A test by the arbitrariness in 1937-1938

Mass political repressions of the 1920s-1950s had serious negative consequences for the life of society and the state. Accurate statistics of political repression in the USSR does not exist, although their scale is extremely large. The author’s paper is dedicated to the victims of repression as well as it gives a description of the initiators, participants and executors of the «operation on repression». One of the orders of the NKVD № 00447 of July 30, 1937 contained this word combination. The author considers events related to the repression of 1937-1939 in the Orenburg Region, where the first arrests began in the second half of 1936. The author shows how the established command and administrative system, monstrous judicial arbitrariness, creation of extrajudicial bodies for repressions implementation, the triumph of lawlessness, the state of lawlessness and much more led to mass tragedies. The focus of the researcher is the destruction of the best party and people, industry captains, thousands of honest workers. The author in addition to documents extracted from the Orenburg archives, attracts memories of victims of arbitrariness, as well as materials from personal correspondence with their relatives. The Russian state condemned the long terror and mass persecution of its people as incompatible with the idea of law and justice.