"Same year as the Night of the Long Knives, Stalin quietly invented a new crime and started filling the camps with men who had committed it.

"Article 121 ran for fifty-nine years. It generated over twenty-five thousand convictions on the record and probably another forty thousand off it. The Holodomor has memorials. The Great Terror has a thousand books. This one got buried. The first English-language history of the Soviet anti-gay purge came out in 2023."