‘Crimes against humanity’ is the overall instrument of analysis used in this report. Nonetheless, in the actual analysis, this is supplemented and objectified using other appropriate and established crime classifications, primarily genocide and terror. In the UN Genocide Convention, the concept of intentionality – the specific intent to commit genocide – is a key condition for the recognition that genocide has been committed and the retrospective punishment thereof. However, in scientific terms, there is often good reason to soften the intentionality perspective and broaden it to include functional reasoning, in which genocide is presented as a ‘cumulative radicalisation’ of societal development characterised by military mobilisation and asymmetrical power relations. Another key point is that genocide is the killing of a category of people selected primarily on the basis that they – through race, ethnicity, nationality or religion, according to the Genocide Convention – are judged to belong to this category, and not because its members are judged to belong to political opposition movements or to be suitable for slave labour. Terror is a broader and less precise type of violence, referring particularly to the often unsystematic and arbitrary use of violence by individuals, groups or states, with the purpose of striking terror into a society. The fact that terror can be used in a ‘didactic’ way, to intimidate and educate in order to force a desired social change, can be seen to a high degree in the actions of communist regimes.

‘Crimes against humanity’ is a linguistically and logically cumbersome term when the aim is to analyse physical violence perpetrated by individual groups, institutions and states against specific victim groups in their own country, which is essentially the case in the context of communist regimes’ crimes against humanity. In addition, it is not in keeping with the terms that have long been used by the academic community. Naturally, the work of creating an inventory includes examining the terms used in practice by researchers in their analyses, and it is reasonable to assume that every time, every society and every paradigm has its own terms to refer to the crimes of communist regimes. Nonetheless, it is possible to establish at this early stage that researchers have long used the word terror to describe the crimes of the Soviet communist regime, regardless of the framework of interpretation to which they adhere. Although the extent to which the mass operations and forced deportations of specific ethnic groups ordered by Stalin before and during the Second World War can be defined as genocide is debated, there is agreement among researchers that the term ‘terror’ is the best reflection of the development of violence in Bolshevik Russia and in the communist Soviet Union under Lenin and Stalin. As a result, terror will be the term most frequently used here in analysing the Soviet communist criminal history.

On the other hand, the term terror is seldom used to describe the mass killings in Cambodia between 1975 and 1979, which may be because it is less clear that the actual intention and stated motive of the Khmer Rouge was to terrorise people into submission. The term genocide, however, is relatively widely accepted and established in describing the systematic and selective crimes of the communist regime in Cambodia, although the use of this term is not entirely uncontroversial. Therefore, in analysing the criminal history of Cambodia, this term will be used in precise contexts dealing with the killing of a category of people, whereas more neutral terms such as mass killing and massacre are used to refer to the general use of violence. The terminology used in the Chinese criminal history is dealt with in detail as part of the section on China.

Terms of reference

One important aspect of this kind of piece of work is setting sensible delimitations. There are four specific problems in terms of setting delimitations, which need to be solved in a satisfactory way. The first concerns geographical scope, in other words, which communist-led countries should be covered by the review. History hardly offers any example of countries that are or have been led by communist powers that have retained respect for human rights as defined in the UN Convention on Human Rights, but is it possible to say that crimes against humanity are or have been committed in countries like North Korea and Cuba? The question is worth some discussion in the light of the research that is available, but in this context focus will be placed firmly on three communist-led countries where there is no doubt that crimes against humanity have been committed by individuals, parties and states that have defined themselves as communist: the Soviet Union, China and Cambodia.

The second delimitation problem is chronological. Where and how did the historical process begin that was to lead to communist regimes committing crimes against humanity? Did it begin with Marx and Marxism, or when Marxism took root in Russian ground and was remoulded to conform to Russian political culture, or when Lenin and the Bolsheviks carried out their coup d’etat in Petrograd on 7 November 1917, or when Stalin began the major, radical Soviet revolution in the early 1920s? If these crimes are an integral part of the modern project, for which there is much evidence in modern research, what marked the beginning of the unbalanced Russian modernisation process that was to have such terrible consequences? These questions are in one sense academic, since this review concerns the development of research, and the simple answer is that it depends what the research says on these issues. However, in reality it is not this simple, since it all depends on where we decide to look, based on our prior understanding. This is a problem that cannot be solved once and for all. It is clear that the question of how the communist utopia metamorphosed into a dystopia cannot and should not be ignored, especially since well-argued texts such as François Furets Le passé d’une illusion (1995) have been devoted to this question. However, the focus here, in terms of Russia and the Soviet Union, will be on Lenin and Stalin’s periods in power, characterised as they are by a fateful structure of ideological struggle, revolutionary pathos, hunger for power, total war, modernist zeal, and crimes against humanity.

