Stalin's Terror High Politics and Mass Repression in the Soviet Union

by McLoughlin, Barry; McDermott, Kevin

• ISBN13: 9781403939036
• ISBN10: 1403939039
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2004-09-04
• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan

Summary

The popular conception of the Stalinist 'purges' during the 1930s holds that mass arrests affected the Party, military and industrial leadership most of all. The studies presented here, based on archival evidence only available since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, challenge this received view. They demonstrate that the great mass of victims were ordinary people, peasants and workers, often of foreign origin. The book also analyses the relationship between the Communist Party and the secret police (NKVD), and delineates how Stalin and his circle scripted and staged the show trials and misused the Communist International to propagate the 'dangers' posed by putative opposition to Stalin's dictatorship. The final section, based on top-secret prisoners' files, shows how NKVD officers invented conspiracies against foreigners and Russians in the Moscow city and rural area. Book jacket.

Author Biography

Barry McLoughlin is part-time Lecturer at Vienna University.

Kevin McDermott is Senior Lecturer in History at Sheffield Hallam University.

Table of Contents

Notes on Contributors	ix
Preface and Acknowledgements	xii
Glossary of Terms and Abbreviations	xv
List of Archives and Archival Abbreviations	xviii
Rethinking Stalinist Terror	1	(18)
Barry McLoughlin
Kevin McDermott
Part I: The Politics of Repression	19	(64)
Party and NKVD: Power Relationships in the Years of the Great Terror	21	(13)
Oleg Khlevniuk
Ezhov's Scenario for the Great Terror and the Falsified Record of the Third Moscow Show Trial	34	(22)
Wladislaw Hedeler
Dimitrov, the Comintern and Stalinist Repression	56	(27)
Fridrikh I. Firsov
Part II: The Police and Mass Repression	83	(90)
Social Disorder, Mass Repression and the NKVD during the 1930s	85	(33)
David Shearer
Mass Operations of the NKVD, 1937--8: A Survey	118	(35)
Barry McLoughlin
The ``Polish Operation'' of the NKVD, 1937--8	153	(20)
Nikita Petrov
Arsenii Roginskii
Part III: Victim Studies	173	(68)
Foreign Communists and the Mechanisms of Soviet Cadre Formation in the USSR	175	(19)
Berthold Unfried
Stalinist Terror in the Moscow District of Kuntsevo, 1937--8	194	(14)
Aleksandr Vatlin
Natalia Musienko
The Fictitious ``Hitler-Jugend'' Conspiracy of the Moscow NKVD	208	(17)
Hans Schafranek
Natalia Musienko
Terror against Foreign Workers in the Moscow Elektrozavod Plant, 1937--8	225	(16)
Sergei Zhuravlev
Select Bibliography	241	(3)
Index	244