Paul R. Gregory. Terror by Quota: State Security from Lenin to Stalin. New Haven, Yale University Press, 2009. viii + 346 pp. $35.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-300-13425-4.
Reviewed by Andrew Janco (University of Chicago)
Published on H-Human-Rights (March, 2009)
Commissioned by Rebecca K. Root
The "Rational" Mass Violence of Stalin's Secret Police
After the fall of the Soviet Union, documents from state and party archives began to reveal a disturbing and previously little understood aspect of Soviet repression operations. The Soviet secret police worked according to quotas. Just as Soviet economic planners set targets for industrial growth, so too did state security organs set their own "limits" for arrests and executions. Why did the secret police function in this way? Why were so many people arrested for crimes they had never committed?
In Terror by Quota, Paul R. Gregory seeks to understand Stalinist repression through a detailed study of the organization, management, and methods of the Soviet secret police. As "producers" of repression, state security organs provided a service that the regime utilized to specific ends. Joseph Stalin was a "rational totalitarian dictator," and the actions of Soviet state security "follow[ed] distinctive patterns as suggested by a rational choice model" (p. 32). Soviet repression operations were not the product of political ideology or Stalin's paranoia, but the rational application of repression in the pursuit of Stalin's objectives as a "power maximizing dictator" (pp. 13-14).
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Boris Gorbachevsky. Through the Maelstrom: A Red Army Soldier's War on the Eastern Front, 1942-1945. Edited and translated by Stuart Britton. With foreword by David M. Glantz. Lawrence University Press of Kansas, 2008. xix + 453 pp. $36.95 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-7006-1605-3.
Reviewed by Stephen G. Fritz (Department of History, East Tennessee State University)
Published on H-German (May, 2009) Commissioned by Susan R. Boettcher
A Forgotten Soviet Soldier
Over sixty years after the end of World War II, western readers still search for the reality of Ivan, the average Red Army soldier. GI Joe, Tommy, and Jerry have all become familiar to us through a wealth of memoirs, published diaries, and collections of letters, as well as numerous scholarly studies. Ivan, though, remains elusive. The Red Army in our minds is as much based on literary metaphors as on any evidentiary basis: a dull mass of stolid, brown-clad soldiers rising out of the endless steppe of southern Russia; an army of mute peasants stoically enduring appalling hardships and brutalities; the "red horde" of Nazi propaganda bearing down on "civilized" Europe.
With the collapse of communism, however, not only have historians published studies based on sources in previously closed archives, but memoirs of Soviet soldiers, until now inaccessible, have begun to appear in translation in the West as well. Boris Gorbachevsky's memoir is thus not groundbreaking in the sense that it reveals any startlingly new revelations, nor does it grip the reader with detailed, harrowing tales of combat. Although Gorbachevsky served as frontline infantry soldier and officer for three years, his memoir provides surprisingly little in the way of graphic descriptions of battle. It does include a valuable account of the fighting around Rzhev, one of the lesser-known, although still appallingly bloody, meat grinders of the eastern front, but this episode is not what gives his memoir its power. Rather, it is his relentless search for the truth of the war, for the reality of the system for which Ivan ostensibly fought but which treated him with callous disregard both during and after the war, for an understanding of the fear, hatred, and desire for revenge that dominated soldiers' lives for these horrible years that motivates Gorbachevsky. With its recreated dialogue and snapshot descriptions of life at the front, Through the Maelstrom is an almost Chekhovian chronicle of individuals caught in the grip of the ultimate inhumanity.
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Viola, Lynne: The Unknown Gulag. The Lost World of Stalin's Special Settlements. Oxford: Oxford University Press 2007. ISBN 978-0-19-518769-4; geb.; 320 S.; £17.99.
Rezensiert für H-Soz-u-Kult von:
Marc Elie, Centre franco-russe de recherche en sciences humaines et sociales, Moskau
E-Mail: [mailto]marc.elie@centre-fr.net[/mailto]
Mit ihrer jüngsten Monographie schließt Lynne Viola, eine der ausgewiesensten Kennerinnen der Russischen Agrarwelt in der Zeit der Kollektivierung, ein Jahrzehnt Forschungsarbeit zum Thema der Entkulakisierung in den 1930er-Jahren ab. Das Resultat ist eine 251seitige, sorgfältig recherchierte Abhandlung, die den letzten Stand der heutigen Forschung zu diesem zentralen Kapitel der Sowjetgeschichte markiert.
