Commissariat Of Internal Affairs Research Articles

INDUSTRIAL BUILDING IN THE SYSTEM OF GULAG IN THE EUROPEAN NORTH OF RUSSIA IN THE 1930 – EARLY 1940s: SCOPE, TRENDS AND CHALLENGES

The article discusses the activities of the GULAG in the field of industrial building in the European North of the country. The study is based on the source database, which includes materials from both Central and regional archives, such as engineering documentation of corrective labor camps and colonies, and the materials from the Chief administration of camps for industrial building. The chronological framework of the issue encompasses 1930s – the beginning of the 1940s. Particular attention is paid to the pre-war development stage of the mobilization economy, during which comes the final formation of the contours of construction production in this region. The article reveals multi-sectoral direction of the activities of People's Commissariat of Internal Affairs in the field of industrial building, covering the objects of mining-metallurgical, fuel, timber industries. The article gives an analysis of the complex problems of the industry based on the analysis of reporting documentation and accounting and control materials of Central directorate of People's Commissariat of Internal Affairs. Almost all of the problems were permanent, despite of the reorganization processes in the GULAG system of forced labor. This approach to the topic gives a deeper and comprehensive assessment of Stalin's special colonization of the periphery of the USSR. The analysis of the processes taking place in the industrial building sector of People's Commissariat of Internal Affairs, illustrates the serious difficulties faced by the GULAG, departing from solving problems of extensive development and intensifying their production activities.

Организация охраны военнопленных и борьба с побегами в лагерях НКВД-МВД СССР в 1941–1956 годах

Организация охраны военнопленных и борьба с побегами в лагерях НКВД-МВД СССР в 1941–1956 годах

No Total Totality: Forced Labor, Stalinism, and De-Stalinization

Alan Barenberg, Gulag Town, Company Town: Forced Labor and Its Legacy in Vorkuta. 331 pp. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2014. ISBN-13 9780300179446. $65.00. Anatolii I. Shirokov, Dal'stroi v sotsial'no-ekonomicheskom razvitii SeveroVostokaSSSR (1930-1950-egg.) (Dal 'stroi in the Socioeconomic Development of the Northeastern USSR [1930-1950s]). 654 pp. Moscow: Rosspen, 2014. ISBN-13 978-5824318944. Aleksei V. Zakharchenko, NKVD iformirovanieaviapromyshlennogo kompleksa v Povolzh 'e, 1940-1943 (The NKVD and the Formation of the Aviation Industrial Complex in the Volga Region, 1940-43). 480 pp. Samara: Institut rossiiskoi istorii Rossiiskoi akademii nauk, Povolzhskii filial, 2013. ISBN 978-5934246588. Recent historical writing about the Soviet Union includes notable, muchneeded, and diligent works dedicated to the consolidation, development, and expansion of the prison camp system, as well as the role that it played in the Soviet Union's transition from a dictatorship to an ordinary authoritarian regime. Researchers have made use of new sources to produce valuable work examining the deep internal conditions leading to the expansion of the I Gulag. (1) The books under review are vivid examples of this historiographical trend. Descriptions of the camps and their economic structures, as well as summaries of statistical evidence about the number of prisoners and industrial output--characteristic of earlier Gulag research--are not completely absent from these new works, but they have taken on a secondary role. To a much greater degree, the authors focus on the practices of administering the camp economy and realizing departmental interests; the evolution of inmate society; and implicit or explicit signs of crisis in the Stalinist system of forced labor. Alan Barenberg dedicates his brilliantly written book to the largest division of the Gulag: the camp complex of Vorkuta, in the northern European part of the USSR. The region, ill-suited for habitation but rich in resources (primarily coal), was the ideal place for a Stalinist camp. Vorkuta became the symbol of the camp system for these and many other reasons. After the camp was eliminated, it became an informative example of how the Gulag's economic and social structures evolved and were maintained. Equally emblematic is Anatolii I. Shirokov's subject of study: the notorious Dal'stroi Trust, which mined gold from the rich deposits on the Kolyma river basin in the northeastern USSR. Over a quarter-century (1932-56), the basin yielded 1,200 tons of gold and huge amounts of other nonferrous metals. Around 850,000 prisoners passed through the camps at Kolyma from 1932 to 1953, of whom 120,000 died (482, 638). Aleksei Zakharchenko focuses his study on a lesser-known and smaller, though no less significant, site of Stalinist forced labor. The famous airplane factories near Kuibyshev, which were constructed by prisoners in extreme conditions in compressed time frames, played a significant role in the war with Nazi Germany, supplying the front with a large portion of its Soviet planes. Despite thematic differences, each of these three works analyzes the same phenomenon: the formation, development, and expansion of major production complexes under the direction of the People's Commissariat of Internal Affairs, later Ministry of Internal Affairs (NKVD-MVD USSR). (2) I am grateful to Liudmila Novikova, Victoria Frede, Paul Werth, and Rhiannon Dowling for their valuable comments and skillful translation. This article was prepared within the framework of a subsidy granted to the National Research University Higher School of Economics (HSE) by the government of the Russian Federation for the implementation of the Global Competitiveness Program. The authors examine two models of Gulag expansion: the first through camp colonization of distant and hard-to-reach parts of the country; and the second through the use of forced labor in populated regions of substantial economic value. …

