Laboratories of Terror

The Final Act of Stalin's Great Purge in Soviet Ukraine

By: Lynne Viola - editor, Marc-Stephan Junge

Narrated by: Christina Delaine

Laboratories of Terror explores the final chapter of Stalin's Great Terror in Soviet Ukraine.

When the Communist Party Central Committee and the Council of People's Commissars of the USSR halted mass operations in repression in November 1938, large numbers of mainly Communist purge victims whose cases remained incomplete were released. At the same time, hundreds of NKVD operatives who had carried out the Great Terror were scapegoated and arrested.

Drawing on materials from the largely closed archives of the Soviet security police, this collection of essays by an international team of researchers illuminates the previously opaque world of the NKVD perpetrator. It uncovers the mechanics and logistics of the terror at the local level by examining the criminal files of a series of mid-level NKVD operatives from across Ukraine. The result offers new perspectives on both Stalin's central role in the architecture of the terror and NKVD perpetrators' agency in implementing one of the most horrific episodes of twentieth-century mass violence.

©2023 Oxford University Press (P)2023 Tantor

Difficult Book for Historians

This is a very academic book that focuses on the exhaustive details of just one period in USSR history. It relies on recently declassified documents, thus making it a ground breaking study, but If you're new to the topic of USSR history or the Reign of Terror, I would not recommend it. Nearly every paragraph or sentence seems to introduce a new person or event.