The Great Terror of 1941: Toward a History of Wartime Stalinist Criminal Justice
- The Great Terror of 1941Toward a History of Wartime Stalinist Criminal Justice
War was the most serious test of the solidity of the Stalinist system or, in the apt phrase of Robert Thurston, "the acid test of Stalinism."1 Moreover, for researchers of Stalinism the upper chronological boundary still remains, as a rule, 1941. In the words of Stephen Lovell, among historians "the war is usually recognized as traumatic and important, but ultimately is granted the status of a cataclysmic interlude between two phases of Stalinism: the turbulent and bloody era of the 1930s and the deep freeze of the late 1940s. … Nonmilitary historians do not quite know what to do with the war."2
This fully applies to Stalinist wartime criminal justice. Between 1941 and 1945, a period including the prewar and postwar months, general jurisdiction courts, military tribunals, and other forms of special courts convicted more than 16 million people.3 Moreover, this does not count those convicted by Special Councils of the People's Commissariat of Internal Affairs (NKVD) and those repressed—primarily exiled—under administrative procedures. The largest number—13,079,195 people, or 81.7 percent—were convicted in general jurisdiction courts, followed by those convicted before military tribunals: 2,530,663, or 15.8 percent. The number in military district courts, special courts, and military tribunals for [End Page 447] railway and water transport reached 406,042 convicted, or 2.5 percent.4 In terms of the numbers of repressed, the wartime period has no equal in the history of the Soviet Union.
Historical study of Stalinist wartime criminal justice remains extremely fragmented. In his well-known monograph, Soviet Criminal Justice under Stalin, Peter Solomon did not specifically examine the wartime period.5 In the past two decades, a number of published works have addressed wartime penal policies, including the functioning of the courts. Primarily, they are devoted to regional aspects of penal policy, as well as the question of the government's criminal justice policy.6
In the present article I attempt to bring to light the particularities of Stalinist wartime criminal justice via the example of the implementation of the most "popular" article of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic (RSFSR) Criminal Code on "counterrevolutionary crimes," article 58-10, regarding propaganda or agitation containing a call to overthrow, undermine, or weaken Soviet power or to commit specific counterrevolutionary crimes. In my view, counterrevolutionary criminal cases most clearly demonstrate both the continuity of Stalinist criminal justice from the period of the 1930s and its evolution under the influence of the realities of war. Above all, the penal policies and judicial practices of the beginning of the war are in many regards reminiscent of the Great Terror, even though in absolute numbers the scale of repression was significantly smaller. Thus in 1937 and 1938 more than 291,000 individuals were convicted under article 58-10, while more than 149,000 were convicted between 1941 and 1945, with a peak totaling more than 95,000 individuals occurring in 1941 and 1942.7 If we consider that approximately 70 million people were located in occupied territories for anywhere from a few months to three years, as well as mass casualties [End Page 448] under various circumstances, then a significantly smaller number of potential "clients" were "at the disposal" of the NKVD than in 1937 and 1938. This allows us to deem politically motivated wartime repression, including under article 58-10 during the opening phase of the war, comparable in intensity to the Great Terror.
The literature on the Great Terror is enormous. For the purposes of this article, it is important that—as several scholars have rightly concluded—one of the causes of the Great Terror was Iosif Stalin's intention to preventively eliminate a potential "fifth column," which emerged from the experience of the Spanish Civil War. Among other actions, this goal determined not only the elimination of "hostile elements" but also the national operations by the NKVD.8 As such, it is most important to analyze the practices of the Stalinist penal system once the war had actually begun.
In the scholarship, one finds comparison...
