Manchester University Press Stalinist Terror in Eastern Europe: Elite Purges and Mass Repression

This wide-ranging collection of essays is the first book in English to examine the impact of Stalinist terror on Eastern Europe in the years 1940 to 1956. Covering the Baltic states, Moldavia, East Germany, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania, Yugoslavia, Bulgaria and Albania, the authors investigate terror both 'from above', in the form of elite purges and show trials, and 'from below' in the guise of large-scale arrests and deportations of ordinary people. Key questions addressed include the relative importance of Soviet influence versus 'local' factors; the persecution of particular groups, such as 'kulaks', church leaders, the middle-class intelligentsia and members of non-communist left-wing parties; cases where repression was more, or conversely less, intense than elsewhere; and the relevance of key events such as the Tito-Stalin split of 1948, the Rajk trial of 1949 and the Slansku trial of 1952. Although there were common features of the terror throughout the region, the individual contributions also highlight areas of considerable diversity, making this volume an excellent starting point for all scholars and students interested in the wider history of political trials, forced labour and state-sponsored violence in the twentieth century's 'age of extremes'. Review Norman Naimark's book seeks to demonstrate that 'Stalin's mass killings of the 1930s should be classified as "genocide" (1). Naimark recognizes the difficulties in arguing that case, given that in the USSR there was no one, single, act of genocide, but rather 'a series of interrelated attacks on "class enemies" and "enemies of the people", and he argues that this period, when millions of people were repressed in the USSR, should be regarded as 'an important chapter in the history of genocide' (2), and that the governmental system created at that time in the USSR should be seen as a genocidal regime. Book Reviews 187 While international law understands genocide to mean the annihilation of individual groups of the population according to racial, national, ethnic or religious criteria, or the deliberate creation of conditions of life calculated to destroy a group wholly or in part, Naimark seeks to broaden the concept. In his definition, genocide is 'systematic mass murder intentionally perpetrated by the political elite of a state against a targeted group within the borders of or outside the state that should distinguish genocide from other forms of mass killing, like pogroms, massacres, and terrorist bombing' (4). He argues his case in chapters dealing with Stalin himself, de-kulakization, the Ukrainian famine ('Holodomor'), the deportation of whole nationalities and the 'Great Terror' of the 1930s. The conclusions he draws are not particularly original, and the whole work is more of a political rather than a historical investigation. It has no separate discussion of historiography and sources, which leaves an impression that the author has ignored evidence which does not fit the picture he is trying to present. Naimark argues that Stalin did not start with genocidal intent, but the pressure of circumstances pushed him that way. One reason for that might be that Stalin, who often declared himself to be Lenin's pupil, enthusiastically continued with Lenin's punitive policies. Naimark's definition of 'genocide' could equally well be applied to the Soviet decree abolishing the social estates of Tsarist Russia (10/23 November 1917) and the persecution of people of noble origin, or to the process of de-Cossackization in 1919-20 which put an end to the Cossacks as a separate military caste. Moreover, when the Cheka's M. Latsis declared in 1918 that 'we are not struggling against individuals, we are destroying the bourgeoisie as a class', this could also count as an incitement to genocide. The weaknesses of Naimark's formulation become apparent when it is tested against Soviet realities, even though its humanistic intent should be welco