Introduction

Lynne Viola and Marc Junge

Laboratories of Terror explores the final chapter of Stalin’s Great Terror. On November 1938, the Communist Party Central Committee and the Council of People’s Commissars of the USSR issued a directive halting mass operations in repression and liquidating the infamous troikas that had served as the main extrajudicial bodies in charge of the fate of hundreds of thousands of Soviet citizens.¹ This directive served not only to end the mass operations, but also led to the release of large numbers of mainly Communist purge victims whose cases remained incomplete.² At the same time, it resulted in the “purge of the purgers” or the “Beria Thaw,” named after the newly appointed head of the NKVD, L.

Laboratories of Terror illuminates the world of the NKVD perpetrator and the mechanisms and logistics of the terror at the local level, two subjects previously opaque. NKVD perpetrators are at the center of this story. The documentary materials on the purge of the purgers derive largely from their criminal files. The criminal files contain verbatim records of the closed trials of NKVD operatives at republican, oblast, district (raion), and city levels, along with original arrest warrants, documentation on searches, biographical information offered up in standard forms as well as autobiographical statements from the accused, interrogation transcripts of the accused and of witnesses, petitions for mercy, sentencing and appeal documentation, and a variety of other types of materials.

The Great Terror (1937–1938) in the Soviet Union has long occupied a central role in the history of Stalinism. During a sixteen-month period, the Stalin regime arrested and convicted over 1.5 million of its own citizens, largely on trumped-up charges of “counterrevolutionary,” “antisoviet,” or “socially harmful” activity. Half of those convicted were summarily executed; the rest ended up in the Gulag, where they became victims of forced labor, daily abuse, and premature death. The majority of victims of the Great Terror were ordinary people, caught up in two large “mass operations” launched in these years—one against former “kulaks,” recidivist criminals, and other “antisoviet” and “socially dangerous” elements, and the other against a series of non-Russian ethnicities.³

The mass operations came largely in the wake of the elite, or nomenklatura, purges, spreading the terror far and wide through the vast territories of the Soviet Union. Mass operation 00447, dated 30 July 1937, was entitled “the operation to repress former kulaks, criminals, and antisoviet elements.” Although this operation has come to be known in the literature as the “kulak operation,” this is a misnomer. The kulak or former kulak figured prominently in this operation but was not the sole socio-political category subsumed. Nor should the figure of the kulak be confused with an objective socioeconomic category. The kulak was mostly a political construct, defined oxymoronically as a “capitalist peasant” during collectivization and, later, by earlier repression in exile or in the labor camps, so-called biological factors, such as a parent or grandparent who was a kulak or other socioeconomic enemy, and largely subjective political criteria including participation in anti-collectivization protests.⁴

In addition to the kulak, mass operation 00447 included as targets of repression former members of “antisoviet” political parties, a series of old regime elites falling under the category of byvshie liudi (or “former people,” such as tsarist officials, gendarmes, village elders, and clergy), fugitives from repression, and a range of recidivist petty criminals.

Following a month of preparations, including canvassing of lower-level NKVD organs on the numbers of “antisoviet elements” in their domains and a 16 July 1937 meeting of regional NKVD representatives in Moscow, the all-union NKVD compiled a set of control figures for the number of people to be arrested in the course of mass operation 00447.⁶ The total numbers of planned arrests was 268,950, divided between a first “most dangerous” category (75,950) and a second “less dangerous” category (193,000). First-category subjects were to be executed by shooting; second-category subjects were to be confined in the Gulag for periods of eight to ten years.⁷ With some exceptions, the operation was set to begin on 5 August 1937, starting with the arrest of first-category subjects, and to end in four months.⁸

NKVD investigations of arrested suspects were to occur “quickly” and “in simplified order,” with an eye to establishing the “criminal connections” of those arrested.⁹ Upon completion of the investigation, the accused were sent on to an extrajudicial troika, generally consisting of the leaders of the relevant regional NKVD, Communist Party committee, and Procurator’s office.¹⁰ The troika passed judgment on the accused, sentencing them either to time in the Gulag or death.¹¹ An NKVD memo of 8 August 1937 ordered the troikas not to announce death sentences to those assigned to the first category, most likely as a precaution against unrest at the time of execution.¹² The troikas generally worked at night. They also worked at great speed. One troika in Leningrad condemned 658 Solovetskii Island prisoners in one night; another, in Omsk, “reviewed” fifty to sixty cases per hour.¹³

The number of arrests quickly surged beyond the NKVD’s initial control figures, reaching as many as 555,641 by the end of December 1937.¹⁴ Although the original NKVD order strictly forbade any lower NKVD organ from independently increasing its arrest numbers, it did allow these organs as well as regional party committees to petition for larger numbers, and Stalin and the Politburo seldom refused.¹⁵ The deadline for the completion of mass operation 00447, moreover, was repeatedly extended, first to 10 December 1937, then to 1 January 1938, and finally to 15 March 1938.¹⁶ After that last date, with the exception of Ukraine, the capital cities, and certain key penal regions such as Siberia, the kulak operation gave way to the so-called national operations.¹⁷

After the confirmation of the kulak operation, at the end of July 1937, the NKVD produced a series of operational orders against specific ethnicities—Poles, Germans, Finns, Latvians, Estonians, Greeks, Romanians, Chinese, and others.

The primary administrative difference between the kulak and national operations was that, instead of the troika, a dvoika, or two-man team consisting of the heads of the relevant regional NKVD and procuracy organs, sat in judgment, condemning individuals and groups to either the first or the second category of punishment. After judgment, the dvoika’s lists were sent to Moscow for confirmation by the so-called Great Dvoika, composed of Nikolai Ezhov, NKVD Commissar for the USSR, and A. Vyshinskii, state procurator of the USSR. (From 17 September 1938, the dvoika was replaced by the national or special troika, formed on the basis of NKVD Order 00606.²¹) Another singularity of the national operations, especially the Polish operation, was that they were far deadlier than 00447, with an imprisonment to execution ratio of one to three, versus that of one to one for 00447.²² Initially, the national operations were to be completed within three months; the deadline was subsequently and repeatedly postponed, with a final date set for 1 August 1938 in most regions.²³ In practice, the kulak and national operations overlapped temporally and could share similar targets; in Ukraine, in 1938, the implementation of the two operations often lacked clear demarcations, with categories of enemies shifted between different NKVD departments.

