This is a very personal book, written by a man whose untimely death has prevented the completion of a work that is the culmination of more than 15 years of interest in the history of Soviet repression from the perspective of the autonomous republic of Karelia. The focus of his last book is thus the unfolding of Soviet terror, especially the phase of “mass operations” in 1937–1938 in the region. It is also very personal in the sense that while the author was not even born during the Terror, his father did participate in the process of repression; the book can therefore be read as a quest to understand his father’s motives and, more generally, as a vehicle to achieve a certain repentance on the road to creating a new democratic society in Russia. It is, moreover, personal in the sense that Ivan Chukhin developed his interest in the history of repression from within the ranks of the Ministry of Internal Affairs, a rare occurrence as one expects mostly victims to be drawn to the history of the violation of citizens’ rights.
Trained first as an engineer, Chukhin joined the Soviet Ministry of Internal Affairs in the Karelian ASSR as a criminal investigator in 1974. As he became interested in the history of Soviet repression in general, the history of the construction of the White Sea Canal (Belomorkanal), and in active participation in the democratization process, he quit his duties in the early 1990s to pursue both a political career and scholarship, leaving the ranks of the Soviet Communist Party at the same time. Chukhin joined the Karelian section of Memorial and launched a new career as a journalist, historian of the Soviet Terror, university lecturer, and finally politician affiliated with the now defunct Russia’s Democratic Choice (DVR). That is the new road that brought him to the State Duma, of which he was a deputy at the time of his death, and to historical scholarship with the publication in 1990 of his first major work, Kanalarmeitsy, on the convicts of the White Sea Canal. At the same time, he worked on various legislative projects related to the rehabilitation of victims of political repression; thus the work under review bears the mark of both a growing scholarly interest and direct public involvement in the issues addressed by the author’s scholarship. The book deals with the history of the Great Terror in the Karelian ASSR (now the Karelian Republic), especially with the actions launched in concordance with the famously infamous order number 00447 that triggered the so-called mass operations in August 1937. In Karelia, as in many other borderland regions, the mass operations took a special “national” color characterized by the statistical overrepresentation of Finnish, ethnic Karelians and Ingermanlanders among the victims. The book does not really have a thesis and is not aimed at challenging current interpretations of the terror. In fact, it seems that its main purpose is to collect facts and data from formerly classified Soviet archives, most notably the Security organs, in order to present a more realistic picture of the process of terror. This, of course, must be understood within the context of the renewal in historical writing launched by Mikhail Gorbachev’s perestroika, in which there was a widespread feeling that everything had to be written from scratch. Thus, Chukhin’s discussion of the general context contains references only to Dmitri Volkogonov’s biography of Stalin, “Triumph and Tragedy”, which is, in itself, quite revealing of the book’s orientation. There are no signs of use of non-Russian scholarship.
The book is divided into nine chapters, with the first acting as a sort of introduction that elaborates the general context surrounding the unfolding of the Great Terror. There is some discussion here of the Terror’s general causes, be they political, economic, or subjective (read psychological), and of the promulgation of decree number 00447 at the end of July 1937 and the unfolding of mass operations in Karelia in the spring and summer of 1938. The second chapter provides the necessary background to understand the role played by émigré communities in the process of terror as targets privileged by the repressive organs. Seen as a potential stepping stone for the spread of Revolution to Scandinavia, Karelia had a relatively small native population that was augmented each year during the 1930s by the influx of tens of thousands of foreign workers, especially forestry workers from the United States and Canada as well as some 7,000 Finns fleeing the Depression in search of a better life. All in all, émigrés represented a little less than a third of the population of Karelia but were overrepresented in Party and security organs. Another concern that was to play an important role in the repression was the perceived need to strengthen the borders by excising “untrustworthy” populations, usually Finns, Karelians, or Ingermanlanders. From the end of the 1920s there were occasional arrests of émigrés accused of spying for Finland, which intensified with the tighter control of Party organs following the assassination of Sergei Kirov and which developed into full-blown persecution following the issuance of the decree on mass operations.
