This volume—a collection of seven “regional microhistories” (14) about the end of the Great Terror in Ukraine—is a major contribution to the historical literature on Stalinist repression and the Soviet secret police. It results from an important international collaboration edited by Lynne Viola and Marc Junge. The book features chapters by scholars from Ukraine, Russia, Germany, the United States, and Canada, taking full advantage of the recent opening of Ukrainian secret police records. (Comparable security police archives in Russia are closed to researchers.) In particular, Laboratories of Terror analyzes the so-called “Beriia thaw” (1) or “purge of the purgers” (1), in which the People's Commissariat of Internal Affairs (NKVD)—under the new leadership of Lavrentii Beriia––cracked down on secret police officials who had been active in the Great Terror. The result is an important analysis of the understudied theme of Stalinist perpetrators based on the criminal files of low- and mid-level NKVD officials from trials between 1938 and 1941.
Viola and Junge lay out the book's primary arguments in a useful introduction, pointing out that the purge of the purgers was not about justice, but about “violations of socialist legality” by officials in the NKVD. Security police officials had been purged in the past, but Junge and Viola argue that the 1938–40 trials differed from earlier purges in that they did not involve charges of Trotskyism or counter-revolution; instead, they scapegoated the NKVD for the excesses of the terror while focusing on issues of process and legality, most often involving the falsification of files and the use of torture. (The trials involved in this purge, the introduction contends, were more similar to Soviet war crimes trials in the 1940s than to the show trials of the 1930s or the work of troikas during the mass operations.) The purge of the purgers resulted in a cadres revolution with the secret police and functioned as “Stalin's symbolic gift to the Party” (7), relegitimizing its authority and power while focusing on communist victimhood and largely ignoring the many Terror victims who were neither communist nor elite.
The seven chapters that follow discuss the “purge of the purgers” in a variety of Ukrainian regions. In Ch. 1, Valeriy Vasylyev and Roman Podkur analyze the fate of the NKVD in Vinnitsa Province, examining the trial of local security police chief Ivan Korablev and his colleagues; the investigations of police officials, they argue, were driven by complaints by local communists whose cases were still up in the air when the Terror ended but generally “had limited results” (44). In Ch. 2, Andrei Savin and Aleksei Tepliakov examine the NKVD purge in Odesa Province, pointing out that many local NKVD leaders were prosecuted for violating socialist legality in cases involving communists and that the trials were a rebalancing of power between the NKVD and the Party. (Freed Party members, they argue, were effective trial witnesses in ways that, say, former priests and Ukrainian nationalists could never be, pushing for the Party to take firmer control over the police without challenging the legitimacy of the mass operations.) Ch. 3, by Marc Junge, looks at the trial of P.V. Karamyshev and three colleagues from the Nikolaev NKVD, examining their defense strategy of portraying themselves as “good Stalinists” and making the case that these trials appeared to be, “in Soviet circumstances . . . completely normal judicial proceedings,” unlike the work of troikas (98). In Ch. 4, Vadym Zolotar΄ov examines the role of personal connections among the NKVD officers of Kharkiv and Odesa in the unfolding of the terror. Lynne Viola looks at the rural Skvirskii district in Ch. 5, examining the role of orders from above and the place of witnesses. (In a rural region, it was especially important for prosecutors to take advantage of the local knowledge of witnesses––many of whom were wary of the Jewish NKVD chief as a non-local.) Serhii Kokin looks at the purges in Zhitomir in Ch. 6, finding that the harshest sentences for NKVD officials often went to the mid-level officials who were most directly responsible. Ch. 7, by Jeffrey J. Rossman, concludes the book by looking at the theme of NKVD motivations in a close analysis of the Northern Donetsk Railroad NKVD. Although Rossman finds that ideology played a part in shaping NKVD officers’ purge-era actions, he argues that situational factors (like the fear of punishment) were primary motivations.
These chapters are models of archival research––judicious, thorough, and well-documented––and they paint a compelling portrait of the NKVD during and after the purges. There were a handful of minor ways in which the book could have been improved, however. Laboratories of Terror ends somewhat abruptly after Jeffrey Rossman's chapter and would have benefited from a conclusion; compelling as the book's analysis was, it could have been still stronger if the editors included a final section stepping away from the details of purge trials to emphasize broader points of analysis. (How is our understanding of Khrushchev-era discussions of socialist legality affected by analyzing the purge of the purgers, for example? Several chapters make implicit comparisons between Nazi perpetrators and NKVD officers—another theme that could be expanded upon in a conclusion.) The book is more effective in explaining how the purge of the purgers worked than in elucidating why it happened––largely, of course, because fully understanding the reasons for the purge would require more knowledge of Stalin's and Beriia's motivations and attitudes, which cannot be divined from local archives. The book's chapters were occasionally a little repetitive (which is a danger for any highly focused collection of essays); the chapters are based on similar source bases and feature similar arguments and similar descriptions of the career trajectories of NKVD officials, for instance.
Overall, however, Laboratories of Terror is a model of archival research and an important contribution to our understanding of Stalinist perpetrators, Soviet secret policing, and the end of the Great Terror.
