Books by David R. Shearer

An English-language exploration of Joseph Stalin's relationship with, and manipulation of, the Soviet political police. It follows the changing functions, organization and fortunes of the political police and security organs from the early 1920s until Stalin's death in 1953. It includes translations of more than 170 documents from Soviet archives.

In his reexamination of the origins of the Stalinist state during the formative period of rapid industrialization in the late 1920s and early 1930s, David R. Shearer argues that a centralized state-controlled economic system was the consciously...

Policing Stalins Socialism is one of the first books to emphasize the importance of social order repression by Stalins Soviet regime in contrast to the traditional emphasis of historians on political repression. Based on extensive examination of new archival materials, David Shearer finds that most repression during the Stalinist dictatorship of the 1930s was against marginal social groups such as petty criminals, deviant youth, sectarians, and the unemployed and unproductive.It was because Soviet leaders regarded social disorder as more of a danger to the state than political opposition that they instituted a new form of class war to defend themselves against this perceived threat. Despite the combined work of the political and civil police the efforts to cleanse society failed; this failure set the stage for the massive purges that decimated the country in the late 1930s.