Archival Revolution Research Articles

Красный спортивный Интернационал в отечественной и зарубежной историографии

This article examines the main approaches and assessments that were given in Russian and foreign scientific literature to the Red Sports International (Sportintern, RSI). The author shows the context of mentioning the organization in scientific literature and identifies controversial issues in its history. The article analyzes the source base of existing works on the his-tory of Sportintern in the context of the archival revolution of the 1990s. and documents from the Sportintern fund in the Russian State Archive of Socio-Political History (RGASPI). The author shows the differences between Russian and for-eign approaches to the history of Sportintern, differences in assessments of its activities. The author traces how the per-ception of RSI has changed in Soviet and Russian historiog-raphy, notes the peculiarities of the views of individual au-thors on the factors of the creation of the Sport International, the goals and objectives of its activities, the role of individual historical characters in the activities of the Sports Internation-al. Particular attention is paid to the issue of the initiator of the creation of Sportintern and the role of N. I. Podvoisky in the formation and development of the organization. Special attention is paid to the activities of the RSI in Latin America and the Latin American historiography of the work of Sportintern in the countries of the region.

Issues of rehabilitation of victims of political repression in the materials of the National Archive of the Republic of Kazakhstan

Questions of the history of political repression are an actual and topical topic, against the background of the activities of the State Commission established by the decision of the President of the Republic of Kazakhstan K. Tokayev. The relevance of the topic proposed by the author is undeniable from the point of view of his appeal to the analysis of the stages of formation and the beginning of the rehabilitation process of the period of perestroika, the archival revolution in the USSR. The research objective is to analyze the sources on the history of rehabilitation of victims of political repression identified in the funds of the National Archive of the Republic of Kazakhstan. The archival materials discovered by the author reveal the issues of the formation of the state policy of rehabilitation of victims of political repression at the present stage of development of Kazakhstan, namely the end of the 80s of the twentieth century - the beginning of the XXI century. Special attention is paid to the first stage of rehabilitation, which began in 1988 with the creation of the State Commission for the Rehabilitation of Victims of Repression. The author drew attention to the legal field of activity of the State Commission and to the history of discussion of the draft, adoption and enactment of the Law "On Rehabilitation of victims of mass repression". In general, the article presents various measures during the implementation of the state policy for the rehabilitation of victims of political repression in 20-30 years. Twentieth century. Based on archival data, the author shows the course of rehabilitation of victims of political repression and statistical materials.

Soviet and Russian Historiography of Fascist Italy: A Brief Review

The history of the study of fascist Italy in our country has 100 years. This period can be divided chronologically into two unequal parts. The first is Soviet, when the Marxist-Leninist approach prevailed, and the second is modern Russian, the main feature of which is the variability of approaches, as well as the access to declassified documents from Soviet archives as a result of the “archival revolution”. Over the past century, Soviet and Russian researchers have achieved great success in studying the internal and foreign policy of the fascist regime, the regime's relationship with various social strata of Italian society, it’s relations with traditional institutions such as the church, or the monarchy; the participation of fascist Italy in World War II, the resistance movement; trends in the Italian historiography of fascist Italy. The study of the phenomenon of fascism is of great practical importance, both from the point of view of the study of mass movements and totalitarian regimes of the first half of the twentieth century, as well as from the point of view of the genesis of the Second World War, but also in the context of exposing the criminal nature of fascism and countering its revival in the form of neo-fascist movements. This article does not pretend to be a comprehensive coverage of Russian historiography, but it attempts to highlight the main issues that Soviet and Russian historians have been working on for a last century.

SCOPE and EaaSI: Software Emulation and the Future of Architectural History

SCOPE and EaaSI: Software Emulation and the Future of Architectural History

Тенденции в западных исследованиях истории ЦентральнойАзии:примержурнала«Central Asian Survey»

