Stalin's Liquidation Game: The Unlikely Case of Oleksandr Shums'kyi, His Survival in Soviet Prison, and His Subsequent Arcane Assassination

Millions of innocent people were arrested in Stalin’s Soviet Union during the 1930s in different waves of mass repression. Under violent interrogation, many were forced to confess to crimes they did not commit. Rather than save their lives, as the interrogators had promised, confession was usually the last step to their execution. Very few of those arrested eventually refused to confess.

Oleksandr Shums’kyi, the Ukrainian Marxist revolutionary, was one of the most important but least known o...