“The Question of the Perpetrator in Soviet History” Lynne Viola

In this article, historian Lynne Viola explores the figure of the perpetrator during the Stalinist regime, conceptualizing the range of cultural, contextual, ideological, and modernity-driven factors which conditioned and enabled the mass violence during Stalinism.  

The first part of the article engages with the status of the Soviet perpetrator’s figure, highlighting the reasons for the limited attention it has received in the contemporary scholarly context. Viola adopts a comparative approach to the postwar trajectories of Stalinist Russia and Nazi Germany to highlight the intersections and divergences in the historical approaches to the perpetrator question. Viola argues that while historians of Stalinist Russia and Nazi Germany have taken similar paths in their historiographical enquiries, historians of the Soviet Union (in the west) have had greater difficulty in overcoming the paradigm of the totalitarian model. Viola traces the tensions between the “intentionalist” approach to studying totalitarian regimes, which privileges a top-down view of history where society is separated from the state, and the “structuralist” model which explores the interplay of social forces with political oppression. While the historiography on Stalin’s Soviet Union approximated a structuralist approach in the late 1980s and early 1990s, the attempt to focus on issues of societal support and complicity in the regime was largely critiqued and fell behind in the tense political context of the Cold War, leaving the question of the Soviet perpetrator relatively open. 

The second part of the article explores the difficulties in defining the perpetrator category in the Soviet context, highlighting the lack of clear differentiation of the state “enemy” through racial or other forms of external othering in Stalinist Russia. Viola highlights the unstable nature of the victim and perpetrator categories in the Soviet context and the open potential for role reversal between them as fundamental in the analysis of the Soviet perpetrator figure as “yesterday’s denouncers could become today’s victims in a terrible, escalating logic” (Viola, 17). 

Arguing for the importance of examining individual perpetrators’ actions within a context of contingent and situational factors, Viola analyses the two-storied “ecosystem of violence at work in the Stalinist 1930s” (14) and its microsettings – the village, the factory, the interrogation room and the gulag, underlining the inverse relation between state power and violence that characterized them. The first storey of the ecosystem focuses on the role of historical legacies and the administrative context in shaping the culture of violence during Stalinism. Viola underlines the continuities of the civil war’s violent mentality into the Soviet era, the role of class hatred in the construction of the “enemy” and the paranoid atmosphere produced by the obsessive secrecy of the Soviet informant system. Soviet violence is further contextualized within a larger, second, ecosystem related to the Soviet Union’s industrialization and “drive to modernity” (20). In this framework, repression forms part of the state building project, where gulags provided an opportunity for permanent labour force and collectivization constituted a “pump” for the economy. 

Viola’s analysis of the ecosystem of violence that underpinned the terror of Stalin’s Soviet Union sheds light on the combination of factors which created the conditions for mass killing and state violence in the 1930s. The article provides an entry point into the national, cultural and social dimensions of political violence in the Soviet Union, incorporating the question of the Soviet perpetrator into the discursive developments in the field of perpetrator studies and the historiography of the Stalinist regime. 

Author of this entry: Bilyana Manolova

Viola, Lynne. “The Question of the Perpetrator in Soviet History”. Slavic Review, vol. 72, no. 1, 2017, pp. 1-23.