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  • Stalinist Perpetrators on Trial. Scenes from the Great Terror in Soviet Ukraine by Lynne Viola
  • Cathy A. Frierson
Stalinist Perpetrators on Trial. Scenes from the Great Terror in Soviet Ukraine. By Lynne Viola. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017. xx plus 268 pp. $29.95).

Stalinist Perpetrators on Trial presents case studies from Ukraine of Soviet internal security police (NKVD) officers, who were brought to heel there during the “capstone stage” of the Great Terror of 1937–1938. By December 1938, NKVD operatives found themselves accused by Stalin of violating socialist legality during the Terror operations. These perpetrators of state-ordered violence themselves became targets of Stalin’s wonted “scapegoating at times of radical policy reversal” (4). Arrest, interrogation, and closed trials followed. Serendipitous access to recently-opened security police archives in Ukraine enabled Lynne Viola to delve into “the bowels” of the Soviet regime, still closed in Russia, to examine the resulting investigative files of NKVD perpetrators in Ukraine (6).

Valuable for specialists, at 179 pages of text, Stalinist Perpetrators is also an exemplary monograph for students. A master historian, Viola writes with Chekhovian diagnostic precision. She ensures the book’s accessibility by including a chronology, map of Ukraine, glossary of terms specific to Soviet history, photographs of the perpetrators, and a note on usage. Her Introduction and first chapter provide a concise overview of the history of the Great Terror as a “hallmark of Stalinism” (5) and of the NKVD as its institutional vehicle.

Without burdening the text with a review of academic polemics about Stalinism, Viola states her position: “Stalin.. .bore the main responsibility for the tragedy of the Great Terror,” which was a product of orders “from the top— from Stalin and his NKVD lieutenants” (18). Yet, NKVD operatives implemented those orders in local conditions according to their own understanding and execution of their roles. The outcomes issued from the dynamic inherent in the fact that “Stalin opened a floodgate of repression,” which in turn permitted NKVD staff “immense institutional and individual agency” (18).

Viola structures her monograph around a handful of NKVD operatives working in Kiev, Khar’kov, and Zaporozh’e. She stresses individual agency at several points, contextualizes the perpetrators’ actions, eschews historical prosecution, yet underscores individual responsibility. “Each had a distinct personality and voice, each was an individual with a role to play and a degree of agency.. .in helping to enact the Great Terror” (29). Their “role to play” captures Viola’s argument that each NKVD operative hewed to the “predominant plot line of the [End Page 313] times” (50). Their actions fulfilled the demands of the “contrivances” in a narrative about active enemies of the Bolshevik/Soviet system still present long after the military conclusion of the “incomplete Civil War” of 1918–1920 (24). Even in multi-ethnic, borderland Ukraine, with its history of nationalist movements and susceptibility to revanchist machinations by neighboring Poland, Viola asserts, former enemies of the Soviet regime “abounded, but in status only; they were certainly not an imminent danger to the regime” (25). The central contrivance of the Great Terror was the fiction that formerly active, but now “inert” enemies were currently active and dangerous. Viola analyses the testimonies from their closed trials for violating socialist legality in their treatment of said mythical enemies. She argues that each NKVD operative oriented to this lodestar contrivance, and subsequently assumed his assigned role in the master plot. The Soviet privileging of confessions as the crucial evidence in any case invited NKVD perpetrators to use torture to extract them. “Still,” Viola reminds readers, “individuals bear responsibility for their actions” (40). She rejects any alibi for NKVD perpetrators as “cogs in a machine,” even as she provides a detailed depiction of the NKVD machinery of terror as an element in the larger Soviet system. One perpetrator, Vasilii Romanovich Grabar’, she eloquently concludes, “was both a force of Soviet power and its emanation” (161).

Viola places this study in several historiographical contexts and methodologies. First is her own thirty-plus year oeuvre on the history of Soviet collectivization, dekulakization, and the gulag. Second, she places this monograph in the historiography of perpetrators of twentieth-century atrocities, quoting Christopher Browning...

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