Customer Reviews

The Great Terror: A Reassessment

5 star:		(24)
4 star:		(10)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

I happened to mention to a few colleagues the other day that I was reading Robert Conquest's "The Great Terror". This drew blank looks. I amplified somewhat, referencing Stalin, Yeshov, Molotov. More blank looks.

I grew up in a cold war household. My father was a something of a rarity, he was a right wing journalist who travelled widely in Russia bringing back a story which, in the 60s and 70s, was largely ignored by the media and everyone else. He knew then what we all know now, that Russian communism was rotten to the core and was a house of cards teetering on abject collapse. Alas, but that house took decades to come down and so condemned a further generation or two to lives of quiet and unrelieved desperation and hopelessness.

What does our society know of this? A society that, in the case of America, can be convulsed with paroxysms of despair when a few thousand people died in a single tragic incident -- genuinely convinced that something without precedent has happened. The most common formulation we hear of this, is the common reference to September 11th as "the day our world changed". For heaven's sake -- there is now a Jenny Craig television advertisement in which a formerly fat person testifies that September 11th changed her world such that she decided to lose wait. Ye Gods.

But what exactly is it that changed? History, as my high school history teacher used to say, tailgates. Conquest tells us that Stalin and Molotov, during a "typical day at the office", would sign liquidation orders for THOUSANDS of innocent people by simply putting their signatures together with the word "liquidate" at the bottom of a sheaf of papers that contained the names. And then they would head for the cinema, a solid day's work done. All that appears to have changed is that moderns have forgotten the nightmares of yesterday. Each fresh outrage is treated as something unique, something personal, something without precedent. "The Great Terror" is an effective antidote to this type of thinking.

"The Great Terror" is a book that was available in the late sixties. It was, like my father, largely ignored. I had school chums who were Marxists. Teachers as well. They either denied the facts or more often, accepted what had happened on the principle that it was necessary to "break a few eggs to make an omelette". And so the regime which was to be responsible for murdering tens of millions of its own citizens, on a scale and in a cold blooded manner that rivals and even surpasses the more famous Hitlerian Holocaust, is ignored or forgotten.

In 1990, communism collapsed. My father, am embittered old cold warrior by then, took little pleasure from having been proven right. Conquest, however, took the opportunity to revise and expand his monumental book. Virtually everything he had written about was confirmed by the glasnost revelations - as he takes pains to demonstrate.

It is true that many of those who died in the execution cellars or the death camps deserved their fate. But the vast majority were innocent wives children, peasants teachers workers and writers. It is estimated that "every other family in the USSR had one of its members in jail". Stalin's purges gave rise to the unthinkable. A slave labour economy. Want to know why they beat us to space or how they got the Bomb so quickly? Well, among other things, they stole virtually all of our secrets and the had slave labour. On the theft of the West's secrets another must read is David Holloway's "Stalin and the Bomb: The Soviet Union and Atomic Energy 1939-1956".

Conquest writes quite well - he is also an accomplished poet. But the book is also something of a catalogue of horrors and he writes in what is at times a dismayingly dispassionate manner. He is somewhat relentless. As fact piles upon fact, outrage upon outrage we are led to say with each turn of the page, "Dear God in heaven, what fresh hell is this". But the horror is NOT lost on Conquest and he stands, almost alone, as our witness to those terrible times. If not in the pages of this book, then where will we learn the names of those who perished so many years ago. Virtually no one under the age of 40 really understands what went on.

Conquest's book needs to be read by all of us. And in particular those who think that the suicide attack on the WTC was something new; an event that "changed our world". Because it wasn't. ...

Reading The Great Terror is an awakening awareness of mind-boggling inhumanity. To say that in the 1930s Stalin snuffed out twenty million of his citizens hardly begins to describe the essential evil of his rule, which caused indescribable suffering for countless millions more, not to mention plunged the world into war for decades.

It's easily forgotten that the October 1917 coup by which the Bolshevik intellegentsia came to power lacked popular support and by 1921 had lost any semblance of representing the proletariat. From its inception, the party of Lenin and Trotsky embraced deceit, violence, and willingness to sacrifice others as a means to power, bringing Hitler later to say that unlike Social Democrats "he could always turn a Communist into a Nazi." Stalin merely took the context of intolerance to its logical extreme, plotting the decimation of his opposition into ever smaller groups, assisted by the very ones that would themselves successively be destroyed by it: Trotskyites, then Rightists, Bukharinites, Zinovievites, and finally the Stalinists themselves. The 1937 Plenum already marked the complete transformation into autocracy.

