Stalinist Terror Research Articles

BOOK REVIEWS

Books reviewed in this issueLiterature and Fine ArtsMartinsen, Deborah A., and Olga Maiorova, eds. Dostoevsky in Context.Marullo, Thomas Gaiton. Heroine Abuse: Dostoevsky's Netochka Nezvanova and the Poetics of Codependency.Salmond, Wendy, Wilfried Zeisler, and Russell E. Martin. Konstantin Makovsky: The Tsar's Painter in America and Paris.Gregory, Serge. Antosha and Levitasha: The Shared Lives and Art of Anton Chekhov and Isaac Levitan.Pickford, Henry W. Thinking with Tolstoy and Wittgenstein: Expression, Emotion, and Art.Wunsche, Isabel. The Organic School of the Russian Avant‐Garde: Nature's Creative Principles.Weld, Sara Pankenier. Voiceless Vanguard: The Infantilist Aesthetic of the Russian Avant‐Garde.Mitchell, Rebecca. Nietzsche's Orphans: Music, Metaphysics, and the Twilight of the Russian Empire.Bartlett, Rosamund, and Sarah Dadswell, eds. and trans. Victory over the Sun: The World's First Futurist Opera.Kukulin, Il'ia. Mashiny zashumevshego vremeni: Kak sovetskii montazh stal metodom neofitsial'noi kul'tury.Van Buskirk, Emily. Lydia Ginzburg's Prose: Reality in Search of Literature.Garipova, Nailya, and Juan José Torres Núñez, eds. Women in Nabokov's Life and Art.Blackwell, Stephen H., and Kurt Johnson, eds. Fine Lines: Vladimir Nabokov's Scientific Art.Skomp, Elizabeth A., and Benjamin M. Sutcliffe. Ludmila Ulitskaya and the Art of Tolerance.Cederlöf, Henriette. Alien Places in Late Soviet Science Fiction: The “Unexpected Encounters” of Arkady and Boris Strugatsky as Novels and Films.Anderson, Richard. Russia.HistoryBarnes, Ian. Restless Empire: A Historical Atlas of Russia.Soroka, Marina, and Charles A. Ruud. Becoming a Romanov: Grand Duchess Elena of Russia and Her World (1807–1873).Suny, Ronald Grigor. “They Can Live in the Desert but Nowhere Else”: A History of the Armenian Genocide.Siegel, Jennifer. For Peace and Money: French and British Finance in the Service of Tsars and Commissars.Stoff, Laurie S. Russia's Sisters of Mercy and the Great War: More than Binding Men's Wounds.Smele, Jonathan D. The “Russian” Civil Wars, 1916–1926: Ten Years That Shook the World.Dornik, Wolfram, et al., eds. The Emergence of Ukraine: Self‐Determination, Occupation, and War in Ukraine, 1917–1922.Khalid, Adeeb. Making Uzbekistan: Nation, Empire, and Revolution in the Early USSR.Graham, Loren. Lysenko's Ghost: Epigenetics and Russia.Levin, Zeev. Collectivization and Social Engineering: Soviet Administration and the Jews of Uzbekistan, 1917–1939.Jordan, Pamela A. Stalin's Singing Spy: The Life and Exile of Nadezhda Plevitskaya.Whitewood, Peter. The Red Army and the Great Terror: Stalin's Purge of the Soviet Military.Horowitz, Brian, and Leonid Katsis, eds. Vladimir Jabotinsky's Story of My Life.Ellis, Frank. Barbarossa 1941.Harrison, Richard W. ed. and trans. Rollback: The Red Army's Winter Offensive along the Southwestern Strategic Direction, 1942–1943.Harrison, Richard W. ed. and trans. Prelude to Berlin: The Red Army's Offensive Operations in Poland and Eastern Germany, 1945.Fitzpatrick, Sheila. On Stalin's Team: The Years of Living Dangerously in Soviet Politics.Karlsson, Klas‐Göran, Johan Stenfeldt, and Ulf Zander, eds. Perspectives on the Entangled History of Communism and Nazism: A Comnaz Analysis.Varga‐Harris, Christine. Stories of House and Home: Soviet Apartment Life during the Khrushchev Years.Friedman, Jeremy. Shadow Cold War: The Sino‐Soviet Competition for the Third World.Lesourd, Françoise, ed. Les mutations religieuses en Russie: Conversions et sécularisation.Haslam, Jonathan. Near and Distant Neighbors: A New History of Soviet Intelligence.Pipes, Richard. Alexander Yakovlev: The Man Whose Ideas Delivered Russia from Communism.Weeks, Theodore R. Vilnius between Nations, 1795–2000.Luehrmann, Sonja. Religion in Secular Archives: Soviet Atheism and Historical Knowledge.Brumfield, William Craft. Architecture at the End of the Earth: Photographing the Russian North.Social Sciences, Contemporary Russia, and OtherRogers, Douglas. The Depths of Russia: Oil, Power, and Culture after Socialism.Hedlund, Stefan. Putin's Energy Agenda: The Contradictions of Russia's Resource Wealth.Nalbandov, Robert. Not by Bread Alone: Russian Foreign Policy under Putin.Pacer, Valerie A. Russian Foreign Policy under Dmitry Medvedev, 2008–2012.Prina, Federica. National Minorities in Putin's Russia: Diversity and Assimilation.Soldatov, Andrei, and Irina Borogan. The Red Web: The Struggle between Russia's Digital Dictators and the New Online Revolutionaries.Stanislav, Markus. Property, Predation and Protection: Piranha Capitalism in Russia and Ukraine.White, Stephen, and Valentina Feklyunina. Identities and Foreign Policies in Russia, Ukraine and Belarus: The Other Europes.