The number of arrests for both operations skyrocketed far beyond the original control figures. In the Soviet Union as a whole, by 1 July 1938, roughly 1,420,711 people had been arrested; of these, 699,929 were apprehended in the course of the kulak operation, including 376,207 “former kulaks,” 121,963 recidivist criminals, and 201,860 “miscellaneous counterrevolutionary elements.” The totals for both operations listed some 522,774 “former kulaks,” 191,384 byvshie liudi, 168,286 “elements” without a defined occupation, 45,009 clergy, and 229,957 white-collar employees; out of these, a “mere” 99,188 were Communist Party members and 15,088 were members of the Komsomol.²⁴ From the 681,692 executions of the Great Terror, some 90 percent were caught up in these mass operations.²⁵ In Ukraine, at a minimum, 267,579 people were arrested and 122,237 of them executed in 1937 and 1938.²⁶

Stalin publicly proclaimed the Great Terror to be a success. At the 18th Party Congress in March 1939, he claimed that the nation’s purge had resulted in the “final liquidation of the exploiting classes [okonchatel’naia likvidatsiia ostatkov ekspluatotarskikh klassov].” He forcefully contested what he called the foreign press’s contention that the purge had weakened the Soviet state, labeling that kind of talk “banal gossip” (poshlaia boltovnia). Instead, he claimed that the purge had created a new edinorodnost’, or internal unity, of the Soviet people that made the Red Army stronger than any other nation’s army.²⁷ This is an important point because at no time in the 1930s or later did Stalin renounce what has come to be known as the Great Terror.

Instead, Stalin renounced those Soviet officials, mainly in the NKVD, who had violated socialist or revolutionary legality in the conduct of mass operations. His renunciation led to the destruction of important clientele or patronage networks within the NKVD.

This purge of the purgers resulted in a series of trials of NKVD operatives under the jurisdiction of military tribunals that occurred throughout the country. These trials proceeded under the aegis of Soviet justice, an often oxymoronic designation in those times. Yet they had little in common with the staged, show trials of the 1930s and nothing whatsoever in common with the assembly-line troika processing of the victims of the mass operations. Instead, these trials more closely resembled the wartime and postwar trials of World War II collaborators and war criminals within the Soviet Union. Scholars who have studied these later trials have concluded that, despite their political and ideological imprimatur, they were, as Alexander Prusin writes, held in full accordance with juridical norms and provided “relatively accurate descriptions” of the war in the Soviet Union. According to Tanja Penter, the wartime and postwar trials “served the Stalinist regime for its own legitimation inside Soviet society and abroad,” with pedagogical and symbolic meaning. The trials of NKVD cadres at the end of the 1930s also revealed a wealth of valuable information about the Great Terror as well as serving pedagogical and disciplinary purposes in spite of the fact that there was scant mention of them in the press.³¹

The NKVD trials were meant to have a disciplinary impact on the NKVD. The relatively wide participation of NKVD operatives in these trials made it highly likely that the substance of the trials was known among its cadres. Their participation as witnesses and signalers meant that they knew what was occurring at these trials locally. Certainly, they discussed these events with other NKVD colleagues at the late 1938/early 1939 NKVD Communist Party meetings and likely elsewhere outside of the trials given the frequent violations of their secrecy agreements. The trials made it clear, above all, that the NKVD, whether due to “institutional interests,” “clans” (i.e., clientele networks), or a few “bad apples,” must be brought under the control of Stalin and the Communist Party. Above all, they were intended to demonstrate that Stalin was not to blame.

The trials also sent a message to the Communist Party. Stalin cast the Party as the main victim of the Great Terror. Party members and other elites played a prominent role in the trials, mainly as victims, sometimes as victimized witnesses. The Party was given a key role to play in “correcting” the violations and seeking out the transgressors in the NKVD.³² The Communist Party would also hereafter serve, along with its youth wing, the Komsomol, as the main recruitment pool for the new NKVD cadres brought in to replace their disgraced predecessors.³³ The trials were part of an emerging narrative of Communist victimization in the terror, followed by the “restoration” of Party control, a narrative traditionally associated with Khrushchev and his 20th Party Congress “secret speech” in 1956. The narrative pitted the NKVD against the Communist Party, airbrushing away the majority of the Great Terror’s victims, who were neither Communist nor elite, and, importantly, ignoring the central role of the leadership of the Party in the Great Terror. The trials were Stalin’s symbolic gift to the Party, serving to relegitimize its authority and its power following two years of its supposedly diminished status.³⁴

Stalin was well aware of the devastating impact of the Great Terror. He certainly knew about its legion of victims as well as the extent to which the terror was undermining local, especially Communist, authority. The victims were not silent, either during or after the mass operations. They and their relatives inundated higher authorities with literally hundreds of thousands of letters of complaint. On 22 February 1938, USSR Procurator Vyshinskii complained to Molotov that the USSR Procurator’s office was unable to handle the volume of written complaints, noting that in the first twenty days of February alone, it had received 40,000 of them.³⁵ In 1938, as a whole, the Procurator’s office received some 600,000 complaints related to the terror.³⁶ The Russian republic Procurator’s office was also overwhelmed, receiving 700 to 800 complaints daily, and from February 1938, 50,000 to 60,000 monthly.³⁷ The Ukrainian RepublicProcurator’s office received some 170,855 complaints between 1 January 1939 and 1 January 1940, of which 46,695 went to the republican offices of the procurator and 124,160 to their oblast offices in sixteen Ukrainian oblasts. The Kiev oblast procurator received 21,278 in the same period.³⁸ These complaints represented the proverbial tip of the iceberg as victims and their relatives also besieged the offices of Stalin, Ezhov, and a large range of other individuals and institutions at all geographical-administrative levels. Needless to say, not all these complaints came from Communists. Stalin, therefore, was fully aware of the pushback against the mass operations.

The 17 November 1938 directive opened up a second floodgate of complaints. News of the directive very quickly reached the prison cells of the NKVD. Many prisoners, whose cases had not yet been completed, rescinded their confessions at this time. This phenomenon was fairly widespread, according to NKVD complaints, and continued into 1939. As a result of the November directive, unfinished cases were transferred to the courts and possibly as many as 110,000 people, mainly Communists, were freed.³⁹ In addition, some 77,000 purged Communists were reinstated into the Party.⁴⁰ At the least, these transfers of cases and releases relieved the deadly prison overcrowding of 1938 and the huge backlog of unfinished cases. At most, they may have served to cover up old wounds and to further strengthen the narrative of victimized Communists.

