An Important Compilation of Oft-Neglected Sources for the Study of Stalinism

Paul Goble

            Staunton, July 27 – One of the greatest disappointments for those of us who were trained and spent much of our careers studying the USSR has been that many of the lacunae of Soviet history that could have been filled with information released with the coming of glasnost and the more open media environment in the first years of post-Soviet Russia.

            And that disappointment has only been intensified by the growing sense among many that with Putin’s increasing repression, those questions about the past somehow will never be answered. But that is a mistake: new sources are appearing, albeit in sometimes unexpected places, and because materials published from the 1990s until 2022 have yet to be exploited fully.

            An example of the former is a new article on the SibReal portal devoted to the largely unknown history of Stalin’s moves against nationalists and regionalists in southern Siberia beginning in 1934 with the suppression of the Union of Siberian Turks who wanted a republic there and World War II (sibreal.org/a/kak-v-1930-e-repressirovali-shortsev/33039971.html).

            The article is important not only for the nationalities involved, many of whom do not know their history and for students of those ethnic groups but also for all those who still seek to trace how Stalin built his system from the periphery where his actions were often ignored to the center.

            And that article contains a link to the second kind of source, first by calling attention to an article that gives remarkable data on the repression of non-Russians in Siberia in the 1930s (nkvd.tomsk.ru/content/editor/DOCUMENTS/Statyi/UjmanowWN/Ujmanov-V-N-K-voprosu-o-nacionalnom-sostave-repressirovannyh-na-territorii-Zapadnoj-Sibiri.pdf) and then by pointing to an even more important guide to information about that period.

            That is a bibliography with texts attached of materials on Stalinist repressions of articles and books published in Russia over the last several decades mostly in regional and local outlets that has been compiled by Memorial and the Tomsk regional studies museum (nkvd.tomsk.ru/researches/publication/sciarticles/).

            The range of coverage of the materials included is so great that no one who wants to better understand what happened in Russia not only under Stalin but after him can afford not to go through the dozens of articles included.