Destructive-Labor Camps: Rethinking Solzhenitsyn’s Play on Words

Destructive-Labor CampsRethinking Solzhenitsyn’s Play on Words Golfo Alexopoulos (bio) Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn has been called “one of the great truth-tellers of the twentieth century,” and a breaker of the Soviet regime’s “blockade of silence.”1 The writer, who first revealed to his countrymen and the world the inhumanity of the Soviet penal labor system, was also a master of language. Like Jacques Rossi, whose Gulag Handbook exposed the camps’ alternative conceptual universe, Solzhenitsyn focused attention on the Gulag lexicon.2 He rejected the Stalinist term for the slave labor system, corrective-labor camps (ispravitel´no-trudovye lageria), in favor of his own term: destructive-labor camps (istrebitel´no-trudovye lageria).3 This pun or play on Soviet words stressed that Gulag labor was more lethal than corrective. According to Solzhenitsyn, “the camps were designed for destruction” (izobreteny lageria—na istreblenie).4 The writer highlighted the Gulag’s destructive elements, like the inhumane transport of prisoners and the draconian rules governing food and work. Solzhenitsyn did not have access to official Soviet sources, yet the archives support his assertions regarding the Gulag’s destructive capacity. I argue that Stalin’s Gulag constituted an institution of extreme physical exploitation at [End Page 499] its core, and that human exploitation in the camps was destructive by design. Moreover, as the present work illustrates, the system of physical exploitation in the camps grew more severe from the 1930s to the 1950s. Under Stalin, the Gulag produced an enormous population of prisoners on the verge of death, the so-called goners (dokhodiagi). To unburden the camps, conserve resources, and artificially reduce Gulag mortality rates, the Stalinist leadership routinely released these nearly dead inmates. Not only was Stalin’s Gulag destructive, but it deliberately concealed its destructive capacity. Gulag literature catalogues the causes of human suffering and mortality, but scholars do not generally argue that the Stalinist camps were designed for destruction.5 We know that the Soviet security police (Unified State Political Administration, People’s Commissariat of Internal Affairs, Ministry of Internal Affairs [OGPU–NKVD–MVD]), which managed the arrest, deportation, and detention of millions in labor camps and settlements, was distinctly uninterested in preserving human life. Nonetheless, no plan of destruction has emerged from our initial reading of declassified state and party documents. Thus, although historians have emphasized the brutality of the system, few have argued that the Gulag was deliberately destructive.6 More common is the view that the Gulag represented an institution of mass death but not mass murder. Scholars have demonstrated that people died from the brutal journey in sealed railcars to their remote camps; the hostile Arctic environment; and the neglect, incompetence, and cruelty of camp officials and fellow inmates. Memoirs and the historical literature underscore the nonsystemic causes of Gulag mortality: deaths resulting from underdevelopment (poor sanitation and infrastructure), violent criminal gangs, shortages and theft of food, sadistic guards, or factors external to the system, such as the harsh climate and war. Taken together, these do not produce an image of a labor camp system that was destructive by design. Although Solzhenitsyn remains the towering figure in Gulag studies, his analysis of “destructive-labor camps” has not been widely embraced in the historical literature. [End Page 500] There are many reasons why. As noted, no statement from the Stalinist leadership has emerged that expresses a high-level intention or state-sponsored plan to destroy prisoners; quite the contrary, we have found many official complaints concerning elevated rates of illness and mortality and attempts by party leaders to incentivize forced labor and improve productivity through material rewards. Moreover, the Nazi–Soviet comparison looms large. There exists a legitimate desire to avoid false equivalencies between the Nazi extermination camps and the Soviet labor camps.7 Moreover, a vast memoir literature appears to underscore the survivability of the Soviet camps; some memoirists, like Eugenia Ginzburg, endured nearly two decades in detention.8 The Gulag maintained hospitals and clinics, and camp doctors were not tasked with experimental and “mercy” killing, as in the Nazi case.9 Rather, many camp doctors viewed themselves as healers and often struggled to improve prisoners’ chances of survival.10 The NKVD–Gulag leadership regularly...

Russian

Russian

Red Terror against Islamic Manuscripts: The Case of the Manuscript Collection of Salmān Mumtāz

This paper discusses the communist repression against manuscripts and their owners in Azerbaijan. It focuses in particular on the lost manuscript collection of the philologist, writer, and collector, Salmān Mumtāz (1884–1941). His desire for knowledge, together with his proficiency in a dozen or so languages, and his social status as a merchant brought him into possession of a valuable manuscript collection, which became famous beyond Azerbaijan. Upon his arrest in 1937 as an ‘enemy of the state’, his manuscripts were confiscated and subsequently lost within the walls of the offices of the NKVD, the People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs, the Communist Secret Police. In the present paper, a first attempt is made to determine the contents of Salmān Mumtāz’s library. The attempt is based on his research on Azerbaijani literature in general and the archival materials of the KGB in particular. More specifically, it examines the criminal case file concerning Salmān Mumtāz, which includes attestations of contemporary scholars and family members about his library as well as a partial list of the contents of his collection.