Stalin may also have been troubled by reports that news of the mass operations had breached the information security perimeters of the NKVD. Although at this point the evidence is far from conclusive, it is clear that there was considerable “leakage” of the terror into the public domain. The trials demonstrated the ways in which the sheer “noise” of terror reached the streets from the NKVD prisons. Another type of leakage came with the appearance of executed victims’ clothing at local markets as the wives of NKVD execution squad members tried to benefit from their self-proclaimed hard and dirty work. NKVD operatives also lived at least for a time in the same general areas as their victims, often leading lonely bachelor lives and residing in shoddy Soviet hotels due to local housing shortages and frequent transfers. In the town of Uman in Kiev Oblast, for example, the hotel became a center for NKVD carousing and drunkenness. Here, there were also reports of NKVD interrogators sleeping with prisoners’ wives in exchange for the privilege of access to a loved one.⁴¹ In Moscow, according to Russian historian A. Iu. Vatlin, the solution to the housing shortage was for NKVD operatives to move into the victims’ former dwellings; outside of Moscow, this may have been a less attractive prospect given the dismal state of the housing stock.⁴² Occasional reports of “demonstrations” by prisoners’ wives also surface in the Ukrainian documents, providing further possible evidence of “leakage” and suggesting that some brave souls may have attempted to protest more publicly.⁴³

The precise dimensions of public knowledge about the terror cannot be demarcated. Still it is clear that there was leakage and Stalin must have known and been worried about news of the terror leaking out. News of the mass operations had also leaked out abroad. In the republican NKVD offices in Kiev, there was near panic when the Munich agreement was reached in the fall of 1938.⁴⁴ That agreement raised grave doubts in Stalin’s mind about the willingness of the West to fight Hitler. Hedging his bets, Stalin may have realized that war was approaching and it was time to end the mass repressions. The irony here is that Stalin’s war against a supposed Fifth Column likely strengthened rather than weakened his sense of international danger.

In any case, it is likely that Stalin utilized these trials to address the grievances of selected audiences, mainly but not only elite audiences, while transferring the blame for their grievances away from himself and on to designated groups and individuals within the NKVD. Perhaps he recognized that in pursuit of the destruction of the much-touted Fifth Column, the terror had begun to create seedlings for new columns. Perhaps he only cared about the damage done to the Party’s credibility. Initially, Stalin had asked Vyshinskii, the Soviet chief Procurator, to organize an open trial of leading NKVD workers before evidently reconsidering.⁴⁵ The open and extremely revelatory reactions of provincial and local NKVD workers at their trials may have influenced him in this reconsideration. Ultimately, though, Ezhov, Uspenskii, and the past leadership of the NKVD would be condemned for treason, on the grounds of attempting to undermine the Soviet government and crush the Communist Party, while middle- and lower-level personnel were condemned for their violations of socialist legality.

Stalin’s scapegoating of officials of various stripes for violations in policy implementation removed the blame from him. It permitted him to explain away “violations” and “excesses” in policy implementation as the work of a relatively few “bad apples.” A face-saving measure both for Stalin and his policies, it was not unlike similar practices used by other governments to avoid blame.⁴⁶ It was also an established practice that Stalin used to distance himself from the worst of policy practices once a radical breakthrough was achieved. He first deployed it in the violent 1930 collectivization campaign, publishing his famous article, “Dizziness with Success,” that led to the scapegoating of (largely) lower-level Communist Party and Soviet government officials for “excesses” in policy implementation. Stalin was clearly not interested in justice per se; his goal to purge Soviet society of its supposed Fifth Column, if not exactly fulfilled, had gone as far as it could and a policy of scapegoating served to paper over social grievances.

In 1939, the purge of the purgers, or the Beria purge, resulted in the turnover of some 7,372 NKVD operatives at all levels of its bureaucracy. The NKVD purge effectively led to the removal of 22.9 percent of its operational staff.⁴⁷ The figure of 7,372 is somewhat deceptive, however. An NKVD information report (spravka) from 23 March 1940 surveyed the movement of NKVD operative cadres. In all, 937 operatives were arrested and sent to court (according to incomplete data: 91 from the central apparatus of the NKVD, 674 from lower-level NKVD administrations, 91 from the DTO [Dorozhnoi-transportnyi otdel, or the NKVD’s Transportation Department], and 92 from the OO VO [Osobyi otdel voennogo okruga, or the NKVD’s Special Department in the Military]). In total, 3,342 cadres were fired (375 from the central apparatus of the NKVD, 2,532 from lower-level NKVD administrations, 304 from the DTO and 131 from OO VO). Another 1,164 were placed in reserve, 1,830 were transferred to other work outside state security, and 99 died. From these numbers, some 66.5 percent were fired for violations of socialist legality (dolzhnostnye prestupleniia, crimes of office), counterrevolutionary activity, and various types of “compromising material.” The largest percentage (41.7 percent, or 2,639) were fired for compromising material; 17.4 percent (974) were fired for violations of socialist legality, and only 2 percent (108) were fired for counterrevolutionary activity.⁴⁸

Although it is difficult to disentangle the official reasons for these firings, these figures demonstrate that, unlike in earlier years, fewer operatives were fired for so-called counterrevolutionary activities in comparison with the period from October 1934 to fall 1938. During that time period, 2,273 NKVD operatives were arrested, of whom 1,861 (82 percent) were arrested for counterrevolutionary activity and 411 (17 percent) for violations of socialist legality. For the period from fall 1938 to 1943 (and it is important to note that arrests continued in the purge of the purgers after 1939), the correlation reversed, with greater numbers being charged with violations of socialist legality. And, in 1939, of the total 1,190 individuals who were dismissed for violations of socialist legality or counterrevolutionary activity, 937 were arrested and handed over to the courts. It is this last number that figures in the purge of the purgers, with the charge of violations of socialist legality dominating over counterrevolutionary activity.⁴⁹

Unfortunately, precise figures exist only for the year 1939 and only spotty figures for Ukraine itself.⁵⁰ Arrests of NKVD operatives for violations of socialist legality continued into the early 1940s. Notably, in December 1941, Beria sent an appeal to Stalin requesting that 1,610 NKVD employees, who had mainly been convicted of violating socialist legality, be sent to the front given the shortage of (presumably security) cadres there. However, this figure omits those who had been executed for their part in the violations and those who were prosecuted in 1942 and 1943. Despite the problems of uncertain and incomplete data, 1939, the key year of this purge, resulted in a large turnover of NKVD personnel at all levels of its bureaucracy. Some 22.9 percent of its operational staff turned over and resulted in the recruitment of some 14,506 new cadres (who would constitute 45.1 percent of all operative workers), individuals who would more or less remain in office until Stalin’s death in 1953.⁵¹

It is important to note that the NKVD was in permanent flux through the 1930s and especially during the Great Terror. Indeed, it underwent a demographic shift in these years. As endemic transfers, mobilizations of new cadres, and purges escalated within the ranks, the age and social profile of leading operatives changed. The NKVD became younger, with most rank-and-file workers in their thirties, more plebeian and less educated, with larger numbers of operatives of working-class or peasant social origins. Moreover, the NKVD experienced shortages of operative cadres during the mass operations of the Great Terror, leaving it no choice but to expand its cadre of personnel in the very course of operations. Students from the NKVD preparatory schools were mobilized to help staff the NKVD organs. The NKVD also made use of extensive auxiliaries directly in arrests, interrogations, and executions—a motley crew of semiliterate regular police (militsionery), NKVD couriers, chauffeurs, accountants, firemen, postal workers, and others.