The article is devoted to the study of the main trends in Western Central Asian studies over the past 40 years. As a model for tracking the above trends, there was used authoritative foreign academic journal "Central Asian Survey". As a rule, there were published advanced ideas, concepts, and results of the latest research. Respectively, the review of the works presented in it can claim to be representative of the scientific industry in general. In general, the article demonstrates the fundamental transformations in Western Central Asian studies that occurred after 1991, as a result of the collapse of the USSR, the fall of the Iron Curtain, and the corresponding changes in the research field, which faced the need to revise the paradigms that existed at that time and, in general, the tasks of the period the Cold War, the "archival revolution" and, in fact, a new era in historical research, "post-communism", which made possible various forms of intellectual exchange for researchers from previously opposed camps. Among the historiography on the history of the region analyzed in the article. Studies that consider the history of the region over the past few centuries through the prism of Russian expansionism stand out. In addition, the article focuses on works in which an attempt is made to go beyond the conceptual framework of previous studies (in particular, the “totalitarian school”). It is also worth noting the questions of the formation of a single Soviet people and the Soviet national policy in the region, ethnic thinking, as well as the evolution of the administration of tsarist Russia in the region, raised in the papers cited and analyzed in the works.

Deconstruction and the Archival Revolution: on the Relevance and Reception of Archive Fever in New Media Studies

The paper focuses on the reception of Derrida’s Archive Fever among (new) media theorists and its relevance for the ongoing discussions in that academic field. Although this Derrida’s text is often described as the one in which he provides a statement on the pervasive revolutionary impact of new media, its reception among media theorists remains scarce. Several media scholars that tackle the text, however, have an ambivalent stance on it: they appreciate some of Derrida’s theses, but regard them largely obsolete. The first part of the paper analyzes these critiques and argues that many of the objections on Derrida’s behalf are caused by the misinterpretation of important features of the deconstructive thought. In its second part, the paper firstly deals with certain weaker points of Derrida’s reflection and then proceeds to examine his insights pertinent to the problems of contemporary media theory that were neglected in earlier reception. Finally, paper reaffirms the claim about the need for a more profound exchange between the deconstruction and media studies, albeit one that would avoid the examined shortcomings.

О ревизионизме в выготсковедении. Комментарии к статье А. Ясницкого и Е. Ламдана «В августе 1941-го» (2017)

In this article we analyze the shift in Vygotskian science from “archival revolution” to the revelatory “revisionist revolution”, which Yasnitsky and colleagues proclaimed in 2012. The aim of revisionist revolu¬tion supporters is a critical analysis of the scientific heritage of Vygotsky, Luria and their colleagues, and the demythologization of Vygotsky’s personality as well as the scientific contribution of his school. We ana¬lyze in detail a selected set of the papers within “revisionist” movement and describe their advantages and disadvantages, and further question the soundness of statements of these papers. We justify our disagree¬ment with the exposed by revisionist papers undervaluation of the results of Luria’s Central Asian expedi¬tions. We also refute the assumptions of Yasnitsky and his colleagues about the absence of documentary evidence demonstrating that the heritage and name of Vygotsky were under administrative prohibition during the years of Stalinism, and provide corresponding documents. We conclude that ignorance of one group of facts, tendentious analysis of the other facts, and partiality in the discussion lead the researchers who work on “revisionist revolution” to misrepresent psychological science development.

“Tak vy zhivaya istoriya?”: sovetskiy chelovek na fone tikhoy arkhivnoy revolyutsii pozdnego sotsializma

The article focuses on the changes that occurred in archiving practices after Stalin. Based on the analysis of publications in professional journals for archivists and in popular press — as well as the personal archival collection of Perm activist and local historian Valentina Sokolova — we argue that, as a result of the democratic and humanistic turn in Soviet society after Stalin’s death, late socialism saw a shift in the understanding of who is worthy of having their documents preserved in an archive. Whereas previously only “remarkable” individuals had the right for a private archival collection, now some members of the archivist community began a campaign to collect documents of “ordinary” citizens. The archivists found allies not only among specialists but also among elderly members of the Soviet intelligentsia — participants in the building of socialism, who had no prior connection to historical studies. This shift that we call the “quiet archival revolution” became an integral part of the late Soviet commemorative turn. With the help of the archivists — enthusiasts of the “quiet archival revolution,” elderly activist came to realize their own historical significance and the value of their documents, some of which later made it to the state archival depositories.

