1. MarkRoseman, , “Beyond Conviction? Perpetrators, Ideas and Action in the Holocaust in Historiographical Perspective,” in Biess, Frank, Roseman, Mark, and Schissler, Hanna, eds., Conflict, Catastrophe and Continuity: Essays on Modern German History (New York, 2007), 83;Google Scholar and Browning, Christopher R., The Path to Genocide: Essays on Launching the Final Solution (Cambridge, Eng., 1992), x. See also the nuanced and open discussion of the historiography in Michael Wildt, An Uncompromising Generation: The Nazi Leadership of the Reich Security Main Office, trans. Tom Lampen (Madison, 2009), 3–18.Google Scholar

2. For a ränge of views on the trials, see Bloxham, Donald, Genocide on Trial: War Crimes Trials and the Formation of Holocaust History and Memory (Oxford, 2001);CrossRefGoogle Scholar Earl, Hilary, The Nuremberg SS-Einsatzgruppen Trial, 1945-1958: Atrocity, Law, and History (Cambridge, Eng., 2009), chap. 1; Devin 0.Google Scholar Pendas, , “Seeking Justice, Finding Law: Nazi Trials in Postwar Europe,” Journal of Modern History 81, no. 2 (June 2009): 347–68;CrossRefGoogle Scholar and Douglas, Lawrence, The Memory ofjudgment: MakingLaw and History in the Trials ofthe Holocaust (New Haven, 2001).Google Scholar

3. See, e.g., Applebaum, Anne, Gulag: A History (New York, 2003)Google Scholar, epilogue and esp. 575, where she uses the phrase “Gulag denier,” in relation to a certain “few” but unnamed scholars; and Courtois, Stéphane et al., eds., The Black Book of Communism, trans. Murphy, Jonathan and Kramer, Mark (Cambridge, Mass., 1999), especially articles by Martin Malia and Stephane Courtois, both of whom see communism as the moral equivalent of Nazism.Google Scholar

4. The trial ended without resolution. For information on the sources yielded by the trial, see 1.1. Kudriavtsev, , ed., Arkhivy Kremlia i staroi ploshchadi: Dokumenty po “delu KPSS” (Novosibirsk, 1995).Google Scholar

5. See, in particular, the fine historiographical discussions in Geyer, Michael and Fitzpatrick, Sheila, eds., Beyond Totalitahanism: Stalinism and Nazism Compared (Cambridge, Eng., 2009), esp. chap. 1.Google Scholar

6. For a history of the model, see Abbott Gleason, Totalitarianism: The Inner History of the Cold War (New York, 1995). Totalitarianism founds its theorists in Carl Friedrich, Zbigniew Brzezinski, Jacob Talman, and, most famously, Hannah Arendt. See Arendt, Hannah, The Origins of Totalitarianism new ed. (New York, 1973);Google Scholar Friedrich, Carl J. and Brzezinski, Zbigniew K., Totalitarian Dictatorship and Autocracy, 2d rev. ed. (Cambridge, Mass., 1965);Google Scholar and Talman, J. L., The Origins of Totalitarian Democracy (London, 1952).Google Scholar

7. See Bloxham, Genocide on Trial, 2-6.

8. Cited in Douglas, The Memory ofjudgment, 91.

9. Hilberg, Raul, The Destruction ofthe European Jews (New York, 1985), 288.Google Scholar

10. Arendt, Hannah, On Violence (New York, 1970), 38.Google Scholar

11. Arendt, Hannah, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality ofEvil, rev. ed. (New York, 1985), 276.Google Scholar

12. Ibid., 252.

13. For a discussion of the intentionalist-structuralist debate, see Kershaw, Ian, Hitler, the Germans, and the Final Solution (New Haven, 2008), pt. 3.Google Scholar

14. Tucker, Robert C., ed., Stalinism: Essays in Historical Interpretation (New York, 1977), esp. xi–xx.Google Scholar

15. Kershaw, Hitler, 246. Emphasis in the original.

16. For a discussion of the German literature, see Herbert, Ulrich, “Extermination Policy: New Answers and Questions about the History of the ‘Holocaust’ in German Historiography,” in Herbert, , ed., National Socialist Extermination Policies: Contemporary German Perspectives and Controversies (New York, 2004), 4–11.Google Scholar

