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"Wrecking" is when someone sabotages the Soviet Union. At first they thought they would be a very productive utopia. By implementing socialism it would automatically transform into prosperity and advancement in every way. Then that didn't happen. By the 1930s it was clear they were getting stuck somehow. So Stalin determined there must be "wreckers" purposefully harming society and particularly sabotaging industry. Such people were identified, tortured into confessing and executed. Then their torturers were tortured and executed. Then the torturer-torturers were tortured and executed. And so on. One indeed wonders why this enlightened society failed to progress into a sci-fi eutopia.
Anyways it's commie talk for "saboteur". As invented or at least popularized by Stalin himself.
Is this factual?
The campaigns of collectivization and industrialization were initiated in 1929. Both of these essentially entailed show trials, local purges and waves of terror directed at 'wreckers', 'saboteurs', 'hoarders', 'terrorists' and other so-called anti-revolutionaries. The leaders of the state security service (GPU, formerly Cheka) who carried these out were so-called Old Bolsheviks, that is, participants of the revolution and civil war, not appointed by Stalin and generally lacking a sense of personal loyalty to him which he found suspicious. The short story is that these officials and their subordinates were purged during the great terror wave of 1937-38. The state security commissar who carried this out was himself purged in 1940 by his successor who was then himself purged after Stalin’s death.
I'm aware that there were great purges of leading figures, generals and officers, etc. But I wonder if these cycles of killing were separate from the butchery of commoners, or not. The sadists who were employed in the gulags and tortured millions to death - were they met with a similar, deserved end during these cycles, too?
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Yes, it's factual. It's maddening that people don't know this sort of thing, given our society's purported obsession with searching for any visible sign, marker or dogwhistle of genocidal totalitarianism, provided it's not visible signs, markers or dogwhistles of the genocidal totalitarianism that's considered super-cool and popular with large portions of the tribe most obsessed with the search.
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I thought that literally happened in the 1930s with the NKVD iteratively denouncing and torturing their own members and leadership.
A cursory look at Google confirms this. Not every last torturer was himself later tortured. But there were waves of denouncements. Multiple cycles of this. I know it sounds like absurd parody, but it appears to have happened.
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Wikipedia indicates (1 2 3) as follows:
1936: Kamenev and Zinoviev are interrogated by Yagoda's NKVD and executed
1938: Yagoda is interrogated by Yezhov's NKVD and executed
1940: Yezhov is interrogated by Beria's NKVD and executed
1953: Beria is executed
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