The Great Terror - Stalins Purge of the Thirties

443 Pages·2018·6.589 MB·English

by  Robert Conquest

CONTENTS
Cover
About the Book
About the Author
Also by Robert Conquest
Dedication
Title Page
Foreword by Anne Applebaum
Introduction to 2008 Edition
BOOK I, THE PURGE BEGINS
Introduction, The Roots of Terror
1 Stalin Prepares
2 The Kirov Murder
3 Architect of Terror
4 Old Bolsheviks Confess
5 The Problem of Confession
BOOK II, THE YEZHOV YEARS
6 Last Stand
7 Assault on the Army
8 The Party Crushed
9 Nations in Torment
10 On the Cultural Front
11 In the Labor Camps
12 The Great Trial
13 The Foreign Element
14 Climax
BOOK III, AFTERMATH
15 Heritage of Terror
Epilogue, The Terror Today
Notes
Acknowledgements
Bibliography
Additional select bibliography for 2008 edition
Index
Copyright
ABOUT THE BOOK
Robert Conquest’s The Great Terror is the book that revealed the horrors of Stalin’s
regime to the West. This definitive fiftieth anniversary edition features a new foreword
by Anne Applebaum.
One of the most important books ever written about the Soviet Union, The Great Terror
revealed to the West for the first time the true extent and nature Stalin’s purges in the 1930s, in
which around a million people were tortured and executed or sent to labour camps on political
grounds. Its publication caused a widespread reassessment of Communism itself.
This definitive fiftieth anniversary edition gathers together the wealth of material added by the
author in the decades following its first publication and features a new foreword by leading
historian Anne Applebaum, explaining the continued relevance of this momentous period of
history and of this classic account.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Robert Conquest (1917 – 2015) was one of the twentieth century’s greatest historians of the
Soviet Union. Publication of The Great Terror: Stalin’s Purge of the Thirties in 1968 brought him
international renown, as did his revelatory later history The Harvest of Sorrow: Soviet
Collectivisation and the Terror-Famine published in 1986. As well as holding academic posts at
various universities, including the London School of Economics, Columbia University and
Stanford University, he was an acclaimed poet, critic, novelist and translator.
Also by Robert Conquest
Non-fiction
Power and Policy in the USSR
Common Sense about Russia
Courage of Genius: The Pasternak Affair
Russia after Khrushchev
The Great Terror
The Nation Killers
Where Marx Went Wrong
V. I. Lenin
Kolyma: The Arctic Death Camps
Present Danger: Towards a Foreign Policy
We and They: Civic and Despotic Cultures
What to Do When the Russians Come (with Jon Manchip White)
Inside Stalin’s Secret Police: NKVD Politics 1936–1939
The Harvest of Sorrow
Stalin and the Kirov Murder
Tyrants and Typewriters
The Great Terror: A Reassessment
Stalin: Breaker of Nations
Reflections on a Ravaged Century
The Dragons of Expectation
Poetry
Poems
Between Mars and Venus
Arias from a Love Opera
Coming Across
Forays
New and Collected Poems
Demons Don’t
Verse Translation
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s Prussian Nights
Fiction
A World of Difference
The Egyptologists (with Kingsley Amis)
Criticism
The Abomination of Moab
For my sons, John and Richard

