Tali Perch, writing in Guernica Magazina, chronicles the horrors of Stalin’s repression, banditry, and genocide. She readily conflates him with Hitler. Notably, Stalin’s goons break into poor shtetl homes looking for gold and cash. It was an interesting read about generational trauma. Even so, I have a hard time believing some of the claims put forward. Does someone more knowledgeable than me want to clarify its contents?
From what I read, Stalin’s thinking at the time was that removing fascist elements and traitors from racial groups in the Soviet Union was already stirring up more blowback and dissent than expected. Amplified by the spread of capitalist lies and media, he and the other Soviet leaders at the time were between a rock and a hard place. They figured either go “all-in” with the repression of capitalist elements, which is a process that would take a longer amount of time than the USSR had before Nazi invasion, or move populations further east away from the Nazis, set up new regions and then filter out the scumbags.
I saw a tweet many months ago that used data from racial and ethnic groups in the USSR that was compared to political affiliation, and the data showed that the extent of the purges and repression against interlopeprs (Yezhov’s excesses notwithstanding) was supposedly at or around the maximum that many populations would tolerate, and Stalin didn’t want to risk further subterfuge or breakup of the USSR.