The article by Nikos Papadatos “Guilty by suspicion: The fate of the Greek communists in the USSR during the ‘Great Terror’: 1936-1939”, is based exclusively on primary sources from the state archives of the Russian Federation.

The study presents a new perspective on the persecution of Greek communists who lived in Moscow and the territories of the former USSR during the period 1936-1939. This study uses the micro-historical method to challenge the common analysis of this period. At the heart of microhistory is the principle of reduction of the object: understanding a large-scale historical phenomenon through a specific ad-hoc criterion. This can be a controlled field of limited size, but of great heuristic value, and must be investigated within the general historical context.

The persecution of Greek communists is reframed by analysing the everyday actions of the main actors in history, rather than using the broad study of the struggle of the masses.