Soviet Jews and the NKVD during the Great Terror: The Issue of Prewar Antisemitism

Date
-
Event Sponsor
CREEES Center for Russian, East European & Eurasian Studies
Location
Encina Hall West, Room 219

In this talk, Lynne Viola will explore the controversial issue of Jews and the NKVD, but with a twist. Based on preliminary research, she argues that antisemitism combined with a series of other factors in the Great Terror-era purge of Jewish NKVD operatives, suggesting the meeting of popular antisemitism and a nascent official antisemitism that predated the postwar period.

Lynne Viola is University Professor and Professor of History at the University of Toronto. She is the author of The Best Sons of the Fatherland (OUP, 1987), Peasant Rebels Under Stalin (OUP, 1996), The Unknown Gulag (OUP, 2007), and co-editor of The Tragedy of the Soviet Countryside. Viola is a member of the Royal Society of Canada and has received the John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship, the Killam Research Fellowship and grants from the NEH, ACLS, and the SSHRC of Canada.

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