Shaping the European School of Intelligence Studies

ABSTRACT Within a generation, intelligence studies have established themselves in continental Europe. Research infrastructure has been created with journals and conferences. The article explores how a European School of Intelligence Studies (ESIS) differs from the traditional British and American research and which scholars constitute ESIS. This work also presents new methodical proposals (e.g. using a quantitative method for selecting material from the existing empirical data sets), following the requirement that intelligence studies should have an interdisciplinary nature. Our argumentation is based on an analysis of the two main conferences, the conference of the International Intelligence History Association (IIHA) and the Need to Know-format (NtK), and it defines the content of the ESIS based on state of the art. European researchers participating in these fora were primary from Germany, Benelux, the Nordic states, and Central- and Eastern Europe. ESIS shows European West-East unity and strong ties to British, American and Israeli research, it also indicates a North-South divide. The Archival Revolution has been defining for the development of the ESIS. The access to documents regarding all areas of intelligence activity, including operational records and personal files of agents, differs from traditional declassification. This way, it is possible in Europe to do empirical research on intelligence operations in a hitherto unseen scale. Furthermore, the ESIS is characterized by substantial interest to counterintelligence and awareness of the differences between intelligence in democracies and authoritarian regimes.

American Catholic Press: Religious NEP, Repression and Laicization (1925–1939)

Recent scholarship, reflecting the “religious turn” and research opportunities after the “archival revolution” of 1991, has substantially increased our knowledge of the Roman Catholic Church and other confessions in Soviet Russia. However, most of that research has focused on Soviet religious policy and relies overwhelmingly on documentation from the state, party, and police—a voluminous, but biased source base. Those documents (including the famous “investigative files” in police archives) reveal more about Bolsheviks than believers and tell us very little about everyday religious practice. To explore the religious life at the local level, it is essential that we find a new complex of documentation. This article suggests one such set of materials: the newsfeeds and internal files of the American Catholic press agency, founded in 1920 with the task of making diocesan papers less parochial and more global—by gathering information from around the world. It is argued here that: (a) despite interwar “deglobalization,” this press agency transmitted information about religious life in the USSR that increased in volume and proved highly reliable; (b) those reports helped to trigger and sustain a Vatican shift from accommodation to anticommunism—a perspective that dominated American Catholicism well into the Cold War; (c) the press agency also demonstrated the counter-productive impact of Soviet anti-religious policies: the closing of churches and repression of clergy inexorably led to the laicization of religious practice that enabled popular Catholicism to survive in the Soviet era and to undergo a striking resurgence in post-Soviet Russia.

Polityka narodowościowa i kolonialna Związku Radzieckiego w ujęciu historiografii amerykańskiej

Changes in American interpretations of Soviet nationality policies have reflected broader shifts in U.S. historiography of the former U.S.S.R. Notwithstanding pro-Soviet apologists, U.S. scholars initially viewed the Soviet expansion into neighboring non-Russian lands as forced and integral to the emergence of the Soviet “party-state.” In effect, the Soviet rule, in particular outside of ethnic Russia, was perceived as brutal and often colonial in nature. The fall of the Soviet empire and resulting political relaxation, however, presented a turning point for the field, ushering in the so-called “archival revolution.” Consequently, the topic literature increasingly interpreted Soviet policies no longer as necessarily colonial but instead responsible for generating modern nationalities, or at least national categories. At the same time, the Soviet-era ideological divisions among U.S. scholars have not completely disappeared, while the more recent postmodern tendencies have affected the field in both positive and negative ways. Theoretical approaches that encourage comparative analysis and the deconstruction of analytical categories are used productively to maintain critical distance but also carry the risk of moral relativism.

