Stalinist Perpetrators on Trial by Lynne Viola

The significance of this work is that it demonstrates at close quarters and in great detail the 'illogical logic' of the Terror and Stalinist policing. What emerges is an extraordinary and novel portrait of the individual perpetrators of Stalinist violence, a study hitherto not possible. Utilizing these documents, she brings readers into the interrogation rooms, prison cells, and execution sites, thus populating the Stalinist policing apparatus (under the nkvd) and showing 'how the terror was implemented, what happened, and who was responsible' (171). Although her sources are exclusively from Ukraine, the picture that emerges, according to Viola, is broadly representative of the Terror in the USSR more broadly. Viola draws from case files located in the security policy archives of Ukraine ( sbu), which, unlike similar archives in Russia, are now readily accessible to scholars. This portrait of the Terror at the local level, the first volume of an international collaborative project about Stalinist perpetrators, is based on a 'unique source'-the testimony of operatives (investigators, interrogators, and executioners) from the People's Commissariat for Internal Affairs ( nkvd) at the closed trials who became the scapegoats for the excesses of the Terror. Viola's new book, the most detailed and significant examination of the rank-and-file perpetrators of Stalinist violence during the so-called 'mass operations' of 1937/8, is one of the most important publications about Soviet mass violence and the functioning of the Stalinist system more generally.

Although it might seem that there is little new-or substantively new-left to be written about it, original and insightful scholarly work continues to appear. Studies of this remarkably violent time are legion, especially since the availability of previously declassified archives in the 1990s. The apogee of Stalinist violence in the interwar Soviet Union occurred in 1937/8, during what historians usually term the Great Terror.

Stalinist Perpetrators on Trial by Lynne Viola