Whitewood, Peter The Red Army and the Great Terror: Stalin's Purge of the Soviet Military (review)

REVIEWS 561 Whitewood, Peter. The Red Army and the Great Terror: Stalin’s Purge of the Soviet Military. Modern War Studies. University Press of Kansas, Lawrence, KS, 2015. vii + 360 pp. Notes. Bibliography. Index. $37.50. In the introduction to his new history of Stalin’s pre-war purge of the Red Army, Peter Whitewood declares boldly: ‘I offer an entirely new explanation for the purge’ (p. 2). Using ‘huge amounts of previously inaccessible documents from the Russian archives’ (p. 7) he questions ‘Cold War accounts’ — a term he deploys as an epithet a dozen times in his short introduction. These earlier works, by scholars such as Adam Ulam, Robert Tucker and Robert Conquest portrayed Stalin’s assault on the Soviet officer corps as one facet of the dictator’s premeditated, violent quest to subordinate all branches of government and society to his personal rule. By contrast, Whitewood argues that, far from being a well-planned decapitation of the military by a ruthless dictator who justified mass arrests using evidence he knew to be unreliable or even fabricated, Stalin’s army purge ‘appears’ to have been a ‘hesitant, last minute, almost reluctant’ (p. 271) act of ‘an indecisive leader’ (p. 281). ‘Moreover,’ Whitewood declares, ‘there is nothing to suggest that this spy scare in the military was cynically contrived. Stalin seems to have genuinely believed that foreign-backed enemies had infiltrated the ranks and managed to organize a conspiracy at the very heart of the Red Army’ (p. 276). Despite the book’s title, this is no comprehensive study of the Red Army purge. Whitewood writes little about how Stalin actually purged the army, the fate of individual officers, the consequences of the purge on foreign perceptions of Soviet strength, nor its impact on the effectiveness of the Soviet military. Instead, he devotes more than two-thirds of the book to the first two decades of Soviet power, leaving little space for the purge itself, and almost none for its wider consequences. These early chapters are the book’s strongest. Whitewood shows how ‘Stalin was never able to put his full trust in the military’ (p. 280). From the earliest days of the Revolution through the succeeding two decades, Soviet security services suspected officers of sympathizing with the Bolsheviks’ ‘White’ enemies during the Civil War, anti-Communist émigrés during the 1920s, the peasantry during the collectivization of agriculture and Trotskyists during the 1930s. As the threat from Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan grew, the secret police fretted that officers were in league with these foreign enemies. Of the actual purge, Whitewood asks: ‘Why would Stalin build with one hand and destroy with the other? Why actively prepare for war while weakening the Red Army through a mass purge?’ (p. 2). His answer is that the head of the Army, Klimenty Voroshilov, failed adequately to cleanse the ranks of unspecified ‘foreign agents and treacherous former oppositionists’ (p. 284). This alleged failure enabled Nikolai Ezhov, the sinister head of the NKVD, to concoct ‘fascist’ plots, producing evidence extracted by torture and forced SEER, 94, 3, july 2016 562 confessions to link leading officers to foreign, especially Nazi, intelligence. Although Whitewood notes repeatedly that ‘The military-fascist plot had no basis in reality’ (p. 268), he insists that Stalin believed Ezhov’s dark fantasies. Here one encounters the central problem of this study. Although Whitewood uses newly available documents, very few of these originate from the highest levels,whichremainclosedtoresearchers.ItishardtoknowwhatStalinhimself was thinking or planning, and he was not one to share his reasons. Whitewood resorts distressingly often to conjecture, not all of which is persuasive. In one single, short paragraph he tries to explain Stalin’s motives, using the following phrases: ‘it suggests’, ‘[he] appears hesitant’, ‘he seems to have waited’, ‘Stalin presumably wanted’, ‘Stalin faced little choice but to opt for’, ‘it is reasonable to suggest’, ‘perhaps even from a sense of panic’, and ‘the military purge may have sparked the mass operations’ (pp. 271–72). As Winston Churchill said in a different context, ‘the terrible “ifs” accumulate’. Whitewood does not explain how Voroshilov can be faulted for failing to root out enemies, when by Whitewood’s own admission these enemies...

