Stalin's Police

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.''This is an extraordinary book of cardinal importance to the history of Stalin's USSR. Based on scrupulous original research in once secret archival documents, Stalin's Police presents a magisterial and authoritative account of the struggles of Soviet leaders to control and manage their public.''—Peter Solomon, University of Toronto''Stalin's Police betrays a prodigious amount of work and knowledge and makes a great contribution to the literature on Stalinism and totalitarianism. It also helps us better understand a feature of everyday life under Stalin, namely the sweeps of arrests of targeted segments of the population and attendant insecurity and fear that those sweeps left with nearly all Soviet citizens.''—Mark Von Hagen, Arizona State University