Agents of Terror

Agents of Terror
Author: Alexander Vatlin
Publisher: University of Wisconsin Pres
Total Pages: 206
Release: 2016-10-11
Genre: History
ISBN: 0299310809

During Stalin's Great Terror, more than a million Soviet citizens were arrested or killed for political crimes they did not commit. Who carried out these purges, and what motivated them? Alexander Vatlin opens up the world of the Soviet perpetrators using detailed evidence from one Moscow suburb. Spurred by ambition or fear, local secret police rushed to fulfill quotas for arresting "enemies of the people"-even when it meant fabricating evidence. Vatlin confronts head-on issues of historical agency and moral responsibility in Stalin-era crimes.

Stalin's Police

Stalin's Police
Author: Paul Hagenloh
Publisher:
Total Pages: 488
Release: 2009-05-15
Genre: History
ISBN:

Stalin’s Police offers a new interpretation of the mass repressions associated with the Stalinist terror of the late 1930s. This pioneering study traces the development of professional policing from its pre-revolutionary origins through the late 1930s and early 1940s. Paul Hagenloh argues that the policing methods employed in the late 1930s were the culmination of a set of ideologically driven policies dating back to the previous decade. Hagenloh’s vivid and monumental account is the first to show how Stalin’s peculiar brand of policing—in which criminals, juvenile delinquents, and other marginalized population groups were seen increasingly as threats to the political and social order—supplied the core mechanism of the Great Terror.

Stalin's Secret Police

Stalin's Secret Police
Author: Rupert Butler
Publisher: Amber Books Ltd
Total Pages: 348
Release: 2015-09-15
Genre: History
ISBN: 1782743510

Illustrated with more than 100 black-and-white photographs and expertly written, Stalin’s Secret Police is a chilling history of the Soviet secret police from 1917 to the fall of Communism.

Photography and Political Repressions in Stalin’s Russia

Photography and Political Repressions in Stalin’s Russia
Author: Denis Skopin
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 222
Release: 2022-03-29
Genre: Art
ISBN: 1000547221

This book is devoted to the phenomenon of removal of people declared "public enemies" from group photographs in Stalin’s Russia. The book is based on long-term empirical research in Russian archives and includes 57 photographs that are exceptional in terms of historical interest: all these images bear traces of editing in the form of various marks, such as blacking-out, excisions or scratches. The illustrative materials also include a group of photographs with inscriptions left by officers of Stalin’s secret police, the NKVD. To approach this extensive visual material, Denis Skopin draws on a wealth of Stalin-era written sources: memoirs, diaries and official documents. He argues that this kind of political iconoclasm cannot be confused with censorship nor vandalism. The practice in question is more harrowing and morally twisted, for in most cases the photos were defaced by those who were part of victim’s intimate circle: his/her colleagues, friends or even close family members. The book will be of interest to scholars working in history of photography, art history, visual culture, Russian studies and Russian history and politics.

Stalin and the Lubianka

Stalin and the Lubianka
Author: David R. Shearer
Publisher: Yale University Press
Total Pages: 391
Release: 2015-01-01
Genre: History
ISBN: 0300171897

This fascinating documentary history is the first English-language exploration of Joseph Stalin's relationship with, and manipulation of, the Soviet political police. The story follows the changing functions, organization, and fortunes of the political police and security organs from the early 1920s until Stalin’s death in 1953, and it provides documented detail about how Stalin used these organs to achieve and maintain undisputed power. Although written as a narrative, it includes translations of more than 170 documents from Soviet archives.

Stalinist Perpetrators on Trial

Stalinist Perpetrators on Trial
Author: Lynne Viola
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 305
Release: 2017
Genre: History
ISBN: 0190674164

Between the summer of 1937 and November 1938, the Stalinist regime arrested over 1.5 million people for "counterrevolutionary" and "anti-Soviet" activity and either summarily executed or exiled them to the Gulag. While we now know a great deal about the experience of victims of the Great Terror, we know almost nothing about the lower- and middle-level Narodnyi Komissariat Vnutrennikh Del (NKVD), or secret police, cadres who carried out Stalin's murderous policies. Unlike the postwar, public trials of Nazi war criminals, NKVD operatives were tried secretly. And what exactly happened in those courtrooms was unknown until now. In what has been dubbed "the purge of the purgers," almost one thousand NKVD officers were prosecuted by Soviet military courts. Scapegoated for violating Soviet law, they were charged with multiple counts of fabrication of evidence, falsification of interrogation protocols, use of torture to secure "confessions," and murder during pre-trial detention of "suspects" - and many were sentenced to execution themselves. The documentation generated by these trials, including verbatim interrogation records and written confessions signed by perpetrators; testimony by victims, witnesses, and experts; and transcripts of court sessions, provides a glimpse behind the curtains of the terror. It depicts how the terror was implemented, what happened, and who was responsible, demonstrating that orders from above worked in conjunction with a series of situational factors to shape the contours of state violence. 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.

Stalin's Loyal Executioner

Stalin's Loyal Executioner
Author: Marc Jansen
Publisher: Hoover Institution Press
Total Pages: 289
Release: 2013-11-01
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 0817929061

Stalin's Loyal Executioner, drawn from still-classified Soviet archives, chronicles the meteoric and bloody career of Nikolai Ezhov, NKVD leader and security chief, revealing the tragic scope of communist terrorism under Joseph Stalin.

Terror by Quota

Terror by Quota
Author: Paul R. Gregory
Publisher: Yale University Press
Total Pages: 354
Release: 2009-01-06
Genre: History
ISBN: 0300152787

This original analysis of the workings of the Soviet state security organs under Lenin and Stalin illuminates the ways in which terror and repression in the Soviet Union were used during this period.

Stalin's Secret War

Stalin's Secret War
Author: Rupert Butler
Publisher:
Total Pages: 220
Release: 2010
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN:

The use of terror has been a characteristic of Russia from the days of the Tsars. During 'the Great Patriotic War', Soviet soldiers and citizens feared not only the Germans but the secret police. The agents of the NKVD waged a merciless campaign against their own people. The full extent of this operation is told in this compelling study.