nkvd mass secret operations

The NKVD Mass SecretNational Operations (August

1937 - November 1938)Werth, NicolasThursday 20 May 2010

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The NKVD Mass Secret National Operations (August 1937 - November 1938)

1.Context

In 1992, the discovery in the Soviet archives of the NKVD's secret operational orders has drasticallychanged our perception of Stalin's Great Terror. These documents disclosed the mechanisms of the hithertohidden side of the Great Terror � that of the mass secret repressive operations (as opposed to the "publicside" � that of the "show trials" and the purges of the political, economic and military elites). These secretoperations were a form of social engineering intended to rid the country "once and for all of the entire gangof anti-Soviet elements who undermine the foundations of the Soviet State" (in the words of Nikolai Ezhov,the Head of the NKVD, in the preamble of Order n° 00447). Two main groups of "enemies" were targeted:

The Kulak Operation, launched by the NKVD Operational Order n° 00447 dated July 30, 1937, targeted awide category of previously identified "social outcasts": the innumerable cohort of "formers", directly andpurposefully marginalized in the 1930s ("former kulaks", "former members of anti-Soviet parties", "formerWhite officers", "former tsarist civil servants" and "church officials"), but also various kinds of "sociallyharmful elements" (such as "recidivist criminals", "bandits", "hooligans", "speculators", "persons with nodefinite place of work or having ties with the criminal world", etc).

The "National Operations" targeted a number of diaspora minorities, suspected of being "a hotbed of spiesand wreckers". On July 25, 1937, Nikolai Ezhov sent to all regional NKVD headquarters Order n° 00439prescribing the immediate arrest of all German citizens employed (or having been employed) in defensefactories, on the railroads and in "other sectors of the national economy". But "Germans" were not the maintarget: Order n° 00449 prescribed the arrest of all Soviet citizens "having, or having had, ties", in one wayor another, with "German spies, wreckers and terrorists". This, of course, considerably widened the scopeof the operation, since no more than 4,000 German citizens were registered in the Soviet Union in 1937(Okhotin & Roginskii, 1999).

Two weeks later, on August 11, 1937, following a Politburo top-secret resolution taken two days earlier,Nikolai Ezhov issued another secret directive, Order n° 00485, aimed at "the complete liquidation of localbranches of the Polish Military Organization (POW) and its networks of spies, wreckers and terrorists inindustry, transport and agriculture". Order n° 00485 identified targets for arrest: all Polish political émigrésand refugees, as well as "the most active part of local anti-Soviet nationalist elements from the Polishnational districts". A month later, this category was extended to all "Soviet citizens of Polish nationalitywith ties to Polish consulates", a category that could easily embrace any Soviet Pole.

Order n° 00485 served as a model for a series of similar NKVD secret decrees targeting a number of theSoviet Union's diaspora nationalities: the Finnish, Latvian, Estonian, Rumanian, Greek, and Chinese. TheNKVD referred to these decrees collectively as "the National Operations" directed against "nationalities offoreign governments". Concerning diaspora minorities, the vast majority of whom were Soviet citizens andwhose ancestors had resided for decades and sometimes centuries in the Soviet Union and Russian Empire,"this designation absolutized their cross-border ethnicities as the only salient aspect of their identity,sufficient proof of their disloyalty and sufficient justification for their arrest and execution" (Martin, 2001:338). Oleg Khlevniuk has convinsingly shown, on the basis of Stalin's correspondence with Sovietdiplomats and NKVD officials in Spain in the months preceding the Great Terror, that the launching of theNational Operations was related to Stalin's reading of rearguard uprisings against the Republican regime inSpain in the course of the Spanish Civil War. Stalin was convinced that hostile capitalist powers such asGermany, Poland, Japan, Finland, Romania and the Baltic States would organize, in the ever more probableevent of war with the Soviet Union, the same kind of rearguard uprisings, resorting to anyone who hadsome sort of connection with foreign countries, in order to form a "fifth column of diversionists and

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wreckers" (Khlevniuk, 2000).

