Hello, I've been looking into Stalin's role in the Great Purge. There still seems to be loads of questions and lots of historical debate surrounding Stalin's culpability in the scale of the violence and I was wondering how the historical perspectives have changed, particularly in the last 10-15 years. Furthermore, what was Stalin's role in the 'day-to-day' administration of the Purge and how intimately was he involved in the drawing up of quotas and communicating with NKVD Troikas - how accountable are other Politburo members too? In essence, I'm really trying to understand whether Stalin is solely responsible for the creation, administration, and escalation of the Great Purge, or whether other individuals - and agencies - were more significant?
Any answers would be much appreciated and I look forward to responses, thank you!
When it comes to writing about the history of the Soviet Union -- newer is usually better, because huge archives opened up quite recently, earlier works didn't have access to them.
So I'd vote for the most recent works, for example by Stephen Kotkin at Princeton. He has a three volume deep biography of Stalin and the government he lead, the second volume Stalin: Waiting for Hitler 1929-41 covers the purges in great detail.
Kotkin's analysis of Stalin's actions is straightforward: "[Stalin] articulated and drove toward a consistent goal, in his case a powerful state backed by a unified society that eradicated capitalism and built industrial socialism.”
While with Hitler it is possible to ask the question "how much did he know about X or Y" -- because he was basically a malignant fabulist, someone who raged but didn't actually work very hard, you can't say that about Stalin. His letters with his right hand man, Lazar Kaganovich, are an excellent read if you're trying to get a first hand picture of "is this a hands on guy"-- the answer is "yes, always". There are letters where he gets on Kaganovich about whether a railway bridge somewhere remote is one track or two track; he is intensely involved in everything. He's engaged in the economics, the culture, the politics, and he's deciding who lives and dies. He's a theatre critic and an executioner. Well worth a read if you want to hear in Stalin's own words "how he did business"
The Stalin-Kaganovich Correspondence, 1931–36
and here's a fascinating transcript of a meeting between Stalin and Molotov and the film director Sergei Eisenstein, as Stalin explains just how Ivan the Terrible should be presented on the screen: Stalin on the film Ivan the Terrible
In it, Stalin has a particularly telling comment:
Ivan the Terrible was extremely cruel. It is possible to show why he had to be cruel. One of the mistakes of Ivan the Terrible was that he did not completely finish off the five big feudal families. If he had destroyed these five families then there would not have been the Time of Troubles. If Ivan the Terrible executed someone then he repented and prayed for a long time. God disturbed him on these matters… It was necessary to be decisive.
It seems to me that that explains a lot of how Stalin saw himself
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... and a picky observation: You mean "history" -- rather than "historiography" (the latter term would mean "what are the ways in which different historians have approached the Great Purge over the years, as opposed to "what's the best information we have today")