Key to Stalin's success were his patience and that he never revealed (or tested) the limits of his ruthlessness. Rivals continually underestimated him: Trotskyites supported the disastrous 1930 agricultural collectivisation, miscalculating that he wouldn't dare another repression and the peasants would revolt-- but Stalin did impose an even worse famine two years later, starving an unimaginable 10 million Russians and Ukrainians. Supporters and opponents alike never held him personally responsible: even the Terror itself was called the Yezhovschina. Victims could be persuaded that the Terror was in the interest of Communism not Stalin, and it is to this day unknown whether Stalin himself believed it. His capriciousness and promises of leniency induced even high officials to produce confessions and denunciations, hoping that perhaps one more obscenity committed in his service might restore them to favour.

At first, at least an actual crime and the formality of a show trial were needed. The fringe benefit of Stalin's assassination of Kirov was that other opponents could be executed for it. Convictions relied solely on confessions that were rather blatantly inconsistent and sometimes bizarre. Though brave individuals sometimes recanted at trial, they fell back into line after a short 'recess'. The rare evidence introduced that was actually verifiable was knowingly false: for example, the Copenhagen Hotel Bristol where Sedov had allegedly met had actually been demolished at the time. But full show trials were a luxury reserved for the Party elite. One court report simply read: "No prosecutor. No witnesses. No co-accused. No defender."

The crimes themselves were soon completely fatuous. Article 58 of the Criminal Code outlawed "flight abroad," "lack of faith in the Socialist state," and fascinatingly "suspicion of espionage." Insufficient loyalty to Stalin was fatal. Workers or managers who failed to meet their quotas were convicted of sabotage, as indeed were NKVD investigators for failing to meet their 'arrest quotas'. Doctors were convicted for assassinating Gorky by smoke from bonfires, Jews for spying for Nazi Germany, and clergy for praying. Purges soon reached to the citizenry, and the mere misfortune of being denounced practically guaranteed guilt.

Confessions were wrought by horrible torture. Wives and children of accused were held hostage and often shared their fate. Children under the age of 17 were despatched to NKVD settlements. Overflowing cells built for twelve held a hundred, so that prisoners had to pack down sideways like sardines-- and only in shifts. Most could not withstand round-the-clock beatings for more than a few months and succumbed, although a few exceptional individuals held out.

The horror of the gulag is beyond comprehension. Camps were brutal, soul-destroying, ruled on behalf of guards by hard-core criminals. The journey to the camps was deadly and could last months. Outside work was compulsory until temperatures dropped below -50 *C. Inmates were starved and savaged by epidemics. Perhaps the best thing about them was that one would not be expected to survive more than two years. In Kolymev only three out of every hundred survived. From Novaya Zembla, nobody returned at all.

It's unknown whether the Purges stopped because the courts were overstretched or because the geometric rate of denunciations would soon have implicated the entire population. Fully 5% of the population had been arrested, while 7 million people languished in camps. Of the original partisans and Bolsheviks no-one at all remained. The Terror machinery nonetheless continued at a more controlled pitch, and the gulag population would grow to 12 million at Stalin's death in 1953. Soviet science, technology, and the military were robbed of their best people. The cumulative psychological effect of the Terror nightmare on generations of Soviets is unimaginable.

Unfortunately, the West generally left these citizens to their fate. Driven by Communist idealism, foreign correspondents ignored, glossed over, or simply flat-out lied about the show trials. Jean-Paul Sartre and other intellectuals still denied the existence of the gulag long after its evidence was undeniable. A French literary journal called Victor Kravchenko's account of the camps a lie. The New York Times' Walter Duranty received a Pulitzer prize for his Stalin apologia.

The Left never let facts get in the way of an attractive ideology, and never understood that "not even high intelligence and a sensitive spirit are of any help once the facts of a situation are deduced from a political theory, rather than vice versa." That neither Stalin, nor his ideology, have ever been fully held accountable is maddening and a disgrace to the memory of his victims.

