The Great Terror

The struggle to publish the truth was not an easy one. But over the past three years, not just once, but continually, every falsehood about the period has been ripped to pieces. The accused in the great trials have all, with the exception of Yagoda, been rehabilitated. The mass graves of victims are being dug up, and the bodies given decent burial. More difficult, the effects on the consciousness of the Soviet peoples of a whole epoch of great fear and false indoctrination are being faced. Recovery cannot be instantaneous, and there may even be relapses. But the strongest and most effective medicine is, and is seen to be, the truth.

Terror and falsehood have been repudiated. As the organ of the Soviet Government lately wrote, “Not only did they annihilate people physically, but they also hoped to destroy even the memory of them.”¹⁸ They succeeded in the first, but not in the second. And the restoration of the truth is not the concern merely of historians, but of Soviet society as a whole, and emerges not only in the journals, but also in the activities of a great public movement—Memorial—which works to discover the fates of the mass of victims, long-mourned relatives of so many living citizens.

If The Great Terror had a virtue, it was in giving a full, consistent, and evidential account of that critical period, at a time when only incidental and individual records otherwise existed. The present book’s fuller and sounder record of these events is above all bound up with the fact that the suppression and falsification which for so long prevented the emergence of truth in the USSR itself have now collapsed. The world, whatever its other problems, is a better place without them.

NOTES

Preface

1. Moscow News, no. 13 (1989).

2. Leningradskiy rabochiy, 7 April 1989.

Introduction: The Roots of Terror

1. See Boris Souvarine, Stalin (London, 1949), p. 316.

2. See Isaac Deutscher, Stalin

(London, 1949), p. 234.

3. See Souvarine, Stalin, p. 302.

4. Ibid., p. 303.

5. See Leonard Schapiro, The Communist Party of the Soviet Union (London, 1960), p. 215.

6. Souvarine, Stalin, p. 329.

7. V. I. Lenin, “The Deception of the People” (speech of 19 May 1919).

8. Kommunist, no. 5 (1957), p. 21, quoted in Schapiro, Communist Party of the Soviet Union, p. 207.

9. See Louis Fischer, The Life of Lenin (London, 1965), p. 589.

10. Alexander Barmine, One Who Survived (New York, 1945), p. 94.

11. Sapronov, speech to the IXth Party Congress.

12. Victor Serge, Memoirs of a Revolutionary, 1901–1941 (London, 1963), p. 190.

13. Anton Ciliga, The Russian Enigma (London, 1940), p. 86.

14. E.H. Carr, Socialism in One Country (London, 1958), vol. 1, p. 151.

15. Barmine, One Who Survived, pp. 93–94.

16. Milovan Djilas, The New Class (London, 1957), p. 50.

17. Pravda, 18 December 1923.

18. See Souvarine, Stalin, p. 249.

19. Ibid.

20. Ibid.

21. See Robert V. Daniels, The Conscience of the Revolution

(Oxford, 1960), p. 28.

22. X1V s”ezd Vsesoyuznoy kommunisticheskoy partii (b) 18–31 dekabrya 1925 g. Stenograficheskiy otchet (Moscow, 1926).

23. Souvarine, Stalin, p. 418.

24. Pravda, 17 October 1926.

25. Souvarine, Stalin, pp. 489–90.

26. See Isaac Deutscher, The Prophet Unarmed (London, 1959), pp. 388–89.

27. Ibid., p. 351.

28. Ciliga, Russian Enigma, p. 74.

29. Alexander Weissberg, Conspiracy of Silence (London, 1952), p. 501.

30. Victor Kravchenko, I Chose Freedom (London, 1947), p. 275.

31. Nikita Khrushchev, “‘Confidential Report’ to the XXth Party Congress,” in The Crimes of the Stalin Era

(New York, 1956) (henceforward referred to as Secret Speech).

32. See Deutscher, Prophet Unarmed, p. 548.

33. “Letter of an Old Bolshevik,” in Boris I. Nicolaevsky, Power and the Soviet Elite (New York, 1965), p. 48.

34. Komsomolskaya pravda, 2 April 1988.

35. Report of the Court Proceedings in the Case of the Anti-Soviet Trotskyite Centre, English ed. (Moscow, 1937), p. 482 (henceforward referred to as Pyatakov Trial).

36. V. I. Lenin, Sobranie sochineniy, 3rd ed. (Moscow, 1926–37), vol. 29, p. 229.

37. See Souvarine, Stalin, p. 246.

38. Deutscher, The Prophet Unarmed, p. 82.

39. Leon Trotsky, My Life (London, 1930), vol. 2, p. 207.

40. See Souvarine, Stalin, p. 424.