To the Editors

I thank the editors of Kritika for permitting me to respond to a number of unfounded charges against the English translation of my book Cannibal Island in the otherwise pertinent and well-reasoned review by Paul Hagenloh.¹

According to Hagenloh, my book, which was first released in France in February 2006, "leans heavily" on works by fellow scholars, particularly Lynne Viola, David Shearer, and Hagenloh himself; of these, the first appeared in 2007, the other two in 2009.

The first proof of my supposed borrowings concerns how my interpretation of the "Nazino affair" in my contribution in 1997 to the Black Book of Communism differs from the interpretation I offered in 2006 in Cannibal Island.² It should be evident, first of all, that I could not give as elaborate an interpretation in 2 pages as in 200! It is also obvious that over the intervening decade, the historiography on the 1930s, on the violence perpetrated by the Stalinist regime, on the deportations, and on the Nazino affair was greatly enriched by the works of many historians in both the West (including, of course, Viola, Shearer, Hagenloh, and others) and Russia (Khlevniuk, Danilov, Krasil'nikov, and others). During those years, I too published a great deal on these questions—about 30 articles, of which about 20 were collected in the volume La terreur et le désarroi: Staline et son système (Terror and Disarray: Stalin and His System),³ as well as a collection of documents published in Russia in 2004 in collaboration with Director Sergei Mironenko (Massovye repressii v SSSR [Mass Repressions in the USSR], the first volume of the seven-volume series Istoriia stalinskogo Gulaga [A History of the Stalinist Gulag]) of the State Archive of the Russian Federation (GARF).⁴ I also had the privilege to participate, under the editorship of the late Viktor Petrovich Danilov, in the project that I am currently completing with Alexis Berelowitch, the five-volume Sovetskaia derevnia glazami VChK—OGPU—NKVD, 1918-1939: Dokumenty i materialy (The Soviet Village through the Eyes of the VChK—OGPU—NKVD, 1918-39: Documents and Materials).⁵ All this individual and collective research has shaped my thinking and affected some of my interpretive hypotheses as much as, if not more than, the research conducted concurrently by my colleagues.

As a second proof of my "borrowings" in Cannibal Island, Hagenloh cites an article (from 2003) that I unfortunately wrote directly in English (a point to which I return below), "The Mechanism of a Mass Crime," which appeared in a collection edited by Robert Gellately and Ben Kiernan, The Specter of Genocide: Mass Murder in Historical Perspective.⁶ According to Hagenloh, this article establishes the "analytical framework" for Cannibal Island and hence provides abundant damning evidence. First of all, I see no reason why this article in particular, focusing as it does on the Great Terror and especially the "mass operations" of 1937-38, should be targeted as presenting the analytical framework for Cannibal Island. One could just as easily, and no doubt with more justification, cite my article "Les Logiques de violence dans l'URSS stalinienne" (Logical Reasons for Violence in the Stalinist USSR), which appeared in 1999—before Paul Hagenloh's article from 2000, "'Socially Harmful Elements' and The Great Terror."⁷ But let us return to the disputed article. In that article, I cite Hagenloh extensively (four footnotes): to document passages of a very general nature (219 n. 15), to recommend additional reading ("This point has been developed by Hagenloh, '"Socially Harmful"'" [227 n. 45]), and to cite archival sources ("quoted in Hagenloh, '"Socially Harmful"'" [nn. 50, 53]). On this last point, my accuser is in no position to lecture me on scholarly ethics. As I was researching the corpus delicti—a tedious exercise made necessary by the charges brought against me by Paul Hagenloh—I noticed that in his own article, he simply "forgets" (n. 51) to mention that already in 1994, I had published in Rapports secrets soviétiques: La société russe dans les documents confidentiels, 1921-1991 (Secret Soviet Reports: Russian Society in Confidential Documents...