This note is part of a larger study of the Donbas. The author wishes to thank the British Council and the Moscow State Historical Archival Institute for facilitating his work in the USSR.

1. For the terror in the Stalin years, see Conquest, Robert, The Great Terror: Stalin's Purge of the Thirties (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973)Google Scholar, and the second edition (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), Arch Getty, J., The Origins of the Great Purges: The Soviet Communist Party Reconsidered, 1933-1938 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, Nicolas Werth, Les proces de Moscou (Brussels, 1987), and Gábor Tamás Rittersporn, Simplifications staliniennes et complications soviétiques. Tensions sociales et conflits politiques en U.R.S.S. (1933-1953) (Paris, 1988).

2. See Vera Tolz, “Another Blow to Lenin's Image,” Radio Liberty, Report on the USSR 2:18 (4 May 1990), pp. 4-6. Lenin's 19 March 1922 letter to the Politburo, which proposed to crush the church by taking advantage of the famine crisis, was published in hvestiia TsK KPSS, 1990, 4:190-193.

3. “Perestroika v arkhivnom dele: po puti revoliutsii ili reform?” Voprosy istorii KPSS, 1990, 1:57.

4. Note, for example, V. V. Tsaplin, “Statistika zhertv stalinizma v 30-e gody,” Voprosy istorii, 1989, 4; V. Zemskov's series of articles in the form of response to readers’ questions in Argumenty ifakty, 1989, 38, 40, 1990; 5, and interviews with Zemskov, “ ‘Arkhipelag Gulag’: glazami pisatelei i statistika“), ibid., 1989, 45, and “Dokumenty tragicheskogo vremeni: arkhivy otkryvaiut tainy,” ibid., 1990, 35; V. Nekrasov, “Desiat’ ‘zheleznykh’ narkomov,” Komsomol'skaia pravda, 29 September 1989; A. Dugin, “Gulag: otkryvaia arkhivy,” Na boevom postu, 27 December 1989 (an abridged version appeared as “Gulag. Glazami istorika,” Soiuz (Moscow), 1990, 9:16); idem., “Govoriat arkhivy: neizvestnye stranitsy GULAGa,” Sotsial'no-politicheskie nauki, 1990, 7 (an abridged edition is “Stalinizm. Legendy i fakty,” Slovo, 1990, 7); and F. B. Komal, “Voennye kadry nakanune voiny,” Voenno-istoricheskii zhurnal, 1990, 2. Most of these articles are analyzed by Vera Tolz, “Publication of Archive Materials on Stalin's Terror,” Radio Liberty, Report on the USSR 2:32 (10 August 1990), and “Archives Yield New Statistics on the Stalin Terror,” ibid. 2:36 (7 September 1990). Information from closed (secret) funds is usually cited without any reference or as, for example, “kollektsiia TsGAORa.” D. A. Volkogonov, Triumf i tragediia. Politicheskii portret I. V. Stalina, 2 vols. (Moscow, 1989), also contains new information on the terror culled from various Soviet archives.

5. “Reabilitatsiia,” Pravitel'stvennyi vestnik, 1990, 7 (30): 11.

6. For the most recent contributions, see note 23.

7. Sotsialisticheskoe stroitel'stvo soiuza SSR (1933-1938 gg.). Statisticheskii sbornik (Moscow, 1939), 47-48.

8. See Brodskii, L. I., “Ideino-politicheskoe vospitanie tekhnicheskikh spetsialistov dorevoliutsionnoi shkoly v gody pervoi piatiletki,” Trudy Leningradskogo politekhnicheskogo institute im. Kalinina, 261 (Leningrad, 1966), 73.Google Scholar

9. Little work has been done on this subject either in the Soviet Union or in the west.

10. Gosudarstvennyi arkhiv Donetskoi oblasti (GADO), fond R-920, opis’ 1, delo 9, list 50. As is well known, “socialist property” included a watermelon in the collective farm fields. There were cases in which hungry peasants and workers, who stole a watermelon from the collective farms, were shot.