17. Browning, Christopher R. (with contributions by Jürgen Matthäus), The Origins of the Final Solution: The Evolution of Nazi Jewish Policy, September 1939-March 1942 (Lincoln, 2004), 214.Google Scholar

18. Kershaw, writes: “Hitler would Signal a ‘green light’ to party radicals to step up measures against Jews; ‘action’ would inevitably build from below, putting pressure on the regime to sanction it, and ultimately Hitler's intervention; this would ‘legitimate’ the radical action before starting the process once more … without any need for explicit orders.” Kershaw, , Hitler, 20–21,40-41.Google Scholar

19. For classic work in the revisionist genre, see Fitzpatrick, Sheila, ed., Cultural Revolution in Russia, 1928-1931 (Bloomington, 1978);Google Scholar Fitzpatrick, , Education and Social Mobility in the Soviet Union, 1921-1934 (Cambridge, Eng., 1979);CrossRefGoogle Scholar Arch, Getty J., Origins of the Great Purges: The Soviet Communist Party Reconsidered, 1933-1938 (Cambridge, Eng., 1985);Google Scholar Kuromiya, Hiroaki, Stalin's Industrial Revolution: Politics and Workers, 1928-1932 (Cambridge, Eng., 1988);Google Scholar Manning, Roberta, “Government in the Soviet Countryside in the Stalinist Thirties: The Case of Belyi Raion in 1937,” Carl Beck Papers in Russian and East European Studies, no. 301 (Pittsburgh, n.d.);Google Scholar and Viola, Lynne, The Best Sons ofthe Fatherland: Workers in the Vanguard of Soviet Collectivization (New York, 1987).Google Scholar

20. Malia, , “Foreword: The Uses of Atrocity,” in Courtois et al., eds., Black Book of Communism , xx. In “To the Editors,” Kritika 3 no.3 (Summer 2002): 569–71CrossRefGoogle Scholar, Malia, writes, “To really put the revisionist corpse behind us, its conceptual failures will have to be explicitly [his emphasis] recognizedbyaconsensus ofthe field, ifpossiblebysome ofthe responsible parties themselves.” In “On the Primacy of Ideology: Soviet Revisionists and Holocaust Deniers,” Kritika 5, no. 1 (Winter 2004): 100–101 Google Scholar, Michael David-Fox discusses Malia's political critiques of the revisionists, noting “The Soviet historical tragedy thus repeats itself as historiographical farce, with Malia issuing the call for self-criticism, recantation, and condemnation by an activist majority.“

21. For a sense ofthe tone ofthe debate, see Fitzpatrick, Sheila, “Revisionism in Retrospect: A Personal View,” Slavic Review 67, no. 3 (Fall 2008): 682–704.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

22. Browning, Christopher R., Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland (New York, 1992);Google Scholar Goldhagen, Daniel Jonah, Hitler's Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust (New York, 1996).Google Scholar

23. Browning, Ordinary Men, 161.

24. Goldhagen, Hitler's Willing Executioners, 6x 2013; 7, 28-29, 266–67, 419.

25. Hilberg, Destruction of the European Jews, 277. E.g., Earl, The Nuremberg SSEinsatzgruppen Trial, 140-41, takes a middling view between Browning and Goldhagen. For another nuanced view, see Wildt, An Uncompromising Generation. Wildt presents a sophisticated analysis of the conjuneture of generation, institution, and war to understand the shaping of the leaders of the Reich Security Main Office. Wildt is careful (and in this unusual) to note that his conclusions do not extend necessarily to other groups of Nazi perpetrators (425).