In Ukraine, the NKVD underwent two purges before the final rout of November 1938—following the removal of earlier NKVD Ukraine commissars V. A. Balitskii and I. M. Leplevskii, who fell in May 1937 and January 1938, respectively. These purges entailed removing the leaders as well as their “tails,” or clientele networks, generally under the accusation of counterrevolutionary activity. When Uspenskii took over the helm of the NKVD in Ukraine, he too brought his clients, many of them extremely young, into the leadership of the NKVD’s territorial units. Almost all of the leaders of oblast NKVD administrations from about March 1938 were clients of Uspenskii. When Uspenskii fell, the purge of his minions followed.

This constant turnover testifies to the extreme instability within the NKVD. The purge of the purgers was only the final episode of this phenomenon. Its significance resides less in the numbers of NKVD operatives removed or tried in court than in its function as a break on the Great Terror. The purge of the purgers put an end to the existence of clan warfare in the NKVD. Although one “clan” remained—Beria’s—Stalin remained firmly in control of the NKVD, while insisting after November 1938 that the Communist Party would remain the predominant authority in the Soviet Union. Some scholars have also suggested that this purge may have resulted in the strengthening of the Procuracy, the chief Soviet agency responsible for ensuring the observation of legality.⁵² While much still remains unclear about the causes and consequences of the Great Terror, two things are clear: Stalin remained in full control until his death in 1953 and there was never a mass purge of the Communist Party again. At the same time, it is important to note that mass violence against civilians continued, especially during World War II and its immediate aftermath.

In the last two decades, scholars inside and outside the former Soviet Union have been at work attempting to understand the dynamics and scope of the Great Terror. Historians have carried out a series of valuable studies on the prehistory of the terror, the machinery of repression, and the local and social dimensions of the terror.⁵³ Among the most contentious issues has been the degree to which Stalin exerted control over the terror’s implementation. While some scholars have argued that the terror was a closely controlled mass operation, others have highlighted the local dimensions of the terror, center-periphery conflicts, and societal input.⁵⁴ Although the final word on this issue is not in and may never be, it is clear that when Stalin called for an end to what he labeled “violations of socialist legality,” the machinery of terror came to a grinding, if sometimes reluctant, halt.⁵⁵

Until recently, much about the Soviet perpetrator has remained fairly opaque. Who participated in the violence of the 1930s? Who was complicit and who benefited? This raises complex and broad issues that have not been adequately studied. However, the research for Laboratories of Terror highlights one particular group of perpetrators—mid-level NKVD operatives in Soviet Ukraine. The greatest “gift” of this episode in the Great Terror is the documentation that it bestowed upon historians. Although we can glean valuable information about perpetrator motives and individual personalities from the interrogation materials and trials, it is necessary to use these sources with a great deal of care when discussing perpetrator motives. These sources are clearly perpetrator documents; the voices of the real victims rarely surface.⁵⁶ However, in the course of their own, often lengthy investigations, the NKVD perpetrators detailed the story of the Great Terror in all its horrors. As such, these sources present unique perspectives not just on perpetrators, but importantly on the mechanisms of repression, how the terror traveled from Moscow to the republic and from the republic to the oblasts and districts. The chapters in this book cast in fine relief the local and regional workings of the terror in Ukraine, especially in 1938, but often with a look back into 1937 as older cases were brought to bear against NKVD operatives.

The NKVD perpetrators arrested at the end of the Great Terror constituted the leadership of the NKVD at the republic, oblast, district, and city levels. The leaders of the NKVD administrations, along with their deputies and the individual heads of key NKVD departments, tended to be the primary targets for arrest. Individual chapters in Laboratories of Terror examine cases in the oblasts of Vinnitsa, Odessa, Nikolaev, Kharkov, Kiev, and Zhitomir, as well as in the important NKVD Transportation Department of the Northern Donetsk Railway. As Chapters 1 and 2 show, many of the officials from these offices were targeted by their own former victims, almost exclusively Communists and other elite victims released in early late 1938 and early 1939. Significantly, they were charged not with counterrevolutionary or Trotskyist activities as happened in earlier NKVD purges, but with the “violation of socialist legality” or crimes of office. It is important to be clear, however, that “everyone was guilty,” a claim repeated many times by purged NKVD officials. Although it is possible that some of the arrested NKVD operatives had indeed violated specific directives or had drawn attention to themselves through particularly brazen acts, the NKVD, to quote the head of the Kiev Oblast NKVD, A. R. Dolgushev, had acquired a “taste for torture” and other violent interrogation practices.⁵⁷

The true motivations of NKVD perpetrators are difficult to ascertain, but we can see how they justified their actions, at their trials and particularly in their “last words” to the court. Most denied that they had committed a crime. Among these, some claimed to be following superior orders; others believed that they were acting against real enemies—“I believed and could not not have believed in the authority of Uspenskii.”⁵⁸ Those who admitted guilt said they acted no differently from anyone else at that time—“We are all guilty in this.”⁵⁹ Many of those caught up in this stage of the purge were young vydvizhentsy (or recently promoted workers of sterling social character), who claimed that they were afraid not to follow orders. And, indeed, operatives were punished for being “liberal,” for not obtaining the requisite number of confessions, for not using force. At the NKVD operational meetings, NKVD leaders castigated these cadres. At the same time, they praised those who were most reckless, feeding into the pride and ambition of those who routinely beat their victims into submission. In the words of one man, “At the meetings which were then held in the department, they poured shame on the workers of the Fourth Department, who did not use physical methods of influence... they set me up as an example to others [in the use of torture]. And, I, fool, was proud of this.”⁶⁰ The testimony of witnesses (both actual victims of the purges and NKVD colleagues) used words like “sadist,” “careerist,” and “power hungry” to describe NKVD interrogators. Alcohol also played a role in some interrogations and most executions, whether as lubricant, bonding mechanism, or after-the-fact celebration: executioners routinely drank in the same room where they had shot their victims.⁶¹ Finally, venality characterized those NKVD and other officials who fought over the shoddy material remains left behind by the very people they had executed.