11. See Hiroaki Kuromiya, “The Commander and the Rank and File: Managing the Soviet Coalmining Industry, 1928-1933,” paper presented at the Conference on Industrialization and Change in Soviet Society, 1928-1941, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, 22-24 April 1988. A volume of this and other conference papers will be published by Indiana University Press in 1991.

12. For this movement and terror, see Siegelbaum, Lewis H., Stakhanovism and the Politics of Productivity in the USSR, 1935-1941 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988)Google Scholar, Gábor Tamás Rittersporn, “Heros du travail et commandants de la production. La campagne stakhanoviste et les stratégies fractionelles en U.R.S.S. (1935-1936),” Recherches, 32-33 (1978), and Maier, Robert, Die Stachanov-Bewegung 1935-1938. Der Stachanovismus als tragendes und versharfendes Moment der Stalinisierung der sowjetischen Gesellschaft (Stuttgart: Steiner, 1990)Google Scholar. Francesco Benvenutu has also published Fuoco sui sabotatori! Stachanovismo e organizzazione industriale in Urss, 1934-1938 (Rome, 1988).

13. Promyshlennost’ i rabochie Donbassa. Sbornik dokumentov. Oktiabr’ 1917-iiun' 1941 (Donetsk, 1989), 174-175. See also the editorial in Sotsialisticheskii Donbass, 28 July 1937, and Izvestiia TsK KPSS, 1989, 12:86 and 110.

14. See Sotsialisticheskii Donbass, 9 April 1938, Moscow News, 1988, 22:16, and Izvestiia TsK KPSS, 1989, 12:86 and 109.

15. Sotsialisticheskii Donbass, 26 May 1937 and 8 June 1938. In June 1938 the Donetsk obkom split into two: the Stalino and the Voroshilovgrad obkoms. 70 of the original 76 members appeared on neither obkom membership list in June 1938.

16. See, for example, ibid., 28 July 1938 (ed.) and 24 May 1938 (speech by A. S. Shcherbakov who replaced Pramnek).

17. For the decimation of provincial party leaders, see Arch Getty, J., “Party and Purge in Smolensk: 1933-1937,” Slavic Review, 42:1 (Spring 1983), 75 Google Scholar.

18. The Central Committee of the All-Union Communist party lost the majority of its members to the terror: 44 of the 71 full members and 53 of the 68 candidate members (97 percent of the victims were shot in 1937-1939). See Izvestiia TsK KPSS, 1989, 12:82-87.

19. Sotsialisticheskii Donbass, 29 April and 1 November 1937, and Tsentral'nyi gosudarstvennyi arkhiv natsional'nogo khoziaistva SSSR (TsGANKh SSSR), fond 7566, opis’ 1, delo 2750, list 3. For a brief biography of Bazhanov, see Paramonov, I. V., Komandarm ugol'nogo fronta (Moscow, 1977)Google Scholar.

20. See TsGANKh SSSR, f. 7297, op. 1, d. 232,1. 1-10, 23, 29, 30-37, 38-44, 45-57, 63-67, 68-73, 74-83, 84-94, 95-101, 102-110, 111-118, 128-129, 130-135, 136-139, 140-146, 147-155, 156-161, 215-223, 224-230. Before he went out to the Donbas, Kaganovich had “purged” his commissariat's Chief Coal Administration. See Pravda, 2 October 1937 (ed.), and TsGANKh SSSR, f. 7566, op. 2, d. 110, 1.8-14, which suggest that the great majority of new staff arrived in September and October 1937.

21. TsGANKh SSSR, f. 7566, op. 2, d. 79, 1. 60-69. (“Spravka o rukovodiashchikh rabotnikakh shakht i trestov ‘Donbassuglia.’” In this directory, “senior officials” refer mostly to mine directors and chief engineers. This document is undated but signed in pencil by two officials: I. Fesenko, the director of Donbas Coal, who in June 1938 was removed by L. M. Kaganovich, and Savitskii, the head of Donbas Coal's Registration and Allocation Department.) Donbas Coal was a giant industrial organization which in 1938 consisted of some 22 trusts and 277 mines. An almost identical document is also found in ibid., f. 7566, op. 2, d. 114, 1. 15-24.

