<< where the largest # of victims of the purges and
GULAG camps were not, fascists (in Vishinsky's summation at the "Trial of
Trotskyite, Fascist, Bukharinite Bloc of Rights" in was it '36 or '37,
transformed into , "fascist hyenas.") but Old Bolsheviks, >>
I don't really want to start something going on the Russian question, but this cannot be factually accurate, even if we accept the very low figures for the Gulag and the purges urged by Jerry Hough (low hundreds of thousands) or the intermediate ones urged by Getty (low millions), much less the more standard 20 millions.
There just weren't that many old Bolshies. I mean, whole party in 1917 was small--in Petrograd, party membership in October was 43,000, up from 16,000 in April (Steve Smith, in Kaiser, ed, The Worker's Revolution in Russia: The View from Below (1987), p. 73). And that was the core of Bolshevik strength. In August, the Bolshies claimed 200,000 (Lane, State & Politics in the USSR, 1985, p. 49). Probably many of these were killed in the Civil War. Many more, particulatly if they didn't rise too high, prospered under Stalin. or at least avoided the the camps and the Lubyanka.
It's true that the Party suffered at a higher rate than most groups--one thinks of the Congress of Victots of 1934, half or more of which was murdered (I cannot lay my hands on this figure just now), but most victims of the purges and the Gulag were ordinary, apolitical folk who got caught in some Chekist quota, even leaving aside the artificial famines due to collectivation and the liquidation of the kulaks. `See here Gett'ys Origins of the Great Purges and his new book, as well as Medvedev's Let History Judge (look at the 2d ed).
An old zek joke:
What'r you in fer and what'd ya get? --25 years, and I did absolutely NOTHING! Liar, for absolutely nothing, you only get 15 years.
--jks (Not a Bolshie, either)