Agents of Terror: Ordinary Men and Extraordinary Violence in Stalin's Secret Police
Brand: University of Wisconsin Press
Categories: Books, Politics & Social Sciences, Politics & Government



Dimensions: 6 x 0.5 x 9 inches
ISBN-13: 978-0299310844
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0299310841
Publisher: University of Wisconsin Press
Print length: 206 pages
Publication date: July 3, 2018
subtitle: Paperback – Illustrated, July 3, 2018
author: Alexander Vatlin Seth Bernstein Oleg Khlevniuk
review: Editorial Reviews Review "Groundbreaking. In the first detailed description of Stalin's mass terror, Vatlin unfolds the day-to-day working of the Soviet political police who carried out orders to select, arrest, interrogate, and often murder their fellow citizens. An absorbing, heartrending account."―David Shearer, author of Policing Stalin's Socialism ―David Shearer, author of Policing Stalin's Socialism "Only a handful of case studies consider how the purges took place at the grassroots level. One can only hope that Agents of Terror will inspire more research on the purges' perpetrators and victims as well as on the broader sociology of this brutal period." ―David Brandenberger, author of Propaganda State in Crisis "A sensationally significant, detailed microhistory, based on the criminal files of NKVD agents who were arrested as scapegoats at the end of the terror―what some historians have called the purge of the purgers." ―Lynne Viola, author of The Unknown Gulag About the Author Alexander Vatlin is a professor of history at Moscow State University. The author of many works in Russian, he is the editor of Piggy Foxy and the Sword of Revolution: Bolshevik Self Portrait s. Seth Bernstein is an assistant professor of history at the Higher School of Economics in Moscow.