Terror and the Gulag

Since the collapse of the USSR, few eras in Soviet history have been the focus of as much attention as the 1930s, few topics as much as mass repression under Stalin. Revelations about the horrors visited on the population by the emerging Stalinist state—the brutality of the forced collectivization of agriculture, the drive to eliminate "kulaks" as a class (or otherwise), the waves of mass executions carried out by the security police in 1937 and 1938—began well before the collapse. The publication of formerly secret archival materials in the official news outlets of the Communist Party at the end of the Gorbachev era was enough to send historians reeling, both inside and outside the USSR, as they attempted to work through the rapidly expanding source base and square what they uncovered with what they knew (or thought they knew) about Stalinism. Yet few at the time could have predicted the sheer volume of materials that has become available in the 20 years that followed or the surprising durability of access for historians—never freely open, and certainly restricted after 2000 in comparison to the Yeltsin years, but nonetheless still so expansive that merely reading all the relevant monographs and annotated document collections (many of the latter translated into English, in a virtual cottage industry of document publication on Stalinism) is alone a task formidable enough to keep a single historian busy for a good portion of his or her career.¹

Given the rapidly evolving nature of the field, most historians of the period have wisely avoided much attempt at grand synthesis; the curious reader will find no Medvedevs or Conquests in the current crop of historians of Stalinist repression.² These three radically different books present no exception: one a microhistory of an appallingly deadly set of events on the tiny Siberian island of Nazino in 1933; the second a study of a handful of cases of individuals executed in Kiev during the "Great Terror" of 1937 and 1938; and the third an exercise in the application of the tools of political economy, especially rational choice theory, to the perplexing question of why state actors in Stalin's USSR made the decisions they did.

Perhaps the most ambitious of the three studies, in terms of scope, is Gregory's Terror by Quota, which attempts to explain the repressive actions of the early Soviet state with reference to the goals, constraints, and choices of security police officers up and down the chain of command (including Lenin and Stalin themselves). Gregory begins with a series of assumptions that he takes to be constant in all state systems: that state actors make decisions based on rational determinations of self-interest; that these actors are divided into "principals" (those that set policy) and "agents" (those that carry out the policies set by the principals); that the chief principal in a dictatorship is the dictator (or, at most, the dictator and his "inner circle") but that each agent, or subordinate, becomes the principal of the next subordinate down the line (the "agency chain"); and that agents carry out the policies of the principals to an extent determined by their own calculations of self-interest (in the language of political economy, they act "rationally").³ Gregory also begins with ten assumptions about the nature of mass repression in the USSR (in his account, "stylized facts" that capture the essence of Stalinist repression), for which his model must account if it is to be valid: almost all victims were innocent of any real crimes; certain ethnicities were targeted as threats to state security; punishments were exceptionally harsh in comparison to nondictatorial...