The Purge of the Purgers: The NKVD on Trial in Ukraine, 1938-42

Date
-
Event Sponsor
CREEES Center for Russian, East European & Eurasian Studies
Location
Building 200, Lane History Corner, Room 307

Based on her forthcoming book, Stalinist Perpetrators on Trial: Scenes from the Great Terror in Soviet Ukraine (Oxford University Press), Lynne Viola’s talk will focus upon the “purge of the purgers” that followed in the wake of the Great Terror. She explores the arrest dossiers and trials of NKVD operatives scapegoated for the “excesses” of Stalin’s terror. The talk is based on new sources from the Ukrainian security police archives, including the criminal files of NKVD operatives arrested for “violations of socialist legality” in late 1938 and early 1939.

Lynne Viola is University Professor and Professor of History at the University of Toronto. She is the author of The Best Sons of the Fatherland (OUP, 1987), Peasant Rebels Under Stalin (OUP, 1996), The Unknown Gulag (OUP, 2007), and co-editor of The Tragedy of the Soviet Countryside. Viola is a member of the Royal Society of Canada and has received the John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship, the Killam Research Fellowship and grants from the NEH, ACLS, and the SSHRC of Canada.

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