“So, it’s shocking, but it’s a great honour and I’m very, very grateful.”

“I kept thinking of all the other Impact Award recipients – that, ‘God, they’re so much more interesting than me,’” she says. Viola says she’s humbled by the recognition and felt a wave of imposter syndrome during a recent virtual rehearsal for the SSHRC Impact Awards roundtable session. One of the SSHRC Impact Awards, it recognizes a scholar whose research and leadership have significantly advanced understanding in their field. Her extraordinary contributions were today recognized with the highest research honour bestowed by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC): a Gold Medal. She has authored five books and more than 30 articles, and supervised more than 20 PhD students since starting her professorial career at U of T in 1988. Nearly 35 years later, Viola, a University Professor in the department of history at the University of Toronto’s Faculty of Arts & Science with a cross-appointment to the Munk School of Global Affairs & Public Policy, is celebrated for her archival research into the Stalinist era that has provided revelations about perpetrators of violence and given voice to those who were oppressed by the Soviet dictator’s regime.

“People were so sure that the only perpetrators, so-called, were Stalin or Stalinism – and, of course, they’re central, but looking at perpetrators was extremely important as we saw in later years in German history … so that caused me some trouble.” “The book entailed looking at a group of factory workers who would now be called perpetrators and that was extremely controversial in the West,” Viola says of The Best Sons of the Fatherland.

Lynne Viola was forced to contend with what she calls a “Cold War mentality” in Soviet studies after publishing her first book in 1987 – one that explored social support for Stalinism among the Russian working-class.

Russian style hat