The Great Terror, 1937/38

(last modified June 2004)

Since 1991, the Moscow human rights association "Memorial" has published a Gulag handbook as well as numerous books in remembrance of the victims of Stalinist terror and has analyzed the biographies of the NKVD perpetrators and Stalin's ethnic purges. In this joint project of Memorial and the Hamburg Institute for Social Research, an anthology of documents is being prepared which will outline the structures and inner bureaucratic workings of the Stalinist reign of terror, including the interaction between the NKVD, Stalin himself, and the Politburo of the Soviet Communist Party. The introduction to this volume will analyze the dimensions of Stalinist annihilation of human lives and also discuss research conducted to date on the number of victims of Stalinist terror.