L ynne V iola . Stalinist Perpetrators on Trial

In November 1938, and after two years of carnage, Stalin began to rein in the Great Terror. Beria replaced Ezhov as head of the NKVD. In the next year, 7,372 (22 percent of the total) of the NKVD’s agents were removed (4). As many as 110,000 prisoners were released, and 77,000 party members were reinstated in the party (28). The winding down of the terror also involved the organizing of trials of low-ranking officials involved in the conduct of the terror. These continued until 1942. This is the focus of Lynne Viola’s study, Stalinist Perpetrators on Trial: Scenes from the Great Terror in Soviet Ukraine, based on documents obtained from Soviet-era archives in Ukraine. In Ukraine a total of 665 NKVD cadres were arrested, of whom at least 151 were arrested for violations of socialist legality (6). The trials were conducted by a military tribunal that “adhered strictly to Soviet law (such as it was)” (7).The trials relate a litany of charges: the use of torture, theft of prisoners’ property, drunkenness among the officers, and sexual abuse of the relatives of the accused. Those on trial almost invariably justified themselves on the grounds that they were only carrying out orders. Some of the defendants were executed, but how many remains unclear.

Criminology · Human rights · Political science · Principle of legality · Sociology · Torture · Tribunal · Communism, Protests, Social Movements · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis · Law · Vietnamese History and Culture Studies