233 David R. Shearer and Vladimir Khaustov Stalin and the Lubianka

Book Reviews 233 David R. Shearer and Vladimir Khaustov Stalin and the Lubianka: A Documentary History of the Political Police and Security Organs in the Soviet Union, 1922–1953 (New Haven, ct: Yale University Press, 2015), 392 pp., $85.00 (hb), isbn 9780300171891. Stalin and the Lubianka has appeared in Yale University Press’ Annals of Communism Series, presenting selected, formerly unavailable documents concerning Soviet history. It was prepared and the commentaries were written by David R. Shearer and Vladimir Khaustov, Shearer being Professor of Soviet history at the University of Delaware and author of the excellent study Policing Stalin’s Socialism (2009), and Khaustov Professor at the Federal Security Service Academy of Russia. As the title suggests, it is a documentary history rather than just a volume of 177 documents, drawn from different archival sources, including those of the Russian Presidential Archive and the archive of the Russian state security service. Most of them have been selected from a much broader collection, the 4-volume Russian-language series Lubianka, Stalin (Moscow, 2003–2007), with Khaustov as one of the editors. It is a book about the relationship of the Communist Party Secretary General Joseph Stalin and the powerful institution with its many succeeding names (Cheka, ogpu, nkvd, nkgb, mgb, etc.) that had its headquarters at Lubianka Square in the centre of Moscow. Although it remained essentially the same organization, the authors convincingly argue that it went through considerable successive changes. Created on December 20, 1917 as a temporary agency in the exigencies of a brutal revolutionary war, originally it functioned as just a political police, perse- cuting (perceived) enemies. From the mid-1930s on, however, the nkvd as it was called by now transformed into a kind of “social gendarmerie,” a “social policing force.” In order to protect the system established by Stalin, it also moved into areas of mass surveillance and repression. It took upon itself the struggle against criminality and social disorder, in an urban equivalent of the dekulakization of the early 1930s mounting operations to clear cities and border zones of “socially harmful elements.” These people were refused passports. So, through the 1933 passport laws and the resulting various catalog registries, the organs gained the authority to define social status and citizenship rights. Moreover, during the late 1930s they conducted mass operation purges against what they together with Stalin saw as a basis for insurgency in case of war and invasion (the fifth column argument). Hereafter they continued with the depor- tations of whole “suspect” ethnic populations that had started already much earlier. Apart from that, the organs were responsible for a sprawling economic empire that included extractive industries, agriculture, and construction. The © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2015 | doi 10.1163/18763324-04202008 234 Book Reviews labor force for that empire consisted of hundreds of thousands of convicts in gulag labor camps, all under control of the political police. After the war, mass violence persisted only in the newly acquired border- land territories, that were “sovietized” in the usual way, with arrests, confisca- tion of property, deportation, and social purging of “anti-Soviet elements.” Inside the pre-1939 territories, however, there was a general demilitarization of the social sphere; the security forces got out of the business of social order policing, although Stalin continued to use the mgb for the same kind of dis- crediting and purging, domestic spying and monitoring of “anti-Soviet” behav- ior that had occupied “Chekists” since the 1920s. At the same time, he became increasingly suspicious about the security organs’ growing power, reason why he removed Viktor Abakumov, state security chief since 1946, and a number of his subordinates. According to the authors, after his death in 1953, Stalin’s des- potic, martial law version of socialism gave way to an “oligarchic dictatorship” and an “authoritarian-bureaucratic kind of socialism.” The role of the Chekists diminished still further, as more stable, secure and professionalized officials took over. Many aspects of Stalinism, however, remained to shape the social and state development. “If the Soviet political police became a state within the state, it was surely Stalin’s state,” the authors argue. (p. 2) Although Stalin was the Party leader, according to them he could not have ruled as he did without the police and security forces that he did so much to create: “Stalin needed the political police to enforce his power and his version of reality, and the political police had a willing patron.” (p. 88) They look for the explanation of his undisputed authority in his ability to play off his two centers of power, the Party apparatus and the political police, against each other. He used each to purge the other. At times he used the police to purge perceived rivals or groups in the Party, and alternately he used the Party to subdue and purge the police. The state security chiefs of the 1930s, Yagoda and Yezhov, for example, were Stalin’s creatures; but when they had outlived their usefulness, Stalin rid himself of them in this way. The result can be observed in the Biographical Sketches in the back of the book under review, with so many lifes of people of both categories turning out to have been abrupted prematurely. With good reason, the authors pay attention to the brutalized language of the official state security documents, especially those of Stalin’s “social engi- neers,” namely Yagoda and Yezov, with little regard for grammar and sentence structure. Those who were to be removed were dehumanized. Real people were rarely mentioned, but were categorized into “elements”—socially harmful, socially dangerous, anti-Soviet, etc. Social “elements” were to be moved about in “contingents” and “echelons.” the soviet and post-soviet review 42 (2015) 223-243.

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