Laboratories of Terror: The Final Act of Stalin’s Great Purge in Soviet Ukraine

About the Author: Lynne Viola is University Professor of History at the University of Toronto. Her books include The Unknown Gulag and Stalinist Perpetrators on Trial (OUP, 2017) and The Unknown Gulag: The Lost World of Stalin’s Special Settlements (OUP, 2007). Marc Junge is Senior Researcher of Eastern European History at the University of Erlangen. His publications include Stalin’s Mass Repression and the Cold War Paradigm and Nation-Building by Terror in Soviet Georgia.

Vadym Zolotar’ov, associate professor Department of Information and Network Engineering, is the author of Chapter 4 of the book.

Laboratories of Terror explores the final chapter of Stalin’s Great Terror. On November 1938, the Communist Party Central Committee and the Council of People’s Commissars of the USSR issued a directive halting mass operations in repression. This directive not only served to end the mass operations, but led to the release of large numbers of mainly Communist purge victims whose cases remained incomplete. At the same time, it resulted in a “purge of the purgers,” resulting in the scapegoating and arrests of hundreds of NKVD operatives who had carried out the Great Terror at regional and local levels. This episode in the Great Terror remained hidden from view for decades due to the largely closed archives of the Soviet security police. The opening of the Ukrainian security police archives in the 2010s allowed historians for the first time to begin to excavate this chapter in the history of the Great Terror. This collection of essays illuminates the world of the NKVD perpetrator and the mechanics and logistics of the terror at the local level through an examination of the criminal files of a series of mid-level NKVD operatives arrested at the end of the Great Terror in Soviet Ukraine. It reveals the complex relations between center and periphery, illustrating both Stalin’s central role in the architecture of the terror and NKVD perpetrators’ agency in implementing it.

In Chapter 4, Vadym Zolotar’ov details the career of D. A. Pertsov who, like many of the UNKVD leaders in Ukraine at this time, was a client of Uspenskii. Pertsov was an expert in interrogating detained NKVD operatives both in NKVD Ukraine and in the Kharkov Oblast UNKVD. He led by example, frequently walking in on interrogations to threaten and torture those who hesitated to confess. He also worked in the Polish operations. He was arrested in November 1938. He was sentenced to fifteen years and died in a logging camp in 1948, having been charged anew with counterrevolutionary crimes, an unusual sentence during this NKVD purge, following an earlier more lenient sentence of four years for “violations of socialist legality.” The chapter, like many others, demonstrates the importance of personal connections among different groups of NKVD workers.