Der Buchtitel "The Unknown Gulag" deutet nicht nur darauf hin, dass das Thema Entkulakisierung noch relativ wenig erforscht ist, sondern vielmehr auf den Umstand, dass das Netz von Siedlungsdörfern für deportierte Kulaken ein Experimentierfeld war, das die offizielle Einführung des Gulag-Systems vorwegnahm. Zunächst galten nämlich die Sondersiedlungen Stalins und der OGPU als universales Straf- und Wirtschaftsinstrument, um die 'Liquidierung sozial fremder Elemente' und die Erschließung der ressourcenreichen, aber entlegenen Gebiete Sibiriens, Kasachstans, des Nordens und des Urals voranzutreiben. Für Lynne Viola erklärt gerade das Fiasko der Kulaken-Deportation, gekennzeichnet durch miserable wirtschaftliche Erträge, Massensterben und Massenflucht, warum schließlich ein geschlossenes und mit überwiegend arbeitsfähigen Zwangsarbeitern funktionierendes Lagersystem den auf Familienarbeit basierenden Siedlungsdörfern ab 1934 vorgezogen wurde.
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Simon Pirani. The Russian Revolution in Retreat, 1920-24: Soviet Workers and the New Communist Elite. London Routledge, 2008. xiv + 289 pp. $160.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-415-43703-5; (e-book), ISBN 978-0-203-93029-8.
Reviewed by Michael C. Hickey (Bloomsburg Universty)
Published on H-Russia (April, 2009)
Commissioned by Nellie H. Ohr
A Social Contract and No Socialism
In this meticulously researched and densely argued case study of Moscow in 1920-24, Simon Pirani argues that the Bolshevik "Party elite" crushed workers' democracy and dissent and transformed the soviets and trade unions, which in 1917 had been arenas of workers' politics, into instruments for executing the regime's commands. The purpose of this command structure was not simply to sustain Bolshevik power, but to transform the Party and state into tools for promoting industrial expansion. In the process, the Party elite oversaw the re-creation of hierarchical social class relations that (ostensibly) had been shattered by the October Revolution: the nascent ruling class (the Party elite and industrial administrators) extracted surplus capital from the alienated labor of workers in the name of the "proletarian" state. But the Bolshevik elite did not rule through repression alone. Pirani's central argument is that their power rested on a new "social contract," under which the Bolsheviks provided workers with improved standards of living in exchange for workers' acquiescence in their own political expropriation and in the repression of dissent. As part of the bargain, workers also agreed to participate in their own economic exploitation by supporting the project of economic construction.
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Susan Emily Reid, Rosalind P. Blakesley, eds. Russian Art and the West: A Century of Dialogue in Painting, Architecture, and the Decorative Arts. DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2007. viii + 246 pp. $42.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-87580-360-9.
Reviewed by Krista Sigler (University of Cincinnati)Published on H-Russia (April, 2009)Commissioned by Nellie H. Ohr
Identity and Imagination: Artistic Exploration of Russia and the West
Ever since the nineteenth century, Russian art has taken pride of place for its innovative styles --from modernism, to eclecticism, to constructivism and socialist realism-- while also reflecting the Russian social order. The role of Russian artists as interpreters and symbols of Russian society has attracted the attention of the nine authors in the collection Russian Art and the West. These essays offer a fascinating analysis of lesser-known artistic fields to challenge the idea that Russian art was isolated from the currents of Western European art.
In the collection, edited by Rosalind P. Blakesley and Susan Emily Reid, nine authors read the history of modern Russian art alongside changing discourses, within Russia and abroad, querying Russia's identity. As an example, Blakesley and Reid address the debate between the nineteenth-century Slavophiles and Westernizers, who portrayed Russia's trajectory, respectively, in terms of a movement to a uniquely Slavic future or into the arms of Western European culture. Through the story of Russian art, primarily of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the authors of the essays in this collection look to move beyond this dichotomy in understanding Russia. They set aside the vision of Russia as a failed imitation of Europe, and they reject as well the concept that Russia was somehow the antithesis of all things European. Instead, Blakesley and Reid argue, Russia has been a zone of mediation between East and West.
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