The Red Army and the Great Terror: Stalin's purge of the Soviet military

On June 11, 1937, a closed court ordered the execution of a group of the Soviet Union's most talented and experienced army officers, including Marshal Mikhail Tukhachevskii; all were charged with participating in a Nazi plot to overthrow the regime of Joseph Stalin. There followed a massive purge, from the officer corps through the rank-and-file, that many consider a major factor in the Red Army's dismal performance in confronting the German invasion of June 1941. Why take such action on the eve of a major war? The most common theory has Stalin fabricating a military to tighten his control over the Soviet state. In The Red Army and the Great Terror, Peter Whitewood advances an entirely new explanation for Stalin's actions—an explanation with the potential to unlock the mysteries that still surround the Great Terror, the surge of political repression in the late 1930s in which over one million Soviet people were imprisoned in labor camps and over 750,000 executed. Framing his study within the context of Soviet civil-military relations dating back to the 1917 revolution, Whitewood shows that Stalin sanctioned this attack on the Red Army not from a position of confidence and strength, but from one of weakness and misperception. Here we see how Stalin's views had been poisoned by the paranoid accusations of his secret police, who saw spies and supporters of the dead Tsar everywhere and who had long believed that the Red Army was vulnerable to infiltration by foreign intelligence agencies engaged in a conspiracy against the Soviet state. Recently opened Russian archives allow Whitewood to counter the accounts of Soviet defectors and conspiracy theories that have long underpinned conventional wisdom on the purge. By broadening our view, The Red Army and the Great Terror demonstrates not only why Tukhachevskii and his associates were purged in 1937, but also why tens of thousands of other officers and soldiers were discharged and arrested at the same time. With its thorough reassessment of these events, the book sheds new light on the nature of power, state violence, and civil-military relations under the Stalinist regime.

On Stalin's team: the years of living dangerously in Soviet politics

Stalin was the unchallenged dictator of the Soviet Union for so long that most historians have dismissed the officials surrounding him as mere yes-men and political window dressing.On Stalin's Team overturns this view, revealing that behind Stalin was a group of loyal men who formed a remarkably effective team with him from the late 1920s until his death in 1953. Drawing on extensive original research, Sheila Fitzpatrick provides the first in-depth account of this inner circle and their families. She vividly describes how these dedicated comrades-in-arms not only worked closely with Stalin, but also constituted his social circle. Stalin's team included the wily security chief Beria; Andreev, who traveled to provincial purges while listening to Beethoven on a portable gramophone; and Khrushchev, who finally disbanded the team four years after Stalin's death. Taking readers from the cataclysms of the Great Purges and World War II to the paranoia of Stalin's final years,On Stalin's Team paints an entirely new picture of Stalin within his milieu-one that transforms our understanding of how the Soviet Union was ruled during much of its existence.

