From the Editors: Violence, "Political" Violence, and Terror in Russian History

Most scholars reading these pages in the peaceful quiet of a library or a comfortable chair at home probably would agree, if asked, that violence is not an admirable historical phenomenon. On reflection they would soon recognize, however, that an instinctive abhorrence of violence hardly rises to the level of a universal truth: a few years ago, for example, Soviet historians certainly operated within a framework that endorsed revolutionary violence, and all but the most committed pacifists would maintain that violence is sometimes necessary. Yet that instinctive abhorrence, related to a historical link between the absence of violence and standards of "civilization," is certainly one reason why political violence has become such a favored topic of study in recent years. Studying violence has become a way to focus attention, often in new ways, on the causes and mechanisms of some of the most controversial episodes in the modern period, such as genocide, population transfers, revolutionary and state terror, pogroms, ethnic cleansing, and communist purges.

One thrust behind the contemporary interest in political violence is the implicit question, who is to blame? How could this have occurred, especially in the 20th century? Or, put another way, what makes bad regimes so bad? That this new historiographical lens should quickly be applied to Russia, and especially the Soviet Union, should hardly be surprising in this light. Yet a focus on violence can, by the same token, reflect a new interest in the costs of historical phenomena traditionally considered justifiable. Thus, the nature and purposes of political violence came to occupy center stage in that generator of historiographical as well as historical modernity, the French Revolution. Here again we can observe a live link to our own field, for the discussion of "modern" political violence growing out of the French Revolution has traced this thread from 1793-94 down to Russia's Revolution of 1917.

If we were to follow this implicit logic, which is embedded in much current interest in political violence, this special issue of Kritika might have sponsored new research on the Red Terror in 1918, the camp system, the Great Purges, and all the extraordinary horrors of Soviet state violence. Even a cursory glance at the Table of Contents will reveal that this is not the focus of the present volume. This is hardly to imply that all research in those areas fits into a single agenda—nothing could be farther from the truth—or that the nature of violence in the Soviet period should not be the object of a greatly expanded research effort and historical reflection. Violence under Soviet communism—its motivations, regularities, varieties, scope, and unintended consequences—is surely one of the key issues for the entire Russian field as well as for modern European history. Our point, rather, is that the interest in political violence should be spurred by otherlogics that can take us down historical byways that are equally important if perhaps less obvious. In the long run, broadening the study of violence should inform and refine conclusions in the already large-scale scholarship on Soviet-era atrocities.

The implicit comparative application need not focus only on illiberal regimes. Violence is intrinsic to any political order: a state is that entity, after all, that claims the monopoly on official force both within its borders (law enforcement) and outside them (war). A study of violence should allow for comparison of the practices of widely different organized groups subscribing to a range of belief systems—including, for example, liberalism and nationalism as well as fascism and communism, religious as well as political ideas. At least one article in the present volume addresses the link between violence in Western colonial settings and its application "at home" in Europe and Russia during and after World War I. Moreover, we need not focus only on state violence, but also on violence by a wide range of historical actors. This...