Written by one of the world's leading Sovietologists, this is a shocking documentation of Stalin's atrocities. As one who has studied and taught professionally in the area, I stand in awe of Professor Conquest's scholarship.

The last review is utter nonsense: Conquest is one of the most respected of all Soviet historians. He clearly despises Stalin, but how could one look upon his unfathomable devastation otherwise? As someone who has studied Soviet history for years, I can tell you that Conquest's writings are right in line with nearly all books on the topic of Stalin, even those by Marxists like Medvedev (not to mention the great Solzhenitsyn himself).

This is a good intro to the topic of Stalinist terror. To a novice reader, it will be a bit hard to keep all of the names straight, but it will also be a real eye-opener -- you'll see where Orwell mined many of his ideas. I'd strongly recommend that all readers of this gravitate to Kravchenko's I Chose Freedom (cliched title, I know, but a great autobiography).

Which is more terrifying? Stalin's 1936-38 terror, or Western liberals' inability to recognize it? Updating his original work "The Great Terror" with a vast amount of new data, Conquest scrupulously details and puts into context the purges themselves: the many players and defendants, the shifting political cross-currents, the rounds of trials and arrests.

And he does the same for the many Western observers - intellectuals, writers, journalists, and left activists - who were oblivious to it or actively sought to hush it up, even decades later when there were no longer any shreds of doubt. This is the equivalent of Holocaust denial.

And a Holocaust it was. While left-wing apologists pooh-poohed the numbers of purge deaths as in the thousands, the estimates of those killed politically in the people's progressive utopia are now solidly in the eight figures, with as many as 15 to 20 million arrested and executed, or worked to death in the camps, in the years up until Stalin's death in 1953. As many more died were starved by the Communists in the Ukraine to break the peasantry a few years earlier. Yet most people seem never to have heard of any of this.

In the Terror itself, Stalin and the NKVD prosecuted fictitious espionage, sabotage and subversion charges against millions of people. Those arrested would be tortured until they agreed to confess and implicate others. Most did, and quickly. It wound down only when the NKVD saw that, mathematically, every citizen of the nation would soon be implicated. But it flared up periodically until Stalin's death in 1953.

The purges served several purposes. They transformed the USSR from a dictatorship of the proletariat into Stalin's despotism. They removed most previous party members and high-ranking officials, suppressing alternate notions of what Communism was about, and replaced them with ruthless Stalinists. Those persecuted included those who had been non-Bolshevik leftists, even if they since had conformed; Bolsheviks who had subscribed to Lenin's agricultural compromise delaying collectivization to boost agricultural production; Trotskyites; and finally, Stalinists and the NKVD themselves, for no ostensible reason but merely to terrify and cow.

Stalin meanwhile could blame the country's Bolshevik-destroyed economy on the fictional sabotage "confessed to" in public trials, or to foreign spies. And he could blame the purge's excesses on the NKVD itself.

We see the breakdown of figures and how they were derived: those executed with or without trial, those deported to slave labor camps, those executed in the camps, and those merely worked to death within them. The death rate for those sent to slave labor camps was around 90 percent. There are some camps whose mere existence cannot be confirmed firsthand because no one is known to have survived them to give testimony.

This is an essential part of the anti-Communist canon, certainly on the top shelf. Conquest's work here confirms his original book and shows that its estimates, if off in any way, were too conservative.

Let me begin by saying that Robert Conquest is an absolutely brilliant writer and scholar. I'd classify him as being at the top of our era's historians; which would put him alongside men like Anthony Beevor and Paul Johnson. I read this book about 10 years ago but studied it again this week. It is a concise account of one of the most horrific periods in the history of mankind. Few books will have the unexpected outcome of making you so grateful to live in the present age. Conquest is meticulous in his telling of the Yagoda/Yeshov/Beria schinas, and behind them all we find Stalin willfully exterminating his countrymen and consolidating his rule. No book that I've read has given a more thorough or readable accounting. I would give it 10 stars if I could. My only regret is that no photos were included. The rare photos offered in this year's "Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar" really accentuated the text.