The following chapters consist mostly of a sequential narrative of events. Chapter 3 focuses solely on the actions undertaken in the wake of the order 00447 that fixed quotas of enemies of the people to be prosecuted. The chapter is based mainly on individual prosecution files, which lend a certain human aspect to the discussion of the terror process. After a short Polish operation and an even shorter one against kharbintsy (former émigrés to Manchuria), the major ethnic operation was, of course, directed against Finns or Finnish elements. It sought first and foremost all emigrants from Finland working in the military or transportation sectors, all former participants in the “Karelian uprising” of 1921–1922 against the Soviet regime in East Karelia, all Soviet citizens linked to Finnish diplomatic employees in one way or another, all Finnish political émigrés on whom there were compromising materials, Finns from North America, NKVD personnel linked to the Finnish secret services, and all people whose work brought them into contact with Finnish sailors or Finnish railroad employees about whom there was sufficient doubt. Chukhin then follows with chapters on the role of public opinion and mass media, particularly the part played by Pravda special correspondents in the spreading of terror, and on outright attacks on Party and NKVD leaders during terror. Another chapter focuses on the various organs (dvoiki, troiki, courts and commissions of the NKVD) that carried out the terror during the fateful years. The last two chapters are fairly general and weakly highlight the specificity of Karelia in the process.
The most interesting chapter of the book provides statistical data that can be analyzed in such a way as to highlight the specificity of Karelia in the unleashing of the Great Terror. The author stresses four factors that determined a region’s propensity to be a privileged target: the proximity to NKVD centers of operations, the level of activity of the NKVD staff, the proximity to the border, and the existence of contingents of formerly displaced people (pereselentsy). In total, there were 8,605 people repressed in the Karelian Republic in 1936–1938, among whom 1,215 (or 14.1%) were sentenced to execution. Chukhin considers this to be exceptional in the USSR as a whole, where on average there were as many people sentenced to death as to service in labor camp. There were three major waves of arrest in the republic: December 1937, March 1938, and July 1938. Men aged 25–40 were the most likely to be targeted and an unusually high percentage of homeless people (bomzhi) figure among the victims, which is characteristic of the mass operations. Another characteristic of the operations is the predominance of Finns among the victims even though their statistical weight in the overall population was negligible. But when Chukhin uses the term “genocide” to describe the repression against Finns and Karelians, one cannot help but raise an eyebrow. This interesting discussion is followed by a rather descriptive but not unhelpful portrayal of the NKVD and Party leaders who initiated the campaigns in Karelia and a short description of the routes taken by the people sentenced to detention in labor camps. Finally, Chukhin meticulously presents the process of rehabilitation of the victims in Karelia following the abandonment of the procedures in November 1938 up to the 1980s. A few thousand cases were under review in 1954 and close to 11,000 others have been rehabilitated following the major 1957 Decree of the Supreme Soviet.
As the work seems to have been cut short by the author’s death, it is with a certain unease that we must point out the lack of a proper introduction and conclusion. There is a great deal of archival work, with a privileged access to Soviet police sources, but not much in the way of historical context and references to the current historiography, which was already well developed by the time the work was published. In addition, although the book is very personal, greater coherence would have been most welcome. The work is somewhat typical of the historical pamphlets (publitsistika) of the early 1990s: there is ample evidence to support the author’s point of view, but working in “the heat of the moment” seems not to have left much time for drawing a deeper understanding of the historical context as the rush for acquiring archival data was seen as an end in itself. Yet there was already a nascent scholarship on the Stalin period at the time, including works by O. Khlevniuk, B. Briukhanov, N. Petrov,^[1] and others against which Chukhin’s findings could have been compared and discussed. One has to take this small book for what it really is: a storehouse of data focused on one region and its rather interesting peculiarities, such as the absolute overrepresentation of minority ethnic groups, that we can now link to the general question of policing the borderlands during the early Soviet and Stalin period. In this connection, the appendices (Pp. 138-160) contain copies of significant police documents and especially timetables of arrests and sentences by NKVD troiki and other organs that permit a deeper insight into the dynamic of terror in Karelia. On another level, there is no incisive analysis of the functioning of security organs and the reasons for their relative zeal in Karelia. The process is described, the main actors are introduced, the extent of their zeal is amply demonstrated, but one does not learn much new about Stalin’s henchmen in the Northern region or why they happened to be so zealous there. That said, ample data are available to be mined for years to come in any serious discussion of the terror in border regions, particularly in the very rich veins of the security organ files. It certainly will also be very useful for anyone interested in the process of political policing in the borderlands under Stalin.