The Great Terror

Epilogue

THE TERROR TODAY

Whoever knew Truth put to the worse, in a free and open encounter?

Milton

As the world knows, from 1986, and much more so in the ensuing years, the USSR entered the period of glasnost. Among the first products of glasnost was truth about current economic and social disasters. Its sponsors made it plain, moreover, that the command-economy system of Stalinism, based on endless coercion, was in itself a dead end and needed dismantling. Thus the horrors of Stalinism were at first often attacked less on humanitarian grounds than as economically counterproductive: the Soviet economist Nikolai Shmelyov, in a crucial (though in theory confidential) speech in June 1987, told for the first time of 5 million peasant families having been deported, of 17 million souls having passed through the Gulag. But his theme was that this was economically worthless. What had the prisoners contributed—three canals, one of which was useless (a reference to the Baltic–White Sea Canal) and a quantity of lumber which could have been better produced by free labor.¹

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).

4. In prison, late 1938: 1 million. This rough estimate was based on the known prison accommodation and many reports of the level of overcrowding, together with figures of inmates for particular prisons. These last are now confirmed in Soviet accounts.⁶

5. In camps, late 1938: approximately 8 million. This is based in the main on multifarious reports from ex-prisoners. The assumption that 5 million were already in camps at the beginning of 1937 was derived merely from the estimates by other students of the matter, and may be too high. I should be inclined to reduce the 8 million at the end of 1938 to 7 million, or even a little less. Such a figure is consonant with the 12 million now given in Moscow for the camp population in 1952.⁷

The above are, in any case, only approximations.

The Great Terror was only peripherally concerned with the total casualties of the Stalin epoch. But it reckoned the dead as no fewer than 20 million. This figure is now given in the USSR. And the general total of “repressed” is now stated (e.g., in the new high-school textbooks) as around 40 million, about half of them in the peasant terror of 1929 to 1933 and the other half from 1937 to 1953.⁸

Thus it would now be accepted almost everywhere that the estimates given above cannot be far wrong. But it is just worth recording that, though it has long been clear that the victims ran into the millions or tens of millions, Western misconceptions of the sort we discussed in Chapter 15 recently had a brief revival. Over the years, a vast amount of true information had established itself in the Western consciousness. But by an inexplicable development, when such notions no longer seemed possible, a few Western Sovietologists began to assert that the Terror had claimed far fewer victims, and that ordinary life was not affected. The writer of a Western Sovietological textbook concerned to reduce the estimates to, as he put it, a few hundred thousand or even a few tens of thousands, wrote, “Surely we don’t want to hypothesise 3 million executions or prison deaths in 1937–1938 or anything like this figure, or we are assuming most improbable percentages of men dying.”⁹ The key word here is “improbable.” The Stalin epoch is replete with what appear as improbabilities to minds unfitted to deal with the phenomena. Similarly with the argument that Stalin could not have killed millions of peasants, since that would have been “economically counterproductive.” Following such leads, a new group of Westerners came forward, with singularly bad timing, in the mid-1980s and told us (in the words of one of them) that the terror had only killed “thousands” and imprisoned “many thousands.”¹⁰ Such views could only be formed by ignoring, or actively rejecting, the earlier evidence. This was accomplished by saying that those who produced it were opposed to Stalin and Stalinism, and therefore prejudiced, and that some of the material was secondhand. Thus it was not merely a matter of mistaken assessment of the evidence. It was, contrary to the duties of a historian, a refusal to face it.

There were even demographers who, among other errors, accepted the faked census of 1939. A Soviet demographer, deploring this, explains that that census was unacceptable on three grounds. First (as I had already registered in Chapter 16 of The Harvest of Sorrow), the earlier 1937 census had been suppressed and the Census Board shot as spies who had “exerted themselves to diminish the population,” thus providing a certain incentive to their successors to find higher figures than were justified. Second, the 1939 totals were announced by Stalin before the new Census Board had examined the material. Third, censuses of the period omitted the deaths of those who had “died in custody.”¹¹ It is unfortunate that implausibly benign assessments should have appeared in one or two Western textbooks and periodicals and that students should thus have been methodically misinformed. Soviet professionals with whom I have discussed this are, naturally, especially outraged. And, indeed, it is worth noting of glasnost that it has produced a number of articles attacking Western apologists for the regime, from the Webbs on.

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.

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.