In parentheses: Extrajudicial executions during the Great Patriotic War

Cahiers d'histoire russe, est-européenne, caucasienne et centrasiatique (ex. Cahiers du Monde Russe). 2022. Vol. 63. No. 1. P. 223–239.

Budnitskii O.

Oleg Khlevniuk’s article Who and how many: The scale and structure of State violence in the Stalinist system (Cahiers du Monde russe, 2022, 63/1), analyzes the internal statistical records of judicial institutions, as well as state security and internal affairs bodies, in the Stalinist period. There is no doubt that these statistics reflected the bulk of repressive actions, arrests, labour camp sentences, executions, exiles, etc. At the same time, as the author justifiably notes, in addition to the defects of these statistics themselves, it is important to account for repressive actions that were not included in institutional punitive statistics in principle. One such phenomenon was extrajudicial executions, primarily germane to the war period. The author mentions this phenomenon, but does not provide a quantitative estimate – for an obvious reason. The literature lacks any systematized data on wartime extrajudicial executions, which precludes us from estimating their approximate scale (to say nothing of any precise calculations). The purpose of this article is to supplement the statistics presented in Oleg Khlevniuk’s article. This will make it possible to more accurately assess the scale of Stalin-era repressions, although, of course, it is unlikely to exhaust the question.

Keywords: Великая Отечественная война, Great Patriotic War, Extrajudicial executions, бессудные расстрелы

Publication based on the results of: Soviet Social, Political and Cultural Practices in Transnational Context (2022)