“Execution Limits”: from the History of Big Terror in North Ossetia

• Main Author: Alan T. Tsarikaev
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Sochi State University 2014-03-01
• Series: Bylye Gody
• Subjects: big terror; “public enemy”; “kulak operation”; limits; NKVD; North Ossetian Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic; “purge”
• Online Access: http://bg.sutr.ru/journals_n/1395410930.pdf

Based on previously unknown archive documents from the funds of the State Archive of Modern History of the Republic of North Ossetia-Alania (SAMH RNO-A), periodical materials and Books of Condolence for Victims of Political Repressions, this article attempts to consider, for the first time in the regional historiography, the large-scale operations of the NKVD in the North Ossetia in the years of the Big Terror. The article focuses largely on the “kulak operation”, statistics of terror and the social composition of the people repressed in this region. It also demonstrates the role played by members of the regional NKVD triumvirate court in the escalation of terror. The conclusion is made that the “kulak operation” in the North Ossetia had a clearly demonstrated anti-peasantry nature, and its initial limits had been exceed several times; the article points out that similar “national operations”, primarily “Polish” and “German”, often repressed people who were not ethnic Germans or Poles at all.