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Stalin?s Great Terror was primarily a State terror: conceived at its top, it was implemented by its agents. There was, however, a popular dimension of the terror that this paper seeks to study. Mostly secret, Stalinist violence was sometimes staged in public at meetings where Soviet citizens were forced to be spectators, if not actors. Soviet people took part in these meetings in different ways: by voting, speaking or denouncing. But people were far from being simply passive against the Terror. This paper focuses more particularly on the letters sent to the authorities during these months of extreme violence: Soviet people wrote continuously to protect themselves, to deny, to defend relatives but also to attack, to smear, to harm others. The aim is to study how the people acted in all the various ways.