Stalinist Perpetrators on Trial

Scenes from the Great Terror in Soviet Ukraine

Lynne Viola

The first work in English to be based on case files of interrogations and trials of the secret police who carried out state violence
Builds the biographies of the lower and mid-rank men who enacted the Great Terror
Chilling dissection of the late Great Terror, including provincial towns and cities where arrests, beatings, and torture were carried out

Stalinist Perpetrators on Trial

Scenes from the Great Terror in Soviet Ukraine

Lynne Viola

Description

Between the summer of 1937 and November 1938, the Stalinist regime arrested over 1.5 million people for "counterrevolutionary" and "anti-Soviet" activity and either summarily executed or exiled them to the Gulag. While we now know a great deal about the experience of victims of the Great Terror, we know almost nothing about the lower- and middle-level Narodnyi Komissariat Vnutrennikh Del (NKVD), or secret police, cadres who carried out Stalin's murderous policies. Unlike the postwar, public trials of Nazi war criminals, NKVD operatives were tried secretly. And what exactly happened in those courtrooms was unknown until now.

In what has been dubbed "the purge of the purgers," almost one thousand NKVD officers were prosecuted by Soviet military courts. Scapegoated for violating Soviet law, they were charged with multiple counts of fabrication of evidence, falsification of interrogation protocols, use of torture to secure "confessions," and murder during pre-trial detention of "suspects" - and many were sentenced to execution themselves. The documentation generated by these trials, including verbatim interrogation records and written confessions signed by perpetrators; testimony by victims, witnesses, and experts; and transcripts of court sessions, provides a glimpse behind the curtains of the terror. It depicts how the terror was implemented, what happened, and who was responsible, demonstrating that orders from above worked in conjunction with a series of situational factors to shape the contours of state violence.

Based on chilling and revelatory new archival documents from the Ukrainian secret police archives, Stalinist Perpetrators on Trial illuminates the darkest recesses of Soviet repression — the interrogation room, the prison cell, and the place of execution — and sheds new light on those who carried out the Great Terror.

Stalinist Perpetrators on Trial

Scenes from the Great Terror in Soviet Ukraine

Lynne Viola

Chronology
A Note on Usage
Glossary
Introduction
Ch 1: The Incomplete Civil War and the Great Terror
Ch 2: A Taste for Terror
Ch 3: Vania the Terrible
Ch 4: Under the Dictation of Fleishman
Ch 5: What Happened in Uman?
Ch 6: An Excursion to Zaporozh'e
Ch 7: Upsenskii's Stooge
Postscript
Conclusion
Acknowledgments
Notes
Bibliography
Index

Stalinist Perpetrators on Trial

Scenes from the Great Terror in Soviet Ukraine

Lynne Viola

Author Information

Lynne Viola, Professor of History, University of Toronto

Lynne Viola is Professor of History at the University of Toronto. She is the author of The Unknown Gulag: The Lost World of Stalin's Special Settlements, Peasant Rebels Under Stalin, The Best Sons of the Fatherland, co-editor of Russian Peasant Women, and editor/co-editor of six other books.

Stalinist Perpetrators on Trial

Scenes from the Great Terror in Soviet Ukraine

Lynne Viola

Reviews and Awards

Winner of the Thomas Henry Pentland Molson Prize

Winner of the American Association for Ukrainian Studies' annual Book Prize

"Much detail on how NKVD leaders and rank-and-file interrogators behaved during the height of the terror appears here for the first time, and Viola has expanded our knowledge of how the mass repressions worked." - Robert W. Thurston, Journal of Modern History

"Viola has set a high standard in economical, illuminating prose....Valuable for specialists...Stalinist Perpetrators is also an exemplary monograph for students. A master historian, Viola writes with Chekhovian diagnostic precision." - Cathy A. Frierson, Journal of Social History

"Much detail on how NKVD leaders and rank-and-file interrogators behaved during the height of the terror appears here for the first time, and Viola has expanded our knowledge of how mass repressions worked." - Robert W. Thurston, Journal of Modern History

"This succinct monograph is an important contribution to scholars of Stalinism and the Great Terror... By unpacking the transcripts and formulating her microhistories of the Terror, the author provides a valuable insight into the thinking of the individuals who implemented it, which in turn allows for a useful analysis of how the Stalinist system operated locally." - Curtis Richardson, Center for Slavic, East European and Eurasian Studies, The University of North Carolina, Europe-Asia Studies

Stalinist Perpetrators on Trial

Scenes from the Great Terror in Soviet Ukraine

Lynne Viola

From Our Blog

A few bad apples: Stalin, torture, and the Great Terror

On 10 January 1939, Stalin wrote that the Central Committee of the Communist Party had permitted the use of what was euphemistically called 'the application of physical measures of persuasion' in interrogations from 1937. To date, there is no extant written order on the use of torture during the Great Terror. Stalin's admission demonstrates conclusively that directives on torture came from the top.

Posted on January 23, 2018

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The Great Terror in Soviet Ukraine: a timeline

Between the summer of 1937 and November 1938, the Stalinist regime arrested over 1.5 million people for 'counterrevolutionary' and 'antisoviet' activity and either summarily executed or exiled them to the Gulag. This was Stalin's 'Great Terror' and, contrary to popular belief, the largest number of victims were not elites or 'Old Bolsheviks,' but common people. Below is a timeline of The Great Terror in Soviet Ukraine.

Posted on December 2, 2017

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