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

275 Pages·2003·2.09 MB·English

by  Barry McLoughlin

Stalin’s Terror
High Politics and Mass Repression in the
Soviet Union
Edited by
Barry McLoughlin and Kevin McDermott
Stalin’s Terror
Also by Kevin McDermott:
THE CZECH RED UNIONS, 1918–1929
THE COMINTERN: A History of International Communism from Lenin to
Stalin (co-author)
POLITICS AND SOCIETY UNDER THE BOLSHEVIKS (co-editor)
Stalin’s Terror
High Politics and Mass Repression in the
Soviet Union
Edited by
Barry McLoughlin
Lecturer
Vienna University
and
Kevin McDermott
Senior Lecturer in Political History
Sheffield Hallam University
Selection, editorial matter and Chapter 1 © Barry McLoughlin and Kevin
McDermott 2003
Chapter 6 © Barry McLoughlin 2003
Remaining chapters © Palgrave Macmillan Ltd 2003
Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2003 978-1-4039-0119-4
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First published in hardcover 2003
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Stalin’s terror: high politics and mass repression in the Soviet Union/edited
by Barry McLoughlin and Kevin McDermott.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
1. Political purges – Soviet Union. 2. Kommunisticheskaëì partiëì
Sovetskogo Soëìza – Purges. 3. Stalin, Joseph, 1879–1953. 4. Soviet Union
– Politics and government – 1936–1953. I. McLoughlin, Barry, 1949–
II. McDermott, Kevin, 1957–
DK267 .S6955 2002
947.0842’2–dc21 2002074847
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
13 12 11 10 09 08 07 06 05 04
To Susanne and Susan
and our fantastic kids Siobhán, Frances and Alex
This page intentionally left blank
Contents
Notes on Contributors ix
Preface and Acknowledgements xii
Glossary of Terms and Abbreviations xv
List of Archives and Archival Abbreviations xviii
1 Rethinking Stalinist Terror 1
Barry McLoughlin and Kevin McDermott
Part I: The Politics of Repression 19
2 Party and NKVD: Power Relationships in the Years of
the Great Terror 21
Oleg Khlevniuk
3 Ezhov’s Scenario for the Great Terror and the Falsified
Record of the Third Moscow Show Trial 34
Wladislaw Hedeler
4 Dimitrov, the Comintern and Stalinist Repression 56
Fridrikh I. Firsov
Part II: The Police and Mass Repression 83
5 Social Disorder, Mass Repression and the NKVD
during the 1930s 85
David Shearer
6 Mass Operations of the NKVD, 1937–8: A Survey 118
Barry McLoughlin
7 The “Polish Operation” of the NKVD, 1937–8 153
Nikita Petrov and Arsenii Roginskii
Part III: Victim Studies 173
8 Foreign Communists and the Mechanisms of Soviet
Cadre Formation in the USSR 175
Berthold Unfried
vii
viii Contents
9 Stalinist Terror in the Moscow District of Kuntsevo,
1937–8 194
Aleksandr Vatlin and Natalia Musienko
10 The Fictitious “Hitler-Jugend” Conspiracy of the
Moscow NKVD 208
Hans Schafranek and Natalia Musienko
11 Terror against Foreign Workers in the Moscow
Elektrozavod Plant, 1937–8 225
Sergei Zhuravlev
Select Bibliography 241
Index 244
Notes on Contributors
Fridrikh Firsovhas over 40 years’ experience of extensive research in
the history of the Comintern. Among his many publications are:
‘Stalin and the Comintern’, Voprosy istorii, nos 8 and 9 (1989); ‘Die
“Säuberungen” im Apparat der Komintern’, in Kommunisten verfolgen
Kommunisten (1993); Dimitrov and Stalin, 1934–1943: Letters from the
Soviet Archives, co-edited with Alexander Dallin (2000).
Wladislaw Hedeler has translated the prison writings of Nikolai
Bukharin and Dimitrov’s diary into German and co-edited three
volumes of documents on the “purging” of the Marx-Engels Institute
in Moscow in the 1930s. He is currently researching the history of the
Karaganda Gulag complex.
Oleg Khlevniuk is the internationally acclaimed expert on Stalin’s
leadership during the 1930s and is currently working in the
Department of Public Administration at Moscow State University. His
studies of Stalinism have been translated into English, French,
German, Italian, Japanese and Chinese. At present he is preparing a
volume of documents on the history of the Gulag system up to 1941.
Kevin McDermott is Senior Lecturer in Political History at Sheffield
Hallam University. He is the author of The Czech Red Unions, 1918–1929
(1988), co-author of The Comintern: A History of International Communism
from Lenin to Stalin(1996), and co-editor of Politics and Society under the
Bolsheviks(1999). He is at present working on a study of Stalin.
Barry McLoughlin is Dozent at the Institute of Contemporary
History, Vienna University, where he offers seminars on Irish and
Soviet history. He has co-authored two volumes on the history of
Austrian political refugees in the Soviet Union and has written arti-
cles on the history of the Comintern and its schools. Dr McLoughlin
is currently working on a biographical study of Irish victims of
Stalinist terror.
Natalia Musienko studied German at Moscow University and is a
teacher of the German language. She collaborated with other volun-
teers in compiling the data of victims shot in Moscow during the late
1930s. She is preparing a book of documents on the history of the Karl
ix