Loud and Clear

Loud and Clear Kelly Cherry (bio) 1917: Stories and Poems from the Russian Revolution Boris Dralyuk, ed. Pushkin Press www.pushkinpress.com/book/1917/ 240 Pages; Print, $14.95 As a translator and as an editor, Boris Dralyuk has quickly achieved success and status. There is a reason for this: he is a superb translator and editor. I always look forward to his books, and it is an additional pleasure in this instance that the publisher is Pushkin Press, which chooses books that engage and inform. The book at hand, 1917, allows us to examine the poetry and fiction of that tumultuous year when the Bolshevik Revolution took place, unsettling a number of nearby countries. If you ever saw the movie of Pasternak’s novel Doctor Zhivago (1965), you saw images meant to represent the 1917 revolution. (This was one of the few movies better than the book on which it was based. Pasternak was a very great poet but not a great fiction writer.) Dralyuk has divided his book into two parts: poetry first, then fiction. Along the way he provides a good deal of interesting commentary, detailing the lives of poets and authors and clarifying their relationships with one another. Thus we are introduced to those writers who were writing at that time and sometimes influencing the world around them. Some of the work is translated by Dralyuk, but not all of it. This makes the book even more enjoyable, as we derive a sense of variance from the poems. At the same time, Dralyuk’s ability to find rhymes and slant rhymes in English for Russian poems is exciting, as in his translation of Mikhail Gerasimov. “Fed by the dream of Communism, I stoked the furnace with new power, intoxicated by its rhythm, I forged my iron flowers.” Gerasimov was, of course, executed. Denunciation was the name of the game, and execution the eternal winner. Two caveats: those of us who are English-speaking may find it odd that Russian poems include a plethora of exclamation marks (an American poet will go a long way to avoid an exclamation mark; it seems foolishly loud to us, but Russians had good reason to shout). Second, Russian poetry, especially that written by the Acmeists, a group of poets who got together at The Stray Dog Café in St. Petersburg, tends to slight metaphor (though there is metaphor) and emphasize direct statement. Knowing this was their aim helps us to relax into a sympathetic posture with respect to the Acmeists. Among them were Osip Mandelstam, perhaps the greatest of them all (I suggest you also read Christian Wyman’s translations of Mandelstam); Anna Akhmatova, perhaps even better known to English-speaking readers; Pasternak, whose poems dared to be lyrical; Marina Tsvetaeva, who turns up now and then in American and British novels, possibly because she committed suicide; and a good many others. They often addressed their poems to the Russian state, and in this, too, they were different from English-speaking poets. To us it may seem grandiose to speak to a nation, but that is because we can freely address anything or anyone we wish to address. And at least some American poets have indeed directed poems at our country: think of Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Allen Ginsburg. We cannot say that no English-speaking poets have addressed the Western hemisphere. The Russian poets understandably wanted to speak loudly and clearly to their nation, praising, rebuking, offering ways of improving what seemed to them to need improvement. These poems tend toward the dramatic, as if the poet might die the next day. And that was not unheard of. There were other groups of poets besides the Acmeists: Gumilyov’s Guild of Poets—Gumilyov was Akhmatova’s husband until he was executed “with sixty alleged co-conspirators”—Centrifuge (a Futurist group); New Peasants; Scythians; Imaginism. One can imagine all these poets writing feverishly in separate rooms, spied on by the press and the Cheka. When Stalin came to power, pretty much no one was safe. He launched one Great Purge after another. Sergey Esenin was a member of the New Peasants, later joining the Imaginism group. Dralyuk...

ЄВРОПЕЙСЬКА КУЛЬТУРА ПАМ’ЯТІ ПРО ЕКОЛОГІЧНІ КАТАСТРОФИ

This article examines the theory of the problem of terror; sources and consequences of The Great Purge. A special attention is given to historical and psychological features of the main ideologists and those who were involved in terror. Author makes urgent conclusions.

A House of Our Own: Diaspora Politics Among Koreans in the Russian Far East

This paper discusses the newly formed public space that exists for Koreans in the Russian Far East (RFE). It shows that the notion of diaspora is a fluctuating political subjectivity in Russia that is largely defined and regulated by the state. It examines the changes that have taken place in the local politics surrounding the Korean diaspora in the RFE resulting from their experience of the Stalinist purge and their return from Central Asia during the post-socialist transition. Central to this research is a building called Koreiskii Dom and the conflicts surrounding its ownership and use. By examining these conflicts, this paper explores how the focus of community for Russian Koreans has shifted from national rehabilitation to cultural recognition influenced by the increasing prominence of businessmen in local politics, and the substantive demands made on public spaces for practices of cultural reconsolidation.

