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

Historians of Nazi Germany led the way in studying the motives and actions of perpetrators. Like Nazi genocide, Stalinist mass repression cannot be fully understood without examining the role of perpetrators. Until recently, however, sources have not been sufficiently accessible to study the role of Stalin-era perpetrators, the core of whom operated within the Soviet Union's secret police (nkvd). Russia's security police archives are still closed, although victims of repression, their relatives, human rights researchers, and some scholars have obtained partial access. But in Ukraine, especially after the regime change in 2014, security police archives were thrown wide open for study of Soviet-era repression. For this book, Lynne Viola accessed a treasure trove of sources in the archive of Ukraine's security service on nkvd perpetrators of the Great Terror in 1937–38. By ethnicity, they included Russians, Ukrainians, and Jews. Many came from worker and peasant families and had served in the Red Army.

Having examined secret 1939–42 trials of nkvd operatives in Ukraine, Viola argues that their rationale was to assert Stalin's authority over the nkvd, to impose discipline upon its personnel, and to send a message to Communist Party cadres that the nkvd rather than party leaders had victimized party personnel. In a set of related microhistories, Viola analyzes cases against nkvd operatives in a range of locations in Ukraine: a major administrative centre; a rural area; an industrial city; and several proximate districts.

The closed trials proceeded after Stalin decided in November 1938 to scale down mass terror. Although he claimed in public that mass operations had successfully eliminated traitors and hostile classes and created unity in the USSR, Stalin knew that the terror's arbitrariness and cruelty had created unrest. Therefore, he heaped blame on the nkvd leadership under Nikolai Ezhov for illegal torture, falsification of evidence, and conviction of some innocent people. Ezhov was convicted of treason and executed. Ezhov's appointee to head the nkvd of Ukraine, A.I. Uspensky and his underlings were also arrested and accused of having exceeded "socialist legality." In 1939, twenty-two percent of nkvd operational cadres across the USSR were purged through arrests. Under Ezhov's replacement Lavrenty Beria, the nkvd was reinforced with new hires, who constituted forty-five percent of operational personnel.

Though nkvd operatives had followed unwritten orders from above to use torture, the trials depicted them as a "few bad apples" whose actions were unauthorized by party leaders. In fact, Viola finds, operatives had some space for interpreting orders, but they were mostly "ordinary men" whose brutality stemmed from pressure from above to assemble cases based on arrestees' confessions.

Viola's early work emphasized initiative from below. After the opening of Soviet archives, she and most others from her generation of scholars were convinced that Stalin "steered the ship" (171) of the state in launching, directing, and changing his policies. Nevertheless, in this book she proves effectively that nkvd operatives in Ukraine sincerely believed that enemies of the Soviet state posed a threat to the Communist system. Regarding their work as a continuation of the Russian Civil War of 1918–21, they responded creatively to a storm of directives from above to expand and accelerate the targeting and conviction of victims.

This is a grim and chilling read, but nkvd operatives seem to have fared better in the end than many of their victims. The trend Viola shows is that their sentences of execution were commuted to Gulag terms, with a number of convicts surviving to return to civilian life. A major exception was Uspensky, whose story unfolds in a suspenseful postscript. Sensing his imminent arrest, he faked suicide, fled Kiev, and crisscrossed much of European Russia under a new identity, before a five-month manhunt finally uncovered him. He was executed after trial.

Viola carefully points out that the picture revealed...