26. Two decades of archival work have yielded multiple empirical studies and a voluminous array of published documents on Soviet violence in the 1930s that allow us to begin the work of excavating the Soviet perpetrator. Some of the best work includes Zhdanova, G. D.. et al., eds., Massovye repressiiv Altaiskom krae, 1937-1938 gg.: PrikazNo. 00447 (Moscow, 2010);Google Scholar Stalinism v Sovetskoi provintsii, 1937-1938 gg.: Massovaia operatsiia na osnoveprikaza No. 00447 (Moscow, 2009); Junge, Marc, ed., “Cherez trupy vraga na blago naroda“: “Kulatskaia operatsiia” v Ukrainskoi SSR1937-1941 gg., 2 vols. (Moscow, 2010);Google Scholar Danilov, V., Manning, R., Viola, L. et al., eds., Tragedüa Sovetskoi derevni. Kollektivizatsüa i raskulachivanie. Dokumenty i materialy, 1927-1939, 5 vols. (Moscow, 1999-2006);Google Scholar Berelovich, A. and Danilov, V., eds., Sovetskaia derevnia glazami VChK-OGPU-NKVD, 1918-1939: Dokumenty i materialy, 4 vols. (Moscow, 1998-2005);Google Scholar as well as the works of Tepliakov, A. G., most notably Mashina terrora: OGPU-NKVD Sibiri v 1929-1941 gg. (Moscow, 2008);Google Scholar Junge, Marc and Binner, Rolf, eds., Kak terror stal “bol'shim” (Moscow, 2003);Google Scholar Leibovich, O. et al., eds., “Vkliuchen v operatsiiu“: Massovyi terror v Prikam'e v 1937-1938 gg. (Moscow, 2009);Google Scholar Stepanov, A. F., Rasstrelpo limitu: Iz istorii politicheskikh repressii v TASSRvgody “ezhovshchinu” (Kazan, 1999);Google Scholar Samosudov, V. M., 0 repressüakh v Omskom Prürtysh'e: Istoricheskie etiudy (Omsk, 1998).Google Scholar

27. Goldman, Wendy, Terror and Democracy in the Age of Stalin: The Social Dynamics of Repression (Cambridge, Eng., 2007), and Goldman, , Inventing the Enemy: Denunciation and Terror in Stalin's Russia (Cambridge, Eng., 2011);Google Scholar Hagenloh, Paul, Stalin's Police: Public Order and Mass Repression in the USSR, 1926-1941 (Baltimore, 2009);Google Scholar and Shearer, David, Policing Stalin's Socialism: Repression and Social Order in the Soviet Union, 19241953 (New Haven, 2009).Google Scholar See also the excellent studies in McLoughlin, Barry and McDermott, Kevin, eds., Stalin's Terror: High Politics and Mass Repression in the Soviet Union (New York, 2003).CrossRefGoogle Scholar Although unpublished, the work of Cynthia V. Hooper should be noted as an excellent study examining (among other things) the structural and institutional framework for repression. See Hooper, , “Terror from Within: Participation and Coercion in Soviet Power, 1924-1964” (PhD diss., Princeton University, 2003).Google Scholar Also noteworthy are the works of Alexopoulos, Golfo, including Stalin's Outcasts: Aliens, Citizens, and the Soviet State, 1926-1936 (Ithaca, 2003);Google Scholar Alexopoulos, , “Stalin and the Politics of Kinship: Practices of Collective Punishment, 1920s-1940s,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 50, no. 1 (January 2008): 91–117;Google Scholar and Alexopoulos, , “Amnesty 1945: The Revolving Door of Stalin's Gulag,” Slavic Review 64, no. 2 (Summer 2005): 274–306.CrossRefGoogle Scholar Alexopoulos's fortheoming work on practices in the gulag will undoubtedly prove formative in our knowledge and interpretations.

28. Halfin, Igal, Terror in My Soul: Communist Autobiographies on Trial (Cambridge, Mass., 2003);Google Scholar Halfin, , From Darkness to Light: Class, Consciousness, and Salvation in Revolutionary Russia (Pittsburgh, 2000);CrossRefGoogle Scholar Halfin, , Intimate Enemies: Demonizing the Bolshevik Opposition, 1918-1928 (Pittsburgh, 2007);CrossRefGoogle Scholar Halfin, , Stalinist Confessions: Messianism and Terror at the Leningrad Communist University (Pittsburgh, 2009);CrossRefGoogle Scholar and Hellbeck, Jochen, Revolution on My Mind: Writing a Diary under Stalin (Cambridge, Mass., 2006).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