El calvario de los brigadistas húngaros

The elite of the Hungarian volunteers of the Spanish Civil War became victim of the Communist terror after World War II (1949-1950). The main role was played by the brigadist, László Rajk, who, before the trial, was the secretary of the Hungarian Communist Party, Minister of the Interior, and then Minister of Foreign Affairs. He was charged with spying for the “imperialists” and Tito as well as with high treason and anti-Semitism. In the show trial of “Rajk and his associates” 155 people were charged and convicted, 15 of them, including Rajk, were condemned to death. In the indictment Rajk was condemned for his activity during the Spanish Civil War: he was accused of being a fascist, and then an imperialist agent, as well as a “Trockyist”, just like the twenty other Hungarian Brigadists. The background of the trial has been thoroughly analysed in Hungarian historiography, but the accusation connected to the Spanish period has not been examined or criticized. The present study, based on new sources, such as the reports of the Hungarian Communist Secret Service, the papers of the KGB Archives in Moscow, and the Comintern, raises the issue emphasizing the negative role of Ernő Gerő (“Pedro”), who was the representative of the Comintern and the PCIA (People's Commissariat for Internal Affairs), in the process.

Kartka z dziejów administracji spraw wewnętrznych RSFRR : na drodze do dekretu z 6 lutego 1922 r.

This article is about stages of evolution of the security apparatus in Russia from the time of appointment until the establishment of the Soviet Union in 1922. The starting point is presentation of the positions of the classics of Marxism (Marx, Engels, Plekhanov, Lenin) about the place and role of the apparatus of oppression in the state of the proletariat during the liquidation of the resistance of the exploiting class. Then, were discussed circumstances of the establishment of the CZEKA, its structure and the place in the system of power during the fi rst period of its operation. Much attention was devoted to the description of the confl ict between the socialist-revolutionary fraction of communist party and the Bolsheviks within the Commission itself. Moreover, was presented the terror of CZEKA in the years 1918–1920, then, the causes and consequences of its liquidation in 1922. In the ending remarks, the Author focused on the presentation of institutions, that took over roles and competences of CZEKA – the People’s Commissariat of Internal Aff airs (NKVD) and the State Political Directorate (GPU). He also signaled the creation of counterintelligence, dealing with the protection of the Red Army (Smersh).

Poliuvannia na Val´dshnepa: Rozsekrechenyi Mykola Khvyl´ovyi (Hunting for "Woodcock": Mykola Khvyl´ovyi Declassified) (review)

Iurii Shapoval, ed., Poliuvannia na Val'dshnepa: Rozsekrechenyi Mykola Khvyl'ovyi (Hunting for Woodcock: Mykola Khvyl'ovyi Declassified), introduction and commentary by Iurii Shapoval and Volodymyr Panchenko. 295 pp. Includes DVD Tsar' i tab khytroshchiv (Tsar and Slave of Wiles). Kyiv: Tempora, 2009. ISBN-13 978-9668201851. The Ukrainian historian Iurii Shapoval's recent volume of previously unpublished documents from the archive of Ukraine's security service, the Sluzhba bezpeky Ukrainy (SBU), attests to the involvement of the secret police in the life of the Soviet Ukrainian writer and Communist Mykola Khvyl'ovyi (1893-1933). The volume includes the majority of documents from file S-183, the State Political Administration (GPU) file on Khvyl'ovyi kept in the archives since the 1930s. Shapoval has worked for a long time to gain access to this file, and the documents are well worth the wait. They both confirm and complicate our understanding of the relationship between artists and officialdom in the early Soviet period. Shapoval's introductory essay and commentary, however, present an analysis of this relationship that I would like in this review to contest. (1) Iurii Shapoval has written extensively on the mechanisms of Soviet rule in Ukraine and published numerous collections of archival documents. This particular volume is of especial value to researchers because it contains material not widely available elsewhere, either in Ukraine or in Russia. While only accessible to family members of the repressed in Russia (or those with privileged access), investigation files (sledstvennye dela) are, in general, open to researchers in Ukraine, whether at the SBU archive (including its local branches) or the central party archive in Kyiv. These files, however, begin only with an arrest warrant and include statements from the arrested, notice of sentencing, and, when applicable, documents on rehabilitation. Nowhere can one read the files that led to these files. The Khvyl'ovyi file is so valuable precisely because it constitutes that extraordinary pre-story: information gathered from local informers, internal memoranda, and other documents that could have led to the printing of an arrest warrant and opening of an investigation file. (2) Shapoval's contribution, then, differs from previous collections of documents relating to Soviet culture and Soviet artist-official relations. Andrei Artizov's and Oleg Naumov's volume of documents (translated and edited for the Annals of Communism series by Katerina Clark and Evgeny Dobrenko) illuminates the relationship between the Soviet party-state and the arts with memoranda and letters from the GPU-People's Commissariat of Internal Affairs (NKVD), the Central Committee, and Stalin himself in order to focus on the party-state's decision making in cultural policy. The file on Khvyl'ovyi, by contrast, illuminates less high-level decision making and more the world in which artists and officials lived and worked. (3) Although this volume centers on only one file, that file belonged to Mykola Khvyl'ovyi, a writer, card-carrying Communist, and figure central to the early years of Soviet Ukraine. Volodymyr Panchenko's background essay gives thorough biographical detail (46-79). Born Nikolai Fitilev in the Sumy region to a teacher's family, the future Mykola Khvyl'ovyi acquired a modicum of education and joined the Russian Imperial Army in 1914. He continued his military service during the Civil War, ended up in the Red Army (from 1917-18 his exact military affiliation is unknown), and found himself demobilized in Kharkiv in 1921. Within several years, he was the leading cultural figure in Soviet Ukraine thanks to his polemical pamphlets and personal magnetism that attracted other writers and party officials. The major cultural figures gathered at his apartment, the journals with which he was involved constituted the major publications, and everyone who was anyone was either his friend or his enemy. …