As a matter of fact, diaspora nationalities with cross-border ethnic ties to a foreign Nation-State had beenconsidered as potentially disloyal for several years. In early 1935, the Soviet regime launched a number ofdeportations aimed at "cleansing" the most strategic border regions (the region of Leningrad and theSoviet-Polish border) of their "ethnically suspect elements". Over 8000 families of Polish and Germanorigin were deported in February-March 1935 from the border districts of Kiev and Vinnitsa provinces toeastern Ukraine; at the same time, 12,000 Finns, Estonians and Latvians were deported from the borderdistricts of Leningrad province to Siberia and Central Asia. The cleansing operations in border areas werecontinued and expanded in 1936, encompassing 20,000 families from the Leningrad region and WesternUkraine. In these operations which were still limited and selective, the ethnic criterion was "blended" withclass considerations. Ethnicity was not the only element at stake in the deportations of 1935-1936 and in themurderous outburst of the National Operations of 1937-1938. "Soviet xenophobia" (Martin, 2001: 342) wasan ideological rather than an ethnic concept. A good illustration of this is provided by one specific NationalOperation, initiated by NKVD Order n° 00593 on September 20, 1937, which targeted the so-called"Kharbintsy". These were former personnel (engineers, employees, railway workers) of theChinese-Manchurian railway whose headquarters were based in Kharbin, in Manchuria. After the sale, bythe Soviet government, of this railway to Japan in 1935, many returned to the Soviet Union. For Stalin andhis team, although most of the Kharbintsy were ethnic Russians, their cross-border ties to the Kharbintsyremaining in China turned them into the functional equivalent of a diaspora nationality. And so, despitetheir "Russianness", they too became an "enemy group" targeted as part of the National Operations duringthe Great Terror (Martin, 2001: 343).

The National Operations were not a minor part of the Great Terror. According to centralized NKVDstatistics, from July 1937 to November 1938, 335,513 persons were sentenced by extrajudicial organs in thecourse of the implementation of the National Operations (while over 800,000 persons were convicted in theso-called Kulak Operation carried out under Order n° 00447). Among them, 247,157 (or 73.6%) were shot �a proportion considerably higher than in the Kulak Operation, in the process of which 49.3% weresentenced "in the first category" (death sentence) (Okhotin & Roginskii, 1999).

2.Decision-Makers, Organizers and Actors

Although Nikolai Ezhov signed all the secret NKVD Operational Orders related to the National Operations,its instigator was Stalin himself. Five days before the issuing of Order n° 00439 (which launched theGerman Operation), Stalin scribbled, during the Politburo meeting of July 20, 1937, a short note: "ALLGermans working on our military, semimilitary and chemical factories, on electric stations and buildingsites, in ALL regions are ALL to be arrested" (Okhotin & Roginskii, 1999). As his correspondence withEzhov clearly shows, Stalin closely monitored the implementation of the National Operations. On Ezhov�sfirst report on the progress of the Polish Operation (23,000 arrests in four weeks) Stalin wrote: "Cam.Ezhov. This is excellent! Continue to dig, cleanse, eradicate all this polish dirt ! Liquidate all this dirt in thename of the interests of the USSR. J.Stalin, 14.X.37".

In their organization and implementation, National Operations had several specific characteristics withregard to the Kulak Operation". Order n° 00485 (as well as all the other secret directives concerningNational Operations) did not fix any quotas of people to sentence in the first category (death) or secondcategory (10 years imprisonement), but indicated several categories of people to arrest. In the case of thePolish Operation, for example, these were: all Polish ex-prisonners of war, who had remained in the USSR all Polish refugees settled in the USSR





all Polish political exiles all ex-members of the Polish Socialist Party and of other polish political parties all "antisoviet and nationalistic elements" from districts and regions of the USSR where a Polishcommunity existed. all Soviet citizens having had some sort of contact with Polish diplomatic, consular, military, commercialor economic representatives in the USSR.