In Search of Soviet Podlinnost´

In Search of Soviet Podlinnost´ Vitalij Fastovskij Anatolii Pinskii [Anatoly Pinsky], ed., Posle Stalina: Pozdnesovetskaia sub˝ektivnost´ (1953–1985) (After Stalin: Subjectivity in the Late Soviet Union, 1953–85). 454 pp. St. Petersburg: EUSP Press, 2018. ISBN 978-5943802423. Back in the 1990s, two circumstances came together: the “linguistic turn” reached historians of Russian and Soviet history and the “archival revolution” opened new possibilities for investigation. This made it possible to find new answers to the question of which statements—private or public—made by people living under totalitarian regimes are more believable and to what extent “common” people internalized Bolshevik values. Since then, the discovery of a “Stalinist subject” that sincerely tended to articulate itself through totalitarian discourses and practices had a huge impact on the study of Stalinism and promoted the appearance of a wide range of works dealing with “subjectivity” under Stalin and later in the post-Stalin era.1 Anatoly Pinsky’s edited volume is a contribution to this ongoing research endeavor. The term “Soviet subjectivity” appearing in the title is more an umbrella term for various ways of looking at the actors’ level than an operational concept. The authors, for example, differ not only on the question of how a subject is constituted but also on the question of its possibility to judge and to act independently. Also, not all contributors favor ego documents for the analysis of “subjectivity.” The editor’s attempt to distinguish three conceptual forms of “subjectivity” used by the contributors functions, unfortunately, only on a quite abstract level and thus only partially clarifies the problem. There seems, however, to be at least one common premise formulated by Pinsky: [End Page 184] the paradox that after the end of mass terror, the Soviet state became with time more branched and stable. This development fostered the strengthening of individual tendencies toward more autonomy and creative self-expression, which in turn undermined the attempts of various Soviet authorities to create normative Soviet subjects. The texts in the first section of the volume deal with the “macrolevel”: that is, with discourses and practices considered to be crucial for the understanding of the “subjectivity” of a considerable number of Soviet people. Cynthia Hooper shows in her text on Soviet writers and filmmakers how difficult the search for “authenticity” (podlinnost´) and happiness was after mass terror had abated, when Soviet authorities had to reconcile “that what the people want with that what people should want in their opinion” (40). Hooper shows that Soviet filmmakers and writers like El´dar Riazanov or Vasilii Aksenov were still dedicated to the normative values of the Soviet state, although they extended the boundaries of personal possibilities for Soviet people. However, while it seems to be true that these cultural figures thought in similar categories to, for example, state propagandists, it is not entirely clear why all of Hooper’s historical actors saw “this sometimes absurd and disturbing Soviet social-economic structure” (29) as a guarantee of podlinnost´. Such a view implies that Soviet film-makers and writers have been unable in principle to distinguish between morals and politics and therefore unable to undock Soviet (or “humanistic”) moral goods from the Soviet “social-economic structure.” It is also doubtful whether the opposition of podlinnyi and mnimyi (delusionary) actually originated in the 1930s, when the distinction between “true” and “false” Communists reached an unprecedented peak, or was a much older problem. Maria Maiofis writes about children’s choral studios as a place where Soviet values and virtues such as discipline, collectivity, devotion to work, and solidarity were internalized. Maiofis argues that in the absence of terror the Soviet project was in great need of new, positive forms of mobilization. This led to growth in the number of children’s choral studios and finally to their absolute dominance in the Soviet Union. She also points to the fact that many former members of the studios maintained a nostalgic form of loyalty to their former collectives even after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Another contribution to the problem of podlinnost´ is offered by Mikhail Rozhanskii in his paper on Soviet films dealing with Siberia in 1959. Rozhanskii’s finding is that with the “semantic...

A Science of Facts? Classifying and Using Records in the French Imperial Archives under Napoleon

The article explores the practice of historical research in connection with archival management at the turn of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, focusing on revolutionary and imperial France, when the French archives underwent unprecedented alteration. More precisely, it deals with the period 1808–14, when the archives directed by former revolutionary P. C. F. Daunou were merged into a new Palais des Archives and the historical archives of Europe were transported to Paris to form a central imperial repository. The article argues that the management, classification and use of archival documents followed the notion of history as a social science and an analytical empirical discipline put forward by the influential group of the Idéologues in post-Thermidorian France. This resulted in a peculiar way of dealing with the mass of new sources now available in the Archives de l’Empire. Indeed, the practice of historical research in the French archives was linked to a small, yet significant innovation in data management and material culture, namely, the use of filing cards in order to extract facts from documents. The article discusses the distinctive features of archival management and historical research in this transition period in comparison with the supposed “archival revolution” of Romantic historiography.

