Vatlin on state-sponsored violence in the USSR

We missed this one in 2016. Agents of Terror: Ordinary Men and Extraordinary Violence in Stalin's Secret Police by Alexander Vatlin, Moscow State University has been edited and translated by Seth Bernstein and published by the University of Wisconsin Press. From the press:

In the Great Terror of 1937–38 more than a million Soviet citizens were arrested or killed for political crimes they didn't commit. What kind of people carried out this violent purge, and what motivated them? This book opens up the world of the Soviet perpetrator for the first time. Focusing on Kuntsevo, the Moscow suburb where Stalin had a dacha, Alexander Vatlin shows how Stalinism rewarded local officials for inventing enemies. 

Agents of Terror reveals stunning, detailed evidence from archives available for a limited time in the 1990s. Going beyond the central figures of the terror, Vatlin takes readers into the offices and interrogation rooms of secret police at the district level. Spurred at times by ambition, and at times by fear for their own lives, agents rushed to fulfill quotas for arresting “enemies of the people”—even when it meant fabricating the evidence. Vatlin pulls back the curtain on a Kafkaesque system, forcing readers to reassess notions of historical agency and moral responsibility in Stalin-era crimes.

Praise for the book: 

“Groundbreaking. In the first detailed description of Stalin’s mass terror, Vatlin unfolds the day-to-day working of the Soviet political police who carried out orders to select, arrest, interrogate, and often murder their fellow citizens. An absorbing, heartrending account.” -David Shearer

“Although the literature on the Great Terror has improved markedly over the past twenty-five years, only a handful of case studies consider how the purges took place at the grassroots level. Thankfully, Alexander Vatlin’s pathbreaking work has now become available to English-speaking audiences. One can only hope that Agents of Terror will inspire more research on the purge’s perpetrators and victims as well as on the broader sociology of this brutal period.” -David Brandenberger

“A sensationally significant, detailed microhistory of Stalin’s Great Terror, based on the criminal files of NKVD agents who were arrested as scapegoats at the end of the terror—what some historians have called the purge of the purgers.” -Lynne Viola

Further information is available here.

Viola on Stalin-era trials in Soviet Ukraine

Lynne Viola, University of Toronto published Stalinist Perpetrators on Trial: Scenes from the Great Terror in Soviet Ukraine with Oxford University Press in 2017. From the publisher:

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.

Praise for the book:

"A research tour de force from one of the leading historians of Stalinism, shedding remarkable new light on what happened at the end of the Great Purges. A 'must read' for scholars and students of the Soviet period."-Sheila Fitzpatrick

"This book is exceptional among the voluminous scholarship on Stalin's terror. Lynne Viola has written a fascinating and valuable work. The voices of those hangmen who ultimately became victims of the terror, as well as those they arrested, provide a stark picture of the Great Terror. The author explores the banality of evil in the Stalinist context: from the daily routine of torture and murder emerges the familiar figure of the self-righteous criminal."-Oleg V. Khlevniuk

"Stalinist Perpetrators draws back the curtain on how the Stalinist Terror actually operated--not just how the state ordered it, but how it happened in provincial offices and prison cells. Her subject is the 'purge of the purgers,' the trial and often execution of the men responsible for the Terror. The nature of her source material--voluminous case files on these accused individuals--allows her to reconstruct the process and practices of the Stalinist Terror, including the beatings and torture, at the level of individuals, both in Kyiv and in more mundane provincial cities." -Peter Holquist

"The Stalinist purges of the late 1930s stand as one of the most horrific episodes of state terror in the twentieth century. Yet the perpetrators of those crimes have remained anonymous for many decades, protected mainly by the rules of historical access in Russia. Now, Lynne Viola, working in Ukrainian archives, provides the first remarkable study of the perpetrators. In this groundbreaking book, we see for the first time who these individuals were, their backgrounds, what brought them to their position of life and death decisions, what life was like for them and their families during such a time. Most important, Viola examines with keen and dispassionate acumen how Stalin's murderers justified the torture and killing of hundreds of thousands of their fellow citizens. This is a disturbing book, and one that needs to be read." -David Shearer

Further information is available here.

Macalister-Smith and Schwietzke on Russia and the Great War

Peter Macalister-Smith, Assistant General Editor of the Encyclopedia of Public International Law, and Joachim Schwietzke, Library Director Emeritus at the Max Planck Institute for Comparative Public Law and International Law (Heidelberg) have published Russia and the Great War 1914 to 1924: A Brief Calendar of State with Talbot Publishing. From the press:

Russia and the Great War 1914 to 1924: A Brief Calendar of State Practice is a chronicle of events in diplomacy and international relations combined with references to sources and documentary extracts. A key to several kinds of distinctive information, it: - locates 200 official acts in time and place, - names the party or parties to each act, - supplies a title in English for each instrument, - cites versions in authentic languages and translations, - refers to reliable source materials systematically, - offers notes and explanations for further guidance, - includes references to related acts and instruments, within and beyond the core reporting period, and - reproduces 75 documentary extracts of central passages from the instruments cited in English language versions. The book is a baseline chronology documenting events from global history intended for study, research and ready reference. Russia, the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic, and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics are represented in Russia and the Great War as a party to over 85 transactions and as the location of some 45 forty-five acts concluded from 1914 to 1924. Russia and the Great War: A Brief Calendar of State Practice 1914 to 1924 is an interactive repertory of practice within and beyond the reporting period from 1914 to 1924.

Further information is available here. 

Heinzen on Corruption in the USSR

Out recently with Yale University Press is The Art of the Bribe: Corruption under Stalin, 1943-1953 by James Heinzen, Rowan University. The publisher describes the book as the first "archive-based study of official corruption under Stalin and a compelling new look at the textures of everyday Soviet life after World War II": 

In the Soviet Union, bribery was a skill with its own practices and culture. 
James Heinzen’s innovative and compelling study examines corruption under Stalin’s dictatorship in the wake of World War II, focusing on bribery as an enduring and important presence in many areas of Soviet life. Based on extensive research in recently declassified Soviet archives, The Art of the Bribe offers revealing insights into the Soviet state, its system of law and repression, and everyday life during the years of postwar Stalinism.

Praise for the book:

“Corruption could be the most important of all the understudied topics in Soviet history, but James Heinzen has found a way to illuminate this dark terrain with brilliant research. His cogent analysis built upon startling archival finds enlarges the pioneering work of the great Gregory Grossman, and provokes a rethinking of Soviet legal machinery, the state, and the society.”-Stephen Kotkin

“A magnificently researched, archivally based study of bribery and corruption under high Stalinism in the Soviet Union. The analysis is carefully drawn, fully persuasive, and makes an important contribution to the historiography of the Soviet Union and the comparative study of corruption and bribery.”-Norman M. Naimark

“Stunning …. Bribery was not peripheral or alien to the Stalinist command economy but an essential consequence…. Heinzen's study is bigger than its ostensible subject, for it gives a deeply textured view into how Soviet society actually worked.” -Ronald Grigor Suny

“In Stalin’s Russia, where the party ruled every aspect of life, to give or take a bribe was to be human. Heinzen’s fascinating study shows how and why it was done.” -Mark Harrison

"This deeply researched and thoughtful book sheds new light on corruption in the late Stalin years, newly illuminating the limits to Stalin’s power and the Soviet legal system." -Deborah Kaple  

More information is available here.