All these motivations constitute the usual panoply of perpetrator motivations seen in other cases of state violence and genocide. However, situational factors were also at play, serving to create certain conditions that dictated practice. For example, G. N. Petrov, a member of the local militia seconded to the NKVD to assist in the processing of victims, maintained that he had no choice but to use force; otherwise, he stated, he would not have been able to keep up with his assigned task of obtaining 100 preliminary confessions a day.⁶² The very scale and scope of the mass operations determined many of its practices. Although Moscow created the infrastructure of terror through policy and the intense pressure put upon NKVD subordinates, it was up to the NKVD on the local level to implement the terror. To be sure, NKVD perpetrators acted with an agency constrained by certain parameters, but one which allowed for “creativity” in fulfilling orders that most, in fact, believed would destroy real enemies. As Oleg Khlevniuk has written, “Just because the center controlled the operations that made up the Great Terror (and other similar operations) does not mean, however, that ‘elemental factors’ and local initiative did not play a role in shaping them.”⁶³ None of them, moreover, were “ordinary men” in the sense of Christopher Browning’s descriptions of members of the German order police.⁶⁴ Soviet perpetrators were instead trained military operatives long accustomed to strict hierarchies and the use of violence and shaped by radical Stalinist ideology.

This book presents a series of regional microhistories that endeavor to document the mechanisms of the Great Terror in Soviet Ukraine, as well as to illuminate its mid-level perpetrators. At a granular level of detail, these chapters illuminate the darkest corners of the terror—the prison cells, the interrogations rooms, and the execution chambers. They document the NKVD operational and Communist Party meetings where operatives discussed process and procedure and, after November 1938, criticized their bosses. Individual chapters present detailed biographical information about NKVD leaders, including their activities, arrests, and trials, as well as their sentences and later fate when possible. The authors suggest various determining factors for the actions of NKVD perpetrators, including ambition, fear, authoritarian personalities, belief in Stalinist ideology, the culture of the cheka, the need to “follow orders,” and a variety of situational factors. Several chapters also explore the causes and consequences of this final purge of the NKVD.

In Chapter 1, Valeriy Vasylyev and Roman Podkur explore the activities of the Vinnitsa Oblast NKVD during mass operations. The focus of their attention is on Uspenskii-appointed Ivan Mikhailovich Korablev, who led the Vinnitsa UNKVD from May 1938 until his attempted suicide in January 1939, as well as his assistants Anton Iakovlevich Prishivtsyn, Aleksandr Mikhailovich Zaputriaev, and Nikolai Stepanovich Butenko. Vasylyev and Podkur document Koroblev’s activities and motivations as a chekist “convinced that [he] was executing serious Party business.” Following their arrests, the main characters of this story are first sentenced to death, followed by a commutation of their sentences to ten years in the Gulag. None of them served their terms; instead, they were mobilized to the front in 1942, like many other incarcerated NKVD operatives, and lived fairly normal lives after the war. Vasylyev and Podkur also present information on the second wave of arrests of perpetrators after Stalin’s death in the 1950s. In that phase, the case against the Vinnitsa NKVD perpetrators was reopened, but ultimately dismissed, showing the limited effectiveness of the “purge of the purgers.” The authors demonstrate, importantly, that many Communist Party victims of the purges, whose cases were incomplete at the time of the November 1938 directive, played a key part in the investigations of the NKVD in Vinnitsa by sending waves of telegrams, petitions, and complaints to the authorities.

In Chapter 2, A. I. Savin and A. G. Tepliakov further investigate the importance of the role of released Party and other elites in the NKVD purge. Based on materials from Odessa Oblast, they argue that “the main share of convicted NKVD workers found themselves under prosecution as a result of complaints from victims who survived and were freed after the 17 November 1938 directive.” These freed victims were largely members of the Party with connections and status. The authors also note that the NKVD victims of the Beria purge tended to be precisely from among those NKVD operatives who worked specifically in the repression of Communist Party members. According to Savin and Tepliakov, the Great Terror had resulted in an imbalance “below” among mid- and lower-level NKVD workers who came to perceive themselves as above the Party. Focusing on the criminal files of important Odessa Oblast NKVD leaders like V.F. Kaliuzhnyi and S. I. Gaponov and their subordinates, these historians view the purge of the purgers as a rebalancing of power between Party and NKVD, while at the same time never losing sight of the role of the highest levels of the Party in the Great Terror. They see the Beria purge as a tool to discipline the NKVD and follow the story of their main characters through and beyond the war years.

Marc Junge’s focus in Chapter 3 is on Nikolaev Oblast, where there were six trials of NKVD operatives for the violation of socialist legality. Junge explores what arguably was the most important of these trials, that of P. V. Karamyshev, the head of the Nikolaev UNKVD, along with three of his associates. The story centers on a fire in one of Nikolaev’s sensitive defense-related shipbuilding factories, which were under intense scrutiny in 1938, and the two trials that followed Karamyshev’s arrest. Junge examines the Nikolaev defendants’ defensive tactics at their trials, their self-image as “good Stalinists,” the role of witnesses, and, ultimately, the death penalty served on Karamyshev.

In Chapter 4, Vadym Zolotar’ov details the career of D. A. Pertsov who, like many of the UNKVD leaders in Ukraine at this time, was a client of Uspenskii. Pertsov was an expert in interrogating detained NKVD operatives both in NKVD Ukraine and in the Kharkov Oblast UNKVD. He led by example, frequently walking in on interrogations to threaten and torture those who hesitated to confess. He also worked in the Polish operations. He ended up working in the Naval Department of the Odessa Oblast NKVD before he was arrested in November 1938. He was sentenced to fifteen years and died in a logging camp in 1948, having been charged anew with counterrevolutionary crimes, an unusual sentence during this NKVD purge, following an earlier more lenient sentence of four years for “violations of socialist legality.” The chapter, like many others, demonstrates the importance of personal connections among different groups of NKVD workers.

Lynne Viola, in Chapter 5, examines the case against O. S. Fleishman, the head of the Skvirskii district NKVD in Kiev Oblast, and M. M. Krivtsov, a district-level regular policeman mobilized to work in the NKVD during the mass operations. The chapter offers a view of the Great Terror at the district and village levels, demonstrating the role of “witnesses” and the use of regular policemen in mass operations. Fleishman, who did not admit guilt, claimed to be following orders, as did the policemen working under him who declared that they did everything “under the dictation of Fleishman.” Tried in August 1940, Fleishman was sentenced to eight years and Krivtsov to six years in the Gulag.

