Stalin's Genocides (17 page)

20. For analyses of the transcripts of the Politburo meetings, see Paul R. Gregory and Norman Naimark, eds.,
The Lost Politburo Transcripts: From Collective Rue to Stalin’s Dictatorship
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009). The Central Committee plenums are available for research in the Hoover Institution archives.

21. Robert C. Tucker, “Foreword,” in
Stalin’s Letters to
Molotov: 1925–1936
, eds. Lars T. Lih, Oleg V. Naumov, and Oleg V. Khlevniuk (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995), p. xii.

22. Stalin to Molotov [no later than September 15, 1930], in
Stalin’s Letters to Molotov
, p. 216.

notes to chapter 3 145

23. Alfred J. Rieber, “Stalin: Man of the Borderlands,”
American Historical Review
106, 5 (December 2001): 1.

24. Hiroaki Kuromiya, “Stalin in the Light of the Politburo Transcripts,” in
The Lost Politburo Transcripts
, eds. Gregory and Naimark, p. 45.

25. Montefiore,
Young Stalin
, p. 268.

chapter 3. dekulakization

1. See Andrea Graziosi,
The Great Soviet Peasant War: Bolsheviks and Peasants, 1917–1933
(Cambridge: Harvard University Ukrainian Research Institute, 1996).

2.
Pravda
, February 5, 1931.

3. Cited in Nicolas Werth, “A State against Its People: Violence, Repression, and Terror in the Soviet Union,” in
The Black
Book of Communism: Crimes, Terror, Repression
, ed. Stephane Courtois et al., trans. Jonathan Murphy (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999), p. 146.

4. Orlando Figes,
The Whisperers: Private Life in Stalin’s
Russia
(New York: Metropolitan Books, 2007), p. 85.

5. Cited in Mark Iunge, Rol’f Binner,
Kak terror stal

“bol’shim”: Sekretnyi prikaz No 00447: tekhnologiia ego ispol-neniia
(Moscow: Airo-XX, 2003), p. 155.

6. Peter Holquist, “State Violence as Technique: The Logic of Violence in Soviet Totalitarianism,” in
Landscaping the
Human Garden: Twentieth-Century Population Management
in a Comparative Framework
, ed. Amir Weiner (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003), p. 145. Quotes from Lynne Viola,
Peasant Rebels under Stalin: Collectivization and the Culture
of Peasant Resistance
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), p. 37.

7. Cited in Graziosi,
The Great Soviet Peasant War
, p. 49.

146

notes to chapter 3

8. Paul Hagenloh,
Stalin’s Police: Public Order and Mass Repression in the USSR, 1926–1941
(Washington, DC: Woodrow Wilson Center Press, 2009), p. 12.

9. Figes,
The Whisperers
, p. 88.

10. Kuromiya,
Stalin: Profiles in Power
, pp. 91–92.

11. Cited in Lynne Viola,
The Unknown Gulag: The Lost
World of Stalin’s Special Settlements
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), p. 155.

12. Ibid., p. 6; Anne Applebaum,
Gulag: A History
(New York: Doubleday, 2003), p. 102.

13. Viola,
The Unknown Gulag
, p. 96.

14. Gellately,
Lenin, Stalin, and Hitler
, p. 227.

15. Nicolas Werth,
Cannibal Island: Death in the Siberian
Gulag
, trans. Steven Rendall (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007), pp. 76–77

16. Ibid., p. xviii.

17. Vladimir Khaustov and Lennart Samuel’son,
Stalin,
NKVD i repressii 1936–1938 gg.
(Moscow: Rosspen, 2009), p.

52.

18. See Hagenloh,
Stalin’s Police
, pp. 15, 207; David Shearer,
Policing Stalin’s Socialism: Repression and Social Order in the
Soviet Union, 1924–1953
(New Haven, Yale University Press, 2009), pp. 313–318. I thank Shearer for sending me a copy of the prepublication page proofs of the book.

19. Marc Jansen and Nikita Petrov,
Stalin’s Loyal Executioner: People’s Commissar Nikolai Ezhov, 1895–1940
(Stanford: Hoover Institution Press, 2002), p. 91; Khaustov and Samuel’son,
Stalin, NKVD i repressii
, pp. 67–68.

20. Paul Gregory,
Terror by Quota: State Security from
Lenin to Stalin
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009).

21. Hagenloh,
Stalin’s Police
, p. 227.

22. Khaustov and Samuel’son,
Stalin, NKVD, i repressii
, pp.

67–68. Hagenloh doubts the importance of the elections, suggesting instead that Stalin and Yezhov were intent on pursu-notes to chapter 4 147

ing “social prophylaxis” to the end, removing all “’threatening’

population cohorts in preparation for war.” Hagenloh,
Stalin’s
Police
, p. 285.

