The Great Terror

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.