The Great Terror

So the ‘Great’ terror ends with the appointment of Beria to head the NKVD, which is to say that, even if not great by some standards, terror continued to flourish.

There are a number of other points in the 1990 edition that need input or correction from material not then available. One of these is on the victim totals of 1937–8, of which no full account had yet emerged. So I had little choice but to summarise the long Appendix on the subject in here of the 1968 edition, with estimates based on various sources. As it turned out, this was correct on the vital matter – the numbers put to death: about one million.’

‘Camps’ is a vague and general category; the dating is confused; and the figures given fail to cover various other forms of penal exile18 (or indeed the fate of families); ‘special exiles’ as given by Pavel Polyan for MEMORIAL are in the six–seven million range – and this is not including the eight million who had gone through Gulag by 1940.19 This of course affects the figures given for ‘Arrests’ – both as to dates and because including all arrested for minor offences (sometimes only held for days and often counted again on rearrest).

Even so apparently concrete a number as those dead in camps runs into problems – being affected by the practice of releasing prisoners on the point of death, so that they could be registered as civilian dead; or the writing off of the many deaths among the million-odd Gulag prisoners ‘released’ into penal battalions and driven into attacks by machine-guns. The subject is still full of uncertainties – the most highly detailed Russian analyses continue often to mix both particular categories and the periods covered. To this day it is hard to enumerate those directly suffering – though not so listed. Nor, of course, can we specify so simply the crucial matter of the effect on the general population.20

However, we are now much better informed than in 1990. In the absence of total documentation, estimates of large categories are always in dispute – even the numbers in peaceful ‘demonstrations’ in the West! In history, the numbers given by Herodotus for Xerxes’ army, or by Tacitus for the losses at Mons Graupius, are similarly a good deal too high – as are those given at the time on the medieval Anglo-Scottish border wars. So in this field some ‘revision’ must be taken into account, though not as to the crucial killings of 1937–8. Exact numbers may never be known with complete certainty, but the total of deaths caused by the whole range of the Soviet regime’s terrors can hardly be lower than some thirteen to fifteen million.

I have seen it argued, or implied, that the deaths might be seen as a necessary sacrifice to the expected creation of a perfect society. Yet the worst of the terror was not the killings, however excessive, but the regular accompaniment throughout of torture. How could anyone ignore or justify the torments inflicted on Meyerhold, or Babel, or all the many other victims?

It is accepted everywhere – well, almost everywhere – that these terrors were on a mass scale, enough to crush the country both physically and mentally – and, one should add, morally.

8

Meanwhile I should fill in a few other points.

One sphere which was inadequate in the 1990 edition was a complete coverage of the NKVD – the core of the terror. Its basic order of battle, as given in 1934, is there. But after that it becomes far less definitive. This was so even in the late 1990s. On some quite important points one had nothing (one typical, if minor nuisance was that one had no way of knowing that the NKVD ‘Economic Department’, so called, was no longer so listed). We now have the complete terror personnel of the NKVD. This does not, it is true, affect one’s view of the terror, but it needs attention.

It was known, for example, that the key figure in the Zinoviev case was a G. A. Molchanov – and it is now known that V. M. Kurski led the Pyatakov case (though then committing suicide while Acting Deputy People’s Commissar of the NKVD).

One major error I gave was the reported execution of the fearful Zakovski in 1939. In fact he was shot on 28 August 1938. His killing, together with other NKVD men shot with him, was later to be attributed to Frinovsky covering his tracks by ‘silencing’ fellow conspirators.