from their homes, imprisoning and starving and shooting them in the back of the head and burying them in a ditch, that is a problem, and the system that did this survived until 1980's, and now Russia is increasingly nostalgic about it.