The article is prompted by a report from November 2025: Ivan Repin, the former head of the anti-extremism center in Russia’s Yaroslavl region, said he was tortured after being detained in a bribery case. According to the human rights project Public Verdict, he was beaten on the head until he lost consciousness and was choked with a rag. In 2022, Repin himself was said to have brutally beaten activist Andrei Akimov, who had been detained in a case over “discrediting the army.”
The authors argue that such episodes fit the logic of an “ecosystem of violence”: torture used against outsiders eventually destroys legal protections for the perpetrators themselves. In Soviet history, this was especially visible during the Great Terror, when security officers extracted confessions by force on a massive scale and later some of them were repressed as well.
How the system worked
Formally, the 1923 Criminal Procedure Code of the RSFSR banned obtaining testimony through violence, but in practice the security services operated outside legal constraints. First through extrajudicial OGPU troikas, created in 1930 during dekulakization, and later through NKVD troikas in 1937–1938, the authorities assigned regions quotas for arrests, exile, and executions.
In 1939, Stalin explicitly argued that “physical methods of influence” against “enemies of the people” were permissible and expedient.
Testimony cited in the article describes beatings, forced standing for hours or even days, humiliation, and provocation. Confessions served not so much as evidence as a way to generate new names and expand repression. According to S. N. Severin, head of the 6th department of the state security directorate, about 16,000 people were arrested in the Kamianets-Podilskyi region between August 1937 and August 1938, and 90% of them “confessed” to espionage and anti-Soviet activity.
The purge of the purgers
After the fall of Genrikh Yagoda and the dismissal of Nikolai Yezhov, Stalin ordered in November 1938 that the NKVD’s “shortcomings” be eliminated. Troikas were disbanded, mass extrajudicial operations were banned, and some officers came under investigation. Yet, the publication stresses, this “purge of the purgers” mainly protected the system itself: most victims of the terror never saw justice, while many convicted Chekists were later amnestied and returned to service.