:Terror and Democracy in the Age of Stalin: The Social Dynamics of Repression

Abstract

Before the late 1980s, research on the Great Purges of 1937–1938 was to a large extent captive of officially published Soviet sources. They focused on old Bolsheviks and officials, lionized them, and described their ordeals and the role the political police played in their fates. Terror looked pretty much like a simple police operation. The supreme leader ordered the arrest and murder of people, and his henchmen obediently executed his will. A few historians timidly proposed a somewhat more nuanced interpretation. They wondered if popular discontent and conflicts among officeholders did not fuel the terror. They also argued that the victims did not necessarily accept their fate meekly. The opening of former Soviet archives changed the perspective. Newly available sources allowed the documentation of the suffering of simple citizens who constituted the overwhelming majority of victims. Understandably, the masses interested researchers more than functionaries. Wendy Z. Goldman demonstrates that the Soviet state apparatus is worthy of attention, among other reasons because its fate throws new light on the role the masses played in the purges. She shows that apparatchiki were not only victims. She even argues that the spread of the terror was inseparable from a strange sort of popular rule.