" For social pathologies like the Great Purges, there are no fully satisfactory explanations. Every individual knows that he is powerless, an actual or potential victim. It seems impossible, at least to minds brought up on Enlightenment principles, that something so extraordinary, so monstrously outside normal experience, could happen “by accident.” There must be a reason, people think, and yet the thing seems essentially unreasonable, pointless, serving no one’s rational interests. This was basically the framework within which educated, Westernized, modern Russians, members of the elite, understood (or failed to understand) the Great Purges. The dilemma was all the more agonizing in that these were the very people who were most at risk in this round of terror, and knew it. For the majority of the Russian population, less educated and less Westernized, the conceptual problems were not so acute. The terror of 1937–38 was one of those great misfortunes, like war, famine, floods, and pestilence, that periodically afflict mankind and simply have to be endured. "

― Sheila Fitzpatrick , Everyday Stalinism: Ordinary Life in Extraordinary Times: Soviet Russia in the 1930s