In Chapter 6, Serhii Kokin documents the unfolding of the Great Terror in Zhitomir Oblast, following the cases of a series of mid-level NKVD operatives purged before and after the November 1938 directive curtailing mass operations. In this oblast and more widely, the mass operations developed at a pace and scope that almost predetermined the use of torture to obtain what were fake confessions within a compressed period of time. Here as elsewhere, NKVD operatives were charged with looting at the place of execution and the removal of gold teeth from victims. Kokin surveys the results of the arrests of NKVD leaders Grigorii Viatkin and Grigorii Grishin and speculates as to the different sentences for various leaders, suggesting that the harshest sentences were dealt to mid-level NKVD operatives, that is, the people directly responsible in various operations. Kokin offers a reminder that, despite the arrest of these NKVD operatives in the Beria purge, no one ever questioned the Great Terror.

In Chapter 7, Jeffrey Rossman focuses on the investigation and trial of Georgii Kocherginskii, who served as the head of the Transportation Department (DTO) of the Northern Donetsk Railway NKVD. This study of a little-known, but important, agency within the NKVD argues that situational factors served as a primary context for the activities and motivations of Kocherginskii and his colleagues. Fear of punishment and the habit of “following orders” combined with ambition and the desire to please superiors to explain the motivations of these NKVD operatives. Additionally, Kocherginskii clearly believed that class enemies permeated the Soviet Union, making him a typical example of a “true believer” in Stalin’s Soviet Union.

Each chapter presents its own laboratory of terror, exploring how the Great Terror unfolded regionally. Although many questions remain surrounding causation and consequence, what is clear about this remarkable episode in the history of the Great Terror is that the purge of the purgers was not about justice. No one questioned the Great Terror, no one questioned the Communist Party, no one questioned Stalin. The vast majority of victims were common people caught up in the mass operations. Seldom were they released. “Justice” was a very limited benefit in this time, obtainable only by some elite victims. The most these individuals could hope for was release, reinstatement to the Party, and the punishment of individual interrogators. Still, the purge of the purgers brought to a halt the Great Terror. Moreover, this episode at the end of the Great Terror generated tens of thousands of documents that would re-emerge in legal and Communist Party tribunals in the mid-1950s when victims, mainly Communists, once again attempted to reclaim their innocence. Notes

“Postanovlenie SNK SSSR i TsK VKP (b) ‘Ob arestakh, prokurorskom nadzore i vedenii sledstviia,’ ” in Tragediia Sovetskoi Derevni: Kollektivizatsiia i raskulachinvanie. Dokumenty i materialy, 1927–1939 v 5 tomakh, ed. V. P. Danilov, R. T. Manning, and L. Viola (Moscow: Rosspen, 1999–2006), tom 5, kn. 2, 307–311 (further cited as TSD). The troika generally consisted of the leaders of the relevant republic or regional NKVD, Communist Party Committee, and Procuracy, though at times the subordinates of each could substitute for their bosses. For further information on the troiki, see TSD, tom 5, kn. 1, 335–336.

Oleg Khlevniuk, “Party and NKVD: Power Relationships in the Years of the Great Terror,” in Stalin’s Terror: High Politics and Mass Repression in the Soviet Union, ed. Barry McLoughlin and Kevin McDermott (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), 27; and V. N. Khaustov, V. P. Naumov, and N. S. Plotnikova, eds., Lubianka: Stalin i NKVD-NKGB-GUKR “Smersh” 1939–mart 1946 (Moscow: Materik, 2006), 564n11.

The statistics are from V. P. Popov, “Gosudarstvennyi terror v Sovetskoi Rossii, 1923–1953 gg. (istochniki i ikh interpretatsiia),” Otechestvennye arkhivy 2 (1992): 28.

TSD, tom 5, kn. 1, 330–37. At the 18th Congress of the Communist Party in March 1939, the Central Committee noted the widespread use of the “biological approach” in 1937 and 1938, and condemned it as having nothing in common with Marxism. See XVIII s”ezd vsesoiuznoi kommunisticheskoi partii (b). 10–21 marta 1939 g. Stenograficheskii otchet (Moscow: OGIZ, 1939), 523. Also see Mark Iunge, Gennadii Bordiugov, and Rol’f Binner, Vertikal bol’shogo terrora (Moscow: Novyi Khronograf, 2008), 128–30, on arrest lists in Vinnitsa including those who had been involved in the collective farm disturbances of 1930.

TSD, tom 5, kn. 1, 330–37.

On the 16 July meeting, see Iunge, Vertikal’, 19–26; for other preparations behind the directive, see TSD, tom 5, kn. 1, 319–27.

TSD, tom 5, kn. 1, 331–33.

TSD, tom 5, kn. 1, 331–34.

TSD, tom 5, kn. 1, 335.

On the troikas, see TSD, tom 5, kn. 1, 335–36; and J. Arch Getty and Oleg V. Naumov, eds., The Road to Terror (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1999), 470.

TSD, tom 5, kn. 1, 335–36.

TSD, tom 5, kn. 1, 340. On 7 July 1937, NKVD First Deputy M. P. Frinovskii had issued an earlier order to this effect. See A. G. Tepliakov, Protsedura: ispolnenie smertnykh prigovorov v 1920–1930-kh godakh (Moscow: Vozvrashchenie, 2007).

Iunge, Vertikal’, 52–53; A. G. Tepliakov, “Organy NKVD Zapadnoi Sibiri v ‘kulatskoi operatsii’ 1937–1938 gg.,” in Stalinizm v Sovetskoi provintsii, 1937–1938 gg. Massovaia operatsiia na osnove prikaza no. 00447, ed. M. Iunge and R. Binner (Moscow: Rosspen, 2009), 560.

Iunge, Vertikal’, 162; and TSD, tom 5, kn. 1, 387–93.

On orders not to increase regional control figures independently, see TSD, tom 5, kn. 1, 333; on the center seldom refusing, see Iunge, Vertikal’, 141–42. In the historiography, there has been controversy over the exact meaning of “limity,” translated variously as “quotas” or “limits,” with scope for regional initiative. See, for examples, J. Arch Getty, Practicing Stalinism: Bolsheviks, Boyars, and the Persistence of Tradition (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2013), chapter 7; Getty, “‘Excesses Are Not Permitted’: Mass Terror and Stalinist Governance in the Late 1930s,” Russian Review 61, no. 1 (2002): 112–37; Oleg V. Khlevniuk, The History of the Gulag: From Collectivization to the Great Terror, trans. Vadim A. Staklo (New Haven, CT, and London: Yale University Press, 2004), 148–49.

Iunge, Vertikal’, 150, 277.

Iunge, Vertikal’, 285; Iunge et al., eds., “Cherez trupy vraga na blago naroda”: “Kulatskaia operatsiia” v Ukrainskoi SSR, 1937–1941 gg.: 1938–1941 gg. Vtoroi etap repressii. Zavershenie Bol’shogo terrora i vosstanovelnie “sotsialisticheskoi zakonnosti” v 2 tomakh (Moscow: Rosspen, 2010), tom 2, 23–25.

