Alexander Vatlin's original and complex work examines the Kuntsevo district NKVD office to reveal how Stalin's Great Terror unfolded on the ground. Located southwest of Moscow, the Kuntsevo district had a population of about 200,000 in 1937. Roughly one thousand people were arrested there during the purges, with the peak of arrests taking place in March 1938. About one-third of those arrested were executed, per central NKVD quota. The author had access to a large number of individual case files from 1937–38, which were declassified in 1992–2006, but are now closed to historians and available only to family members. This outstanding book looks not only at ordinary people who were victimized, but at the bosses of the Kuntsevo district NKVD, Aleksandr Kuznetsov and Viktor Karetnikov, who went from perpetrators to victims (after their arrest in the summer of 1938).
Vatlin's microhistory of the terror is important in several ways. First, it reveals the centrality of informal networks and client-patron relationships among NKVD workers. The book shows that the Kuntsevo NKVD was effectively a bureaucratic clan. Stalin accused such clans of constituting counterrevolutionary groups and spy rings. Second, it sheds valuable light on the perpetrators—their fears and motivations. Kuznetsov, for example, tried to prove himself because he came from a wealthy peasant family that opposed Bolshevik taxes during the civil war. His right-hand man, Karetnikov, was of petit-bourgeois origins. Each man tried to overcome these dark spots in their past by demonstrating their loyalty to the Moscow NKVD bosses. They worked closely with the Kuntsevo district's party organization and felt pressure to fulfill arrest quotas. They took part in mass arrests not only out of fear. They responded to pressures because they feared being unmasked due to their socially alien background. People like Karetnikov and Kuznetsov “knew better than most how thin the line between prison and freedom was and their fear was appropriate” (75). This fear caused some to develop anxiety and mental illness and led others to suicide.
Stalin's perpetrators also used the terror for personal enrichment, appropriating the belongings and apartments of their victims. Vatlin maintains that provincial NKVD operatives were not mainly sadists who believed that their victims were really spies and saboteurs. Rather, they were largely people who had to fulfill quotas for arrests. They used torture, beatings, threats, humiliation, and nighttime interrogations to extract confessions, and did not think too much about their victims’ actual culpability. They shut themselves down emotionally in order to faithfully execute orders from above.
Third, the author illustrates the fact that non-elites constituted the primary victims of the Great Terror. The most mundane acts were politicized and criminalized. People were arrested for attending church or synagogue (counterrevolutionary agitation), possessing a gun (terrorist intent), getting packages from relatives abroad (foreign spy ring), or telling a joke (anti-Soviet agitation). People denounced their in-laws, co-workers and neighbors. Stalinist collective punishment meant that one arrest resulted in the arrest of entire families. The author found forty families on the list of victims. Husbands, wives, siblings, parents, and children were typically condemned together as members of spy rings or conspiracies. High-ranking workers and officials were arrested as saboteurs and spies, but so were peasants, schoolteachers, and others who had “suspicious contacts with foreigners,” including two unemployed Greek women who were homemakers and minor traders. Some were sent to labor camps, others were executed. Many of the Kuntsevo district's victims were buried at Butovo, the site of mass graves of over 20,000 victims of the Great Terror. On the last day in February 1938, for example, roughly 562 people were executed at Butovo, as authorities rushed to meet their monthly quota (128).
Finally, the book closely examines how Stalin's perpetrators became victims at the end of the terror, when Lavrentii Beriia replaced Nikolai Ezhov as head of the NKVD, and the leadership needed scapegoats for the violence. Kuznetsov and Karetnikov were arrested and executed, and they brought many others down with them. According to Vatlin: “The Great Terror marked a major transformation in the country as Stalin broke clans from the district to the national level, making fear the principle motive for productivity” (77). This is a fascinating book and Seth Bernstein's translation and introduction are excellent.
