The Great Terror

There is a later decree, of 15 August 1937, on the treatment of children of enemies of the people. Those over fifteen were to be tried like their mothers. ‘Socially dangerous children’ were to be sent to labour camps or colonies or ‘children’s homes of special regime’. Nursing babies up to one or one and a half years old were to remain with their mothers. Under Stalin that was unpublished, but in the case of Rolland it appears that Stalin wanted to have it both ways – to publicise terror without losing his Western admirers – just as, in a more demonstrative way, with the ‘democratic’ New Constitution of 1936, presaging or accompanying, with as huge a propaganda uproar, the great show trials.

I have suggested that there were veterans who, though submissive to the ‘Party line’, held remnants, or remembrances, of the idea of the open mind. There had always been in the past a certain tendency (often denounced) to ‘rotten liberalism’. It had given trouble, right from the October days of 1917, when a majority of the leadership wanted a coalition government, to the ‘Right’ opposition of the late 1920s – always denounced, but even so representing some revulsion against mass repression and thought control.

In the Politburo debates of the late eighties the point is several times made that Stalin held power already in 1934 at the time of the Seventeenth Congress, so that he did not need to struggle. It was ‘the Congress of Victors’. Most of the former opposition had conceded. That is to say there was, by any standards, no call for a Party purge – even less for a full-scale tyranny. If Stalin had been deprived of power in 1934, might some sort of Dubček near miss have arisen in Moscow? Perhaps.

That is, as far as progress and any idea of ‘inevitability’ are concerned. The logic of Stalinism, and Stalin, was different. The crushing of the enemy classes was complete. The non-Communist views on socialism had long since been rejected. Deviationism was defeated, but there were signs of its revival. A new elite, with none of the detritus of their past, was needed for total triumph. He had accomplished much. But the class enemy was becoming ever more vicious and more subtle, infecting the Party and indeed the whole country. All ways to combat this were urgently needed. Terror means terrorising. Mass terror means terrorising the whole population, and must be accompanied by the most complete public exposure of the worst enemies of the people, of the Party line and so of the truth. We know the results.

One of the strangest notions put forward about Stalinism is that, in the interests of ‘objectivity’ we must be – wait for it – ‘non-judgemental’. But to ignore, or downplay, the realities of Soviet history is itself a judgement and a very misleading one. Let me conclude with Patrick Henry saying in 1775 ‘I know no way of judging of the future but by the past’.40 The corollary is that misreading of the past incapacitates us as regards our understanding of the future – and of the present too.

Robert Conquest, September 2007

BOOK I THE PURGE BEGINS

This fear that millions of people find insurmountable, this fear written up in crimson letters over the leaden sky of Moscow—this terrible fear of the state …

Vasily Grossman

Introduction

THE ROOTS OF TERROR

The remedy invented by Lenin and Trotsky, the general suppression of democracy, is worse than the evil it was supposed to cure.

Rosa Luxemburg

LENIN’S PARTY

The Great Terror of 1936 to 1938 did not come out of the blue. Like any other historical phenomenon, it had its roots in the past. It would no doubt be misleading to argue that it followed inevitably from the nature of Soviet society and of the Communist Party. It was itself a means of enforcing violent change upon that society and that party. But all the same, it could not have been launched except against the extraordinarily idiosyncratic background of Bolshevik rule; and its special characteristics, some of them hardly credible to foreign minds, derive from a specific tradition. The dominating ideas of the Stalin period, the evolution of the oppositionists, the very confessions in the great show trials, can hardly be followed without considering not so much the whole Soviet past as the development of the Party, the consolidation of the dictatorship, the movements of faction, the rise of individuals, and the emergence of extreme economic policies.

After his first stroke on 26 May 1922, Lenin, cut off to a certain degree from the immediacies of political life, contemplated the unexpected defects which had arisen in the revolution he had made.