Stalinist Perpetrators on Trial: Scenes from the Great Terror in Soviet Ukraine by Lynne Viola (review)

The apogee of Stalinist violence in the interwar Soviet Union occurred in 1937/8, during what historians usually term the Great Terror. Studies of this remarkably violent time are legion, especially since the availability of previously declassified archives in the 1990s. Although it might seem that there is little new—or substantively new—left to be written about it, original and insightful scholarly work continues to appear. Viola's new book, the most detailed and significant examination of the rank-and-file perpetrators of Stalinist violence during the so-called "mass operations" of 1937/8, is one of the most important publications about Soviet mass violence and the functioning of the Stalinist system more generally.

This portrait of the Terror at the local level, the first volume of an international collaborative project about Stalinist perpetrators, is based on a "unique source"—the testimony of operatives (investigators, interrogators, and executioners) from the People's Commissariat for Internal Affairs (nkvd) at the closed trials who became the scapegoats for the excesses of the Terror. Viola draws from case files located in the security policy archives of Ukraine (sbu), which, unlike similar archives in Russia, are now readily accessible to scholars. Although her sources are exclusively from Ukraine, the picture that emerges, according to Viola, is broadly representative of the Terror in the USSR more broadly. Utilizing these documents, she brings readers into the interrogation rooms, prison cells, and execution sites, thus populating the Stalinist policing apparatus (under the nkvd) and showing "how the terror was implemented, what happened, and who was responsible" (171).

What emerges is an extraordinary and novel portrait of the individual perpetrators of Stalinist violence, a study hitherto not possible. The significance of this work is that it demonstrates at close quarters and in great detail the "illogical logic" of the Terror and Stalinist policing. In the process, Viola skilfully and thoughtfully extracts broader themes, such as the "grey areas" between perpetrators and victims of Stalinist violence; the political culture of the ruling regime and the institutional culture of the nkvd; the relationship between center and periphery in the Stalinist state; and, most profoundly, the factors that combine to make possible a dysfunctional paroxysm of massacre.

The book is structured as a series of microhistories. Each chapter focuses on a particular nkvd operative's case file, but the interconnectedness of the individuals—from the head of the Kiev nkvd to lower-level district investigators in urban and rural settings—is cleverly revealed as the book progresses. Viola's purpose is to excavate the dynamics of the Terror on the ground, away from Moscow, but her microhistory is consistently conversant with the larger narrative. She accepts the dominant scholarly view that the Terror was a purge in preparation for war. However, she stresses the idea of an "incomplete civil war," locating the roots of the Terror in the Russian Civil War twenty years earlier (similar to Harris' recent book).¹ The political and institutional culture of the Communist Party and the security police were strongly informed by the ethos of struggle against enemies, contrived though the security threats often were.

Perhaps the principal sub-theme of the book is the tension between center and periphery, and the nature of their interactions. Viola treats it with great nuance, stating unambiguously that the Terror originated in Moscow but also underlining the agency of lower ranks within the nkvd apparatus. As she puts it, "'local artistry'combined with higher orders to create the . . . circumstances in which the mass operations unfolded" (98).

The book captures the operatives' use of torture to extract confessions vis-à-vis the enormous and unrealistic arrest quotas determined by Moscow and the pressures exerted on investigators. Viola leaves little doubt that torture was sanctioned from above, even though it was one of the charges that operatives frequently had to face on trial. The book's themes converge neatly through the...