Lynne Viola

Popular Resistance in the Stalinist 1930s: Soliloquy of a Devil's Advocate

Over the last several decades, the western historiographical map of the Stalinist 1930s has expanded topically and conceptually, albeit incrementally and sometimes reluctantly, from cold war fixations on totalitarian control, repression, and societal atomization; to the revisionist arguments of the 1980s, which illuminated the social base of Stalinism, center-periphery conflicts, and the administrative weaknesses of Stalinist governance, while pioneering a more detached approach to source study; to, among other concerns of the present, an interest in resistance. Recent work on the topic of popular resistance to the Stalinist dictatorship in the 1930s derives chiefly from new evidence surfacing in previously classified archival holdings, although to ignore or dismiss altogether an element of historiographical virtue in these recent historical excavations would be, perhaps, shortsighted. A long entrenched tradition of historiographical bifurcation of Soviet history into a Manichaean world of good and evil based both on cold war and Stalinist mentalities (the latter seeping into the former on an all too regular basis and, more recently within Russia, the opposite as well) should serve as a cautionary tale, highlighting the polemical and potentially ahistorical pitfalls of either a valorization of resistance or a preoccupation with resistance to the exclusion of the rest of the historical record. Otherwise we risk projecting our own cold war, anti-Stalinist tropes onto the popular classes of the 1930s. The story of popular resistance in the Stalinist 1930s is not entirely new, although a clearer sense of its size and content is only now emerging. The significance of the topic resides less in the fact of resistance as an object in itself than in the light the topic sheds on its historical surroundings. Popular resistance is best treated as a kind of prism that refracts and distills what otherwise might be opaque dimensions of the social, cultural, and political history of the 1930s. And at the same time that we highlight a new and largely salutary trend in recent scholarship, it is important to recognize the inherent subjectivities and blurred outlines of the nature of resistance, and to question when, under what circum-

New sources on Soviet perpetrators of mass repression: a research note

ABSTRACT At the end of the Great Terror, Stalin reversed course and reined in the NKVD. Hundreds of NKVD interrogators and other officials were arrested and charged with “violations of socialist legality.” Punishments ranged from imprisonment in the Gulag to execution. This repression of the NKVD was the result of a combination of scapegoating and “clan” politics. The arrests and accompanying trials of these NKVD officers created an enormous paper trail of sources, strictly classified in the FSB archives in Moscow. Recently, however, the security police archives in Ukraine opened its doors to researchers. The result is access to a range of sources which allow researchers, for the first time, to explore in detail the topic of Soviet perpetrators, in this case, the Soviet security police during and in the aftermath of the Great Terror.

Peasant Rebels under Stalin: Collectivization and the Culture of Peasant Resistance

Based on newly declassified Soviet archives, including secret police reports, Peasant Rebels Under Stalin documents the active history of the vast peasant rebellion against collectivization between 1928-1932. Lynn Viola reveals the manifestation in Stalins Russia of universal strategies of peasant resistance in what amounted to virtual civil war between state and peasantry.