23. Wendy Z. Goldman,
Terror and Democracy in the Age of
Stalin: The Social Dynamics of Repression
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), p. 128.

24. Amir Weiner, “Introduction,” in
Landscaping the Human
Garden
, pp. 14–15.

chapter 4. the holodomor

1. Conquest,
Harvest of Sorrow: Soviet Collectivization and
the Terror-Famine
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1986).

For the debates, see the exchange between R. W. Davies and Steven G. Wheatcroft, on the one hand, and Michael Ellman, on the other, in
Europe-Asia Studies
57, 6 (2005); 58, 4 (2006); and 59, 4 (2007).

2. Kuromiya,
Stalin: Profiles in Power
, p. 103, concludes that 7–8 million died in the Soviet Union and “at least 4 million in Ukraine.” Davis and Wheatcroft, as well as Michael Ellman, deal in lower numbers. For example, Ellman uses the figure of 3.2 million who died in Ukraine. Ellman, “Stalin and the Soviet Famine of 1932–33 Revisited,”
Europe-Asia Studies
, 59, 4 (2007): 682, n. 30. Ukrainian economic historian Stanislav Kulchytsky estimates that between 3 and 3.5 million people died of starvation and disease (from malnutrition) in the republic itself, but that the total demographic losses, including famine-derived decrease in fertility, was between 4.5 and 4.8 million. See Serhy Yekelchyk,
Ukraine: Birth of
a Modern Nation
(New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), p. 112.

3. Nicholas Werth, “Strategies of Violence in the Stalinist USSR,” in
Stalinism and Nazism: History and Memory Com-148

notes to chapter 4

pared
, ed. Henry Russo, trans. Lucy B. Golsan et al. (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2004), p. 80.

4. See Kuromiya,
Stalin: Profiles in Power
, pp. 111–112.

5.
Stalin’s Letters to Molotov
, p. 230, n. 3.

6. Ellman, “Stalin and the Soviet Famine,” p. 689.

7. Cited in Terry Martin,
The Affirmative Action Empire: Nations and Nationalism in the Soviet Union, 1923–1939
(Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2001), p. 301.

8. Nicholas Werth, “The Crimes of the Stalin Regime: Outline for an Inventory and Classification,” manuscript, p. 10. My gratitude to Werth for allowing me to cite his manuscript.

9. Martin,
The Affirmative Action Empire
, pp. 306–307.

10. Cited in Gellately,
Lenin, Stalin, and Hitler
, p. 234.

11. See the many testimonies to this effect in
Report to Congress: Commission on the Ukraine Famine
(Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1988), pp. 235–507.

12. See Ellman, “Stalin and the Soviet Famine,” pp. 688–689.

13. See Werth, “The Crimes of the Stalin Regime,” p. 10.

14. R. W. Davies and Stephen G. Wheatcroft,
The Years of
Hunger: Soviet Agriculture 1931–1933
(New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), p. 440.

15. Andrea Graziosi, “The Soviet 1931–1933 Famines and the Ukrainian Holodomor: Is a New Interpretation Possible, and What Would Its Consequences Be?” in
Hunger by Design: The
Great Ukrainian Famine and its Soviet Context
, ed. Halyna Hryn (Cambridge: Ukrainian Research Institute, 2008), pp. 3–7.

16. Niccolo Panciola, “The Collectivization Famine in Kazakhstan, 1931–1933,” in ibid., p. 103.

17. See Niccolo Panciola, “Famine in the Steppe: The Collectivization of Agriculture and the Kazakh Herdsmen, 1928–

1934,”
Cahiers du Monde russe
45, 1–2 (2004): 189.

18. Kurt Jonassohn with Karin Solveig Björnson,
Genocide
and Gross Human Rights Violations in Comparative Perspective
(New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 1998), p. 256.

notes to chapter 5 149

chapter 5. removing nations

1. On the “creation” of nationalities, see Ronald G. Suny,
The
Revenge of the Past: Nationalism, Revolution, and the Collapse
of the Soviet Union
(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993).

2. Francine Hirsch,
Empire of Nations: Ethnographic Knowledge and the Making of the Soviet Union
(Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2005), p. 274.

3. Hoover Institution Archives (hereafter HIA), fond (f.) 17, opis (op.) 2, delo (d.) 591, list (l.) 90; d. 593, l. 79.

4. McLoughlan, “Mass Operations of the NKVD, 1937–38,”

p. 143.

5. Jansen and Petrov,
Stalin’s Loyal Executioner
, pp. 94–95.

6. According to Eric van Ree, Stalin both intensely disliked and reluctantly admired the Poles, an attitude that paralleled his ambivalent admiration and distaste for the Germans. See

“Heroes and Merchants: Stalin’s Understanding of National Character,”
Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History
8, 1 (2007): 49.