29. Arch, Getty J. and Naumov, Oleg V., The Road to Terror: Stalin and the Self-Destruction of the Bolsheviks, 1932-1939, trans. Sher, Benjamin (New Haven, 1999), particularly the introduetion.Google Scholar

30. See the important new collection by Steinberg, Mark D. and Sobol, Valeria, eds., Interpreting Emotions in Russia and Eastern Europe (DeKalb, 2011), in particular the editors’ introduetion and the chapters by Ronald Grigor Suny (“Thinking about Feelings“) and Glennys Young (“Bolsheviks and Emotional Hermeneutics“).Google Scholar

31. Sofsky, Wolfgang, The Order of Terror: The Concentration Camp, trans. Templer, William (Princeton, 1997).Google Scholar

32. Bauman, Zygmunt, Modernity and the Holocaust (Ithaca, 1992), 18.Google Scholar See also Weitz, Eric D., A Century ofGenocide: Utopias ofRace and Nation (Princeton, 2003).Google Scholar

33. See, in particular, Weiner, Amir, “Nature, Nurture, and Memory in a Socialist Utopia: Delineating the Soviet Socio-Ethnic Body in the Age of Socialism,” American Historical Review 104, no. 4 (October 1999): 1114–55;CrossRefGoogle Scholar and Weiner, , ed., Landscaping the Human Garden: Twentieth-Century Population Management in a Comparative Framework (Stanford, 2003), especially the introduction by Weiner and the brilliant article by Peter Holquist, “State Violence as Technique.”Google Scholar

34. See, e.g., Omer Bartov's critique of Sofsky, in, “ Ordering Horror: Conceptualizations of the Concentrationary Universe,” Germany's War and the Holocaust: Disputed Histories (Ithaca, 2003), 105–11;Google Scholar and Viola, Lynne, “The Aesthetic of Stalinist Planning and the World of the Special Villages,” Kritika 4, no. 1 (Winter 2003): 101–28.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

35. Rossiiskii gosudarstvennyi arkhiv sotsial'no-politicheskoi istorii (RGASPI), f. 560, op. 1, d. 10,1.159. This quote is taken from “Zapiski osobista,” by M. F. Zhabokritskii, an unpublished manuscript dated 1967.

36. Levene, Mark, Genocide in theAge ofthe Nation State, 2 vols. (London, 2005), 1:99.Google Scholar

37. Levi, Primo, The Drowned and the Saved, trans. Rosenthal, Raymond (New York, 1989), 186–87.Google Scholar

38. Regardless ofthe theoretically precise categorizations ofthe police files.

39. For an example of these characterizations in Germany, see Roseman, “Beyond Conviction?“

40. For examples, see Tucker, Robert C., Stalin as Revolutionär)/, 1879-1929: A Study in History and Personality (New York, 1973);Google Scholar Rieber, A. J., “Stalin, Man of the Borderlands,“ American Historical Review 106, no. 5 (December 2001): 1651-91;CrossRefGoogle Scholar Rieber, , “Stalin as Georgian: the Formative Years,” in Davies, Sarah and Harris, James, eds., Stalin: A New History (Cambridge, Eng., 2005), 18–44;CrossRefGoogle Scholar Rancour-Laferriere, Daniel, The Mind of Stalin: A Psychoanalytic Study (Ann Arbor, 1988).Google Scholar

41. Viola, , The Best Sons ofthe Fatherland, 21,222n45; Getty, Origins ofthe GreatPurges, 46,68–69,82-83;Google Scholar Viola, Lynne, The Unknown Gulag: The Lost World of Stalin's Special Settlements (New York, 2007), 108–9;Google Scholar Bakirov, E. A. et al., eds., Butovskiipoligon, 1937-1938, 8 vols. (Moscow, 1997), 1:26. On the use of alcohol among Einsatsgruppen members, see, e.g., Browning, Ordinary Men, 61, 69, 82-85;Google Scholar Hilberg, , Destruction ofthe European Jews, 146; and Sereny, Gitta, Mo ThatDarkness (London, 1990), 200.Google Scholar

42. Tepliakov, A. G., Protsedura: Ispolneniia smertnykhprigovorov v 1920-30-kh godakh (Moscow, 2007), 33–37.Google Scholar

