lynne viola stalinist perpetrators on trial

It uncovers the mechanics and logistics of the terror at the local level by examining the criminal files of a series of mid-level NKVD operatives from across Ukraine. Drawing on materials from the largely closed archives of the Soviet security police, this collection of essays by an international team of researchers illuminates the previously opaque world of the NKVD perpetrator. At the same time, hundreds of NKVD operatives who had carried out the Great Terror were scapegoated and arrested. When the Communist Party Central Committee and the Council of People's Commissars of the USSR halted mass operations in repression in November 1938, large numbers of mainly Communist purge victims whose cases remained incomplete were released. Julian-Varnon is a History Instructor at Lee College.Laboratories of Terror explores the final chapter of Stalin's Great Terror in Soviet Ukraine. Viola argues that multiple factors shaped the behavior of these perpetrators: orders from above, the extraordinary pressures placed on cadres to find enemies, situational factors, and individual decision-making. From a sadistic interrogator to an execution squad leader who robbed graves, Viola’s work allows readers to understand the motivation and thought processes of individuals who are often absent in scholarship on the Terror. Each man’s story reveals how low- and mid-ranking cadres executed the mechanisms of the Great Terror. They pursued any means necessary, including the use of torture to obtain false confessions, to reach their increasingly unrealistic arrest and confession quotas. The men she discusses were True Believers firm in their devotion to Soviet power. Viola’s work deepens our understanding of the victim-perpetrator paradigm within Soviet history. She gives readers an intimate look at the arrest, interrogation and trial records of NKVD members purged following the zenith of the Great Terror. Lynne Viola dives into the previously secret records of the Ukrainian SSR NKVD (Stalinist-era secret police).

What happened inside NKVD interrogation rooms during the Great Terror? How did the perpetrators feel when the Soviet state turned on them in 1938 during “the purge of the purgers?” In her newest book, Stalinist Perpetrators on Trial: Scenes from the Great Terror in Soviet Ukraine (Oxford University Press, 2017), Dr.

Lynne viola stalinist perpetrators on trial