Laboratories of Terror

Abstract

Abstract Laboratories of Terror explores the final chapter of Stalin’s Great Terror. On November 1938, the Communist Party Central Committee and the Council of People’s Commissars of the USSR issued a directive halting mass operations in repression. This directive not only served to end the mass operations, but led to the release of large numbers of mainly Communist purge victims whose cases remained incomplete. At the same time, it resulted in a “purge of the purgers,” resulting in the scapegoating and arrests of hundreds of NKVD operatives who had carried out the Great Terror at regional and local levels. This episode in the Great Terror remained hidden from view for decades due to the largely closed archives of the Soviet security police. The opening of the Ukrainian security police archives in the 2010s allowed historians for the first time to begin to excavate this chapter in the history of the Great Terror. This collection of essays illuminates the world of the NKVD perpetrator and the mechanics and logistics of the terror at the local level through an examination of the criminal files of a series of mid-level NKVD operatives arrested at the end of the Great Terror in Soviet Ukraine. It reveals the complex relations between center and periphery, illustrating both Stalin’s central role in the architecture of the terror and NKVD perpetrators’ agency in implementing it.