43. Fitzpatrick, Education and Social Mobility.

44. Viola, Lynne, Peasant Rebeis under Stalin: Collectivization and the Culture of Peasant Resistance (New York, 1996), 24–27;Google Scholar and Viola, , “The Campaign to Eliminate the Kulak as a Class, Winter, 1929-1930: A Reevaluation of the Legislation,” Slavic Review 45, no. 3 (Autumn 1986): 503–24.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

45. See, e.g., Hagenloh, Stalin's Police, 278-81.

46. See, e.g., the document in Viola, Lynne et al., eds., The War against the Peasantry, 1927-30: The Tragedy ofthe Soviet Countryside, trans. Shabad, Steven (New Haven, 2005), 279–88;Google Scholar and Viola, Unknown Gulag, 36.

47. On “apartment denunciations,” see Fitzpatrick, Sheila, “Signals from Below,“ Tear Off the Masks! Identity and Imposture in Twentieth-Century Russia (Princeton, 2005), 228–29.Google Scholar

48. Tepliakov, Protsedura, 67-71.

49. Vatlin, A. Iu., Terror raionnogo masshtaba (Moscow, 2004), 85–87.Google Scholar

50. For Nazi Germany, see Browning, Ordinary Men, 170.

51. Viola, Best Sons, 127-29.

52. E.g., Goldman, Terror and Democracy in the Age of Stalin, 175, 205-6.

53. E.g., Grigorenko, Petro G., Memoirs, trans. Whitney, Thomas P. (New York, 1983), 28,36;Google Scholar Kopelev, Lev, Isotvoril sebe kumira (Ann Arbor, 1978);Google Scholar Orlova, Raisa, Memoirs, trans. Cioran, Samuel (New York, 1983), ix-x, 65, 83, 72.Google Scholar

54. See Halfin, Stalinist Confessions.

55. Clark, Katerina, Petersburg: Crucible of Cultural Revolution (Cambridge, Mass., 1995), ix-x.Google Scholar

56. A similar approach can be found in James Waller's masterful BecomingEvil. Waller combines a macrohistorical approach with a psychosocial exploration of the individual perpetrator. Starting from what seems now to be the consensus view—that perpetrators were “ordinary people“—he examines a ränge of factors including what he calls “ancestral shadows” (ethnocentrism, xenophobia, the desire for social dominance), the forces that mold perpetrators (cultural belief Systems, moral disengagement, rational self-interest), the culture of cruelty (the role of Professional socialization, binding factors of a group, the merger of bureaucratic role and person), and the notion of the “social death of the victim” (the us-them mentality, dehumanization, blaming the victim). He further argues that a “trigger” is necessary to put in motion this cultural and social baggage, therefore highlighting the situational and the contingent. See James Waller, Becoming Evil: How Ordinary People Commit Genocide and Mass Killing (New York, 2002). . Etkind, Alexander, Internal Colonization: Russia's Imperial Experience (Cambridge, Eng., 2011), 249.Google Scholar

58. Stalin, I., Sochineniia, 13 vols. (Moscow, 1951-1955), 11:171.Google Scholar

59. See, e.g., Molotov Remembers: Inside Kremlin Poltics. Conversations with Felix Chuev (Chicago, 1991), 254.

60. Hagenloh, Stalin's Police; and Shearer, PolicingStalin's Socialism.

61. Viola, Unknown Gulag, 5-6; Viola, Peasant Rebeis under Stalin, 32-38.

62. E. H. Carr was the first scholar to note that policy often determined class in the Soviet context. See Carr, , Socialism in One Country, 1924-1926, 4 vols. (London, 1958-1964), 1:99CrossRefGoogle Scholar

63. Rossiiskii gosudarstvennyi arkhiv ekonomiki (RGAE), f. 7486, op. 37, d. 23233,177.

64. Viola, Peasant Rebeis under Stalin, chaps. 1,4-5.

65. Goldman, Terror and Democracy in the Age of Stalin; and Goldman, Inventing the Enemy.

66. Viola, Unknown Gulag, 104-12.

67. Afans'ev, Iu. N. et al., eds., Istorna Stalinskogo Gulaga. Konets 1920-kh—pervaia polovina 1950-kh godov. Sobranie dokumentov v semi tomakh (Moscow, 2004-5), 2:34, 43, 67–69, 96-99,109-13,145-46.Google Scholar

68. See Alexander Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago, trans. Thomas P. Whitney and Harry Willetts, 3 vols. (New York, 1973-78). The classic memoir account on the criminal-political dichotomy is by Eugenia Semenovna Ginzburg, Journey into the Whirlwind, trans. Paul Stevenson and Max Hayward (New York, 1967), but many other memoirs by intellectuals testify to this as well.