“The Differences Were Only in the Details”: The Moral Equivalency of Stalinism and Nazism in Anatolii Bakanichev’s Twelve Years behind Barbed Wire

In the spring of 1945, Anatolii Efimovich gakanichev (1920-2006), having endured almost four years as a German prisoner of war (POW), finally returned to his native USSR. Instead of a warm welcome, he was met with intense suspicion. In his unpublished memoir, Bakanichev vividly described the scene of his repatriation to the Soviet occupation zone: 5,000 [repatriating citizens] stood in a field with their things .... NKVD [People's Commissariat of Internal Affairs] troops began to walk through the rows and pick out people. This strongly reminded me of the beginning of my time as a POW, when the Germans did the exact same thing, picking out Jews. (1) Bakanichev's homecoming was to be short-lived. Although allowed to return home to Moscow, in 1948 he was arrested and dispatched to the Gulag. Here he found no surprises waiting for him: The Noril'sk camp turned out to be exactly like I imagined. In general, the same thing as in the Hitlerite camp; the differences were only in the details. (2) As the above passage illustrates, Bakanichev perceived a fundamental similarity between his experience as a POW in Germany and his time in the Gulag. This article presents a close analysis of how Bakanichev's desire to tell the about led him to question Stalin's wartime conduct and the simplistic, heroic version of the Great Patriotic War, how he drew on memories of German POW camps and the Gulag to challenge Soviet readers to recognize the equivalency between Stalinism and Nazism, and how this challenge fit into wider debates over the history of Stalinism in the late Soviet Union. By describing how his time in German captivity had opened his eyes to the criminal nature of Stalin's rule, Bakanichev subverted the dominant Soviet mythology of the Great Patriotic War, which sought to legitimize the postwar Soviet order by presenting the war as a moral triumph of Soviet socialism over German fascism. (3) For Bakanichev, the Great Patriotic War was indeed a moral test, but it was one that Stalin's Soviet Union had resoundingly failed. Bakanichev was not content, however, to simply chronicle the ways in which Stalin had betrayed his own soldiers, or even to point out the myriad similarities between his camp experiences. Rather, he argued that the two camp systems were indicative of a deeper affinity between Stalinism and Nazism and challenged Soviet readers to recognize the moral implications of this connection. Convinced that this truth about Stalinism needed to be communicated to others, Bakanichev committed his memories to paper in 1974-75. He did not attempt to publish this work, however, until the height of glasnost : Bakanichev's efforts in 1988 to publish his memoir in both Literaturnaia gazeta and Novyi mir were unsuccessful, but excerpts would eventually appear in the Rabochaia tribuna newspaper in 1993. (4) Bakanichev also donated typewritten copies of his memoir to Memorial and to Narodnyi arkhiv as another means of preserving his story for others. Looking back on his own life, Bakanichev saw the story of a young man whose dreams of academic success were suddenly interrupted by war and terror. Bakanichev was able to fulfill his longtime goal of attending Moscow State University (MGU) for only two months before being drafted into the army in 1939. After being surrounded and captured during Operation Barbarossa, he endured almost four years of hunger and forced labor in a series of POW and labor camps, including Steyerberg and Bomlitz. After escaping in the spring of 1945, Bakanichev chose to repatriate to the Soviet Union and attempted to resume his academic studies. Unfortunately, he was now refused entry into MGU, and instead he chose to train at the Gubkin Oil Institute as an engineer. Even this small consolation was not to last, however, as the Ministry of State Security (MGB) soon summoned Bakanichev several times for interrogation and attempted to persuade him to become a police informant at his institute. …

Revolution on My Mind: Writing a Diary under Stalin , and: Stories of the Soviet Experience: Memoirs, Diaries, Dreams (review)

