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According to Conquest, two days after Sofia was executed, on December 12, 1937, Stalin and his premier, Vyacheslav Molotov, approved 3,167 death sentences—and then went to watch a movie. Not all the executions were approved at such a high level; on a day in October, the secret police chief, Nikolai Yezhov, and another official considered 551 names and sentenced every one of them to be shot.
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David E. Hoffman (The Billion Dollar Spy: A True Story of Cold War Espionage and Betrayal)