Paul R. Gregory,Defining Ideas
Eighty years ago, Josef Stalin ended the remarkable Terror, and citing as his reason local excesses that had come to his attention. His November 17,1938 decree ordered additional-judicial tribunals, called troikas, and to end their sentencing of political prisoners. The troikas lay at the heart of political terror. They provided a lean veneer of socialist legality to what was mass murder and wanton ((adj.) undisciplined, lewd, lustful) incarceration. Stalin's November 1938 action stopped in its tracks a killing machine that had been executing an unfathomable average of 1400 victims per day. It wasn't until two decades later...
Source: realclearhistory.com