See Nikita Petrov and Arsenii Roginskii, “The ‘Polish Operation’ of the NKVD, 1937–8,” in Stalin’s Terror, ed. McLoughlin and McDermott, 154. For a copy of the directive on the Polish Operation, see V. N. Khaustov, V. P. Naumov, and N. S. Plotnikova, eds., Lubianka: Stalin i glavnoe upravlenie gosbezopasnosti NKVD, 1937–1938 (Moscow: Materik, 2004), 301–3, and, for the official view on “Polish enemies” in the Soviet Union, 303–21. The German “national operation” was not a part of the national operations per se, but began earlier, from 25 July 1937. See Mark Iunge and Bernd Bonvech, eds., Bol’shevistskii poriadok v Gruzii v 2 tomakh (Moscow: AIRO-XXI, 2015), tom 1, 205n21.

Petrov and Roginskii, “The ‘Polish Operation’,” in Stalin’s Terror, ed. McLoughlin and McDermott, 154–55. See Timothy Snyder, Sketches from a Secret War (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2005), for information on the POV and Polish attempts, largely unsuccessful, to infiltrate Soviet Ukraine with a spy network.

TSD, tom 5, kn. 2, 163 (data for the period from 1 January 1936 to 1 July 1938).

The “special troikas” were established by Directive No. 00606, replacing the dvoika used earlier in the National Operations. See “Prikaz No. 00606 Narodnogo komissara vnutrennykh del SSSR ‘Ob obrazovanii Osobykh troek dlia rassmotreniia del na arrestovannykh v poriadke prikazov NKVD SSSR No. 00485 i drugikh,’ 17.09.1938,” in Bol’shevistskii poriadok v Gruzii, ed. Junge and Bonvech, tom 2, 165–67. See also Khaustov, Naumov, and Plotnikova, eds., Lubianka. Stalin i glavnoe upravlenie gosbezopasnosti NKVD, 1937–1938, 549.

Barry McLoughlin, “Mass Operations of the NVKD, 1937–8: A Survey,” in Stalin’s Terror, ed. McLoughlin and McDermott, 141.

Petrov and Roginskii, “The ‘Polish Operation,’ in ibid., 161.

TSD, tom 5, kn. 2, 156–63.

McLoughlin, “Mass Operations of the NVKD,” in Stalin’s Terror, ed. McLoughlin and McDermott, 141. For sentencing statistics, see Khlevniuk, The History of the Gulag from Collectivization to the Great Terror, 290.

George O. Liber, Total Wars and the Making of Modern Ukraine, 1914–1954 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2016), 187.

XVIII s”ezd vsesoiuznoi kommunisticheskoi partii (b). 10–21 marta 1939 g. Stenograficheskii otchet (Moscow: OGIZ, 1939), 16, 26–27.

On the eve of the November 1938 directive, when it became clear that Stalin was about to bring down Ezhov, several key NKVD regional leaders fled or committed suicide. Uspenskii fled on 14 November 1938 and remained a fugitive until his arrest in mid-April 1939. For further information, see Lynne Viola, Stalinist Perpetrators on Trial: Scenes from the Great Terror in Soviet Ukraine (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017), 162–65.

Violations of socialist legality, or crimes of office, fell under Article 206-17 of the Ukrainian Penal Code. Point “A” of the article dealt with minor offenses and could result in imprisonment for a period of no fewer than six months; Point “B” was more serious and could result in the death sentence. The equivalent article in the Russian Republican Penal Code was Article 193-17.

Aleksandr Kokurin and Nikita Petrov, “NKVD: struktura, funktsii, kadry,” Svobodnaia mysl’, no. 7 (1997): 111; and Khlevniuk, “Party and NKVD,” in Stalin’s Terror, ed. McLoughlin and McDermott, 30.

For mention of the trials against NKVD workers in Moldova, see Kommunist (Ukraine), 30 December 1938; 31 December 1938; and 1 January 1930. On the war and postwar trials, see Alexander Victor Prusin, “‘Fascist Criminals to the Gallows!’: The Holocaust and Soviet War Crimes Trials, December 1945–February 1946,” Holocaust and Genocide Studies 17, no. 1 (2003): 17, 21; Ilya Bourtman, “‘Blood for Blood, Death for Death’: The Soviet Military Tribunal in Krasnodar, 1943,” Holocaust and Genocide Studies 22, no. 2 (2008): 258–59; Tanya Penter, “Local Collaborators on Trial: Soviet War Crimes Trials under Stalin (1943–1953),” Cahiers du monde russe 49, no. 2 (2008): 361.

Khaustov, Naumov, and Plotnikova, Lubianka: Stalin i glavnoe upravlenie gosbezopasnosti NKVD 1937–1938, 663–64n92.

See Khlevniuk, “Party and NKVD,” in Stalin’s Terror, ed. McLoughlin and McDermott, 30, indicating that of 14,500 new NKVD workers in 1939, over 11,000 were recruited from the Communist Party and Komsomol.

For more on this argument, see Viola, Stalinist Perpetrators on Trial, 166–71.

Iunge, Vertikal, 299.

“Zapiska komissii prezidiuma TsK KPSS v presidium TsK KPSS o rezul’takh raboty po rassledovaniiu prichin repressii i obstoiatel’stv politicheskikh protsessov 30-kh godov,” Istochnik, no. 1 (1995): 84.

S. V. Mironenko and N. Werth, eds., Istoriia Stalinskogo Gulaga: Konets 1920-kh-pervaia polovina 1950-kh godov v 7 tomakh (Moscow: Rosspen, 2004–2005), tom 1, 327–28.

Iunge et al., eds., “Cherez trupy vraga na blago naroda,” tom 2, 489, 511–13.

Khaustov, Naumov, and Plotnikova, Lubianka: Stalin i NKVD-NKGB-GUKR “Smersh” 1939–mart 1946, 129–32, 564n11.

Khlevniuk, “Party and NKVD,” in Stalin’s Terror, ed. McLoughlin and McDermott, 27.

For examples, see Viola, Stalinist Perpetrators on Trial, chapter 5.

A. Iu. Vatlin, Terror raionnogo masshtaba (Moscow: Rosspen, 2004), 85–87.

E.g., Haluzevyi derzhavnyi arkhiv Sluzhby bezpeky Ukrainy (State Archive of the Security Services of Ukraine, further HDA SBU), f. 16, spr. 322, ark. 248–52.