Reviewed by: Revolution on My Mind: Writing a Diary under Stalin, and: Stories of the Soviet Experience: Memoirs, Diaries, Dreams Thomas Seifrid Jochen Hellbeck , Revolution on My Mind: Writing a Diary under Stalin. 448 pp. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006. ISBN-13 978-0674032316. $19.95. Irina Paperno , Stories of the Soviet Experience: Memoirs, Diaries, Dreams. 304 pp. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2009. ISBN-13 978-0801448393, $55.00 (cloth); 978-0801475900, $22.95 (paper). Jochen Hellbeck's Revolution on My Mind: Writing a Diary under Stalin and Irina Paperno's Stories of the Soviet Experience lay to rest two closely related commonplaces about the historiography of the Stalin era in Russia (some of the first blows, at least for readers in the West, having been dealt by the translated anthology of Stalin-era diaries, Intimacy and Terror).1 The first is that the Stalinist regime—whose own rhetorical campaigns so aggressively dominated contemporary media, public space, and archives—ensured that very few documents of private life were preserved for subsequent generations. The second is that there were few such documents to begin with, because the invasive and repressive manner in which the regime thrust itself on its citizenry meant that personal thoughts and experiences were discussed only in the most private realms and not, as a rule, committed to paper—which, like the rubles Nikanor Ivanovich Bosoi hides in the ventilation flue of his bathroom in Bulgakov's Master and Margarita, had an uncanny way of ending up as hard currency in the hands of the People's Commissariat of Internal Affairs (NKVD). As both these studies amply demonstrate, the Stalin era in fact witnessed something of a boom in diary writing in spite of the state's insistence on collective, public life and party ideology—and even, in some ways, because of it. Both Hellbeck and Paperno survey of a range of diaries (and, in some cases, autobiographical memoirs) in an effort to identify recurring patterns in them: [End Page 911] of self-identity and development; of self-defined relation to the Party, state, or workplace; and patterns across diaries and memoirs of reaction to cardinal events such as the purges of the late 1930s or World War II. Hellbeck covers a somewhat wider range of materials than does Paperno, examining the diaries of well-known writers such as Dmitrii Furmanov, Iurii Olesha, and Aleksandr Afinogenov as well as those kept by members of the former intelligentsia, who resisted and then struggled to adapt to the new order, and, most symptomatic of all, those of several vydvizhentsy, men who ascended from obscure provincial or rural origins to acquire an education (typically technological) and some sort of public role (e.g., as brigade leader at work, as agitator, etc.). Hellbeck's primary interest lies in using the diaries to probe the nature of Stalin-era subjectivity. He warns against the facile application of a "public-private binary" to these records of personal experience because it assumes that Soviet citizens strove "like liberal subjects" (86) for individual autonomy, whereas most of them, he suggests, were committed Marxists who actively participated in the initiatives of the state. This suspension of Western prejudice is certainly necessary to a scholarly consideration of the material, but in some ways it intensifies rather than allays concerns about how we, at our historical and geographical remove, understand the diaries. One such concern is hermeneutic and applies to the reader: how can we tell what the diarist's ultimate intentions and self-understanding were? It might be reasonable to assume that, if a diarist like Nina Lugovskaia, one of Hellbeck's examples, states that she keeps her diary to expose the "lies" of communist propaganda (60), then she is telling the truth, because it is improbable that any one would fictionalize such a posture. But what of the many vydvizhentsy who in their notebooks express nothing but enthusiasm for the Soviet remaking of their world? In the absence of other evidence, are we safe in assuming they are sincere? Or is it also possible, as other forms of evidence from the Stalinist era might suggest, that some of these Soviet subjects were in fact clever...

The Enemy, the Communist, and Ideological Closure in Soviet Cinema on the Eve of the Great Terror: ( The Peasants and The Party Card )

The Enemy, the Communist, and Ideological Closure in Soviet Cinema on the Eve of the Great Terror(The Peasants and The Party Card) Andrey Shcherbenok (bio) The figure of the contemporaneous internal enemy was an integral part of Soviet cinema throughout the 1930s. This figure was novel—Soviet cinema in the 1920s found little material in a Soviet reality dominated by the New Economic Policy (NEP) to warrant a violent political plotline; although ideological debates and anxieties were intense,1 the demarcation lines between "us" and "them" remained blurred, while the representations of the most obvious candidate for the role of the enemy—the nascent NEP bourgeoisie—tended to belong stylistically to comedy rather than political drama. As a result, Soviet avant-garde film, with its inherent predilection for vehement political struggle, concentrated on the past rather than the present: the Revolution and the Civil War—the events, although recent, clearly belonging to a quite different historical period—were the subject matter of the films that such directors as Sergei Eisenstein, Aleksandr Dovzhenko, and Vsevolod Pudovkin made before 1929. The situation changed with the Great Break of 1928–29 that inaugurated the collectivization of agriculture and the industrialization drive. The radicalization of adversarial internal politics, with its sharp dividing lines between communist proponents of the new policies and their mortal enemies, coincided with an important development in cinematic art—the introduction of Socialist Realism, which strove to combine the political consciousness and propagandism of the Soviet avant-garde with the engaging potential of mass-entertainment cinema. Socialist Realist films promoted individualized and psychologized characters that replaced the collective hero of the avant-garde, making cinema an important vehicle for the process that Oleg Kharkhordin describes as the individuation/ [End Page 753] individualization that the Soviet subject underwent after 1929.2 This development was greatly facilitated by the introduction of sound in 1931, which made cinema closer to theater with its traditional models of psychologization. Thus the development of the figure of the contemporaneous, internal, and individualized political enemy in the 1930s was overdetermined by political practice, ideological discourse, the introduction of the new aesthetic, and the development of cinematic technology. Enemies of all kinds—wreckers, foreign spies, and double-dealers—routinely appear in 1930s Soviet films of all genres, including even musical comedies.3 Their centrality to the plot and their articulateness as characters, however, vary greatly. In many of the 1930s films, the enemy only appears in subplots to give the protagonist an opportunity to display his/her heroism, as in N. A. Kosheverova and Iu. A. Muzykant's Arinka (1939), where an unnamed enemy appears literally from the woods trying to derail the train, or in E. V. Cherviakov's Honor (1938), where a similar attempt to derail the train is made by one of the minor characters. Many industrial dramas of the period include sabotage as one of the obstacles faced by the builders of socialism, as in F. M. Ermler and S. I. Iutkevich's Counterplan (1932), S. I. Iutkevich's Miners (1937), or S. A. Gerasimov's Komsomol´sk (1938). Finally, the detective genre provides, as in Evgenii Shneider's High Award (1939) or A. V. Macharet's The Mistake of Engineer Kochin (1939), its share of foreign spies to be traced and captured by the People's Commissariat of Internal Affairs (NKVD). While the many Soviet films of the 1930s tend to use the enemy as an auxiliary figure to sustain the plot and do not concentrate on the enemy himself, some of them address the subject in a much more thorough and complex manner. Not surprisingly, these films did not pass unnoticed by the Soviet authorities. Ermler's The Peasants (1935), one of the two films I analyzet in this article, was included among just a few feature films to be put in a special preservation safe in the recently opened Soviet film archive;4 the other, I. A. Pyr´ev's The Party Card (1936), was specifically promoted by Stalin, who overruled the initial rejection of the film by the censorship committee and gave it its title.5 Not only are these two films among the first to address seriously the topic...

