Questions for discussion:

Which are the best explanations for the nature and extent of the Purges? How did those caught up in the terror seek to rationalize, or to resist, its horrors?

Set reading (to be prepared for class discussion):

Source: Nikolai Bukharin, ‘Letter to Stalin, December 10, 1937’, in The Structure of Soviet History: Essays and Documents, ed. Ronald G. Suny (New York, 2003), pp. 245-249. Scan available here.

James Harris, The Great Fear: Stalin’s Terror of the 1930s (Oxford, 2016), Chapter 7, ‘The Perfect Storm’, pp. 141-180. E-book.

Paul M. Hagenloh, ‘Socially Harmful Elements and the Great Terror’, in Sheila Fitzpatrick, ed. Stalinism: New Directions (London: Routledge, 2000), pp. 286-308. Scan available here.

Selected further reading:

Anne Applebaum, Gulag: A History of the Soviet Camps (Penguin, 2012). See also her collection of documents Gulag Voices: An Anthology (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2012). E-book.

Sarah Davies, Popular Opinion in Stalin’s Russia: Terror, Propaganda and Dissent, 1934-1941 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997). E-book.

J. Arch Getty, Oleg V. Naumov, and Benjamin Sher, The Road to Terror: Stalin and the Self-Destruction of the Bolsheviks, 1932-1939 (New Haven Conn.: Yale University Press, 2010).

J. Arch Getty and Roberta T. Manning, Stalinist Terror: New Perspectives (Cambridge University Press, 1993). E-book.

Wendy Z. Goldman, Terror and Democracy in the Age of Stalin: The Social Dynamics of Repression (Cambridge ; New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007).

Oleg V. Khlevniuk, The History of the Gulag: From Collectivization to the Great Terror (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004).