HDA SBU, f. 5, spr. 43626 (sledstvennoe delo Grabaria), tom 3, ark. 297–98 (Protokol zakrytogo partiinogo sobraniia partorganizatsii osobovo otdela KOVO, sostoiavshegosia 2 dekabria 1938 g.), tom 5, ark. 585, 595.

Khaustov, Naumov, and Plotnikova, Lubianka: Stalin i NKVD-NKGB-GUKR “Smersh” 1939–mart 1946, 9; David R. Shearer and Vladimir Khaustov, eds., Stalin and the Lubianka: A Documentary History of the Political Police and Security Organs in the Soviet Union, 1922–1953 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2015), 228–29.

The same “bad apples” approach to punishment is apparent in the US government’s actions in My Lai during the Vietnam War and at Abu Ghraib during the Iraq war.

Kokurin and Petrov, “NKVD: struktura, funktsii, kadry,” 111; and Khlevniuk, “Party and NKVD,” in Stalin’s Terror, ed. McLoughlin and McDermott, 30. Many thanks to Andrei Savin, Aleksei Tepliakov, Vadym Zolotar’ov, and Wladislaw Hedeler for their assistance in clarifying this issue. Thanks also to anonymous reader 2, who encouraged us to disentangle this figure.

These terms, particularly “counterrevolutionary activities,” should be taken with a grain of salt. The data are from “Spravka Otdela kadrov NKVD SSSR o dvizhenii operativno-chekistskikh kadrov organov NKVD za 1939,” published in Mironenko and Werth, eds., Istoriia Stalinskogo Gulaga, tom 2, 173–77.

In N. V. Petrov and K. V. Skorkin, eds., Kto rukovodil NKVD, 1934–1941: Spravochnik (Moscow: Zven’ia, 1999), 501, the editors make reference to a document in the FSB archives that apparently V. M. Chebrikov made use of when he made the incorrect claim that some 20,000 NKVD operatives had been repressed. This document, somewhat unhelpfully, includes data (not dissected) not only on NKVD operatives, but on other state security staff, including firemen, members of the militsia, Gulag workers, and others. This data shows that in 1933, 738 state security workers were “repressed”; in 1934, 2,860; in 1935, 6,249; in 1936, 1,945; in 1937, 3,837; in 1938, 5,625; and in 1939, 1,364, totaling 22,618 over these years. The figure for 1939 seems to be an anomaly; it does not square with the figures presented in our text concerning only NKVD operatives workers, and we have no way to check these figures. It should be noted, however, that the editors of this volume also indicate that 7,372 “sotrudniki” (or 22.9 percent of the operative chekist staff) were let go (uvoleno) in 1939.

For a first attempt, see V. Zolotar’ov “Represii sered spivrobitnykiv derzhavnoi bezpeky URSR u 1936–1941 rr. Personalizovano-statystychnyi analiz,” Z arkhiviv VUChK-GPU-NKVD-KGB, no. 2 (1998): 156–217. Data are available for the Mykolaiv (Nikolaev) Oblast of Ukraine. Here, a total of six trials for violation of socialist legality took place between 1939 and 1943. In these trials, 13 NKVD workers were sentenced, 4 (31 percent) to death and 9 (69 percent) to camp imprisonment. Not a single one was brought to justice for counterrevolutionary activity. Since the Mykolażv (Nikolaev) NKVD administration had about 171 operative members, 8 percent of this apparatus was thus affected by the persecutions. In addition, and as elsewhere, many operational staff were interrogated but ultimately not charged. (M. Iunge [Junge], Chekisty Stalina: Moshch’ i bessilie. “Berievskaia otepel’ ” v Nikolaevskoi oblasti Ukrainy [Moscow: AIRO-XXI, 2017], 148–189, 203, 255).

See Kokurin and Petrov, “NKVD: struktura, funktsii, kadry,” 111; and Khlevniuk, “Party and NKVD,” in Stalin’s Terror, ed. McLoughlin and McDermott, 30.

See, for examples, Peter H. Solomon Jr., Soviet Criminal Justice under Stalin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), chapters 7 and 8; and Immo Rebitschek, “Lessons from the Terror: Soviet Procurators and Police Violence in Molotov Province, 1942 to 1949,” Slavic Review 78, no. 3 (Fall 2019): 738–57.

For a sampling of the English-language secondary sources, see Getty and Naumov, eds., The Road to Terror; J. Arch Getty and Oleg V. Naumov, Yezhov: The Rise of Stalin’s “Iron Fist” (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2008); Wendy Z. Goldman, Terror and Democracy in the Age of Stalin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007); Goldman, Inventing the Enemy: Denunciation and Terror in Stalin’s Russia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011); Paul Hagenloh, Stalin’s Police (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009); Igal Halfin, From Darkness to Light: Class, Consciousness, and Salvation in Revolutionary Russia (Pittsburgh: Pittsburgh University Press, 2000); Halfin, Intimate Enemies: Demonizing the Bolshevik Opposition, 1918–1928 (Pittsburgh: Pittsburgh University Press, 2007); Halfin, Stalinist Confessions: Messianism and Terror at the Leningrad Communist University (Pittsburgh: Pittsburgh University Press, 2009; Halfin, Terror in My Soul: Communist Autobiographies on Trial (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003); James Harris, The Great Fear: Stalin’s Terror of the 1930s (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016); Marc Jansen and Nikita Petrov. Stalin’s Loyal Executioner: People’s Commissar Nikolai Ezhov, 1895–1940 (Stanford, CA: Hoover Press, 2002); McLoughlin and McDermott, eds., Stalin’s Terror; David R. Shearer, Policing Stalin’s Socialism (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009).

E.g., Getty, “Excesses Are Not Permitted”; and Oleg V. Khlevniuk, Master of the House: Stalin and His Inner Circle, trans. [stet Nora, her first name] Seligman Favorov (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009), 183.

TSD, tom 5, kn. 2, 308.

For a discussion of the sources, Lynne Viola, “New Sources on Soviet Perpetrators of Mass Repression: A Research Note,” Canadian Slavonic Papers 60, nos. 3–4 (September–December 2018): 592–604.

Viola, Stalinist Perpetrators on Trial, 49.

Ibid., 138.

Ibid., 48.

Ibid., 67–68. “Physical methods of influence” was the NKVD euphemism for torture.

On the use of alcohol during the mass shootings of the Holocaust in the east, see Edward B. Westermann, Drunk on Genocide: Alcohol and Mass Murder in Nazi Germany (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2021).

For more on Petrov, see Viola, Stalinist Perpetrators, 109–10.

Khlevniuk, Master of the House, 183.

Christopher R. Browning, Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland (New York: HarperPerennial, 1992).