Stalin's Police: Public Order and Mass Repression in the USSR, 1926–1941

by Paul Hagenloh

Stalin’s Police offers a new interpretation of the mass repressions associated with the Stalinist terror of the late 1930s. This pioneering study traces the development of professional policing from its pre-revolutionary origins through the late 1930s and early 1940s. Paul Hagenloh argues that the policing methods employed in the late 1930s were the culmination of a set of ideologically driven policies dating back to the previous decade. Hagenloh’s vivid and monumental account is the first to show how Stalin’s peculiar brand of policing—in which criminals, juvenile delinquents, and other marginalized population groups were seen increasingly as threats to the political and social order—supplied the core mechanism of the Great Terror.

Genres: Soviet Union, History

480 pages, Hardcover

First published April 23, 2009

Reviews

[Ben · Rating 5 out of 5]

A piece with Shearer's book on Soviet Policing, Hagenloh distinguishes between the political repressions of the Great Terror (targeted at supposed Trotsykites, Fascists, etc) and the mass operations of the same period, targeted at "socially harmful" and "socially dangerous" elements. Totalitarianists and Revisionists have long suggested that all the violence of this period was the result of political repression snowballing and spiraling out to effect the rest of the population. Hagenloh suggests that the mass operations were a very different sort of repression, an attempt at prophylactic violence that would cleanse soviet society of any potential threats on the eve of war with Germany and Japan. Eventually the two types of terror became one, as local police (who had been responsible for the mass repressions, aided by Yagoda's passportization attempts) sought to fulfill Yezhov and Stalin's quota's.

[Ben · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fantastic. Unrivaled in its detail and a refreshing break from current trends in the study of Russian history. Mandatory reading for anyone interested in the KGB (in this case, its predecessors) and policing in the USSR.