When I read the first edition of this book back during the Cold War, it was difficult to believe the quality of scholarship and research effort that Conquest demonstrated throughout this book, written while the KGB was still running amok. What most general histories dismissed with a few sentences or paragraphs as "millions died or were imprisoned", Conquest gave us the names, the chronology, and the results of Stalin's paranoid Reign of Terror. Now that the archives have become more accessible, Conquest is able to update his work and further illuminate this darkest period of Russian (and perhaps world) history. ANYTHING written by Conquest is worth reading if you want to understand the workings of 20th century Soviet politics and society.

.....both literally and figuratively. When I purchased this book, I thought it was going to be a narrative of life during the purges and at the camps, a la Shalamov or Bardach.

Instead, it is actually a scholarly work with incredible detail regarding the politics and behind the scenes happenings during those terrible times. As such, it was an incredible piece of work, possibly the best of its type. If this is what you are seeking, get it because you will find none better. You won't breeze through it, but you will feel very educated when you finish it.

Instead of repeating other reviewers, I mostly focus on new information. To begin with, Robert Conquest implicitly rejects the argument that Communism was positive in that it modernized Russia. He comments: "But the old Russia had not been all that backward. It already had been the fourth industrial power before the Revolution." (p. 460). He also upends the myth of the insignificance of Lend Lease aid to the Soviet Union in WWII. General Zhukov is quoted as saying that, without it, "victory would have been impossible." (p. xviii).

Conquest provides significant detail about the Katyn massacre (pp. 447-449). Tens of thousands of captive Polish officers and intellectuals were shot in cold blood in the spring of 1940. The author discusses the virtual absence of officers resurfacing after the Nazi-invasion-induced "amnesty" of Gulag Poles in 1941, Stalin's farcical lie about them all having escaped to Manchuria (December 3, 1941), the German revelation about the discovery of the Katyn graves in April 1943, etc. Of course, Katyn is only one location in the former Soviet Union where mass graves containing tens of thousands of victims have subsequently been found (p. 288).

It has been argued that there was no Gulag equivalent to the Nazi death camps--no camps to which admission absolutely guaranteed death. In fact, there were: Novaya Zemlya, for example. (pp. 337-338).

Some revisionists have attempted to downgrade the number of victims of the Gulags into the thousands, based on selected Soviet data. But Soviet archives are rife with falsification. (p. 460). There is no reason to suspect that data relative to the Gulags is any more reliable. (The fact that certain documents refer to essentials such as food is irrelevant. In fact, it is facile to order a certain amount of food and divide it among a large number of prisoners at near-starvation levels for each individual.)

Conquest repeats his minimum estimate of 2,000,000 dead at Kolyma alone. (p. 325). He also refutes the revisionist attempts to downgrade the death toll of the Gulags in general, pointing to multiple interlocking sets of data that put the number of victims of the Soviet system into the tens of millions. (pp. 486-487).

One of the handful of indispensible books on the Soviet Era of the 1930's, the time of great purges, political and social upheaval. Robert Conquest has written the definitive account of the extremist ideaology and totalitarian egomania of Stalin.

I say this even though much of his data is extremely flawed. Since we now have access to many of the archives of the Soviet period it's become apparent that the numbers may need to be lowered. Unfortunately Conquest has remained loyal to his numbers which are based soley on interviews, while many younger historians using quantative methods from numbers based on logistical data, prison records etc, have cast a different light on the terror.

Nevertheless, you cannot read about the terror without asking: How could this happen? How could a whole nation sheepishly comply with it's own destruction? No convincing answer is really given in "The Great Terror". Conquest only gives an accounting of the trials and arrests of countless individuals.

While most are innocent of charges (though many are not "innocents" themselves"), much of the fascination lies with how the terror machine eats its own. Those that arrest and torture one day become arrested and tortured the next. Stalin's paranoia knew no bounds. A slight a few years before would send one to Siberia. A disagreement between with Stalin in the '20s would result in liqiudation when he achieved power. Rivals and former rivals suffered. Hundreds of thousands with little or no connection would disappear for years or forever.

Sadly there are few tales of individual heroism to tell (for that turn to Solzynetsin's "Gulag" trilogy.) Those on the chopping block hold out hope, however false, that their compliance may hold salvation for their families, others, in great feats of denial, continue till the end to support the Communist party.

In spite of the off numbers, millions of lives were still destroyed and it remains chilling in its detail. Anyone wanting to familiarize themselves with a horrible moment of Russian history and the dangers of totalitarianism must read "The Great Terror".