The Great Terror

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.