Governing the interior
Journal: Cahiers du monde russe
Year: 2011

There has been a vogue over the last twenty years to study the Western peripheries of the Soviet Union during the Second World War. While these studies are valuable, the dynamics of political rule in the Western peripheries were often quite different from those of the Soviet heartland. This essay shifts the focus towards the activities of the regional party committees of the interior during the war. In the first part it looks at the relationship between these committees and the “extraordinary sy