The Great Terror

This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorized distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

Epub ISBN: 9781446496275

Version 1.0

1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

VINTAGE

20 Vauxhall Bridge Road,

London SW1V 2SA

Vintage is part of the Penguin Random House group of companies whose addresses can be found at global.penguinrandomhouse.com.

Copyright © Robert Conquest 1968, 1990, 2008

Cover: Josef Stalin © James E. Abbe/ullstein bild Dtl./Getty Images

Foreword copyright © Anne Applebaum 2018

Robert Conquest has asserted his right to be identified as the author of this Work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

First published in the UK by Macmillan & Co in 1968

Revised edition published by Hutchinson in 1990

Published by Pimlico in 1992

Fortieth anniversary edition published in 2008

Fiftieth anniversary edition published by The Bodley Head in 2018

penguin.co.uk/vintage

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

INTRODUCTION TO 2008 EDITION

fn1

I had covered much of the whole terror experience in my biography,

Stalin, Breaker of Nations

(1991); and in sections of my

Reflections on a Ravaged Century

(2000) and

The Dragons of Expectation

(2005).

fn2

Edward Gibbon,

The Miscellaneous Works of Edward Gibbon, Esq

. Vol. 4 (London, 1814), pp. 568–9.

fn3

Galina Vishnevskaya,

Galina: A Russian Story

(1984), p. 278.

fn4

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn,

Prussian Nights

(London, 1977; New York, 1978).

fn5

Valerio Riva,

Oro da Mosca

(Milan, 1999).

fn6

Sergei A. Mikoyan,

Voprosy Istorii #4

, (2006); and Grigory Pomerants,

Znamya

(31 July 2006).

fn7

V Politbum TsIK KPSS

, ed. Anatoli Chernayev, Vadim Medvedev and Georgi Shakhnazarov (Moscow, 2006).

⁸

fn8

Ibid., 3 July 1987.

fn9

Ibid., 31 October 1987.

fn10

Ibid., speech to first secretaries of Provincial etc. Parties, 11–18 April 1988, p. 323.

fn11

Later a book – see Gwyneth Hughes and Simon Welfare,

Red Empire

(London, 1991).

fn12

Kommunist

No. 17 (Moscow, 1990).

fn13

RIA Novosti

(Moscow, 17 April 2006).

fn14

See

here

and

here

of this book.

fn15

‘Rasstrelniye Spiski’, MEMORIAL (Moscow, 2005) and see the summary on pp. 565–96, by A. B. Roginski for a superb overview of the whole terror.

fn16

Oleg Mozokhin,

Pravo na repressii: vnesudebnye polnomochiia organov gosudarstvennoi bezopasnosti, 1918–1953

(Moscow, 2006), p. 170.

fn17

S. A. Papkov,

Staliniski termr v Sibiri: 1928–1941

(Novosibirsk, 1997).

fn18

Well covered in

Pravo na repressii

.

fn19

Best covered in Anne Applebaum,

Gulag: A History

(New York, 2003), pp. 579–86.

fn20

‘the millions of destroyed families …’ ‘1937 God i Sovremennost’, MEMORIAL (Moscow, 15 April 2007).

fn21

V S. Zhukovsky,

Lubyanskaya Imperiya NKVD 1937–1939

(Moscow, 2001), pp. 179–300,

passim;

see also Marc Jansen and Nikita Petrov,

Stalin’s Loyal Executioner: People’s Comissar Nikolai Ezhov, 1895–1940

(Stanford, 2002), p. 186.

fn22

E.g. S. A. Papkov,

Stalinskii termr v Sibiri: 1928–1941

(Novosibirsk, 1997); RGASPI (Russian State Archive of Socio-Political History), f. 1, op. 58, d. 6, 11, 145–6.

fn23

Marc Jansen, et al.,

Stalin’s Loyal Executioner

(Stanford, 2002), p. 187. The full documentation of the Yezhov case is reported as running into twelve volumes

fn24

O. F. Suvenirov,

Tragediia RKKA 1937–1938

(Moscow, 1998), pp. 313, 317–24.

fn25

E. Maksimova, ‘Podslushali i rasstreliali’,

Izvestiya

(Moscow, 16 July 1992).

fn26

Amy Knight,

Who Killed Kirov?

(New York, 1999).

fn27

Oleg V. Khlevniuk,

Politbiuro: mekhanizmy politicheskoi vlasti v 1930—e gody

(Moscow, 1996), p. 141.

fn28

Stalin’s Letters to Molotov: 1925–1936

, ed. Lars T. Lih, Oleg V Naumov and Oleg Khlevniuk (New Haven, 1995), pp. 233–5.

fn29

Oleg V. Khlevniuk,

Politbiuro: mekhanizmy politicheskoi vlasti v 1930—e gody

(Moscow, 1996).

fn30

Lubianka: Stalin i glavnoe upravlenie gosbezopasnosti NKVD, 1937–1938