Based on archival sources, it was shown that at the local level there were practically no differences between repressive campaigns. Local NKVD officers acted according to a single algorithm, uprooting "enemy nests" in district committees and factory offices and delivering a preventive blow to the "counter-revolutionary kulaks" and the "foreign base" of bourgeois intelligence. This allows us to clarify ideas about the great terror and rethink established research approaches to its study.