State Terror in Soviet Russia, 1923-1953 (Sources and Their Interpretation)

Abstract

The crisis of civilization that has embraced the world in the twentieth century has spared no country revolutionary events or wars: state structures that took centuries to forge have crumbled and new ones have been formed, while people's attitudes toward traditional cultural values, including the most important of these, namely, human life, have undergone a radical change. For a long time, our literature avoided any discussion of the problem of the violent destruction of vast masses of people, whose deaths were not a direct result of wars, revolutions, uprisings, or mutinies, but were the consequence of direct repression by the state. The narrow and distorted nature of the principal sources was partly to blame for this. This article is an attempt, at least in part, to rectify this flaw. It is based on official documents in the archives of the USSR People's Commissariats (Ministries) of Internal Affairs and of Justice and the Office of the USSR Procurator General. Unfortunately, the author is bound by having signed a confidentiality agreement and therefore cannot refer to archive legends (i.e., give specific names of the collections, folios, files, and pages); instead, the practice employed by scientific publications is used in such cases, when the "TsGAOR [Central State Archive of the October Revolution], Archive Collection" is cited.