Central Asian History as Soviet History

In a spring 2015 forum in this journal, a group of established scholars discussed Central Asia's place in the field of Russian and Soviet history. (1) Are scholars of Central Asia, they asked, marginalized by--or worse--marginal to the broader profession? The current collection of essays helps answer this question. Here four young historians present research on Central Asia that is not only valuable as Central Asian history but also addresses questions that are absolutely central to the history of the Soviet Union. What did it mean to be national, to be Soviet, to be both national and Soviet? How did World War II transform Soviet citizens and their relationship to one another and to the Soviet state? How did Soviet experts conceive of modernity and economic development? How did the Soviet Union represent itself at home and abroad? Each of these essays uses valuable, hitherto underutilized sources: soldiers' letters from the front, written in Uzbek and other non-Russian languages; republican archives in Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan; the writings of Tajik economists; a trove of photographs from the Sovinformbiuro; oral history interviews. Timothy Nunan and Artemy Kalinovsky focus on topics scarcely explored in Soviet Central Asia--visual culture and political economy. Charles Shaw and Moritz Florin approach the more established topics of ethnicity, nationality, and Soviet identity in innovative ways. All four of these essays investigate the wartime and postwar years, crucial periods in Soviet Central Asian history that have only recently become the object of sustained attention. The essays offer a wealth of material for discussion, but I focus here on three themes that make particularly significant contributions to the field of Soviet history, in my view: World War II as a turning point in the transformation of Central Asia (and, by extension, the Soviet Union as a whole); the evolution of identities in Central Asia during and after the war; and the place of Central Asia in the intersection of Soviet domestic and foreign policy during the postwar era. World War II as a Turning Point The first post-Soviet generation of Western scholars in the 1990s and 2000s focused mainly on the period between the revolutions and World War II, for understandable reasons. A wealth of untouched materials and indigenous-language sources existed for the 1920s and 1930s that was richer and more diverse than that of the later Stalinist era. From a strictly practical point of view, it made sense to gain an understanding of the early Soviet period before turning to the later decades. These early post-Soviet works focused primarily on nation making, gender, and Islam--all topics that had attracted attention from scholars well before the post-1991 archival revolution. (2) Taken together, these monographs suggested that the Soviet transformation of Central Asia in the interwar period was incomplete. Indeed, in some ways it had scarcely begun. At the beginning of World War II, mass education continued to be rudimentary, and few Central Asians knew Russian. Most Central Asians remained mystified by, if not completely unfamiliar with, the main tenets of Marxist-Leninist ideology. Efforts to transform the status of women and backward family customs had met with limited success. Historians working on the 1920s and 1930s knew--or surmised--that the war and early postwar years were crucial in making Central Asia Soviet, but we did not yet have the evidence to demonstrate this. The next wave of scholarly work turned to the wartime and postwar periods, and dissertations and books dealing with this period have begun to appear in recent years. (3) Charles Shaw and Moritz Florin emphasize the war as a turning point in the transformation of Central Asia and its integration into the Soviet imagined community. First and most obviously, the war transformed the young Central Asian men who served in the Red Army. As Shaw shows, Uzbek soldiers learned Russian, adapted to Soviet frontline culture, and learned to present themselves in new ways. …

Sixty Years On: How the Superpowers Could Have Avoided the 1956 Hungarian Revolution

Following the political transition in Hungary and in East-Central Europe in 1989-90 an archival revolution unfolded in the countries of the former Soviet bloc, including Russia after 1991. Thanks to this process, the previously taboo topic of the 1956 Hungarian Revolution has become one of the best researched events of the history of the Soviet Bloc by the time of the sixtieth anniversary of the events. This includes the international context of the revolt as well, which has been covered by scholars in Hungary and abroad based on multiarchival evidence.

