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Laboratories of Terror

The Final Act of Stalin's Great Purge in Soviet Ukraine

Lynne Viola editor Marc-Stephan Junge editor

Format:Paperback

Publisher:Oxford University Press Inc

Published:7th Feb '23

Should be back in stock very soon

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Laboratories of Terror cover

Laboratories of Terror explores the final chapter of Stalin's Great Terror in Soviet Ukraine. When the Communist Party Central Committee and the Council of People's Commissars of the USSR halted mass operations in repression in November 1938, large numbers of mainly Communist purge victims whose cases remained incomplete were released. At the same time, hundreds of NKVD operatives who had carried out the Great Terror were scapegoated and arrested. Drawing on materials from the largely closed archives of the Soviet security police, this collection of essays by an international team of researchers illuminates the previously opaque world of the NKVD perpetrator. It uncovers the mechanics and logistics of the terror at the local level by examining the criminal files of a series of mid-level NKVD operatives from across Ukraine. The result offers new perspectives on both Stalin's central role in the architecture of the terror and NKVD perpetrators' agency in implementing one of the most horrific episodes of twentieth-century mass violence.

Laboratories of Terror...well worth reading, and enables us to observe how terror unfolded in very specific conditions. * The Russian Review *

ISBN: 9780197647554

Dimensions: 156mm x 237mm x 17mm

Weight: 358g

240 pages