Analysis of Completeness and Representativeness of Data of Political Terror Victims “Books of Memory” as a Source for Reconstruction of Social Profile of Political Terror Victims in 1935-1937

The article is dedicated to the analysis of possibilities of using the “Books of Memory” of political terror victims as a source on the history of repression in the USSR in the mid- 1930s in concrete regions. The aim of the article is to test informational potential of different “Books of Memory”. The author analyses completeness and representativeness of data in regional “Books of Memory” to answer a question: can we use these books to reconstruct a social portrait of terror victims in enlarge regions that existed in the mid-1930s (such as Western or Eastern Siberian Region)? The first part of the article deals with the problems and methods of compiling “Books of Memory”: why only part of victims known from statistics is represented in these books and how can we collect all already known names in a unite database. The author concluded that not every “Book of Memory” could be a representative source for studying repressions in concrete regions because some of them consist of only those victims who were sentenced to death. In some books, there are no data about dates of arrest and conviction, so these records are not shown in search. The second part analyzes the completeness of the “Books of Memory” in comparison with the published statistics provided by historian O. Mozokhin from archival documents. The part also reviews a "degree of repression" in various regions. It was calculated as the ratio of the number of terror victims in certain regions according to the statistics provided by O. Mozokhin to the total population of the region according to the census of 1937. The «degree of repression» is one of the factors in choosing the region for analysis, but also the source analysis of the corresponding “Books of memory” is necessary. The author selects one enlarge region with high “degree of repressions” - Western Siberia - that consisted of territories of future Altai Region with Oirot autonomous region, Novosibirsk, Kemerovo and Tomsk Regions to complete the goal of research. Then author compares statistics of terror victims in these regions with the number of records in their “Books of Memory”. The analysis shows that only books of Altai (with Oirot) and Tomsk Region could be representative source for reconstruction of a social portrait of terror victims in Western Siberia in 1935-1937. The conclusion of the research is that it is possible to use only a few “Books of Memory” for analyzing the repressions of 1935 - early 1937 because of completeness of their data. Also nowadays, it is difficult to use “Books of Memory” as a source to study social characteristics or terror victims in enlarged regions and we need to choose books of certain regions after analyzing their representativeness. The author declares no conflicts of interests.

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