> It does sound wild (to me as well), but then there is evidence of USSR party elites (e.g. Kaganovich) turning from maniacs and terrorists into peaceful bureaucrats overnight upon Stalin's death.
They were "murderous bureaucrats" for whom mass murder was a faceless statistics. They would not fret or get emotional about it neither before nor after the fact.
A glimpse of artistic rendition of how plain and "bureaucratic" a mass murder machine could be is a historic re-enactment movie "Conspiracy" [0] about Wannsee conference of 1942 (it is about Nazi Germany not USSR but the theme of "murderous bureaucracy" seems to be universal).
They were "murderous bureaucrats" for whom mass murder was a faceless statistics. They would not fret or get emotional about it neither before nor after the fact.
A glimpse of artistic rendition of how plain and "bureaucratic" a mass murder machine could be is a historic re-enactment movie "Conspiracy" [0] about Wannsee conference of 1942 (it is about Nazi Germany not USSR but the theme of "murderous bureaucracy" seems to be universal).
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conspiracy_(2001_film)