Katyn and the Soviet Massacre of 1940: Truth, Justice and Memory by George Sanford (review)

79? SEER, 85, 4, OCTOBER 2007 course true that the 1928 Shakhty Trial contained elements of drama compa rable with the agitation trials, but did 'fiction and reality become indistin guishable' as the tide of chapter ten suggests? Itwould be foolish to deny that, by the end of the decade, the agitation trials featured little of the 'critical thinking' encouraged by the 1920 Trial of Lenin; the trials were indeed increasingly concerned with condemning enemies. However, Wood's own evidence suggests that the genre was already dying out by the early 1930s, partly because the 'trialsworked best on audiences that had not seen them before' (p. 206). The Shakhty Trial and all the subsequent show trialswere not primarily to educate and agitate, but to punish. Their targets were not selected by local agitation committees inworkers' clubs but by the Central Committee. The purge trials drew on some of the traditions of the agitation trials, butWood perhaps assumes toomuch in suggesting the one prepared the way for the other. School of History G. R. Swain Universityof the West of England Sanford, George. Katyn and theSoviet Massacre of1940: Truth,Justice and Memory. Roudedge, London and New York, 2005. xv + 250 pp. Abbreviations. Map. Tables. Notes. Bibliography. Index. ?65.00. George Sanford, lecturer in theDepartment of Politics at Bristol University, is the latest in a decades'-long line ofwriters who have examined the subject of the Soviet NKVD murder of over 21,000 Polish officersunder their,control inApril-May 1940.The German announcement inApril 1943 of theirdiscov ery of 10,000 such bodies atKatyn just west of Smolensk ? only about 4,000 bodies were at Katyn, the others were buried at two other sites ? set off a time-bomb of incalculable political consequence at the time which has lasted to thisday. The constant search to establish the 'truth' of the case had always been hampered by the unsurprising unwillingness of the Soviet authorities to admit theirguilt, compounded by the controversial failure ofBritain and America to point the fingerof blame atMoscow, even though behind doors it was always acknowledged as a Russian and not a German deed. This Western official attitude was determined for over sixty years by the overwhelming exigencies of thewartime and Cold War relations between themajor powers. Based on the Soviet documentation released to the Poles on 14October 1992 and afterwards ? which followed the astonishing Russian admission on 13April 1990 of Soviet responsibility for these murders ? and available British documents, the author presents in the firsthalf of his book a detailed account with dates, names and locations of the origins, course and mecha nisms of thisNKVD mass murder during April-May 1940 at the PoW camps ofKozelsk, Starobelsk and Ostashkov. Elsewhere, Sanford oudines the decades'-long 'struggle for historical truth' in Europe and theUnited States ofAmerica, and how both the Soviet and Polish Communist regimes likewise tried to stem the tide of disclosure but REVIEWS 791 were eventually forced to admit defeat with the demise of Communism from 1989 onwards. The author also devotes a lengthy chapter to what he categorizes as 'British lies, hypocrisy and self-delusion'. At firstsight, this is all very impressive and certainly interesting because additionally the author has provided a great deal of background historical information to the Polish-Russian relationship. However, and cumulatively, whatever positive impressions one has are gradually chipped away because what emerges are a number of disturbing aspects to the author's approach, and what can only be described as poor or even shoddy work which a good copy editor in the publishers should have picked up on but did not. Ultimately, the book falls lamentably short of all scholarly standards, which even makes one wonder whether Sanford has really handled the new Polish and Soviet documentation entirely accurately. Given the astonishing price being charged for thisbook, would-be purchas ers should be warned about some of itsprofessional and irritatingdeficiencies. For example, it isusual practice to identifythe chief characters in a story the first time they are mentioned. Despite one missed index entry and several earlier page references, the reader is not told until later that the infamous Lavrentii Beria controlled the People's Commissariat of Internal Affairs (NKVD). On page 2...

ORGANIZED AND UNSOLICITED COLLABORATION IN THE HOLOCAUST

The lethal intentions of the Nazi Final Solution to the Jewish Question through mass murder adds a special dimension to the common and banal phenomenon of collaboration between sections of the popu...