The Gulag and the Non-Gulag as One Interrelated Whole

One would be hard-pressed to identify a question of the Soviet past that has been studied with the same intensity over the past few decades as the history of Stalin's Gulag. (1) Thousands of works have been written on the basis of manifold interviews, published memoirs, and documents from both state and private collections. The long list of thoroughly examined topics includes aspects of the Stalinist repressive political apparatus, the structure of the Gulag, the functioning of its administrative bureaucracy from the lowest rungs to the central leadership, and the principles undergirding forced labor and camp life. Many data concerning the magnitude of the camp system, its population, and indicators of production have been published and circulated. Scholars are investigating key moments in the history of the Gulag, such as prisoner uprisings. Increasingly, the object of study has become various aspects of Gulag society itself. (2) The historiography of the Gulag is, broadly speaking, approaching the point at which we merely begin to reproduce or touch up a well-illustrated picture; one now senses a pressing need to reconsider the literature with the aim of identifying lacunae and new directions for research. Indeed, the advent of new approaches for studying the Gulag is to some extent predicated on the development of new source bases. (3) At the same time, the archival revolution has inevitably contributed to ever-growing specialization, and therefore much will still depend on our ability to sharpen our perspective on the most fundamental questions and problems of Gulag scholarship. The present article is intended to highlight several complex questions regarding the Gulag's history. In particular, I draw attention to the task of defining the Gulag's boundaries, identifying the channels of its interaction with the broader Soviet society, and specifying the consequences of these interactions in both short- and long-term perspective. Such questions are not entirely novel; one need only recall Alexander Solzhenitsyn's journey through implicitly bounded circles of the Gulag hell or his conception of the Soviet world as bifurcated between greater and lesser zones. (4) At the same time, as they bring to bear previously unknown facts and new methods, historians are in a position to refine and even to challenge established perspectives, or at the very least to articulate new directions for research. Defining Boundaries Recent work has contributed to a vivid and compelling picture of Soviet society under Stalin as composed of several interrelated layers. The first is the Gulag itself--a flourishing system of camps, colonies, prisons, special settlements, and other more fleeting and specialized units of isolation and forced labor. The preponderance of available data indicates that between 1930 and 1952, nearly 25 million people passed through the Gulag system, 18-20 million of whom were sentenced to imprisonment in camps, colonies, and prisons. (5) Meanwhile, no fewer than six million people, mostly kulaks and members of repressed nationalities, were sent into internal exile, living under conditions approaching those of the camps themselves in special settlements. (6) In addition, World War II saw several million Soviet citizens interned, quarantined, or subjected to forced labor. The Gulag population was notable for its diversity and for an internal hierarchy that mirrored the hierarchy of Soviet society beyond the Gulag. There were inversions as well: political prisoners, many of whom occupied high positions outside the Gulag, frequently found themselves at a much lower level on the Gulag's social ladder, often yielding to common criminals. (7) The world of special settlements was similarly diverse. The groups most typically liable to deportation included peasants, Baltic and Ukrainian partisans, persecuted peoples of the North Caucusus, and city dwellers expelled during the passportization process. …

'Esteemed Comintern!': The Communist International and World-Revolutionary Charisma in Early Soviet Society

The Communist International (Comintern) has been a prominent topic of research in the wake of the 'archival revolution'. This article considers the importance of internationalism in early Soviet Russia and shows how constant reference to its centrality at the beginning of the communist project was used against the rise of Stalinism - the orientation away from spreading revolution abroad to building 'socialism in one country' - not only by the Left Opposition, but crucially by the wider sections of Soviet society. The article re-conceptualises analyses of early Soviet internationalism and the Comintern by developing Max Weber's concept of 'institutional charisma' in an innovative and convincing contribution above and beyond the current revival of interest in 'political religion' as a conceptual framework to explaining political belief and active engagement. Drawing on Weber, it assesses the Comintern not just as an organisation, but as a political symbol and an embodiment of world-revolutionary charisma in early Soviet society. By taking into account a broad variety of sources, the article considers the images of the Comintern that were created by the Party and how these shaped the imagination of the rank and file as well as reaching beyond the party membership. It explores how the 'international' as a potent symbol was being assessed even before the Comintern's official formation in 1919, and its transformations are followed through into the onset of Stalinism.

The Archival Revolution and Contested Memory: Changing Views of Stalin’s Rule in the Light of New Evidence

The article discusses the impact on Western scholarship of the opening of secret police archives in Ukraine since the 1990s. The extent of the phenomenon known as the “archi­val revolution” is surveyed, with special attention to the Stalin period. The archives have answered some old questions concerning the way Stalin exercised power, organized show trials, and forced people to admit to crimes they did not commit. Archival revela­tions have also stimulated Western researchers to consider new ways of interpreting the Soviet period as a whole.

“Really Existing Socialism” and the Archival Revolution

It is often said that the “archival revolution” of the last twenty years—the publication of Soviet party, governmental, and secret police archives both in Russia and the West—has fundamentally transformed our understanding of what the Soviets used to call “really existing socialism.” The volumes in the Yale University Press “Annals of Communism” series (twenty-seven in all) give ample support to this thesis. That series includes indispensable volumes of Lenin’s secret writings, along with the key documentation surrounding the Katyn Forest massacre of 1940 (in which over 20,000 Polish nationals were murdered on the order of Stalin and the Soviet politburo), the Great Terror, which refers to Stalin’s purge trials of the 1930s, and the war against the independent peasantry, which includes the collectivization and forced famines of the early 1930s. Acad. Quest. (2012) 25:308–313 DOI 10.1007/s12129-012-9288-5

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

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.