In the case of the German Operation, the targeted categories were much the same: German ex-prisonners ofwar, who had remained in the USSR; German political exiles and refugees from Germany, especiallyworkers and engineers who had come from Germany in the 1920s and at the beginning of the 1930s andwho had taken Soviet citizenship; "anti-soviet and nationalistic elements" from districts and regions of theUSSR where a German community existed.

To these "standard categories", local officials of the NKVD were encouraged to add "specific groups" �which they did. In Kharkov, for example, L. Reikhman, the newly-appointed Head of the NKVD, orderedthe following "additional" categories of people to be arrested, in the process of the Polish Operation: all ex-agents of the NKVD "Foreign Department" having been in charge of "Polish affairs" all informants of the NKVD "specialized in Polish affairs" all "clerical elements" having, or having had, some kind of connection with Poland all Soviet citizens having "family or other suspect ties" in Poland.

In Gorki, the local Head of the NKVD decided to add to the "standard categories" of the GermanOperation, which were "too thin" in the area within his juridiction, another group consisting of"ex-prisoners of World War I having been in captivity in Germany, recruited by German secret services toorganize terrorist and spying activities" (441 persons were arrested in this category under Order n° 00439 inGorky region). In Sverdlovsk, the NKVD Chief D. Dmitriev decided, for lack of "proper suspects" for theGerman Operation, to arrest thousands of Ukrainian and Russian deportees. Thus, the Sverdlovsk regioncould boast an excellent score � 4,379 individuals arrested in operations implementing Order n° 00439, or8% of the overall figure of the German Operation (but out of these 4,379, only 122 were of Germanorigin!). As the fate of the arrested depended entirely on the zeal of local NKVD bosses, the chance ofbeing caught and the probability of being sentenced "in the first category" (death penalty) variedconsiderably: in Armenia, 31% of those trapped in National Operations were shot; in the Vologda region,46%; in Bielorussia, 88%; Krasnodar territory, Novossibirsk and Orenbourg regions had the highest rate of"first category" victims: respectively 94%, 94.8% and 96.4%!

The cases of people arrested under one of these National Operations was swiftly examined by the regionaldvoïka (a two-man commission comprising the NKVD chief and the procurator), who decided whatpunishment should be applied to the accused: the first category (death sentence) or the second category (10years in camp). The verdict was to be confirmed by Moscow, that is by Ezhov or Vychinski (the GeneralProcurator of the USSR). Each case examined by the local dvoïka was summed up in a few lines giving aminimal information on the identity of the accused, their alleged crime, and the proposed punishment.These short abstracts were copied in a special album. When the album was full, it was sent "for approval"to Moscow, with a special NKVD messenger. Of course, neither Ezhov nor Vychinski had time tocountersign every record, since each album contained several hundred cases. The records werecountersigned (and the verdict of the dvoïka thus confirmed) by NKVD high-ranking officials, who glancedthrough the album, ratifying the sentence in 99% of the cases. Ezhov or Vychinski signed only the finalpage of the album. In spite of this swift procedure, albums got stuck in Moscow: in July 1938, over ahundred thousand cases (several hundred albums) piled up in the headquarters of the NKVD. Meanwhile,prisons all over the country were overcrowded with people waiting for their sentence to be confirmed. Inorder to put an end to this situation, the Politburo decided, on September 15, 1938, to abolish the "albumprocedure" (as it was called in NKVD circles) and to set up, in every region, territory and republic, "special





troïki", whose decisions, as those of the extra-judicial organs implementing Order n° 00447, would notrequire confirmation by central authorities. These special troïki were to complete the examination of allcases related to the different National Operations before November 15. During these two months, over105,000 people were sentenced. Special National Operations were stopped on November 17, 1938, after thePolitburo issued a top-secret decision abolishing all troïki and dvoïki, and sharply criticizing "majordeficiencies and distortions" in the work of the NKVD (Okhotin & Roginskii, 1999; Petrov &Roginskii,2003).

