Tragedy of the Soviet Village

                   The history of Stalinism has long been obscured by official taboos, historical falsification, and
                    restricted access  to archival source material.  Until recently, most essential archives on the subject
                    were closed even to Russian scholars.  Since August 1991, state and Communist Party archives
                    have opened their doors, and millions of pages of formerly inaccessible materials has suddenly
                    become available, far more than any single scholar could hope to work through in a life time.
                    This project has responded to this situation by forming an international team of 41 leading historians
                    from six nations -Russian, the United States, Canada, Great Britain, Australia, and South Korea.
                    This team is collectively exploring both classified and declassified documents in order to publish a five
                    volume document series on the development of Stalinism and Stalinist terror in the Soviet countryside,
                    where over two-thirds of the population resided in the pre-war years. Work on the project began
                    in 1994 in all the major central Moscow archives, including the still closed KGB and Presidential
                    Archives, which  hold the most valuable materials on the Stalin era.

                    The collectivization of Soviet agriculture was a watershed event in the history of the USSR and
                    marked the onset  of Stalin's mass terror.  Peasants responded with widespread rebellions  that at
                    times rivaled the agrarian unrest of the 1905 Revolution. The Soviet political police, under orders from
                    the Communist Party Politburo, launched a series of "mass operations" against real and perceived
                    "enemies" in the countryside that collectively accounted for ago part of Stalin's Terror.
                    Meanwhile a silent but persistent struggle raged sporadically within the Soviet leadership over the scale
                    of the ensuing repression.  These surprising developments, uncovered through the records of the central
                    government, Communist Party, and security police, the OGPU-NKVD.

                    The first volume in the series deals with the onset of collectivization in 1927-1929. Volume 2 deals
                    with the height of forced collectivization and casts new light on the process of dekulakization and the
                    tragic fate of the deported kulaks.  Volumes 3-5, cover the period from 1931-1939, when famine,
                    privation and political terror swept through the newly collectivized countryside. Volume 3 will focus
                    on the origins, course, and consequences of the 1931-1933 famine, which many scholars believe took
                    the lives of the bulk of Stalin's victims.  Volume 4 will deal with attempts to stabilize the collective farm
                    system in the aftermath of the famine, while Volume 5 will concentrate on the Great Purges of
                    1936-1939, which were accompanied by yet another, even more lethal bout of dekulakization.
                    Research for these later volumes is already underway.  Each volume will consist of 850 to 1,200 pages
                    of hitherto unpublished materials.  At the termination of the project, another 12 to 15 thousand pages
                    of unpublished documents, from which materials for publication were selected, will be deposited in
                    the Boston College Archives and made available to scholars.

                    This document collection, the most ambitious effort currently underway to place hitherto classified
                    documents on the controversial Stalin era in the public domain, will allow the scholarly community and
                    interested laymen to test existing interpretations of Stalinism against the evidence found in the
                    archives.  It will stimulate further research by members of those project and other scholars alike by
                    raising new questions and offering new avenues of research.  Archivists connected with the project
                    will become more familiar with newly available documents in their archives and will be able to direct
                    scholars, including Americans, to needed materials with greater facility.

                    The resulting document series should prove an invaluable research too and source of otherwise
                    unobtainable information for individuals and scholars interested in Russian history, peasant studies,
                    totalitarianism, political repression and agricultural development, particularly in less developed nations
                    which share many problems in common with the Soviet Union of the 1920s and 1930s.  The collection
                    will be published first in the original Russian and then in English and should attract a broad audience
                    in Russia, where the Stalinist pat continues to arouse popular interest and figures prominently in
                    current political campaigns.

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