7. Khaustov and Samuel’son,
Stalin, NKVD, i repressii
, pp.

29–30; Jansen and Petrov,
Stalin’s Loyal Executioner
, pp. 96–99.

8. Jansen and Petrov,
Stalin’s Loyal Executioner
, p. 99.

9. Terry Martin, “The Origins of Soviet Ethnic Cleansing,”

Journal of Modern History
70, 4 (December 1998): 857.

10. Pavel Polian,
Against Their Will: The History and Geog-raphy of Forced Migration in the USSR
(Budapest: CEU Press, 2004), p. 100.

11. Weiner, “Nothing but Certainty,” p. 46.

12. A document sent from Merkulov to Stalin, Molotov, and Beria in May 1941 indicates that the numbers of “anti-Soviet criminal and socially dangerous elements” repressed by the NKVD in the three republics from 1939 to 1941 were somewhat fewer. HIA, f. 89, op. 18, d. 6, l. 1.

150

notes to chapter 6

13. Polian,
Against Their Will
, pp. 122–123, 167.

14. See Katherine R. Jolluck,
Exile and Identity: Polish
Women in Soviet Exile during World War II
(Pittsburgh: Pittsburgh University Press, 2002).

15. Beria recommends the death sentence to Stalin in a communication of March 5, 1940. HIA, f. 89, op. 14, dd. 1–20, l. 9; Zaslavsky,
Class Cleansing
, pp. 32–33.

16. Sarah Meiklejohn Terry,
Poland’s Place in Europe: General Sikorski and the Origins of the Oder-Neisse Line
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983), p. 33.

17. A. M. Nekrich,
The Punished Peoples: The Deportation
and Fate of Soviet Minorities at the End of the Second World
War
, trans. George Saunders (New York: Norton, 1978).

18. Norman M. Naimark,
Fires of Hatred: Ethnic Cleansing
in Twentieth Century Europe
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001), pp. 94–95.

19. Most of the information on the deportation of the Chechens-Ingush and Crimean Tatars is taken from ibid., pp.

94–104.

20. N. F. Bugai,
L. Beriia—I. Stalinu: “Soglasno Vashemu
ukazaniiu”
(Moscow: AIRO-XX, 1995).

21. Werth, “The Crimes of the Stalin Regime,” p. 16.

22. See Werth “A State against Its People,” p. 223, for related figures. Also Polian,
Against Their Will
, pp. 210–211.

chapter 6. the great terror

1. See the new edition of the work, Robert Conquest,
The
Great Terror: A Reassessment
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1990).

2. Baberowski,
Der Rote Terror
, p. 201.

3. See Karl Schlögel’s evocative
Terror und Traum: Moskau
1937
(Munich: Carl Hanser Verlag, 2008).

notes to chapter 6 151

4. Figes,
The Whisperers
, p. 159.

5. Wladyslaw Hedeler, “Ezhov’s Scenario for the Great Terror,” in McLoughlin and McDermott, eds.
Stalin’s Terror
, p. 47.

6. Robert C. Tucker and Stephen F. Cohen, eds.,
The Great
Purge Trial
(New York: Grosset and Dunlap, 1965), p. xxiii.

7. Cited in Volkogonov,
Stalin: Triumph and Tragedy
, p. 293.

8. HIA, f. 89, op. 48, d. 2, l. 13.

9. Charters Wynn, “The ‘Smirnov-Eismont-Tolmachev Affair’,” in
The Lost Politburo Transcripts
, eds. Gregory and Naimark, pp. 112–113.

10. Tucker and Cohen,
The Great Purge Trial
, p. xxiii. In a private correspondence, Robert Service makes the important point that Stalin did not have a gross personality disorder, which would normally produce a variety of clinical symptoms of paranoia, like involuntary lapses into passivity.

11. Gregory,
Terror by Quota
, p. 104.

12. Ivo Banac, ed.,
The Diary of Georgi Dimitrov 1933–1939

(New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003), p. 65.

13. J. Arch Getty and Oleg V. Naumov paint a portrait of Yezhov as a killer, to be sure, but more controlled, bureaucratic, modest, understated, and “banal,” in Hannah Arendt’s sense, than the one better known to historians. See their
Yezhov: The
Rise of Stalin’s “Iron Fist”
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008), pp. 212–221.

14. Jansen and Petrov,
Stalin’s Loyal Executioner
, p. 116.

15. Getty and Naumov,
Yezhov
, p. 7.

16. Werth, “A State against Its People,” p. 190.

17. Hiroaki Kuromiya,
The Voices of the Dead: Stalin’s
Great Terror in the 1930s
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007), p. 2.