3.Victims

According to the State Security central authorities� accountancy, over 335,000 persons were sentenced inthe course of the National Operations. The largest contingent (140,000) was trapped in the PolishOperation. Out of this number, 111,000 (or 79%) were executed. Some 55,000 were sentenced under Ordern° 00439 (the German Operation), 76% of whom (or 42,000 persons) were executed. In the course of theKharbin Operation, 33,000 persons were sentenced, of whom 65% (21,200) were executed. The LatvianOperation ended in 22,000 sentences (75% � or 16,500 � in the first category). For the Greek, Romanian,Finnish and Estonian "mass operations", statistics run until mid-September 1938. At that time, the numberof people sentenced in each of the four mass operations was respectively: 11,260 (9,450 sentenced todeath); 6,300 (4,020 sentenced to death); 7,023 (5,724 sentenced to death); 5,680 (4,672 sentenced todeath).

Unfortunately, we do not know exactly how many members of the diaspora nationalities were arrested,sentenced and executed, since not everyone arrested in the Polish Operation, for example, was a Pole or aSoviet citizen of Polish origin, nor were all arrested Poles or Soviet citizens of Polish origin included in thePolish Operation. For instance, through September 1938 in Belorussia, Soviet citizens of Polish originmade up only 43% of those arrested in the Polish Operation, whereas Soviet citizens of German originmade up 76% of the German Operation, and Soviet citizens of Latvian origin 75% of the LatvianOperation. In Moscow, through July 1938, Soviet citizens of Polish origin made up 57% of those arrestedin the Polish Operation (Martin, 2001: 339).

For the Polish and the German Operations, NKVD central statistics, discovered by N. Okhotin, A. Roginskiand N. Petrov, give information on the number of people arrested and sentenced in the different regions ofthe USSR. Not surprisingly, the largest group (40% of all people arrested in the process of the PolishOperation; 39% of all people arrested in the process of the German Operation) came from the Ukraine, andin particular from its western border districts, where there lived a large Polish community and a smallerGerman one. Tens of thousands of peasants, industry and railway workers, employees and engineers werearrested for no reason other than that they lived and worked "too close to the enemy". For the same reason,Bielorussian provinces accounted for 17% of the arrested under Order n° 00485. Surprisingly, at first sight,Western Siberia, Southern Urals, North Caucasus, Kazakhstan and the Far-East showed high numbers ofarrests: in these unruly regions, with large numbers of deportees and social outcasts, high quotas of"anti-Soviet" and "socially harmful elements" to "repress", local NKVD officials tended to fill in "nationallines" (another piece of police jargon) with their usual victims, who had little in common with thosetargeted by Orders 00439, 00485 or 00593 (Okhotin & Roginskii, 1999; Petrov & Roginskii, 2003).

A remarkable feature of the National Operations should be underlined: until May 1938, the NKVDleadership did not seem concerned by the ethnic origin of those arrested; information concerning theirnationality and ethnic origin was systematically collected only after September 1938, when "special troïki"were set up to "finish off" the National Operations. Thus, we know that among the 36,768 individualssentenced under Order n° 0048" (Polish Operation) by the "special troïki" between September and





November 1938, Poles and soviet citizens of Polish origin represented 55% of the total, Bielorussians 15%,Ukrainians 13%, Russians 9% and Jews 4%.

