Suchergebnisse

Based on chilling and revelatory new archival documents from the Ukrainian secret police archives, Stalinist Perpetrators on Trial illuminates the darkest recesses of Soviet repression-the interrogation room, the prison cell, and the place of execution-and sheds new light on those who carried out the Great Terror

Popular resistance in the Stalinist 1930s : soliloquy of a devil's advocate / Lynne Viola -- A workers' strike in Stalin's Russia : the Vichuga Uprising of April 1932 / Jeffrey J. Rossman -- A peasant rebellion in Stalin's Russia : the Pitelinskii Uprising, Riazan 1930 / Tracy McDonald -- Subaltern dialogues : subversion and resistance in Soviet Uzbek family law / Douglas Northrop -- Sexual and gender dissent : homosexuality as resistance in Stalin's Russia / Dan Healey -- Economic disobedience under Stalin / Elena A. Osokina -- Resisting the plan in the Urals, 1928-1956, or, Why regional officials needed "wreckers" and "saboteurs" / James Harris

Abstract
Following the German invasion of the USSR on June 22, 1941, murderous violence against local Jews broke out in many localities of the territories it had occupied in the wake of the 1939 Soviet-German Non-Aggression Pact. In particular, organizers demanded revenge for the recent Stalinist repressions and deportations. Participants claimed that the "Jewish Soviet state," the "Jewish NKVD," or local Jews had been responsible for those crimes. Even now, the legend of prewar Jewish responsibility figures in the dubious "double genocide" thesis animating nationalistic historiographies in Eastern Europe and its international diasporas. The following study counters that mythology, addressing the story of actual Jews in the NKVD at the end of the 1930s. It draws on the archives of the Ukrainian security services, especially records that document Stalin's effort to divert blame for the recent Great Terror onto senior and mid-level officials. Stalin's green light to criticize the bosses gave other NKVD officers the opportunity to address many issues, including that of antisemitism among NKVD cadres. These sources suggest that antisemitism was in fact a potent force within the NKVD in Ukraine and elsewhere.

The question of the perpetrator is largely uncharted territory in the history of the Soviet Union. The term is rarely used in the historiography of the Stalinist Soviet Union. In part, this omission is based upon a reluctance to go beyond Iosif Stalin in assigning agency or responsibility for the immense crimes of his reign. In part, the omission derives from decades-long restrictions on archival access. Lynne Viola begins with an exploration of the postwar trajectories of the historiographies of the mid-twentieth century's classically paired "totalitarian" regimes in order to understand the relative absence of "perpetrator studies" for the Stalinist 1930s. She then examines the question of the Soviet perpetrator, less to demarcate who the perpetrator was than to offer a conceptualization of the range of factors that enabled, conditioned, and shaped their violent acts. Intended to raise questions for further study, Viola's article is complemented by comments from Wendy Goldman and Peter Fritzsche.