Book chapter
Не доверяй и проверяй: система особой проверки в годы Великой Отечественной войны
This article is about filtration system of former soviet POWs, it evolution during the war
In book
This article is about staff issues in NKVD's filtration camps, sources of staff recruting. It is revealed that these camps were ruled by a bunch of a different organization, that made a lot of problems in a filtration work.
This paper is devoted to the explanation of selected bureaus’ behavior patterns in the soviet type of totalitarian dictatorships with the command economic model. It is a proven fact that the plan figures in the soviet economy were fabricated as a consequence of intrigues and secret negotiations between different interested parties. Generally, bureaus, as rational agents that minimize risk and maximize slack, should have been interested in reducing the plan figures, nevertheless, they strived to increase them. As examples, mass repression under dictatorships and overexpenditure of an administrative leverage at elections in non-democratic and quasi-democratic countries can be observed. In the article we develop a simple model of coordination between principal (dictator) and his agents (bureaus), which explain the mentioned paradoxical situation.
In the Great Terror of 1937–38 more than a million Soviet citizens were arrested or killed for political crimes they didn’t commit. What kind of people carried out this violent purge, and what motivated them? This book opens up the world of the Soviet perpetrator for the first time. Focusing on Kuntsevo, the Moscow suburb where Stalin had a dacha, Alexander Vatlin shows how Stalinism rewarded local officials for inventing enemies. Agents of Terror reveals stunning, detailed evidence from archives available for a limited time in the 1990s. Going beyond the central figures of the terror, Vatlin takes readers into the offices and interrogation rooms of secret police at the district level. Spurred at times by ambition, and at times by fear for their own lives, agents rushed to fulfill quotas for arresting “enemies of the people” —even when it meant fabricating the evidence. Vatlin pulls back the curtain on a Kafkaesque system, forcing readers to reassess notions of historical agency and moral responsibility in Stalin-era crimes.
The article, based on archives materials, analyzes a reaction of the victims of repressive policy (peasants and their home-folks) in Perm Region to the beginning of «dekulakisation» and expulsion, also discovers the motives of peasants' complaints to the authorities.
Review of: Surzhikova N. V. (2014). Voennyj plen v rossijskoj provintsii (1914-1922) [Military Captivity in the Russian Province (1914-1922)]. 423 p. Moscow: Politicheskaya encyclopediya. The review was submitted on 24.05.2014. This is a review of a monograph by historian N. V. Surzhikova, Military Captivity in the Russian Province (1914-1922) (Moscow: Politicheskaya Encyclopediya, 2014) published for the series World War I. A Great War. 1914-1918. The reviewer acknowledges the value of the archival material supplied in the work but is critical of its interpretation. The author’s use of sociological concepts, though justified, has a number of flaws in the research’s theoretical model. Additionally, the reviewer maintains that it is incorrect to apply the terminology of professional identity to the category of employment.