Special Settlements in Soviet Russia in the 1930s-50s

Special Settlements in Soviet Russia in the 1930s–50s Reviewed by Oxana Klimkova Translated by Boris Gorshkov Viktor Arkad´evich Berdinskikh, Spetsposelentsy:Politicheskaia ssylka narodov Sovetskoi Rossii [Special Settlers: Political Exile of the Peoples of Soviet Russia]. 527 pp. Kirov: KOGUP, 2003. ISBN 5881864891. Reissued under the same title: 765 pp. Moscow: Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie, 2005. ISBN 5867933571. T. V. Starevskaia Diakina, ed., Spetspereselentsy v SSSR [Special Settlers in the USSR]. 824 pp. Moscow: ROSSPEN, 2004. ISBN 5824306085. Vol. 5 of Iu. N. Afanas´ev et al., eds., Istoriia stalinskogo Gulaga: Konets 1920kh–pervaia polovina 1950kh godov. Sobranie dokumentov, 7 vols. [History of the Stalinist Gulag: The End of the 1920s to the First Half of the 1950s. A Collection of Documents]. Moscow: Rosspen, 2004–5. ISBN 5824306044 (set). Viktor Nikolaevich Zemskov, Spetsposelentsy v SSSR, 1930–1960 [Special Settlers in the USSR, 1930–60]. 304 pp. Moscow: Nauka, 2003. ISBN 5020103152. Contemporary Russian and Western scholarship has shown steadily increasing interest in uncovering the history of special settlements for deported population groups in the Soviet Union, sometimes termed "Soviet internal exile." Soviet authorities began to transfer problematic segments of the population to "special settlements" in distant and inaccessible regions as a repressive measure at the beginning of the 1920s and continued to employ this technique through the early 1950s. Deportations and the system of special settlements were primarily precautionary measures aimed at preventing anti-state demonstrations by certain "risk groups" that might have significant consequences. In their appearance, these places of special exile (often called spetsposelki) usually did not differ [End Page 105] from ordinary rural settlements.1 Their inhabitants, however, had significant limitations on their civil rights: they were subject to severe restrictions on freedom of movement and found themselves under the constant control of the People's Commissariat of Internal Affairs (NKVD). Local administrative organs or so-called "special commands" (spetskomendatura) fulfilled this oversight function. In some cases "elders," who were elected by the deported individuals, answered to district officials (upolnomochennye) who regularly visited the settlements to check on the number of special settlers and the state of affairs in the settlements. The principle of collective responsibility (krugovaiaporuka) ensured the reliability of data submitted in this manner, for under this system the elders answered for any problems in the settlements or any falsifications in the reports.2 This particular regime envisioned the residence of special settlers together with their families within the limits of a region determined by the NKVD (later Ministry of Internal Affairs [MVD]). This system also encompassed compulsory labor by the special settlers in branches of the economy determined by the security organs as well as the absence of any clearly defined term of exile for the inhabitants. The existing historical literature traditionally presents 1930 as the watershed year in the history of the special settlements system. This year witnessed mass deportations of the dekulakized peasants to the country's distant regions, a development that gave rise to a peculiar social category, so-called spetsposelentsy (special settlers).3 Throughout the period from the 1930s to [End Page 106] the 1950s, this category encompassed hundreds of thousands of families. Areas of special settlement were most often located in the northern and eastern regions of the USSR. The largest regions of exile were Kazakhstan, western Siberia, the Urals, the northern stretches of European Russia, and Central Asia. The initial waves of deportees were directed to the North, the Urals, and western Siberia, but with time the focus broadened to include Kazakhstan and Central Asia. Oftentimes, the state employed forced deportation to further its goals of colonizing the country's uninhabited and inaccessible regions. In October 1940, the Gulag system comprised 1,645 special settlements, overseen by 160 regional and 741 district administrations. A total of 258,448 families—959,472 individuals—lived in these settlements.4 By 1 January 1953, the number of special settlers had grown to 2,753,356 (Zemskov, 205). The various...

Culture, Power, and Mission to Moscow: Film and Soviet-American Relations during World War II

Following a sumptuous feast (and copious amounts of vodka), the guests, gathered around a banquet table deep within the Kremlin's walls in May 1943, toasted SovietAmerican friendship. Premier Joseph V. Stalin and Foreign Minister Vyacheslav M. Molotov praised the Grand Alliance. Anastas I. Mikoyan, the Soviet commissar for foreign trade, Lavrenty P. Beria, the head of the People's Commissariat of Internal Affairs (Narodnyi Kommissariat Vnutrennykh Del, NKVD), and Maxim Litvinov, the Soviet ambassador to the United States, offered toasts, and the Anglo-Americans present-including the British ambassador to Moscow, Adm. William H. Standley, the reigning United States representative, and Joseph E. Davies, Washington's former ambassador-reciprocated. The American emissary from 1936 to 1938, Davies was there because President Franklin D. Roosevelt had sent him to arrange an introductory summit with Stalin, a meeting at which Roosevelt was sure all outstanding Soviet-American differences could be ironed out. Although Davies' presence was unusual, thus far the evening had been little different from similar receptions held by Soviet leaders for their Allied comrades during World War II. On this occasion, however, the former ambassador had brought with him a movie that both he and Roosevelt hoped would convince the Soviet dictator to eschew separate peace negotiations with Adolf Hitler and to remain within the tenuous Big Three

Gustav Magnus und sein Haus: Im Auftrag der Deutschen Physikalischen Gesellschaft (review)

