Imagine an official whose job includes deciding who will be arrested and executed. It's not his role because he volunteered or because he's particularly cruel. It's simply his job. He reviews documents. He approves orders. Executions happen as a result. He goes home and eats dinner.
This is state violence routinization: the transformation of mass killing from an extraordinary event into a normal administrative function. Not chaotic violence, not mob violence, but organized, systematic, bureaucratic violence that operates through ordinary people doing ordinary jobs.
Radzinsky documents how the Soviet state achieved this. The Great Purges were not spontaneous outbursts of violence or the actions of sadistic individuals. They were systematic processes where thousands of officials participated in decisions to arrest and execute, treating it as administrative work rather than as moral or personal choice.1
The Administrative Structure
Killing was organized through bureaucratic mechanisms. Arrest quotas were assigned to regions. Regional officials assigned them to local officials. Local officials reviewed lists and approved arrests. The process had approval hierarchies, documentation requirements, and review procedures. It looked and functioned like any other administrative process.
This bureaucratic structure created distance between decision and consequence. An official approving arrests didn't see the actual arrest. The arresting officer didn't see the torture. The person conducting torture didn't see the execution. The executioner didn't see the family grieving. Each person saw only their part of the process.
Radzinsky documents how this division of labor made participation morally manageable. No individual felt responsible for the overall system. Each was simply doing their job, following orders, fulfilling their role in the apparatus. The horror was distributed across so many people that no individual experienced themselves as responsible for it.2
The Normalization Through Repetition
The first execution is extraordinary. An official who orders the first arrest and execution experiences moral weight. But the hundredth execution? The thousandth? Repetition numbs. What was once extraordinary becomes ordinary. Killing becomes work.
Radzinsky documents how officials became habituated to violence. They participated in executions without apparent emotional response. They discussed quotas casually. They treated death as an administrative problem to be solved. The horror had been bleached out of the experience through repetition.3
This habituation was not necessarily chosen. It was a natural psychological consequence of exposure. Humans adapt to extraordinary circumstances by making them ordinary. We normalize what we cannot escape.
The Ideological Justification
But routinization was not just psychological adaptation. It was also ideological. The state provided language that made killing seem justified, even necessary. The executed were enemies of the revolution. They were saboteurs. They deserved death.
Radzinsky documents how this ideological framework allowed perpetrators to experience violence as defense rather than aggression, as necessity rather than choice. They were not killing innocent people; they were eliminating threats. The ideology transformed the moral character of the act from murder to justice.4
Diffusion of Responsibility
When responsibility is distributed across a hierarchy, no individual feels fully responsible. A regional official approved the quota, a local official implemented it, a security officer conducted the arrest, an interrogator extracted confessions, a tribunal sentenced, an executioner carried out the sentence. Each person can say: I did my job. I followed orders. I am not responsible for the system.
This diffusion of responsibility is not unique to Stalin's system. It appears in any bureaucratic apparatus where violence is distributed across multiple actors. Radzinsky documents how this functioned specifically in the Soviet apparatus, but the mechanism is general.5
Compartmentalization
Officials who participated in violence compartmentalized it from the rest of their lives. They could order executions in the morning and attend theater in the evening without apparent cognitive dissonance. The compartmentalization was possible partly because the violence was abstract — they weren't seeing bodies, they were reviewing documents.
Radzinsky documents how compartmentalization was almost complete for some officials. They could maintain a self-image as decent people while participating in extraordinary violence. The psychological mechanism that allows this is itself remarkable.6
Psychology and the Milgram Experiments — Obedience to Authority and Diffused Responsibility: The Milgram experiments documented how ordinary people will administer apparent shocks to others if told to by an authority figure.7 Routinized state violence operates similarly: ordinary people participate in killing because they are told to by authorities. The parallel reveals that routinized violence doesn't require exceptional people. It requires ordinary people with ordinary psychological makeup, placed in structures that diffuse responsibility and provide ideological justification.
Organizational Theory and Bureaucratic Alienation — How Systems Separate Action from Consequence: Organizational theory documents how bureaucratic structures create alienation where workers do not see the consequences of their actions.8 In a factory, a worker may assemble a component without seeing the final product. In a killing apparatus, an official approves arrests without seeing executions. The structural separation makes moral integration impossible. The parallel reveals that any bureaucratic system has the potential for this kind of violence — the structure itself creates the possibility.
History and Modern Genocide — The Banality of Evil: Historical analysis of modern genocide documents how technological systems and bureaucracy permit killing at scale that earlier eras could not achieve.9 Hannah Arendt's phrase "the banality of evil" captures this: the horror of modern violence is precisely that it does not require evil people, only ordinary people in extraordinary systems. The parallel reveals that modernity has enabled a kind of violence that is more efficient and less dependent on individual pathology than earlier forms of violence.
Radzinsky presents routinization as a natural consequence of the apparatus — that any system constructed this way would inevitably routinize violence.10
But evidence suggests that individuals made choices about whether to participate fully, whether to resist, whether to compartmentalize. Some officials refused orders and survived (or were executed for refusal, but refusal was possible). Others participated eagerly. The system permitted variation in individual response.11
This tension reveals that routinization is not purely structural. It requires both the structure (that permits violence to be bureaucratic) and individual choice (to participate and to compartmentalize). Neither alone is sufficient.
The Sharpest Implication
If bureaucratic distance and diffused responsibility can permit ordinary people to participate in mass killing without experiencing moral crisis, then the most dangerous thing is not evil people but normal people in systems that separate them from consequence. A society's defense against routinized violence is not moral education of leaders but structural constraints: transparency that prevents separation of decision-maker from consequence, accountability that prevents diffusion of responsibility, and the absence of ideological frameworks that justify violence. Without these, routinization is inevitable.
Generative Questions