According to N. Okhotin and A. Roginski, Poles and Soviet citizens of Polish origin represented about 70%of the 140,000 persons sentenced under Order n° 00485 (that is 98,000 persons). Altogether, during theGreat Terror, approximately 120,000 Poles and Soviet citizens of Polish origin were arrested andsentenced. With one-fifth of its total group repressed, Soviet citizens of Polish origin paid the heaviest tollof all ethnic minorities forming the "Great Soviet family". Soviet citizens of German origin represented69% of the 55,000 persons sentenced under Order n° 00439 (that is 38,000 people). Altogether, during theGreat Terror, approximately 72,000 Soviet citizens of German origin were arrested and sentenced � that is5% of the Soviet Germans. A remarkable feature should be stressed at this point: relatively few SovietGermans living in the Autonomous Republic of the Volga Germans (by far the largest community of sovietcitizens of German origin) were arrested in the course of the German Operation. In 1937-1938, Sovietcitizens of German origin living in the Autonomous Soviet Republic of the Volga Germans seem to havebeen considered as "better integrated" in the Soviet system than individuals of German origin scattered in"sensitive" border areas or in industrial towns (German, 1996). Ethnicity as such was not the prime criteria,as it would be two or three years later, when entire ethnic groups would be deported (among them, allSoviet Germans).

4.Witnesses

The main characteristic of the mass operations was their absolute secrecy: no more than a hundred highparty and NKVD officials received a copy of the NKVD secret operational orders; all the other executantswere given oral instructions on how to proceed with the operation. The dvoiki and troiki sat behind closeddoors, in the absence of the accused and without any defender. The obsession with secrecy went so far asnot to inform the condemned person - nor his relatives - of the death sentence passed on him. Theinstructions issued on August 14, 1937 to the NKVD regional chiefs, emphasized the need "to ensure thatthere is absolute secrecy concerning time, place and method of execution. Immediately on receipt of thisorder you are to present a list of NKVD staff permitted to participate in executions. Red Army soldiers orordinary policemen are not to be employed. All persons involved in the work of transporting the bodies andexcavating or filling in the pits have to sign a document certifying that they are sworn to secrecy"(McLoughlin, 2003). Nevertheless, some NKVD chiefs not only infringed these regulations, but invitedcolleagues to attend the "wedding" � a coded expression, in NKVD circles, to designate executions. Exceptfor those who were forced to testify during the limited purges of the NKVD apparatus after the end of theGreat Terror (it goes without saying that these testimonies should be subjected to strong historicalcriticism), very few witnesses, such as people living in the neighborhood of the NKVD "shooting ranges"for example, left testimonies on this secret mass crime.

5. Memories

The mass operations of 1937-1938 remained secret for over half a century, until the beginning of the 1990s.Two and a half years after the end of the Great Terror, Soviet society was confronted with the Naziinvasion. The murderous cataclysm of the Great Patriotic War (1941-1945) in the course of which over 20million Soviet citizens were killed and the collective sufferings of a whole nation at war deeply buried thesecret, unspeakable and thus strictly individual memory of the arrest and disapearance of beloved andrelatives during the Great Terror. Only a handful of prisoners, sentenced in 1937-1938 to a ten-yearsentence were released in 1947-1948. Most of those who had survived the terrible war years in the Gulag(the mortality rates were as high as 20% in 1942 and 1943) were given a second ten-year term. Only after





