On July 30, the Russian government held lavish celebrations to mark the annual Navy Day holiday. But there were no official commemorations to mark the 80th anniversary of the July 30, 1937, Soviet government order that formally launched dictator Josef Stalin’s Great Terror that left around 700,000 people dead and millions displaced, orphaned, or crippled.
The silence of the government and the Russian Orthodox Church was symptomatic of Russian society’s ambiguous interpretation of the Great Terror and the other crimes committed by the Soviet government against itself and its own people.
