Victim Talk: Defense Testimony and Denunciation Under Stalin

Abstract

This work examines how a particular response of Stalin's victims had the effect of transforming them from mere pawns to participant agents in the system of repression. The disenfranchised (in Russian lishentsy, or literally, the deprived) were identified as anti-Soviet elements shortly after the revolution, and in the Stalin years of 1929–31 were stripped of all political and economic rights. Some wrote petitions to Soviet authorities and appealed for the reinstatement of rights. The newly opened Soviet archives contain hundreds of thousands of petitions from the disenfranchised, and they are the only widely accessible Soviet source that reveals the voice of Stalin's victims at the time of their persecution as they directly engaged state agents, formulated appeals, created personal identities, and offered testimonies of defense. The denunciations that appear in these petitions reveal how victims can be-come victimizers, and demonstrate that the damaging social identity of the enemy exploiter was ascribed and propagated not only by the regime and those who occupied society's favored roles. Damaging accusations against others were also made in the process of victim talk, as the disenfranchised invoked the official image of an enemy in order to enhance their own self-image as an innocent.