The Great Terror

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

, ed. V. N. Khaustov, V. P. Naumov and N. S. Plotnikova.

Rossia XX vek

series (Moscow, 2004), pp. 252–3.

fn31

Andrei Sukhomlinov,

Kto vy, Lavrenti i Beria?: neizvestnye stranitsy ugolovnogo dela

(Moscow, 2003).

fn32

Anastas Mikoyan,

Memoirs of Anastas Mikoyan

(Madison, Conn., 1988).

fn33

In conversation with Olga Carlisle in January 1960. See

Voprosy Literatury

, No. 3 (1980), pp. 162–83.

fn34

Norman Cohn,

The Pursuit of the Millennium

(New York, 1970).

fn35

Rosa Luxemburg, ‘The Problem of Dictatorship’, in

The Russian Revolution

(New York, 1940), p. 48.

fn36

V. I. Lenin,

Collected Works

, Vol. 13 (Moscow: 1972), p. 473.

fn37

Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels (4 September 1870), in

Selected Correspondence

(New York, 1968).

fn38

Felix Chuev and Vyacheslav Mikhaylovich Molotov,

Molotov Remembers: Inside Kremlin Politics: Conversations with Felix Chuev

(Chicago, 1993).

fn39

Roy Medvedev, in

Moscow News

, 13 August 2002.

fn40

To the Virginia Convention gathered at St John’s Episcopal Church in Richmond, Virginia, 23 March 1775.