The goal of this bibliography is simple : to draw the attention of specialists to a large body of scattered publications related to the mass operations of the Great Terror in the Soviet provinces. We are professional historians, not bibliographers, and we make no claim to have tracked down every single relevant work. Our major effort was devoted to finding primary documentary sources. The section on secondary sources is much more haphazard. We tried to include primarily works related to the provinces and those based on new archival materials. If your own work does not appear in the list, this is certainly due to an oversight on our part, rather than any calculated slight.

The following is a list of the major NKVD decrees, circulars and instructions that governed the mass operations of the Great Terror. It is almost certainly incomplete since access to the former KGB archive in Moscow is severely limited. We have included those decrees that have been published or referred to in published works. The two most important decrees were prikaz 00447, that governed the campaign targeting former kulaks, criminals and numerous other “former peoples,” and prikaz 00485 that served as the paradigm for the various “national operations” of the Great Terror. [1]

We have included in our list of documentary publications numerous “memorial books” (knigi pamiati). These books owe their existence to the persistent efforts of relatives and human rights organizations, above all Memorial, to memorialize the victims of the Great Terror (or of Soviet repression more generally). These books list standard biographical data concerning the victims (birth date and place, profession, nationality, place of residence). Others also provide information concerning social origin, education, Party membership, previous convictions as well as the date of arrest, sentencing (including the article of the criminal code, the sentence itself and the sentencing body) and execution. A drawback of these books is that they almost never include those convicted as ordinary criminals. Many of the memorial books also include extensive valuable documentary materials from local and central KGB archives, as well as autobiographical memoirs from survivors. A nearly complete collection of these memorial books can be found in the library of Memorial-Moscow (Malyi Karetnyi pereulok 12, phone : 200-6506) or in the library of the Sakharov Fund (ul. Semlianoi val. 57, stroenie 6, phone : 923-4401). The adresses of local web sites of Memorial can be found in A. Iutkin, “Sluchainye nakhodki v nesluchainom puteshestvii,” Russkaia mysl´ (02-08.11.2000), p. 11. The web site for Memorial-Moscow also has an extensive list of memorial books : www.memo.ru

ADAMUSHKA U.I., Palitychyia represii 20-50-ykh gadou na Belarusi (Minsk, 1994).