The Crimes of the Stalin Regime: Outline for an Inventory and Classification

Abstract

For about 15 years now, the opening of the Soviet archives, partial though it was, has allowed historians to examine in detail the darker, repressive and criminal aspects of the Soviet regime. Until the beginning of the 1990s there had been many accounts of this (mainly from survivors of gulags), but there had also been numerous theoretical analyses, most based on the concept of totalitarianism, assumed to provide a means of understanding the ‘essence’ of the Soviet regime. Despite this, it is only in the last few years that it has been possible to make a real start on taking an inventory of the victims of the Soviet regime and, more particularly, analysing the mechanisms, decision-making processes and methods for implementing the various repressive policies. These were applied with an intensity that varied considerably throughout the 74 years of what, with the hindsight of historical perspective, we can today refer to as the ‘Soviet period in Russian history’. It was during those years when Stalin was in power, towards the end of the 1920s and up to the beginning of the 1950s, that state violence was at its most intense in the USSR. Unlike the violence practised by the Nazis, essentially directed outwards as part of a powerful, expansionist and imperialist thrust aimed at allowing the Third Reich to rule over the whole of Europe, or indeed the world, ‘for a thousand years’, violence under the Stalin regime was directed, not outwards, but inwards.