Local NKVD agents had planned quotas. That's why I called it a Gosplan of mass murder. Agents who ddn't deliver their quotas were sent to the Gulag. My UCLA classmate Michael Gelb spent a year in Soviet archives in Leningrad in 1983 researching how the purges' national operations worked. His firsthand research in Soviet archives confirms Tim Snyder's Bloodlands' and Figes' research.

Anyone who defends the Stalin regime and tries to delegitimize one of the foremost historians of Stalinism by saying he worked with Memorial, is beyond saving by evidence and reality.