the death of Stalin did hope return for the relatives of the repressed. In 1954-1956, special commissionswere set up in order to "review the cases of individuals condemned for counter-revolutionary crimes andserving their sentence in camps or labour settlements". Approximately 450,000 political prisoners werereleased, but no more than 4% of them were duly rehabilitated. Among those released, how many weresurvivors of the 1937-1938 Great Terror"? Less than 100,000 out of the 750,000 ascribed to the "secondcategory". The return of the survivors brought about a stream of letters sent to the Procuracy or the KGB(State Security) by relatives of those who had vanished since 1937-1938. The question of what they shouldbe answered was discussed at the highest level of the Party and the State Security. On August 24, 1955,Ivan Serov, the newly appointed Chief of the KGB, directed, in a secret instruction to the State Securitystaff, "not to inform the relatives of persons sentenced to the death penalty of the sentence (&) and tell themthat the condemned was sentenced to a ten-year term in camp and had died at a date which will bearbitrarily fixed in the lapse of time between 1937-1938 and 1947-1948" (Artizov et al., 2000). TheProcuracy and the KGB slowed down all the demands of revision. Less than 8% of the demands wereexamined in 1957; 6% in 1958 and under 5% during the following years. The few rehabilitated persons �approximately five to ten thousand per year in the late 1950s and early 1960s � received neither moral, normaterial compensation for all the time they had spent in camps (except a two-month wage calculated on thebasis of their last salary before arrest, the latter being assimilated to a "breach of work contract"). Not asingle NKVD torturer who had extracted false confessions from the victims was handed over to justice.After Khruschev�s fall, in October 1964, the rehabilitation process came to a complete stop for nearlytwenty years. The memory of the Great Terror survived only in the private sphere. Only with theperestroika launched by Mikhail Gorbatchev in 1986 did the tragic events of 1937-1938 begin to re-emergein the public sphere. In september 1987, Mikhail Gorbatchev set up a special commission in charge ofinquiring into the "mass crimes committed by the Stalinist regime" (Artizov et al., 2003). Considering thegrowing flood of rehabilitation demands which threatened to engulf the whole judicial apparatus (since thebeginning of the perestroika, over 100,000 demands of rehabilitation had arrived at the Procuracy), thecommission proposed, in September 1988, a general rehabilitation of every Soviet citizen who had beencondemned by the infamous troWki, dvoWki or by any other extra-judicial authority appointed by Stalinand his team. On January 16, 1989, a law abolished all the sentences delivered by special juridictions underthe Stalinist regime. However, the archives related to the political mechanisms of the repression remainedclosed for historians and members of civic rights associations, such as Memorial. Only after the fall of theSoviet regime, in December 1991, were they allowed to conduct archival research on the mass repressivecampaigns of the Staline era and on the Great Terror in particular. Thus, a team of historians fromMemorial discovered, in June 1992, the secret Stalin instructions on the launching of the mass operationsand the NKVD operational orders of 1937-1938. The testimony of a NKVD official put these historians onthe track of the Butovo "shooting range". Excavations carried out in 1997 established, sixty years after theGreat Terror, that it was a place of mass burials, and probably of mass executions, too (although medicalexperts were uncertain whether "the corpses were thrown into the graves immediately after their death, orfrom eight to ten hours after") (Golovkova, 1999). At the same time, Memorial historians and activistsdecided to start a meticulous process of establishing, in local and central State Security archives, anexhaustive list of the victims of the Stalinist repressions, and of the Great Terror of 1937-1938. Since themid-1990s, several hundred "memorial books" (knigi pamiati) have been published. These books liststandard biographic data concerning the victims (birth date and place, profession, nationality, place ofresidence). They often also provide information concerning social origin, education, Party membership,previous convictions as well as the date of arrest, sentencing (including the article of the criminal code, thesentence itself and the sentencing body) and execution. A drawback of these books is that they almost neverinclude those convicted as ordinary criminals (which they were not). Many of the memorial books alsoinclude extensive valuable documentary materials from local and central KGB archives, as well asautobiographical memoirs from survivors. A complete collection of these memorial books can be found inthe library of the Moscow branch of Memorial (the website www.memo.ru has an extensive list of theseknigi pamiati).





