The Great Terror

But the new glasnost about the past was never solely economic. From the start, it became clear that Stalinism had to be tackled as a whole—if only because the dug-in Stalinist apparat could be discredited only by a full-scale and continued campaign. It was also clear that a great pressure had built up among the better elements of the intelligentsia. The lies which they had been forced to accept had already been shaken in Khrushchev’s time. In the meanwhile, the sacrifices of samizdat writers, the contributions of Western scholars, the output of Western radios, had left the lies intellectually nonviable. And when the opportunity was given, a number of editors went ahead with the continued publication of facts about the Terror.

I ended The Great Terror with the comment that one sign of a recovery from Stalinism “would be a frank confrontation with the past; so that Russians could freely and fully investigate the events of which some account has meanwhile been given in these pages.” And in the Russian edition of The Great Terror, published in Florence in 1972, I deplored the fact that a history of the Terror could, at that time, only be written and researched abroad.

This is no longer true. Readers will have seen how often in these pages the facts are drawn from Soviet publications of the past two or three years. Not only have certain historical points been clarified and added to, but also the very nature of the Terror has been confirmed. Fearful stories of labor-camp life, of torture, of denunciation and falsification have appeared. And, just as important, massive confirmation of the huge impact of the Terror and of the numbers of dead, deported, and imprisoned have been made public.

It had been clear since the 1940s, from a variety of testimonies, that the victims numbered millions. By the late 1960s, when The Great Terror appeared, it was possible to go further. Over the years since then, additional evidence accumulated, in particular from Soviet samizdat writers like Roy Medvedev, Anton Antonov-Ovseenko, Peter Yakir, and others, though also from a variety of émigré and Western sources—and even from occasional Soviet material. Khrushchev himself told us in his memoirs that “ten million or more of our citizens paid with their lives in Stalin’s jails and camps”!

In The Great Terror, I gave estimates of approximate casualty figures for 1937–1938. My rough totals, arrived at through the examination of a number of separate trains of evidence, were

Arrests, 1937–1938

about 7 million

Executed

about 1 million

Died in camps

about 2 million

In prison, late 1938

about 1 million

In camps, late 1938 (assuming 5 million in camp at the end of 1936)

about 8 million

I also concluded, from much Soviet and other testimony, that not more than 10 percent of those then in camp survived.

My estimates were based on thirty-odd sources, mostly unofficial—though including considerations of the 1959 census and of the secret NKVD section of the 1941 State plan. A number of further unofficial testimonies of some value have meanwhile emerged, confirming the earlier. But they, and the fifteen pages of calculations and considerations in The Great Terror, have been made superfluous by Soviet figures given in 1987–1989. However, we may look briefly at the categories:

1. Arrests. My approximately 7 million was derived from (among several solid sources) analyses by Alexander Weissberg and other ex-prisoners of the numbers arrested in the catchment areas of various prisons, and based on prison documents warranting high confidence. Full Soviet figures have not been given. But those provided for the Kursk province²

imply a total of about 8 million for the USSR as a whole.

2. Executed: approximately 1 million. This would be the result for the USSR as a whole for those shot by Troikas alone, if figures now given for Uzbekistan are taken as typical.³ Figures from Irkutsk imply over 1.5 million.⁴ The evidence of the Kuropaty mass graves in Minsk and the Bukovnya mass graves near Kiev suggest higher figures still. My estimate was based in part on relatives’ reports of the proportion of death sentences to other sentences. But while realizing that “10 years without the right of correspondence” was often a euphemism for the death sentence, we did not then know that it always was.⁵ I, and Roy Medvedev (who also gives the 1 million figure), will probably turn out to have underestimated this.

3. Died in camps, 1937 and 1938: approximately 2 million. This was based on prisoners’ reports of the death rate and (taken together with the execution figures) on Yugoslav sources. It would include those executed in camps, who do not figure in the execution estimate above (on the evidence of Kolyma and Bamlag, this may be approximately 600,000 to 700,000).