The Great Terror

Anything like complete accuracy on the casualty figures is probably unattainable. As a Soviet analysis puts it, some records were lost, or never existed. In addition, when it comes to the terror-famine of 1932–1933, it will be almost impossible to sort out the infant deaths from those unborn owing to the decline in birth rate, since registration of births and deaths ceased in the affected areas over the critical period (moreover, under the then procedures, infants dying within a few days of birth were counted as unborn). Nevertheless, it now seems that further examination of the data will not go far from the estimates we now have except, perhaps, to show them to be understated. For example, Sergo Mikoyan, son of the Politburo member, has recently given from his father’s unpublished memoirs a figure reported to the Politburo by the KGB on Khrushchev’s orders in the 1960s: of, between 1 January 1935 and 22 June 1941, just under 20 million arrests and 7 million deaths.¹² The respected A. Adamovich has lately criticized me in a historians’ “round table” in Literaturnaya gazeta:

“always lowering the numbers of the repressed, he is simply unable to understand the true size of these fearful figures, to understand that one’s own government could so torment the people.” It is true that I always described my figures as conservative; but hitherto, I have been more used to objectors finding them unbelievably large.

In any case, the sheer magnitudes of the Stalin holocaust are now beyond doubt.

In Voprosy istorii

, in December 1988, a group of Soviet historians which included the long-rejected Roy Medvedev discussed the Stalin regime; Medvedev argued that once such fearful numbers were reached, it was also a question of the “quality” as well as the “quantity.” It was a matter of

the most cruel tortures, interrogations, the fearful abuse of huamn dignity, when in connection with the repressed anything was permitted, when right and legality were destroyed … if it was necessary to cut you to pieces, they cut you to pieces; if it was necessary to whip you, they whipped you.…

He continues with even more horrible particulars.

To the Western view we have deplored above, the Terror—not in any case very great in extent—was little more than a rough-and-ready means of replacing the old officialdom with new and younger cadres. But the nature of the new cadres was, of course, determined by the Terror! We are often told in current Soviet publications of this “negative selection”¹³ in such terms as

Stalin’s people and ‘new cadres’ started coming to power in an avalanche. The cadres only required to lack ‘suspect’ connections, independent political thinking and even the potential for such thinking and to be ready to fulfil any order from above without question…. The finest peasants, intellectuals and Communists were killed, broken or corrupted…. Mercy and dignity became hindrances to survival. A civil stand, a critical rational attitude to political developments meant definite destruction.¹⁴

And time and time again, one reads of the enormous blow dealt to the consciousness of the population. For example, “the fear which it instilled in our minds and souls still puts people’s consciousness in chains and paralyses it…. All of this generated constant fear of authority, alienated the human being from the state and made relations between them abnormal.”¹⁵ Or, in the words of the writer Chingiz Aitmatov, “it is terrible to imagine just how profoundly our society has been paralyzed by Stalinist repression, and Stalin’s authoritarian regime!” In fact, Soviet writers are now frequently and movingly telling of the fearful longterm effects of Stalinism, which, as Joseph Berger earlier remarked, left the Soviet Union in the condition of “a country devastated by nuclear warfare.”¹⁶

As to the continuing effect of Stalinism on society and on the economy, Aitmatov also speaks typically of “the absurd Stalinist obsession of having a wealthy state but a poor population, which has never been achieved or will be.”¹⁷ Scores of assessments by Soviet economists have made clear the negative results. And this includes condemnation of collectivization and what is now openly described as the “terror-famine” of 1932 to 1933, concluding that the most efficient elements of the peasantry were liquidated, the habit of work was destroyed among the others, and rural production was ruined to this day. Everyone agrees that the Stalinist command economy was, and remains, a disaster.