Terror by Quota: State Security from Lenin to Stalin (an Archival Study), by Hoover research fellow Paul Gregory, is an original analysis of the workings of Soviet state security organs under Lenin and Stalin that addresses a series of questions that have long resisted satisfactory answers.
- Why did political repression affect so many people, most of them ordinary citizens?
- Why did repression come in waves or cycles?
- Why were economic and petty crimes regarded as political crimes?
- What was the reason for relying on extrajudicial tribunals?
- What motivated the extreme harshness of punishments, including the widespread use of the death penalty?
Through an approach that synthesizes history and economics, Gregory develops systematic explanations for the way terror was applied, how terror agents were recruited, how they carried out their jobs, and how they were motivated. The book draws on extensive, recently opened archives of the Gulag administration, the Politburo, and state security agencies themselves to illuminate in new ways terror and repression in the Soviet Union as well as dictatorships in other times and places.
Gregory is the Cullen Distinguished Professor of Economics, University of Houston. As a research fellow at the Hoover Institution, he directs the Soviet Archives Working Group.
Terror by Quota: State Security from Lenin to Stalin (an Archival Study) is part of a Yale-Hoover series on Stalin, Stalinism, and the cold war.
Terror by Quota: State Security from Lenin to Stalin (an Archival Study),
by Paul Gregory
| ISBN-13: 978-0300134254 | $35.00 cloth |
| 360 pages | November 2008 |
