Stalinist Terror: New Perspectives

This collection of essays by scholars from five nations - the United States, Great Britain, Australia, France, and Russia - makes several major contributions to the understanding of Stalinist terror in the 1930s. The essays explore in greater depth than before the background of the terror and patterns of persecution, while providing more empirically founded and substantiated estimates of the numbers of Stalin's victims. Some contributors tap unexplored or underutilized source materials while others have taken advantage of glasnost and the opening of Soviet archives and libraries for the years of the terror to draw on freshly available archival and secondary materials. Many of the essays are informed by distinct trends in social and political history, and they approach Stalinist terror with fresh methods and perspectives. The volume supplements works that have focused exclusively on Stalin's personality by concentrating instead on preconditions, mentalities, economics, and specific groups. Although Stalin remains the central personality in the terror, other leaders, institutions, and social groups played important roles, and by analyzing them the essays in the volume help to provide a more complete and balanced view of the phenomenon of the terror as a whole.

This collection of essays contributes to the understanding of Stalinist terror in the 1930s.

Acknowledgements; Introduction J. Arch Getty and Roberta T. Manning; Part I. Persons and Politics: 1. Narkom Ezhov Boris A. Starkov; 2. The politics of repression revisited J. Arch Getty; Part II. Backgrounds: 3. The second coming: class enemies in the Soviet countryside, 1927-1935 Lynne Viola; 4. The omnipresent conspiracy: on Soviet imagery of politics and social relations in the 1930s Gábor T. Rittersporn; 5. The Soviet economic crisis of 1936-1940 and the great purges Roberta T. Manning; 6. The Stakhanovite movement: the background to the great terror in the factories, 1935-1938 Robert Thurston; Part III. Case Studies: 7. The great terror on the local level: purges in Moscow factories, 1936-1938 David L. Hoffman; 8. The great purges in a rural district: Belyi Raion revisited Roberta T. Manning; 9. The Red Army and the great purges Roger R. Reese; 10. Stalinist terror in the Donbas: a note Hiroaki Kuromiya; Part IV. Impact and Incidence: 11. Patterns of repression among the Soviet elite in the late 1930s: a biographical approach J. Arch Getty and William Chase; 12. The impact of the great purges on Soviet elites: a case study from Moscow and Leningrad telephone directories of the 1930s Sheila Fitzpatrick; 13. Victims of Stalinism: how many? Alec Nove; 14. More light on the scale of repression and excess mortality in the Soviet Union in the 1930s Stephen G. Wheatcroft; Index.