Stalinist state violence: a reappraisal twenty years after the archival revolution

Abstract

The opening of the Soviet archives in the 1990s has offered historians of Stalinism unprecedented opportunities to research and understand the violence of the regime. The discovery of key documents and publication of revealing memoirs have shed light on four important genocides: the man-made famine of 1931-3, the Great Terror of 1937-8, the deportations of ethnic groups in 1939-45, and the mass forced labour in the Gulag. This article discusses three major shifts in the nature of Stalinist repression and examines how the historiography of Stalinist mass violence has changed over the past two decades.