22. TsGANKh SSSR, f. 7566, op. 2, d. 79, 1. 32-40, 42-49, and d. 114, 1. 37-43. “Repressed” meant arrest, deportation to labor camps, or execution.

23. For the trial and executions, see Sotsialislicheskii Donbass, 1-10 November, 3 December 1937.

24. See, for example, the lists of people thus removed in TsGANKh SSSR, f. 7566, op. 2, d. 114, 1. 25-28. For this reason, Donbas Coal was repeatedly threatened with punishment by Kaganovich and the Chief Coal Administration. See ibid., f. 7566, op. 1, d. 3422,1. l,d. 3514,1. 129, and op. 2, d. 105,1. 127.

25. See Sotsialislicheskii Donbass, 17 June 1938 (speech by A. S. Shcherbakov) and 6 August 1938 (article by N. Kasaurov).

26. TsGANKh SSSR, f. 7566, op. 2, d. 114,1. 14 and 19 (signed by the Chief of the Cadre Department of Donbas Coal, Zaitsev).

27. Sotsialisticheskii Donbass, 30 July-2 August, 4-6 August, 21 September 1938.

28. See, for example, Vechernyi Donetsk, 15 October 1989.

29. Economic affairs seemed to have been of particular importance. According to a study of the Moscow party elite of 1917, “anyone whose occupation was connected with economics was a certain victim of the Great Purge.” See Arch Getty, J. and Chase, William, “The Moscow Party Elite of 1917 in the Great Purges,” Russian History/Histoire Russe, 5, part 1 (1978), 113 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

30. According to one account, by the end of 1937, of the six hundred delegates to the First Congress of Soviet Writers, not less than one third “had disappeared without trace.” When Stalin died in 1953, more than two hundred of the delegates had been “liquidated” and dozens were in prison. See Eduard Beltov, “Rastreliannaia literatura,” Vecherniaia Moskva, 12 November 1988. According to another, during Stalin's reign, more than 1,300 writers perished, and approximately 600 more were imprisoned. See Nekhoroshev, Grigorii, “Khotelos’ by vsekh poimenno nazvat'…,” Molodoi kommunist, 1989, 12:66 Google Scholar. For an attempt to compile a list of “physicists, philosophers of science, biologists, and agricultural specialists who suffered repression,” see Joravsky, David, The Lysenko Affair (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1970)Google Scholar, appendix A.

31. Since the interview with Tsaplin was published, the archives of the State Planning Commission (Gosplan), which had been closed, were opened to public use. Note several recently published articles based on data from open Soviet archives such as Mark Tol'ts, “Repressirovannaia perepis',” Rodina, 1989, 11; Wheatcroft, S. G., “More Light on the Scale of Repression and Excess Mortality in the Soviet Union in the 1930s,” Soviet Studies 42:2 (April 1990)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

32. Smolensk is an exception. Part of the Smolensk party archives was captured during World War II and was subsequently used extensively by Fainsod, Merle, Smolensk under Soviet Rule (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1958)Google Scholar, Getty, The Origins of the Great Purges, Rittersporn, Simplifications staliniennes et complications soviétiques, and Nicolas Werth, Être communiste en URSS sous Staline (Paris, 1981). There are also some studies of national republics and minorities based on a limited range of published sources. For example, Hryhory Kostiuk, Stalinist Rule in the Ukraine. A Study in the Decade of Mass Terror (1929-1939) (London: Praeger, 1960).

33. The open depositories of the GADO (see note 10) to which I was given access in the autumn of 1989 and the spring of 1990, provide substantial information on political, economic, and social life in the post-revolutionary Donbas.