Top Down vs. Bottom-up: Regarding the Potential of Contemporary “Revisionism”

In 2013, Oxford University Press published a collection of articles about Stalinist repression, edited by James Harris, and based on a conference at Leeds University in 2010. This new collection of articles about the Stalinist Terror of the 1930s reminds us that this topic is still worth examining, despite the fact that it has been actively studied for many years. Several significant international research projects on the topic have been successfully realized. New archival documents about the...

“Red Mecca”—The Communist University for Laborers of the East (KUTV): Iranian Scholars and Students in Moscow in the 1920s and 1930s

The Communist University for Laborers of the East (KUTV), established in Moscow in 1921 and closed in 1938, presents a unique experiment in Soviet Orientalism. KUTV was the first communist educational institution set up specifically for students from the Orient to study their own countries in their native languages through a Marxist lens. Its purpose was not only to train teachers and revolutionaries for work in their native countries but to bring about a paradigm shift in the study of the East. Orientalism was to be freed from the imperialist prejudices of the past by redistributing the tools of Orientalist scholarship to Orientals themselves and by emphasizing contemporary social and economic history over an idealized and nationalistic antiquity. Iranians made up a strong presence at KUTV among both students and teachers, some of whom returned to Iran to spread learning and revolution, while others remained in the Soviet Union as scholars of Iran, influencing the development of Soviet Orientalism and often serving simultaneously in the Soviet political apparatus. With their students, they produced research and compiled massive collections of reference materials that formed the foundation for future Soviet scholarship and foreign policy. By the second half of the 1920s, KUTV developed into one of the most important centers of Soviet Orientalism, spawning a parallel Research Institute (NIA) that offered graduate programs and published its own periodical, Revolutionary East. With its aim of empowering the oppressed while simultaneously projecting Soviet influence, its attempt to rise above nationalist conceptions while at times succumbing to them, and the repression of its faculty in the Stalinist purges, KUTV exhibits many of the contradictions of the Soviet project itself. Among other sources, this paper uses Soviet case files on Iranian students and teachers at KUTV to shed light on their motivations and backgrounds.

On connaît la musique. La vie culturelle au temps du siège de Leningrad dans La Vie d’un homme inconnu d’Andreï Makine

The present article focuses on the representation o f the cultural life during the siege of Leningrad (1941-1944) in Andrei Makine’s eleventh novel. Analysing the portrait of the block ade created by La Vie d’un homme inconnu (2009) in the light of historical works and personal writings, I demonstrate that despite its a pparent wish to contest the official version of the blockade Makine ends up endorsing some of the myths established by Soviet propaganda. He thus emphasises the Leningraders’ heroism, altruism and high level of culture, representing the blokadniki as active defenders of the city rather than helpless victims of both the atrocious conditions imposed by the siege and Stalinist terror. Consequently, alt hough the novel may seem to belong to the canon of historiographic metafiction which systematically questions official historiography an d gives voice to those excluded from making and writing History, a c areful reading of the Franco-Russian author’s eleventh work of fictio n reveals its conservative — not to say reactionary — character, even if La Vie d’un homme inconnu may be challenging another dominant discourse regarding the Soviet Union’s role in World War II, namely that forged in the West.

Demographic Trends in Ukraine: Past, Present, and Future

Ukraine, during the first half of the twentieth century, underwent a series of man‐made demographic catastrophes—World War I, the Bolshevik Revolution, the 1932/33 famine linked to land collectivization, the massive deportations and executions of Stalin's Great Terror, and World War II. This article assembles estimates of the demographic impact of these deadly events. In their absence, it is estimated that Ukraine's hypothetical population would have been 87 million on the eve of independence in 1991, instead of its actual 52 million. Pre‐independence demographic losses were episodic and driven by external forces. By contrast, since independence in 1991, Ukraine has experienced a sustained demographic crisis of its own making. Ukraine's population declined from 52 million in 1990 to 45 million by 2013. Fertility, while it has recovered from its lowest point, remains at a TFR of about 1.5—far below replacement. Emigration, although the greatest hemorrhage of young people in the 1990s is over, is still of concern. The loss of Crimea and the unsettled state of affairs in Southeastern Ukraine give further cause for concern.