69. On interrogations, see the provocative and erudite Stalinist Confessions by Igal Halfin. Halfin was the first western scholar to explore interrogations. His great contribution is to examine the ways in which the dominant ideological discourse shaped the world of both interrogator and victim, thus, in his opinion, blurring the lines between perpetrator and victim. While his focus on Leningrad students allows him to make this argument quite brilliantly, it limits the possibilities of generalizing this understanding of perpetrators, not only beyond the Great Terror (e.g., the dominant discourse does not exist at any level during the mass repression of peasants in the early 1930s and represents at best a small part of the story within the gulag), but even within the Great Terror (when our attention turns away from the capital cities and away from communists and intellectuals). Nadezhda Mandelstam, Hope against Hope, trans. Max Hayward (New York, 1976), 81.

71. Viktorov, V. A., Bezgrifa “sekretno“: Zapiski voennogo prokurora (Moscow, 1990), 138–39.Google Scholar

72. Ginzburg discusses this phenomenon in Journey into the Whirlwind.

73. Arendt, On Violence, 56.

74. Harris, James, “Resisting the Plan in the Urals, 1928-1956,” in Viola, Lynne, ed., Contending with Stalinism: Soviet Power and Populär Resistance in the 1930s (Ithaca, 2002), 201–27.Google Scholar

75. Levene, Genocide in the Age of the Nation State; Mark Mazower, Dark Continent (New York, 1998). For other comparative works, see Gellately, Robert and Kiernan, Ben, eds., The Specter of Genocide: Mass Murder in Historical Perspective (Cambridge, Eng., 2003);CrossRefGoogle Scholar Kiernan, , Blood and Soil: A World History of Genocide and Extermination from Sparta to Darfur (New Haven, 2007);Google Scholar Mann, Michael, The Dark Side ofDemocracy: Explaining Ethnic Cleansing (Cambridge, Eng., 2005);Google Scholar and Bloxham, Donald and Gerwarth, Robert, eds., Political Violence in Twentieth-Century Europe (Cambridge, Eng., 2011).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

76. See, e.g., Gerlach, Christian and Werth, Nicolas, “State Violence-Violent Societies,” in Geyer, and Fitzpatrick, , eds., Beyond Totalitarianism, 151; and Christian Gerlach, Extremely Violent Societies: Mass Violence in the Twentieth-Century World (Cambridge, Eng., 2010).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

77. Levene, Genocide in the Age of the Nation State, 1:112–13,163,174,176.

78. Fitzpatrick, Sheila, The Russian Revolution, new ed. (New York, 1994), 140.Google Scholar

79. See Hagenloh, Stalin's Police; and Shearer, Policing Stalin's Socialism.

80. See Getty's pioneering work on center-periphery conflicts, beginning with his Origins ofthe Great Purges.

81. See Viola, “Aesthetic of Stalinist Planning.“ As a salutary warning, it is worth noting the words of the German historian of National Socialism, Wildt, who writes in respect to the study of the Nazi perpetrator: “Future research on the subject will be guided not by the presupposition of a Single, predominant perpetrator type but by the analysis of different actors and institutions, of intentional will to exterminate and structural conditions, of ideology and function, as well as of individual premeditation and the dynamics of situational violence.” Wildt, An Uncompromising Generation, 8.

83. Verdery, Katherine, “Postsocialist Cleansing in Eastern Europe: Purity and Danger in Transitional Justice” (unpublished manuscript, 2011), 11,18.Google Scholar

84. Cited in Wieviorka, Annette, The Era of the Witness, trans Stark, Jared (Ithaca, 2006), 94.Google Scholar

85. Browning, Ordinary Men, xx.