Abstract
This chapter explores patterns of repressions and punishment under Stalin using two unique datasets extracted from the Soviet archives. First, I study the profile of the Great terror at one of Soviet industrial ministries, the chief administration of metallurgy. I find that the probability of arrest was higher for party members, high-rank officials, ethnic minorities, and employees with higher education in 1937. Second, my analysis of plan fulfilment by industrial ministries during the postwar years shows that penalties were negatively correlated with production achievements. I discuss these findings in the light of political and economic explanations of Soviet repressive policy.
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Notes
- 1.
Figures on scales of repressions under Stalin are still imprecise. Historians continue their attempts to refine these numbers. On top of reconstruction issues, estimations depend on the definition of a political victim (Okhotin and Roginskii 2007). Stalin’s political victims in the narrow sense include only those, who were repressed by the Soviet secret police. According to the document prepared in late 1953 by the secret police itself, there were about five million such persons; 800 of them were executed (Mironenko and Vert 2003, pp. 608–609). In addition, regular Soviet courts imprisoned about 14.5 million people after 1940 for political, economic, or criminal reasons (250,000 of them were executed) and sentenced about 19.5 million people to correctional works or imposed fines on them (Mironenko and Vert 2003, p. 610). The pre-1940 statistics about sentences imposed by regular courts is less precise. Figures on the flow of prisoners in labor camps suggests that up to 20 million people became Gulag prisoners between 1929, when the Soviet government started to use forced labor in large scales, and 1953, the year of Stalin’s death. About six million people were exiled, including two million former kulaks during collectivization (Polyan 2001).
- 2.
- 3.
I employ a standard system of references to Soviet archival documents below. The abbreviation stands for the name of the archive where the document could be found (full names see in the reference list to this paper), followed by the collection (fond) number, then the inventory (opis) number and the file (delo) number. Figures after the colon refer to the pages in the file.
- 4.
The list includes 33 employees with dates of their dismissal from GUMP. The dates vary from May to December 1937. The document has no title, author, or date when it was created. There is a “not for public” stamp on the document. One-third of the people from the list appear in the public Memorial database on victims of the Great terror (http://lists.memo.ru/), and the dates of their dismissal known from the list fit perfectly with the dates of arrests known from the database. Unfortunately, the Memorial database is incomplete. It includes only 2.65 million victims, and this explains the lack of information on the other two-thirds of the individuals from the GUMP list in the database. The GUMP list is complete; there are no GUMP employees not from the list whose names appear in the Memorial dataset.
- 5.
I thank Mark Harrison for bringing my attention to these data.
- 6.
Petr Parshin, the Soviet minister of machine-building and instrument-making, noticed at a meeting in the Ministry of State Control in 1946, “If you [inspectors] inspect formally, you will be able to reprimand any of us” (GARF 8300/2/189: 55).
Archival and Published Primary Sources
GARF – State archive of Russian Federation (Moscow).
RGAE – Russian State archive of national economy (Moscow).
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Acknowledgments
I would like to thank the Hoover Institution, where I was a National Fellow in 2014/2015 academic year, for its hospitality and support. I am also grateful to Paul Gregory, Mark Harrison, and Sergei Guriev for their comments. A standard disclaimer is applied.
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Markevich, A. (2016). Repressions and Punishment Under Stalin: Evidence from the Soviet Archives. In: Eloranta, J., Golson, E., Markevich, A., Wolf, N. (eds) Economic History of Warfare and State Formation. Studies in Economic History. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-10-1605-9_5
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