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  • The Voices of the Dead: Stalin’s Great Terror in the 1930s
  • Simon Ertz
Hiroaki Kuromiya, The Voices of the Dead: Stalin’s Great Terror in the 1930s. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007. 304 pp. $30.00.

In this ambitious and multifaceted book, Hiroaki Kuromiya endeavors to reconstruct the experiences of “ordinary” victims of the Great Terror in the Soviet Union of the late 1930s. Through a close reading of their case files, he seeks to retrieve what he calls the “true voices” of several dozen randomly selected individuals who were arrested, interrogated, and (with few exceptions) executed by the People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs (NKVD) in the “mass operations” from summer 1937 to autumn 1938 in Kiev. Even though various scholars, including Kuromiya, have much expanded our knowledge of the background, chronology, and mechanics of the Great Terror in recent years, no one has previously offered as meticulous an examination of individual interrogation records. Whenever the longhand interrogation protocols have been preserved, Kuromiya has analyzed them because theyoften exhibit revealing differences from the typed versions. He has carefully attended not only to the content and the dynamics of the interrogations but also to lacunae, internal contradictions, and marginalia in the files. He has ingeniously traced additional background information about his subjects, and he has aptly contextualized their fates within the broader social and political context of the 1930s.

Although Kuromiya’s skills in analyzing and interpreting these sources are truly impressive, several blind spots remain. The most obvious concerns concrete interrogation procedures, particularly the use of threats, deceit, and physical and psychological torture as described in scores of memoirs of repression victims. Because almost all of Kuromiya’s subjects had not even a chance to record their experiences and because their files remain silent on this issue, Kuromiya in most cases can only suspect the use of such practices whenever the interrogated started to confess—gradually, partially, and often in formulaic language—to deeds they in all likelihood had never committed.

Despite such limitations, Kuromiya succeeds in providing remarkably diverse and detailed insights into the core of the machinery of the Great Terror. Thirteen chapters, each of which sketches out the cases of several individuals targeted for a particular reason, illustrate the broad spectrum of factors that could trigger persecution. The reader encounters persons who had occasionally grumbled about the multiple hardships of everyday life, who had too conspicuously held on to religious practices, who had failed to break away from doomed relatives and loved ones, who had been induced to cooperate with the NKVD but had failed to offer satisfactory intelligence, or [End Page 198] who simply bore the wrong surname (as happened to one Leonid Pavlovich Trotskii). One theme running through many stories is alleged links to foreign powers, which supports Oleg Khlevniuk’s and Kuromiya’s earlier arguments about the significance of the foreign policy factor for explaining the timing and the nature of the mass terror of 1937–1938. The grounds for such suspicions were diverse: Polish or Korean ethnicity, any interaction with foreign consulates or their personnel, family members living abroad, or simply the marginality of one’s existence, which, in the eyes of the regime, increased one’s vulnerability to recruitment attempts by foreign secret services.

Had the Soviet leadership any serious reasons for such apprehensions? Kuromiya’s cases vividly illustrate that discontent and grievances were not uncommon in the 1930s in Kyiv and beyond. How could it have been otherwise given the horrors of collectivization and the subsequent famines, the persistent shortages and frustrations that characterized everyday life, the Soviet system’s perennial encroachment on the lifeworlds of ordinary people, lingering memories, idealized or not, of better times under the Tsar, and the suspicion that, across the Western border, life might be more bearable under regimes that appeared to be fundamental alternatives to Bolshevism? And yet, not in a single case that Kuromiya examined did the NKVD assemble plausible evidence, much less proof that any of its victims had engaged in activities that would have come anywhere close to a serious opposition, let alone threat, to the regime.

Precisely because of the width of this gap between what...

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