Picturing the Gulag

The opening of the Soviet archives has brought to light thousands of photographs of the Gulag. Yet many of these images, which range from documentation of construction to portraits of prisoners and their overseers, are little known and seldom reproduced. (1) Visually, Soviet repressions and forced labor camps remain largely defined by the mug shots from the Lubianka files, as well as the infamous propaganda films and photographs of the Gulag, primarily of Solovki and the White Sea-Baltic Canal, produced in the late 1920s and early 1930s for both domestic and international audiences. (2) The Lubianka head shots--each prisoner photographed in his or her own clothing both in profile and looking directly at the camera--are endlessly shocking, for here we come face to face with the victims of Stalin's secret police. These photographs show, above all, individuals, laying bare the human toll of Stalin's purges. (3) This is the side of the Gulag hidden in official propaganda, which attempted to present the camps as a humane system and a productive collective enterprise through a multitude of omissions and a variety of photographic and cinematic techniques. In contrast to the tragic singularity of the Lubianka mug shots or the careful assemblage of propaganda films and photo-essays, the archival photographs of the Gulag, now kept at the State Archive of the Russian Federation (GARF) and regional archives and museums, at first appear almost ordinary. They are usually collected into portfolios with succinct captions, adhering to a format that was used to document the accomplishments of Soviet factories and collective farms, a common practice from the 1920s onward. Most focus on the camps and special settlements' production and infrastructure: here, felled trees or close-ups of rock strata, a new road cleared, a group of prisoners in a barebones but clean canteen. These prints are often small, grainy, and poorly preserved. Yet many are also carefully mounted and meticulously hand-colored, and the pages of the albums that contain them frequently decorated with colorful drawings and elegant penmanship. These albums, although they can provide us with information about the camps, are, first and foremost, documents of the extraordinary degree of state control over the Gulag. The magnitude of the system's brutality is entirely missing from this photographic record: the cramped train cars used to transfer prisoners are never shown; the barracks, when pictured, are neat and decently appointed; and the internees themselves are rarely tired or thin and are--always--alive. (4) If the GPU/NKVD did photograph executions, critically ill prisoners, dead bodies, or mass graves, these images have yet to be found (by contrast, official camp records--even if in greatly suppressed numbers--do register illness and mortality in the Gulag). (5) Little is known about how the surviving photographs and photo albums of the Gulag were made. Some of the camps had their own photographic labs, but their day-to-day operations have not been documented, and the names of the photographers, likely prisoners in most cases, were rarely recorded. The albums usually had a commemorative purpose and were often sent to Moscow as evidence of a site's achievements; as such, they are clearly staged and carefully curated, propaganda created by the state for the state. …

The Search for a Socialist El Dorado: Finnish Immigration to Soviet Karelia from the United States and Canada in the 1930s, by Alexey Golubey and Irina Takala

The Search for a Socialist El Dorado: Finnish Immigration to Soviet Karelia from the United States and Canada in the 1930s, by Alexey Golubey and Irina Takala. Studies in Immigration and Culture. Winnipeg, University of Manitoba Press and East Lansing, University of Michigan Press, 2014. 265 pp. $29.95 US (paper). Like so many other Russian cities, Petrozavodsk, on the shores of Lake Onega in northern Russia and near the border with Finland, bears the telltale symbols of the former Soviet Union. In a square named after him, a stone statue of Vladimir Lenin, rises above the bustling northern city. A statue of Lenin is not an unusual sight in Russia today, but a statue built by Canadians in the 1930s to commemorate the leader of the Russian Revolution is. The Canadians who built the statue were of Finnish descent and they, like their American counterparts, left families and lives behind them in North America to follow a dream. Approximately 7,000 North American Finns ventured to Soviet Karelia in the early 1930s. There they were joined by Finnish nationals and most of the newcomers were young, gifted, and Red. This mass immigration became known as Karelian Fever. The immigrants were initially received with open arms and celebrated as international comrades. They were given better jobs, pay, and housing. North Americans also had access to special stores and were given the freedom to work toward the development of the creation of a republic in the Soviet Union where the Finnish language and culture could thrive. The honeymoon with North Americans and Finns soon came to an end with the Great Purge orchestrated by Joseph Stalin. The fate of the immigrants is reflected in the downfall of Edvard Gylling, a prominent Finnish Social Democrat who became leader of Soviet Karelia but was removed from his position in 1935, arrested and tried for treason in 1937 and executed in 1938. The idea of a Karelian El Dorado ended in the mid-1930s when thousands of Canadian and American Finns experienced the same fate as Gylling, and their stories, like their bodies, were buried deep in the woods of Soviet Karelia. By one estimate, 739 people, or about ten percent of all the Finnish North Americans who went to Karelia were executed and only about 5,000 were still there in the late-1930s. Of the victims, ninety percent were men in their twenties and thirties. This amounted to approximately twenty percent of the male immigrant population at the time, and since children could not be accused of spying, the percentage of adult males who were caught up in the purges was more like sixty percent. Their dreams were betrayed and the outbreak of war in 1939 trapped the survivors in what had become a nightmare. This is the context for Alexey Golubev and Irina Takala's new book on Karelian Fever. …

