Koller Stanislaw (2 results)

Hardcover. Condition: Near Fine. 1st Edition. Hardcover, 407pp + 16 pages of glossy b&w plates (facsimiles of documents, photos), pictorial endpapers, NOT ex-library. Minor handling wear. Book is clean and bright throughout with unmarked text, free of inscriptions and stamps, firmly bound. Issued without a dust jacket. -- Contents: Introduction / Marcin Majewski; A Brief History of the Great Terror in Georgia / Omar Tushurashvili & Vladimer Luarsabishvili; The Great Terror: Repressions Against the Poles / Hiroaki Kuromiya; Editorial Note; Documents [Decrees of the Crime; Protocols of the Troikas; Protocols of the Dvoikas; Appendix]; List of Abbreviations; Index of Surnames; Geographical Index -- "The Great Terror, initiated and directed by Joseph Stalin, brought destruction to many lives throughout the USSR in the second half of the 1930s. Order No. 00447 of the NKVD of the USSR concerning former kulaks and anti-Soviet elements, together with the so-called 'nationality' orders and memos from the Soviet NKVD, turned the terror in the Soviet Union into the Great Terror. The repression covered not only so-called counter-revolutionary and anti-Soviet elements, or those people referred to as 'former persons", but also activists of the Communist Party, the Soviet apparat of the state administration, security officers, and above all, the minority nationalities living in the Soviet Union. The scale of the repression was huge, and totally unprecedented at that time. As the French researcher Nicolas Werth calculated, "in less than 16 months, from August 1937 to November 1938, after trials which were a complete parody, before ad hoc courts, 750,000 Soviet citizens were sentenced to death and shot. This amounted to nearly 50,000 executions per month, 1600 a day." A particularly bloody fate met the Poles, who formed significant communities in Belarus and the Ukraine, and were an extremely resilient element in cities in the European part of Russia and Siberia. The wave of terror unleashed against the Poles reached even to the remotest corners of the USSR. The Caucasus region was no exception in this case. In accordance with Orders No. 00447 and No. 00485 of the USSR NKVD, repression took place against people simply associated with Poland, even in as small a Soviet Republic as Georgia. The present publication concerns the repression against Poles during the Great Terror in what was then Soviet Georgia. Questions associated with the Great Terror in the USSR in 1937-1938 have already been the subject of quite an extensive body of literature; the repression of Poles in Georgia in that period has not been fully examined yet. However, we must remember that these acts of repression were effectively hidden both from the citizens of the USSR and global public opinion. Initially, the Western democracies had no knowledge of the scale of the purges in the USSR at the end of the 1930s. "In the minds of Western public opinion," as noted by Dariusz Tolczyk, "the Great Terror was perceived almost exclusively as Stalin's fight for power in the Bolshevik party. The three great show trials organized in Moscow between the summer of 1936 and in the spring of 1938 dominated the attention of the world, and at the same time distracted it from the terror being carried out on a massive scale".

orig. boards. Condition: Minor wear. VG. 25x17cm, 407 pages., Weighs 800 grams.