Abstract
The mass repression in the Soviet Union in 1937–8, variously referred to as the Great Terror or the ‘Ezhovshchina’, has produced a volume of monographs, articles and memoirs, which have examined the phenomena from a diversity of viewpoints.1 However, many of the circumstances surrounding this tragedy remain obscure. In particular there is little information concerning the mechanism whereby the repression was organised and carried out. Most of the NKVD’s documents for this period remain in the KGB’s archives and are not available for researchers. In the still closed Presidential archives there is a large volume of material concerning the activities of the Politburo and Stalin in 1937–8. In republican, provincial and local archives there is a wealth of material on how central directives were implemented in the localities.
Translated by E. A. Rees.
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Notes
See for example R. A. Medvedev, Let History Judge: The Origins and Consequences of Stalinism (New York, 1971);
R. Conquest, The Great Terror: A Reassessment (New York, 1990);
J. A. Getty, The Origins of the Great Purges: The Soviet Communist Party Reconsidered, 1933–1938 (New York, 1985);
G. T. Rittersporn, Stalinist Simplifications and Soviet Complications; Social Tensions and Political Conflicts in the USSR, 1933–1953 (Philadelphia, 1991);
J. A. Getty and R. T. Manning (eds) Stalinist Terror: New Perspectives (Cambridge, 1993).
Protokoly zasedanii Politbyuro, osobaya papka. On the fate of the Harbintsy see: A. Suturin, Delo kraevogo masshtaba (Khabarovsk, 1991) pp. 195–213.
P. H. Solomon Jnr.,’Soviet Criminal Justice and the Great Terror’, Slavic Review, vol. 46, no. 3, 1987, pp. 405–6.
V. N. Zemskov, ’Kulatskaya ssylka v 30-e gody’, Sotsiologicheskie issledovaniya, 1991, no. 10, p. 19–20.
S. Fitzpatrick, ‘Stalin and the Making of a New Elite’ in S. Fitzpatrick, The Cultural Front. Power and Culture in Revolutionary Russia (New York, 1992) pp. 149–82.
S. Fitzpatrick, ‘How the Mice Buried the Cat: Scenes from the Great Purges of 1937 in the Russian Provinces’, The Russian Review, vol. 52, July 1993, pp. 299–320.
Joseph E. Davies, Mission to Moscow (London, 1942).
L. D. Trotsky, The Revolution Betrayed (London, 1967) p. 229. Trotsky quoted the following passage from The Fourth International and War, published in 1935: ‘Under the influence of the critical need of the state for articles of prime necessity, the individualistic tendencies of the peasant economy will receive a considerable reinforcement, and the centrifugal forces within the collective farms will increase with every month … In the heated atmosphere of war, we may expect.. the attracting of foreign allied capital, a breach in the monopoly of foreign trade, a weakening of state control of the trusts, a sharpening of competition between the trusts, conflicts between the trusts and the workers, etc. … In other words, in the case of a long war, if the world proletariat is passive, the inner social contradictions of the Soviet Union not only might, but must lead to a bourgeois Bonapartist counterrevolution.’
I. Deutscher, Stalin: A Political Biography (Harmondsworth, 1968) pp. 373–4.
Sto sorok besed s Molotovym. Iz dnevnikov F.Chueva (M., 1991), pp. 390, 391, 416. See also the memoirs of G. Dimitrov in Sovershenno sekretno, no. 12, 1990, pp. 18–20.
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Khlevnyuk, O. (1995). The Objectives of the Great Terror, 1937–1938. In: Cooper, J., Perrie, M., Rees, E.A. (eds) Soviet History, 1917–53. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-23939-9_7
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