Ćwierć wieku przed czasem. O etiudzie Henryka Kluby "Ocalenie"

A Quarter of a Century Before Time. About Henryk Kluba’s Student Film Salvation The text is devoted to an unknown short film made in 1957 in the Łódź Film School, Images XVI - rewizja.indd 276 2015-09-07 11:54:38 abstracts 277 Henryk Kluba’s Salvation. The film, showing the scary face of Stalinist terror in Poland, clearly transcends political taboo. Another work whose exploration of this theme goes as far will not be made until some twenty-fi ve years later, Ryszard Bugajski’s well-known Interrogation (1982). It turns out that it was not the first.

Subversion in the Red Army and the Military Purge of 1937–1938

Stalin's purge of his military elite during 1937–1938 is one of the most unusual events of the Great Terror. Why would Stalin execute his most qualified officers at the same time as defence spending was rising and a world war was approaching? This article argues that a long history of the Red Army being perceived as vulnerable to subversion is central to understanding this military purge. When faced with perceived plots in the military Stalin tended to lean towards restraint, but by 1937 he felt he could no longer hesitate, and finally cracked down on what he saw as a compromised army.

The Purge of the Red Army and the Soviet Mass Operations, 1937–38

This article explores the possible connections between Stalin's purge of the Red Army, sanctioned in June 1937, and the Soviet mass operations, launched just weeks later. It argues that Stalin ordered the military purge to combat a misperceived threat from foreign agents in the Red Army that had become a pressing issue in the early months of 1937. The article makes the case that, once launched, the military purge provided the catalyst for the mass operations as the regime sought not only to destroy a ‘fifth column’ in the Red Army, but soon turned attention to the wider population.

Sowiecka sztuka operacyjna w latach 1940-1941

The article presents the evolution of the Soviet operational warfare since its ini­tial phase in the 1920s, followed by a characterisation of the impact of the Great Purge on the evolution of the Soviet military doctrine and the Red Army itself. Finally, Soviet strategic plan­ning is analysed in the context of the offensive war with the Third Reich from the point of view of operational art and its translation into strategy.

Shaw's Final Solutions

Shaw's Final Solutions

Ruling Russia: authoritarianism from the revolution to Putin

Acknowledgments vii Introduction 1 Chapter 1 From Democratic Centralism to Democratic Centralism 14 Chapter 2 Alternative Mobilization Strategies, 1917-1934 43 Chapter 3 From Narrow Selectorate to Autocracy 75 Chapter 4 The Great Purge 102 Chapter 5 From Totalitarianism to Welfare Authoritarianism 130 Chapter 6 Uncertainty and Democratization: The Evolution of Post-Brezhnevian Politics, 1982-1991 164 Chapter 7 Democratizing Russia, 1991-1997 196 Chapter 8 The Demise of Schumpeterian Democracy, the Return to Certainty, and Normal (Full) Authoritarianism, 1998-2008 220 Chapter 9 The Return of Uncertainty? The 2011-2012 Electoral Cycle 267 Chapter 10 The Past and Future of Russian Authoritarianism 291 Selected Bibliography 311 Index 323

‘To help the Republicans not just by donations and rallies, but with the rifle’: militant solidarity with the Spanish Republic in the Soviet Union, 1936–1937

The article sets out to map militant Soviet solidarity with the Republicans during the Spanish Civil War (1936–9). It is based on recently declassified letters that ordinary Soviet citizens addressed to the Comintern, asking its head, Georgi Dimitrov, to send them as volunteers to fight against Fascism in Spain. The articles evaluates the social profiles of these would-be volunteers, their rhetoric of militant solidarity and the social climate in which they formulated their pleas to fight abroad – namely the onset of Stalin's purges in the Soviet Union.