Reviewed by: Gustav Magnus und sein Haus: Im Auftrag der Deutschen Physikalischen Gesellschaft* Gabriel Finkelstein (bio) Gustav Magnus und sein Haus: Im Auftrag der Deutschen Physikalischen Gesellschaft. Edited by Dieter Hoffmann. Stuttgart: Verlag für Geschichte der Naturwissenschaften und der Technik, 1995. Pp. 135. DM 50. Since World War II, experimental physics has entered public consciousness as a large, expensive, technical enterprise. Yet at some point between the cabinets of the eighteenth century and the industries of the twentieth, the laboratory of physics had its start. One place where that occurred was in Berlin, in 1842, at the address Kupfergraben 7, an elegant, two-story house with a slate mansard roof that overlooked an island in the Spree River and gardens beyond. The story of this rococo building and its owner is the subject of the collection of essays under review. In commissioning this volume on its 150th anniversary, the German Physical Society has made a deliberate nod to history. During the cold war, this scientific organization found itself split in two: one part stayed in the East, another moved to the West. That distinction vanished in the wake of German reunification, at least for the organization. With help from the Siemens Corporation, the German Physical Society returned to its roots. It repossessed and refurbished its original home, the Magnus House. Eager to be rid of what had become an eyesore after four decades of Communist neglect, the Berlin Senate supported the takeover. If this was not exactly a changing of the guard, one could call it a changing of the ghosts. But ghosts haunt even in a Festschrift. We discover that the Magnus House served as an institute of Nazi ideology and as an NKVD (People’s Commissariat of Internal Affairs) detention center, that the popular ascription of the building’s design to Knobelsdorff is in error, and that Lagrange was thoroughly miserable as a tenant. Gustav Magnus does not come off much better. In the first sentence of the book, editor Dieter Hoffmann feels compelled to inform us that Magnus was a Jew, although this plight, or honor, apparently made no difference to either his science or his career. Magnus does seem to have been a horribly jealous person, though, refusing his colleagues access to his collection of instruments and only grudgingly recognizing his students as independent scientists. All this is told without the least irony. Magnus worked in a variety of scientific fields throughout his life, his best achievements being his investigation of specific heats, his measurement of dissolved blood gases, and his analysis of the aerodynamics of spinning bodies. He also contributed to the development of Prussian technology beyond his own work, serving as a judge at industrial exhibitions and as an adviser in the fields of agricultural chemistry, mining, weights and measures, and technical education. This aspect of his career is mentioned in passing. [End Page 568] More attention is devoted to Magnus’s role as teacher. Perhaps this focus is justified. Most historians remember him for having trained an entire generation of Berlin scientists in the art of physical experiment. The best pieces in the volume cover this part of his life, though they might have made more reference to relevant literature, for example, Wolfgang Schreier and Martin Franke’s history of the Physical Society (in yet another Festschrift commemorating the 150th anniversary of the organization). The essays draw attention to a figure often overlooked. Their quality, however, is uneven at best. Their failure to treat technology is especially regrettable, as it is the thread that runs through most of Magnus’s scientific research. Readers of this journal, therefore, will probably find the book disappointing and may want to refer to traditional accounts by August Wilhem von Hofmann and Hermann von Helmholtz. Gabriel Finkelstein Dr. Finkelstein, a lecturer at UCLA’s Center for Cultural Studies of Science, Technology, and Medicine, recently completed a dissertation on Emil du Bois-Reymond, a student of Magnus’s and the founder of the Berlin Physical Society. Footnotes * Permission to reprint a review published here may be obtained only from the reviewer. Copyright © 1998 Society for the History of Technology

The People's Commissariat of Defense and the NKVD During the Prewar Years

In June 1934, the USSR People's Commissariat for Military and Naval Affairs was transformed into the People's Commissariat of Defense (NKO), headed by K.E. Voroshilov, and on July 10 of that same year the USSR People's Commissariat of Internal Affairs (NKVD) was formed, with G.G. Iagoda as people's commissar. Relations between these two departments played an important role in the fate of the Red Army from the moment of its establishment. At the end of July 1918, a military department of the VChK [All-Russian Extraordinary Commission To Combat Counterrevolution, Sabotage, and Speculation; the Cheka] was formed to supervise the front and army Cheka units, which were converted into special departments in January 1919 and were retained after the Civil War as well. In the mid-1920s, they actively took part in purging the army of command and political personnel suspected of sympathizing with the Trotskyite opposition and then with "right-wing deviation." According to Voroshilov, a total of 5,000 former oppositionists were dismissed from the army in the 1920s and the first half of the 1930s.

The making of the Soviet bomb

This brief excerpt from the memoirs of Vastly S. Yemelyanov conveys something of the pressure under which nuclear weapons were developed in the Soviet Union. Yemelyanov, who has been a frequent participant in Pugwash meetings, joined the nuclear project in September 1945, when it was being expanded. He became deputy to Boris L. Vannikov, the people's commissar of munitions, who had just been appointed to head a special directorate under the Council of People's Commissars (later the Council of Ministers) to manage the nuclear program. Yemelyanov also had close ties with Abraamii Zavenyagin, who was deputy to the head of the People's Commissariat of Internal Affairs (NKVD, later MVD, predecessor to the KGB), and headed the special administration of the NKVD for the nuclear project. Zavenyagin too had been a major figure in the industrialization drive of the 1930s. The political police played a key role in the nuclear project, and Stalin's deputy Lavrenty P. Berta was in overall charge; camp labor was used i...