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The Question of the Perpetrator in Soviet History

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 January 2017

Lynne Viola
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Extract

The question of the perpetrator is largely uncharted territory in the history of the Soviet Union. The term is rarely used in the historiography of the Stalinist Soviet Union. In part, this omission is based upon a reluctance to go beyond Iosif Stalin in assigning agency or responsibility for the immense crimes of his reign. In part, the omission derives from decades-long restrictions on archival access. Lynne Viola begins with an exploration of the postwar trajectories of the historiographies of the mid-twentieth century's classically paired “totalitarian” regimes in order to understand the relative absence of “perpetrator studies” for the Stalinist 1930s. She then examines the question of the Soviet perpetrator, less to demarcate who the perpetrator was than to offer a conceptualization of the range of factors that enabled, conditioned, and shaped their violent acts. Intended to raise questions for further study, Viola's article is complemented by comments from Wendy Goldman and Peter Fritzsche.

Type
Discussion
Information
Slavic Review , Volume 72 , Issue 1 , Spring 2013 , pp. 1 - 23
Copyright
Copyright © Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies. 2014

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References

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30. See the important new collection by Steinberg, Mark D. and Sobol, Valeria, eds., Interpreting Emotions in Russia and Eastern Europe (DeKalb, 2011), in particular the editors’ introduetion and the chapters by Ronald Grigor Suny (“Thinking about Feelings“) and Glennys Young (“Bolsheviks and Emotional Hermeneutics“).Google Scholar

31. Sofsky, Wolfgang, The Order of Terror: The Concentration Camp, trans. Templer, William (Princeton, 1997).Google Scholar

32. Bauman, Zygmunt, Modernity and the Holocaust (Ithaca, 1992), 18.Google Scholar See also Weitz, Eric D., A Century ofGenocide: Utopias ofRace and Nation (Princeton, 2003).Google Scholar

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34. See, e.g., Omer Bartov's critique of Sofsky, in, “ Ordering Horror: Conceptualizations of the Concentrationary Universe,” Germany's War and the Holocaust: Disputed Histories (Ithaca, 2003), 105–11;Google Scholar and Viola, Lynne, “The Aesthetic of Stalinist Planning and the World of the Special Villages,” Kritika 4, no. 1 (Winter 2003): 101–28.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

35. Rossiiskii gosudarstvennyi arkhiv sotsial'no-politicheskoi istorii (RGASPI), f. 560, op. 1, d. 10,1.159. This quote is taken from “Zapiski osobista,” by M. F. Zhabokritskii, an unpublished manuscript dated 1967.

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38. Regardless ofthe theoretically precise categorizations ofthe police files.

39. For an example of these characterizations in Germany, see Roseman, “Beyond Conviction?“

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46. See, e.g., the document in Viola, Lynne et al., eds., The War against the Peasantry, 1927-30: The Tragedy ofthe Soviet Countryside, trans. Shabad, Steven (New Haven, 2005), 279–88;Google Scholar and Viola, Unknown Gulag, 36.

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50. For Nazi Germany, see Browning, Ordinary Men, 170.

51. Viola, Best Sons, 127-29.

52. E.g., Goldman, Terror and Democracy in the Age of Stalin, 175, 205-6.

53. E.g., Grigorenko, Petro G., Memoirs, trans. Whitney, Thomas P. (New York, 1983), 28,36;Google Scholar Kopelev, Lev, Isotvoril sebe kumira (Ann Arbor, 1978);Google Scholar Orlova, Raisa, Memoirs, trans. Cioran, Samuel (New York, 1983), ix-x, 65, 83, 72.Google Scholar

54. See Halfin, Stalinist Confessions.

55. Clark, Katerina, Petersburg: Crucible of Cultural Revolution (Cambridge, Mass., 1995), ix-x.Google Scholar

56. A similar approach can be found in James Waller's masterful BecomingEvil. Waller combines a macrohistorical approach with a psychosocial exploration of the individual perpetrator. Starting from what seems now to be the consensus view—that perpetrators were “ordinary people“—he examines a ränge of factors including what he calls “ancestral shadows” (ethnocentrism, xenophobia, the desire for social dominance), the forces that mold perpetrators (cultural belief Systems, moral disengagement, rational self-interest), the culture of cruelty (the role of Professional socialization, binding factors of a group, the merger of bureaucratic role and person), and the notion of the “social death of the victim” (the us-them mentality, dehumanization, blaming the victim). He further argues that a “trigger” is necessary to put in motion this cultural and social baggage, therefore highlighting the situational and the contingent. See James Waller, Becoming Evil: How Ordinary People Commit Genocide and Mass Killing (New York, 2002). . Etkind, Alexander, Internal Colonization: Russia's Imperial Experience (Cambridge, Eng., 2011), 249.Google Scholar

