“Stalinist Perpetrators on Trial in Soviet Ukraine, 1938-43”

By: Dr. Lynne Viola

October 15, 2021 @ 12:00 PM

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In what has been dubbed “the purge of the purgers,” almost one thousand NKVD officers were prosecuted by Soviet military courts in the last stage of Stalin’s “Great Terror.” The opening of the Ukrainian KGB (SBU) archives has, for the first time, permitted historians to explore this formerly opaque episode in Stalinist repression. This last purge lifts the veil from the inner workings of the terror as well as the actions and agency of those who perpetrated it.

Lynne Viola is University Professor at the University of Toronto. She is a specialist in 20th century Russian history, focusing on political and social history. Her research interests include gender, rurality, political culture, and violence in the era of Stalin.

She is the author of numerous articles and five books—The Best Sons of the Fatherland: Workers in the Vanguard of Soviet Collectivization (1987); Peasant Rebels Under Stalin: Collectivization and the Culture of Peasant Resistance (1996); The War Against the Peasantry, 1927-1930 (2005); The Unknown Gulag: The Lost World of Stalin’s Special Settlements (2007); and Stalinist Perpetrators on Trial: Scenes from the Great Terror in Soviet Ukraine (2017)–and the editor or co-editor of 18 books.

Professor Viola is the recipient of multiple prestigious fellowships and academic awards. Her most recent book, Stalinist Perpetrators on Trial, received the 2018 Zelnik Prize from the ASEEES, the 2018 Canadian Association of Slavists Book Prize, and the 2018 American Association of Ukrainian Studies Book Prize.