Stalin's Police: Public Order and Mass Repression in the USSR, 1926–1941

WASHINGTON—Woodrow Wilson Center Press has published a new book, Stalin's Police: Public Order and Mass Repression in the USSR, 1926–1941, by Paul Hagenloh. It is copublished with the Johns Hopkins University Press.

Stalin's Police offers a new interpretation of the mass repressions associated with the Stalinist terror of the late 1930s. This pioneering history traces the development of professional policing from its pre-revolutionary origins through the late 1930s and early 1940s, arguing 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. Paul 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. It is a story of the deformation of a modern approach to policing, in which the preventive urge, bolstered by fear and paranoia, led to the removal from the body politic, and ultimately the destruction as well, of groups within the population that seemed to constitute danger to the regime."—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

Paul Hagenloh is Associate Professor of History in the Maxwell School at Syracuse University. He was a Title VIII research scholar at the Woodrow Wilson Center in 2004–5.

Stalin's Police is distributed by the Johns Hopkins University Press, accessible online at www.press.jhu.edu or by telephone at 1-800-537-5487. The list price is $45.00 for hardcover.

Woodrow Wilson Center Press publishes books by fellows, resident scholars, and staff written in substantial part at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. Titles range from popular accounts of historical topics to fundamental reviews of scholarly fields to authoritative background on important policy issues. For more information about the Press, or to search its backlist of titles, please visit www.wilsoncenter.org/press.