In his remarkably interesting article, Oleg Khlevniuk leaves “in parentheses those wartime summary executions, which were a special case of emergency military measures.” Other historians, who examine the topic of wartime repression, also do not to consider the number of victims of extrajudicial executions.
In this article, I will attempt, firstly, to assess the prevalence of this phenomenon and its dynamics during the war, and secondly, to determine the sources that would, at minimum, allow for an approximate estimate of its scale and, accordingly, the number of victims of extrajudicial executions. I consider extrajudicial executions in the Red Army and executions of civilians by the military; executions carried out by the NKVD and its subsidiaries; executions of collaborators and those suspected of collaborating with the enemy by partisans. I believe that this inquiry is important for understanding both the history of wartime Stalinism, and the history of the war as such. I leave ou...