Viola Lynne, Junge Marc-Stephan (eds.). Laboratories of Terror: The Final Act of Stalin's Great Purge in Soviet Ukraine. Oxford University Press,2023. — 565 p.. 2023

The project from which this volume derives began in 2010 at a conference on Stalinist terror, convened by James Harris in Leeds, UK.1 Lynne Viola presented a paper on the general subject of perpetrators. In response, Marc Junge noted the existence and accessibility of key sources on NKVD perpetrators in the Ukrainian SBU archives. Subsequently, in 2011, Viola and Junge made an initial foray into the Kyiv archives. The volume of materials was so vast that they enlisted a team of experienced scholars from Ukraine, Russia, Moldova, Georgia, and the United States to join them in this research. These scholars included Valeriy Vasylyev, Roman Podkur, Vadym Zolotar’ov, Serhii Kokin, Andrei Savin, and Aleksei Tepliakov. At a later stage, they were joined by Ol’ga Dovbnja, Igor Casu, Timothy Blauvelt, and Jeffrey Rossman. The team published four volumes of archival documents, as well as an anthology of articles, each in Ukrainian and in Russian.2 Although we completed the main body of our work before the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, the project’s success was based on Ukrainians, Russians, and others working together. The current, unprovoked war against Ukraine in no way detracts from our successful collaboration, but it is a reminder of the dangers, still, of dictatorial regimes. The chapters presented here are English translations of the final results of this collective work, covering events in the Ukrainian oblasts (or regions) of Kiev (Kyiv), Zhitomir (Zhytomyr), Odessa (Odesa), Vinnitsa (Vinnytsia), Nikolaev (Mykolaiv), and Kharkov (Kharkiv). The pages that follow use the Russian versions of Ukrainian place names given that Russian is the language of the documents.

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Contents

Acknowledgments

Contributors and Translators

Glossary

Maps

Laboratories of Terror

Introduction

1 “The Party Will Demand a Full Reckoning”

Korablev and the Vinnitsa NKVD

“In Ukraine, Entire Antisoviet Ukrainian Nationalist Divisions... Roam Underground”