This contribution focuses on a topic which is close to the genre of “micro history” and at first sight seems to be of marginal significance: the bureaucratic control of those emigrants from Germany as arriving in the Soviet Union at the end of the 1920s / beginning of the 1930s. In this context, the study will exclusively deal with those emigrants who in the following were to fall victim to the “Great Terror”. The fate of this group of people provides an exemplary view at the structures of a bureaucratic machinery whose wheels crushed many.

Courts and administrative justice were decisive instruments of Stalinist rule in the USSR. Especially during Stalin’s “Revolution from Above” in the late twenties and early thirties and in the Great Terror of 1937/38 political justice played an important role for the implementation of Stalinist politics. The special features of Stalinist political justice are its fictiousness with many thousands of falsified indictments, the staging of show trials and the coexistence of courts together with extrajudicial punishment “by administrative means”.

Research on Stalinism, in comparison to the reception of National Socialism, has to struggle with a source and methodology asymmetry in the area of totalitarianism. This led to uncritical acceptance of analytical and evaluative categories, to dogmatic adoption and, as a consequence, to highly problematic conclusions that, at the same time, prove to be very resistant. As a first step out, this paper is offering positivistic source analysis of the mass persecutions in the Soviet Union.

In October 1917, in Russia, emerged the first modern totalitarian regime. This development was, already a few years before, predicted by a number of Russian thinkers. These were the editors of the 1909 collected volume “Vekhi” (Landmarks ). Since the early 1920s, the majority of the “Vekhi” authors were in exile, in Europe. There, they became witnesses of the victorious rise of totalitarian regimes of the extreme right. At that time, it emerged that the catastroph of 1917 in Russia had only been the first act in an all- European tragedy. These developments were astutely analyzed by the authors of “Vekhi” as well as by other thinkers of the Russian exile. This article will focus on some of their findings which have been largely ignored in Western studies of totalitarianism.

The “fourth wave of regime change” witnessed the emergence of “new” authoritarian regimes. The distinctive feature of contemporary authoritarianism consists in its compatibility with institutions commonly associated with liberal democracy. This contribution examines how constitutions facilitate the institutional entrenchment of authoritarian rule in post - communist settings.