6.General and Legal Interpretations of the Facts

Long before the opening of the Soviet archives, the Great Terror had provoked a number of debates aboutthe amplitude, the mechanisms, the reasons and the purpose of these mass purges. In the 1950s Americanscholars proposed a structural explanation of the Great Terror: as a totalitarian system Stalin�s regime hadto maintain its citizens in a state of fear and uncertainty, and recurrent random purging provided themechanism (Brzezinski, 1958). At the end of the 1960s, Robert Conquest published the first detailedaccount, which was to become a classic reference, on the Great Terror (Conquest, 1968). This workemphasized Stalin�s paranoia, focused on the Moscow show trial of �Old Bolsheviks�, and analyzed thecarefully planned and systematic destruction of the Leninist party leadership as the first step towardterrorizing the entire population. In the mid 1980s, John Arch Getty, an american historian of the revisionistschool contested Conquest�s interpretation, arguing that the exceptional scale of the purges was the result ofstrong tensions between Stalin and regional Party bosses who, in order to deflect the terror that was beingdirected at them, had found innumerable scapegoats on which to carry out repressions, demonstrating inthis way their vigilance and intransigence in the struggle against the common enemy. Thus, far from beinga planned and long-term project revealing the growing paranoia of an all-mighty dictator, the Great Terrorturned out to be a �flight into chaos� (Getty, 1985). In spite of their fundamentally different approach,historians of both schools focused on party purges, repression of real or imagined �oppositionists�, showtrials of party leaders, elimination and replacement of political, intellectual, economic or military elites, andstruggle between the center and regional party cliques. Neither of them studied, mainly because of thescarcity of information on the subject, the mechanisms, organization, implementation of mass arrests andmass executions, or the sociology of the victims, who represented a much wider group than party elites orintelligentsia. Thus, the Great Terror of 1937-1938 in the Soviet Union solidified in popular and academicmemory as Stalin�s attack on political and social elites, as the �Great Purges�.

This has been fundamentally challenged since the opening of the soviet archives, the discovery of theNKVD operational orders and other top-secret Politburo documents. Scholars now insist on the hidden sideof the Great Terror, interpreting it as a crucial moment � or rather the culmination � of a vast socialengineering campaign started at the beginning of the 1930s (Hagenloh, 2000; Shearer, 2003; Werth, 2003).In the light of recent research, the qualification of �Great Purges� seems incorrect to characterize thismurderous outburst of violence. The extreme diversity of the victims makes difficult any legal qualificationof this crime, which appears to be in a class of its own: 800,000 people executed in secret (over half ofthem under Order n° 00447) by means of a bullet in the back of the head after a pretence of justice; thisover a period of sixteen months, at a rate of 50,000 executions per month or 1,700 per day for nearly 500days. Let us therefore content ourselves with a �minimalist� classification: the Great Terror was one of theworst and largest mass crimes carried out by the Stalinist State against one per cent of its adult population.

7.Bibliography

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DANILOV, Viktor Petrovitch, MANNING, Roberta, VIOLA, Lynne (eds.), 2001, Tragedia sovetskoiderevni. Dokumenty i materialy v 5 tomax, 1927-1939 (The Tragedy of the Soviet Countryside: Documentsin 5 volumes, 1927-1939), vol.3, Moscow: ROSSPEN.

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JANSEN, Marc and PETROV, Nikita, 2002, Stalin�s Loyal Executioner: People�s Commissar NikolaiEzhov, 1895-1940, Stanford, CA: Hoover Institution Press.

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B - Articles

HAGENLOH, Paul, «Socially Harmful Elements and the Great Terror», in FITZPATRICK, Sheila (ed.),2000, Stalinism: New Directions , London & New York: Routledge, pp. 286-307.

KHLEVNIUK, Oleg, «The Reasons for the Great Terror: the Foreign-Political Aspect», in PONS, Silvio,and ROMANO, Andrea (eds.), 2000, Russia in the Age of Wars, 1914-1945 , Roma: Annali, pp. 159-173.

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OKHOTIN, Nikita, and ROGINSKII, Arsenii, «Iz istorii �nemetskoi operatsii� NKVD 1937-1938» (Historyof the �German Operation� of the NKVD, 1937-1938), in SCHERBAKOVA, Irina (ed.), 1999, NakazannyiNarod (The Punished People), Moscow: Zvenia, pp. 35-74.

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