Introduction: Reflections on Villains, Victims and Violence

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Notes

¹ For key works in English see David-Fox et al. (2003), Holquist (2003b), Suny (2007) and Naimark (2007).

² These historians make much of the Soviet regime's deployment of a rhetoric of cleansing (terms such as ‘ochistit’' and ‘chistka’), yet the examples they offer where this rhetoric was used by the Soviet state in the context of purifying society, rather than in the context of the party seeking to ensure its own purity, are not numerous.

³ Jörg Baberowski (2012) rejects the neo-totalitarian view that Stalinist violence derived either from the categorising and excisionary practices of the modern state or from Bolshevik ideology. He insists that it derived ultimately from Stalin's psychopathology and the fact that he and his henchmen had become inured to the use of violence as a means of dealing with intractable social problems.

⁴ The distinction was made by Hexter (1986).

⁵ This is true even for the purges of 1937–1938 (see Goldman 2007, pp. 163–201).