FOREWORD
BY ANNE APPLEBAUM
More than four decades ago, back when the Soviet Union still existed and the Berlin Wall still
stood, the KGB searched the apartment of a Russian friend of mine. Inevitably, they found what
they were looking for: his large collection of samizdat – illegally printed magazines and books.
They pounced on the bleary mimeographs, rifled through them, put some aside. One of them
held up my friend’s contraband copy of The Great Terror in triumph. ‘Excellent, we’ve been
wanting to read this for a long time,’ he declared. Or words to that effect.
Nowadays, it’s difficult even to conjure up the background necessary to explain that scene.
Can anyone under forty imagine a world without satellite television and the Internet, a world in
which television, radio and borders were so heavily patrolled that it really was possible to cut a
very large country off from the outside world? In the Soviet Union, that kind of isolation was not
only possible, it was successful. Soviet leaders controlled and distorted their history so much so
that their own policemen were unable to find out the truth from their own writers, in their own
language. There was always a vast gap between the official versions of the past on the one
hand, and the stories that people knew from their parents and grandparents on the other. That
gap made people curious, hungry to know what had really happened – even people who worked
for the KGB.
In that world, a single book could have an enormous impact. From the time of its publication
in 1968 – a moment when it went very much against the grain – Robert Conquest’s The Great
Terror was one of those that did. Of course the story that it told was hardly unfamiliar inside the
USSR. In 1956, the Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev had made his famous ‘secret speech’,
denouncing the mass arrests, especially mass arrests of party members, that Stalin had carried
out in 1937–38, the era of the Great Terror. But the speech was never officially published, and
its catalogue of Stalin’s crimes was incomplete. More importantly, the impact of the speech,
although electrifying at the time, did not last. Khrushchev’s reign as Soviet leader was relatively
short, and by 1968 Leonid Brezhnev had begun imposing a new version of Stalinism. History
inside the Soviet Union had once again been stultified, public debate had stopped, and the brief
literary and artistic ‘Thaw’ had come to an end. At that moment, despite Khrushchev, the true
history of the terror of 1937–38 still could not be told. The details were once again in dispute.
For Soviet citizens who had access to it, or who managed to hear about it, Conquest’s book once
again opened a closed door.
But Conquest was also writing for the benefit of the West, which was in 1968 still engaged in
a real struggle against the temptations of Soviet totalitarianism. In 2008, Conquest himself
reminded his younger contemporaries of just how existential this struggle had seemed. He
quoted the French historian Francois Furet: ‘All the major debates on post-war ideas revolved
around a single question: the nature of the Soviet regime.’ This idea – that all important
political debates once revolved around communism – is now as hard to understand or believe as
the closed world of the USSR itself. But in the 1960s, the history of the Soviet Union mattered
to Western Marxists, and indeed to Western anti-Marxists, far more than we now remember. It
mattered because it had implications for the present. Was the tale of Lenin’s revolution a story
of success and triumph, or was it a tale of tragedy? Did the Soviet Union therefore herald a new
paradise on earth, or was it a macabre charade? Conquest always knew that The Great Terror
would play a role in this urgent and important public debate. By documenting the terror of the
1930s, the arrests and executions, the prisons and the torture chamber, Conquest made a
powerful argument for tragedy – and for the fundamental falseness of the Soviet vision as well.
Conquest’s moral and political commitment to anti-communism – his passionate belief that it
mattered how the West perceived the USSR – shaped his book in numerous ways. For one, it
changed the way he did research. At that time, there were no real archives available, because
the Soviet state kept all of its records secret. Although the Soviet press, and official Soviet
histories, were accessible, they were profoundly deceptive, distorted by official propaganda.
They did not tell the story of 1937–38, did not explain what had happened to the Bolshevik elite
during those years, did not tell the full story of the show trials or mass arrests. Conquest used
what was available judiciously, but also used a third source: eyewitnesses, émigrés and
defectors who were often, at the time, dismissed as ‘biased'. They didn’t understand great
power politics, it was said; or they bore grudges; or they didn’t realise that they were
unimportant casualties on the road to the communist utopia.
Conquest ignored these dismissive critics and relied, carefully, on the memoirs, letters and
testimony of Stalin’s victims. These included survivors of the gulag and of Soviet prisons –
Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Varlam Shalamov, Eugenia Ginzburg – as well as eyewitnesses like
Alexander Orlov, an NKVD officer in Spain who defected when he realised that all of his
colleagues were being arrested. Orlov’s book, The Secret History of Stalin’s Crimes, was
considered dubious at the time. But as Conquest observed, ‘just because a source may be
erroneous or unreliable on certain points does not invalidate all its evidence’. The great
eighteenth-century English historian Edward Gibbon himself had, he noted, argued that
‘imperfect and partial’ evidence may contribute to a broader story.
Conquest’s commitment to his public was just as important as his commitment to his sources.
From the beginning, he made it clear that he was not writing for specialists, or at least not
solely for specialists. He was writing, rather, for the general reader. As one reviewer wrote at
the time, the book was designed to appeal not only to ‘serious scholars of Soviet history and
politics’, but also to ‘those seeking a better understanding of the fundamental political and
social problems of our age’. The Great Terror was not a mere list of facts, it aimed higher,
seeking to be a real work of literature as well as a history.
Conquest, who wrote poetry as well as history – the title of his unfinished memoir was Two
Muses – certainly used literary language. He also told stories, used specific anecdotes to
illustrate general points, and referenced particular details. He included long passages from
Stalin’s show trials, and he quoted from prisoners’ memoirs in an effort to explain, for example,
why so many innocent people had confessed to crimes that they did not commit, or why some
even agreed to confess in public. He took this passage from a Polish communist: ‘After fifty or
sixty interrogations with cold and hunger and almost no sleep, a man becomes like an
automaton – his eyes are bright, his legs swollen, his hands trembling. In this state, he is often
convinced he is guilty.’ He quoted the novelist Vladimir Voinovich’s description of the show
trials: “‘In the dingy winter daylight and under the stale glare of the electric lamps,” a wide
variety of prisoners sat in the dock.’ This kind of language transmits to the reader a deeper
truth than could be obtained through the mere reading of archives or the gathering of statistics,
and of course it made a deeper impression on readers too.
For at least two decades, Conquest’s book was the definitive account or the years 1937–38.
But, starting in about 1988, Mikhail Gorbachev, the Soviet Union’s final ruler, launched
glasnost, the policy of ‘openness’, and the first real open discussion of the crimes of Stalinism
inside the USSR. Partly as a result of that discussion, the Soviet Union itself collapsed a few
years later. In subsequent years, Soviet archives opened for the first time to both Russian and
foreign historians. As a result, quite a bit more has been learned about Stalin, about the 1930s,
and especially about the years 1937–38. It became possible to write about Stalinism in different
and more precise ways, using sources that were not available in 1968. Conquest himself
acknowledged this to be true. In the introduction that follows this foreword, written for the new
edition of The Great Terror that appeared in 2008, he wrote of how Soviet scholars had in the
past been ‘like modern historians of an ancient empire who have had to rely on a few
inscriptions, some only recently deciphered, when a huge store of first-hand records is
discovered under some pyramid. Enough for generations of archeologists.’ Indeed, numerous
historians have since pinned down more accurate numbers, firmed up many details and added
enormously to our knowledge of Stalin as well as his systems of repression and control. It’s now
clear, for example, that Stalin’s court – his henchmen and collaborators – played just as great a
role in perpetuating cruelty as did the Soviet leader himself.
The new research also shows, however, that the defectors and émigrés got the outline of the
story right – and so did Conquest. The fundamentals of the story have not changed: in 1937–38,
Stalin and his team inflicted fear and terror on their country and on their own party. Millions
were imprisoned. Millions eventually died, either because they were shot by firing squads or
because they perished, more slowly, in prisons and concentration camps all around the country.
The Great Terror remains the classic account of that era. It is a story of human suffering and
cruelty, an exploration of the power of ideology, a historical narrative which cannot be
forgotten. It should be read now for its literary power, for its language, and for its strong and
clear evocation of an era whose lessons and warnings we are still trying to absorb and
understand.
Anne Applebaum, August 2018