The British, Irish, Russian, American, German and Austrian contributors examine the intricate nature of the mass repression unleashed by the Stalinist leader of the USSR during 1937-38. The first part of the collection deals with annihilation policies against the Soviet elite and the Communist International. The second section of the volume looks at mass operations of the secret police (NKVD) against social outcasts, Poles and other 'hostile' ethnic groups. The final section comprises micro-studies about targeted victim groups among the general population.
The first major study by a Russian Marxist Historian of the Stalinist purges which are often collectively reffered to by the year they reached their greatest intensity: 1937. Rogovin shows that the purges were aimed at the physical annihilation of the growing socialist opposition to Stalin's bureaucratic regime. Focused on Leon Trotsky and his thousands of supporters, the purges were a blow against the October Revolution, its leaders and its heritage.
This book demonstrates the importance of ontology for a central debate in philosophy of mind. Mental causation seems an obvious aspect of the world. But it is hard to understand how it can happen unless we get clear about what the entities involved in the process are. An international team of contributors presents new work on this problem.
A new and original explanation of Stalin's Terror, showing how Soviet leaders developed a grossly exaggerated fear of conspiracy and foreign invasion, and created a Terror that was wholly destructive, not merely in terms of human life, but also in terms of the interests of the Party that managed it.
On June 11, 1937, a closed military court ordered the execution of a group of the Soviet Union's most talented and experienced army officers, including Marshal Mikhail Tukhachevskii; all were charged with participating in a Nazi plot to overthrow the regime of Joseph Stalin. There followed a massive military purge, from the officer corps through the rank-and-file, that many consider a major factor in the Red Army's dismal performance in confronting the German invasion of June 1941. Why take such action on the eve of a major war? The most common theory has Stalin fabricating a "military conspiracy" to tighten his control over the Soviet state. In The Red Army and the Great Terror, Peter Whitewood advances an entirely new explanation for Stalin's actions—an explanation with the potential to unlock the mysteries that still surround the Great Terror, the surge of political repression in the late 1930s in which over one million Soviet people were imprisoned in labor camps and over 750,000 executed. Framing his study within the context of Soviet civil-military relations dating back to the 1917 revolution, Whitewood shows that Stalin sanctioned this attack on the Red Army not from a position of confidence and strength, but from one of weakness and misperception. Here we see how Stalin's views had been poisoned by the paranoid accusations of his secret police, who saw spies and supporters of the dead Tsar everywhere and who had long believed that the Red Army was vulnerable to infiltration by foreign intelligence agencies engaged in a conspiracy against the Soviet state. Recently opened Russian archives allow Whitewood to counter the accounts of Soviet defectors and conspiracy theories that have long underpinned conventional wisdom on the military purge. By broadening our view, The Red Army and the Great Terror demonstrates not only why Tukhachevskii and his associates were purged in 1937, but also why tens of thousands of other officers and soldiers were discharged and arrested at the same time. With its thorough reassessment of these events, the book sheds new light on the nature of power, state violence, and civil-military relations under the Stalinist regime.
Examining Stalin's reign of terror, this text argues that the Soviet people were not simply victims but also actors in the violence, criticisms and local decisions of the 1930s. It suggests that more believed in Stalin's quest to eliminate internal enemies than were frightened by it.
This volume examines the bloodiest period of the Stalinist repression of political opposition in the Soviet Union, debunking the myth that the Great Purges were merely the product of Stalin's paranoia and had no overriding political logic. Through a meticulous examination of original sources, including archival documents only made available for research in the 1990s, Professor Vadim Rogovin argues that the ferocity of the mass repression was directly proportional to the intensity of resistance to Stalin within the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU), particularly the opposition inspired by and associated with the exiled Bolshevik leader Leon Trotsky. Far from Trotsky being a politically isolated figure, as both Stalinist and anti-communist historians have claimed, there was substantial sympathy for his criticism of the Stalin regime in the ranks and even in the leadership of the CPSU, and support for his demands for inner-party democracy, greater social equality and an international orientation to the Bolshevik goal of world revolution. It was this political fact, as Rogovin demonstrates, that accounts for the purge reaching so deeply into the party apparatus, the military, the Komsomol youth movement, and the broader layers of the population. Rogovin bases his analysis on scrupulous research, quoting from newly translated or unpublished documents, including memoirs, meeting minutes, newspaper articles and trial transcripts. He documents the reaction of different social layers to the purges, including workers, peasants, non-party intellectuals and the CPSU rank-and-file. This book includes rarely published photographs of the prison camps, documenting the lives of those labeled by Stalin;enemies of the people. Chronologically, this volume takes up where its predecessor, 1937: Stalin's Year of Terror , left off, with the June 1937 plenum of the Central Committee that followed the purging of the Soviet military command and the execution of Marshal Tukhachevsky and other leading generals. It analyzes such critical events as the Bukharin-Rykov trial, last of the infamous show trials; the massacre of Trotskyists in the Vorkuta slave-labor camp; and the assassination by Stalinist agents of Leon Sedov, Trotsky's son, and other oppositionists outside the Soviet Union. It concludes with an examination of how the purges transformed the CPSU and Soviet society as a whole.
Robert Conquest uses fresh and dramatic material, which has only recently become available, to give further depth and breadth to his history of the momentous years between 1934 and 1939, when millions of people died in Stalin's purges. First publiished in 1968 to universal critical acclaim, this definitive account of Stalin's Terror is reissued with a new introduction which revists the book in light of glasnost.
Cover -- Title -- Copyright -- Contents -- Preface -- 1. What Was Stalinism? -- 2. Imperial Spaces of Violence -- 3. Pyrrhic Victories -- 4. Subjugation -- 5. Dictatorship of Dread -- 6. Wars -- 7. Stalin's Heirs -- Notes -- Index -- A -- B -- C -- D -- E -- F -- G -- H -- I -- K -- L -- M -- N -- O -- P -- R -- S -- T -- U -- V -- W -- Y -- Z
The chilling story of Stalin’s crimes against humanity Between the early 1930s and his death in 1953, Joseph Stalin had more than a million of his own citizens executed. Millions more fell victim to forced labor, deportation, famine, bloody massacres, and detention and interrogation by Stalin's henchmen. Stalin's Genocides is the chilling story of these crimes. The book puts forward the important argument that brutal mass killings under Stalin in the 1930s were indeed acts of genocide and that the Soviet dictator himself was behind them. Norman Naimark, one of our most respected authorities on the Soviet era, challenges the widely held notion that Stalin's crimes do not constitute genocide, which the United Nations defines as the premeditated killing of a group of people because of their race, religion, or inherent national qualities. In this gripping book, Naimark explains how Stalin became a pitiless mass killer. He looks at the most consequential and harrowing episodes of Stalin's systematic destruction of his own populace—the liquidation and repression of the so-called kulaks, the Ukrainian famine, the purge of nationalities, and the Great Terror—and examines them in light of other genocides in history. In addition, Naimark compares Stalin's crimes with those of the most notorious genocidal killer of them all, Adolf Hitler.
