Current Research Projects

“Red Terror and the Origins of the Soviet State, 1917-1922”
(long-term book project).

State-sponsored terror, war and mass civilian destruction waged by rulers against those they rule, was the greatest scourge of the twentieth century. During the twentieth century, governments throughout the world deployed the instruments of state power to spread death and dismay among civilian populations, to cow them into submission, to crush them psychologically. The victims-or targets-have been chosen by political orientation, class, race, ethnic group, faith tradition, and gender. Justifications for their persecution have included allegedly inherent hostility toward the society, polity, or nation; threats to state security; and supposedly congenital degeneracy or wickedness. R. J. Rummel calculated that governments in the twentieth century may have caused the unnatural death of up to 170 million people; Stéphane Courtois attributes 100 million such deaths to Communist regimes alone.

Notwithstanding the vast array of scholarship on the nature and origins of state terror, no major study has examined the role terror played in the rise of the world’s first “terror-state”-Soviet Russia. To be sure, a number of scholars have studied discrete episodes of violence and terror during early Bolshevik rule, including the murder of the Romanovs (Pipes), the suppression of the Kronstadt rebellion (Avrich), and the application of the Red Terror during the Russian Civil War (Mel’gunov). As early as the 1970s, Leggett and Gerson studied the Bolshevik secret police, or the Cheka, the chief instrument of the Red Terror, while the Soviet dissident and Nobel-prize winner Alexander Solzhenitsyn chronicled various aspects of Bolshevik repression in his famous, but nonscholarly work The Gulag Archipelago. While important and path-breaking works in their own right, none of these studies drew upon archival sources. Access to recently declassification sensitive state documents has permitted scholars to illuminate the inner-workings of Bolshevik governance, including various aspects of the Red Terror. The results of these efforts have been tantalizing, albeit incomplete (Brovkin, Courtois et al., Figes, Pipes, Volkogonov).

My study examines the development and institutionalization of state-sponsored terror as a routine instrument of political, economic, and social control in the former Soviet Union. Through an investigation of scholarly works, memoirs, newspapers, and recently declassified archival documents, the project investigates how government-instigated violence directed at the country’s own civilian population became an integral and constant feature of Soviet political culture. In addition to shedding light on the foundations of Bolshevik statecraft and the origins of state-sponsored terror in the twentieth century, my project will help clarify our understanding of Stalinist political culture and the Great Terror. It will also prove valuable to scholars concerned with the relationship of ideology to violence, the adaptation of terror as a political tool, and the role of coercion in an age of mass politics.

Freedom Defeated: The Bolsheviks and Russian Civil Society, 1917-1922

(book manuscript in progress).