New sources on Soviet perpetrators of mass repression: a research note |
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Authors: | Lynne Viola |
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Affiliation: | 1. Department of History, University of Toronto, Toronto, ON, Canada;2. Higher School of Economics, National Research University, Moscow, Russian Federationlynne.viola@utoronto.ca |
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Abstract: | At the end of the Great Terror, Stalin reversed course and reined in the NKVD. Hundreds of NKVD interrogators and other officials were arrested and charged with “violations of socialist legality.” Punishments ranged from imprisonment in the Gulag to execution. This repression of the NKVD was the result of a combination of scapegoating and “clan” politics. The arrests and accompanying trials of these NKVD officers created an enormous paper trail of sources, strictly classified in the FSB archives in Moscow. Recently, however, the security police archives in Ukraine opened its doors to researchers. The result is access to a range of sources which allow researchers, for the first time, to explore in detail the topic of Soviet perpetrators, in this case, the Soviet security police during and in the aftermath of the Great Terror. |
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Keywords: | Stalin perpetrators repression |
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