Soviet purges met nationwide arrest quotas averaging about three percent of the population

Evidence

“Bek Bulat (the pen name of a former Soviet professor) has been able to study documents of the North Caucasian NKVD. From these documents it was obvious that in June, 1937, when the great purge was at its apex, the government prescribed the local NKVDs to have a certain percentage of the population arrested… The percentage varied from one province to the other, reaching 5 per cent in the least loyal areas. The average for the whole of the Soviet Union was about 3 per cent.” — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 2803

Categorization

• QUESTION: Worth chasing: how were the quota percentages calibrated, and does the ‘least loyal areas’ figure of 5% correlate with any independent measure of loyalty or resistance?
• SEED: Angle: the bureaucratic arithmetic of genocide—quotas as the point where administrative rationality becomes mass murder—mirrors how today’s targeted surveillance classifies populations by risk score.