The apogee of Stalinist violence in the interwar Soviet Union occurred in 1937/8, during what historians usually term the Great Terror. Studies of this remarkably violent time are legion, especially since the availability of previously declassified archives in the 1990s. Although it might seem that there is little new—or substantively new—left to be written about it, original and insightful scholarly work continues to appear. Viola’s new book, the most detailed and significant examination of the rank-and-file perpetrators of Stalinist violence during the so-called “mass operations” of 1937/8, is one of the most important publications about Soviet mass violence and the functioning of the Stalinist system more generally.
This portrait of the Terror at the local level, the first volume of an international collaborative project about Stalinist perpetrators, is based on a “unique source”—the testimony of operatives (investigators, interrogators, and executioners) from the People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs (nkvd)...