58. Stalin, I., Sochineniia, 13 vols. (Moscow, 1951-1955), 11:171.Google Scholar

59. See, e.g., Molotov Remembers: Inside Kremlin Poltics. Conversations with Felix Chuev (Chicago, 1991), 254.

60. Hagenloh, Stalin's Police; and Shearer, PolicingStalin's Socialism.

61. Viola, Unknown Gulag, 5-6; Viola, Peasant Rebeis under Stalin, 32-38.

62. E. H. Carr was the first scholar to note that policy often determined class in the Soviet context. See Carr, , Socialism in One Country, 1924-1926, 4 vols. (London, 1958-1964), 1:99CrossRefGoogle Scholar

63. Rossiiskii gosudarstvennyi arkhiv ekonomiki (RGAE), f. 7486, op. 37, d. 23233,177.

64. Viola, Peasant Rebeis under Stalin, chaps. 1,4-5.

65. Goldman, Terror and Democracy in the Age of Stalin; and Goldman, Inventing the Enemy.

66. Viola, Unknown Gulag, 104-12.

67. Afans'ev, Iu. N. et al., eds., Istorna Stalinskogo Gulaga. Konets 1920-kh—pervaia polovina 1950-kh godov. Sobranie dokumentov v semi tomakh (Moscow, 2004-5), 2:34, 43, 67–69, 96-99,109-13,145-46.Google Scholar

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69. On interrogations, see the provocative and erudite Stalinist Confessions by Igal Halfin. Halfin was the first western scholar to explore interrogations. His great contribution is to examine the ways in which the dominant ideological discourse shaped the world of both interrogator and victim, thus, in his opinion, blurring the lines between perpetrator and victim. While his focus on Leningrad students allows him to make this argument quite brilliantly, it limits the possibilities of generalizing this understanding of perpetrators, not only beyond the Great Terror (e.g., the dominant discourse does not exist at any level during the mass repression of peasants in the early 1930s and represents at best a small part of the story within the gulag), but even within the Great Terror (when our attention turns away from the capital cities and away from communists and intellectuals). Nadezhda Mandelstam, Hope against Hope, trans. Max Hayward (New York, 1976), 81.

71. Viktorov, V. A., Bezgrifa “sekretno“: Zapiski voennogo prokurora (Moscow, 1990), 138–39.Google Scholar

72. Ginzburg discusses this phenomenon in Journey into the Whirlwind.

73. Arendt, On Violence, 56.

74. Harris, James, “Resisting the Plan in the Urals, 1928-1956,” in Viola, Lynne, ed., Contending with Stalinism: Soviet Power and Populär Resistance in the 1930s (Ithaca, 2002), 201–27.Google Scholar

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78. Fitzpatrick, Sheila, The Russian Revolution, new ed. (New York, 1994), 140.Google Scholar

79. See Hagenloh, Stalin's Police; and Shearer, Policing Stalin's Socialism.

80. See Getty's pioneering work on center-periphery conflicts, beginning with his Origins ofthe Great Purges.

81. See Viola, “Aesthetic of Stalinist Planning.“ As a salutary warning, it is worth noting the words of the German historian of National Socialism, Wildt, who writes in respect to the study of the Nazi perpetrator: “Future research on the subject will be guided not by the presupposition of a Single, predominant perpetrator type but by the analysis of different actors and institutions, of intentional will to exterminate and structural conditions, of ideology and function, as well as of individual premeditation and the dynamics of situational violence.” Wildt, An Uncompromising Generation, 8.

83. Verdery, Katherine, “Postsocialist Cleansing in Eastern Europe: Purity and Danger in Transitional Justice” (unpublished manuscript, 2011), 11,18.Google Scholar

84. Cited in Wieviorka, Annette, The Era of the Witness, trans Stark, Jared (Ithaca, 2006), 94.Google Scholar

85. Browning, Ordinary Men, xx.