Editing Openai/6874b524-4134-8013-b5e6-0601c853d841 (section)

===== By late 1938, the worst of Stalin’s Great Terror had passed, though the scars—psychological and demographic—remained. Millions were dead or disappeared. Soviet society staggered on in a kind of stunned compliance. =====

And beyond its borders, Europe was sliding into catastrophe.
* Hitler had annexed Austria and the Sudetenland.
* Kristallnacht had revealed the full velocity of Nazi antisemitism.
* And in 1939, the unthinkable happened: the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact, a non-aggression agreement between Hitler’s Germany and Stalin’s USSR, sealed with secret protocols to divide Eastern Europe.

In the corridors of the Kremlin, Artur Gershovitz read the fine print. In the back alleys of Moscow, Yakob heard the irony—his music, once denounced as “Negro corruption,” now fell under suspicion as Jewish cosmopolitanism.