The establishment, airlift, and deployment of a task force for a post-riot area: the Soviet experience in Temirtau, 1959 (original) (raw)
Related papers
Rethinking Transfers of Power and Public Protest in Kazakhstan, 1959-1989
Europe-Asia Studies, 2021
This article attempts to reconstruct and reconnect the history of transfers of power and mass protests in Kazakhstan since 1959. The investigation focuses on two events, the uprising in Temirtau in 1959 and the so-called December events (referred to as 'Zheltoqsan') in Almaty and other cities in Kazakhstan in 1986. In doing so, this article does not intend to simply set the two episodes side by side to discuss their similarities and differences. Rather, it aims to explore the common dynamics that influenced and, to a certain extent, shaped Kazakhstan as a polity in the second half of the twentieth century.
Donald Filtzer (Review on Vladimir A.Kozlov. Mass Uprisings in the USSR: Protest and Rebellion in the Post-Stalin Years. Translated and edited by Elaine McClarnand MacKinnon. Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 2002. In The Europe-Asia Studies, Vol. 56, No. 2 (Mar., 2004), pp. 318-320), 2003
Lessons from the Terror: Soviet Prosecutors and Police Violence in Molotov Province, 1942 to 1949
Slavic Review, 2019
State prosecutors played a central role in the exercise of state power during the Stalinist dictatorship. On the one hand, in the show trials of the 1930s, prosecutors orchestrated the public performance of terror. They provided legitimacy to a system of steered political justice, while signing off on hundreds of thousands of troiki-cases during the mass operations. On the other hand, they were prosecuting millions of non-political cases in regular court proceedings. Their “supervision” (nadzor) task instructed prosecutors to detect and to fight any given legal violation in the Soviet Union committed by individuals or state agencies, appointing the prosecutor (prokuror) as a major tool for combat against arbitrary action within the Soviet state. The procuracy (prokuratura) both sustained mass terror and enforced legal rules in the realms of criminal justice. The Soviet prosecutor is thus a key figure for understanding the correlation of arbitrariness and consistency in the framework of Stalinist rule. This article will elaborate on this correlation and examine the prosecutors’ role in the Stalinist dictatorship by presenting a biographical case study from the Soviet periphery. Dmitrii Nikolaevich Kuliapin was the main prosecutor of the Molotov region from 1942–49. On the basis of his party records, the minutes from prosecutors’ meetings and the correspondences between the militsiia and procuracy in the Molotov province, the paper will shed light on the routines of criminal prosecution and supervision, Kuliapin’s professional ambitions, and on his attempts to prevent and to punish police violence by militsiia officials. Kuliapin’s story, and especially his struggle with the police, reveals both the prosecutors’ aspirations and abilities to enforce rules in the Stalinist state and in the realm of its policies. It exemplifies the institutional clash between prosecutors and the militsiia as a conflict between two competing approaches of Stalinist rule, in which the prosecutors’ approach did eventually prevail.