There is another chronological delimitation problem at the other end of the timeline. The end of the periods of physical crimes against humanity can be established relatively accurately, but recent research has given much attention to the reception history of these crimes. What have been the fates of surviving victims of these crimes, and how have they dealt with their memories? How have the crimes committed been dealt with retrospectively, by the surrounding world and the offending society, in collective memories, monuments and myths? Can past unsolved crimes against humanity form the basis for new ones, as in the case of Chechnya, where historical memories function as ammunition in current conflicts and crime situations? It is impossible to separate such questions from the crimes themselves. Questions like this form an integral part of the research carried out on crimes against humanity perpetrated by communist regimes, and as such they will be mentioned in the report. The fact that they form an integral part is established not least by the reception historical nature of the task at hand: creating an inventory of how research, in varying conditions and with different results, has interpreted and represented the criminal histories of communist regimes. Such questions are also important in information and education activities, not least because they show why issues relating to crimes against humanity committed by communist regimes continue to be relevant and important issues for research and debate to this day.

The third delimitation problem concerns the scope of this review. ‘Crimes against humanity’, as defined in the Nuremberg Statute, relates to physical activities aimed to harm and dehumanise their victims. Research relating to these activities, their mechanisms, intentions and motives, and their actors, perpetrators, victims and witnesses, will of course be presented. What, however, are the outer limits of the context of these crimes, in a communist state structure where different institutions and social bodies are linked in an overall framework? Could issues concerning education, language and the situation for women form part of the context? Such aspects may seem far-fetched, but modern research devotes a significant amount of attention to issues relating to the social and cultural conditions of crimes committed in communist societies. The question of what people read and sing in a society like this relates to how those in power in communist regimes legitimised their criminal activities, and to how ordinary people handled their fear and insecurity. Such aspects, propelled by the linguistic and cultural ‘u-turns’ that have taken place in human and social sciences in the last two or three decades, now stand out as invaluable advances in research. However, for purely practical reasons, it is necessary to be strictly restrictive in relation to the hundreds of biographies that have been written on the communist leaders who carry the ultimate responsibility for the crimes committed. The same is true for the extremely extensive and ideologically biased discussions on the number of victims. Only the overall trends will be dealt with here, linked to various frameworks of interpretation and schools of thought.

The fourth and final major delimitation issue relates to research on different crimes perpetrated against humanity. One problem here is how to portray the relationship between the communist systems and the crimes, and another, which may be the problem that stimulates the most discussion and agitation, relates to the connection between communist and non-communist crimes against humanity. There are several factors indicating that research on the relationship between Nazi and Soviet communist crimes against humanity should be commented on. This is partly because more and more research reports on this comparative theme are being published. It is also partly because it is clear that analyses of the similarities between Nazi and Stalinist atrocities committed during the same era in societies with similar characters and with political leadership that had many features in common, as well as of differences between them, could add to our knowledge of crimes against humanity committed by communist regimes. It is not necessary to compare things that are identical, nor things that are entirely dissimilar, but anything in between can have its contours sharpened through comparison. Comparing two things is not the same as saying they are equal. However, works relating to the terror, genocide and crimes against humanity of modern society in general terms will necessarily be dealt with extremely restrictively. Exceptions will only be made for works that clearly have a bearing on communist criminal history and that the academic community accept as being related thereto, such as Zygmunt Bauman’s Auschwitz and the modern society (1989).

New trends in research – three analytical perspectives

A research trend can be analysed in a host of different ways, depending on the theoretical starting point and area of interest. Attention can be focused on the intra-scientific process, or on the relationship between the research and external change factors, or on ideological shifts and political transformations. Interest may focus on the researchers and the scientific works that introduce the new trend, or on the process by which this trend is disseminated and gains support in the academic community. The following describes three ways to illustrate and analyse new scientific trends that include these earlier perspectives.

A cumulative perspective means that bricks are laid on top of one another in an additive and quantitative sense. Early research on communist countries was often of this nature, as a result of the fact that these societies and states were closed. Researchers had to make do with fragments of knowledge, often information of an official nature, which made the research process into something of a jigsaw puzzle. Over the last two decades, conditions have changed radically for research on the Soviet Union and its satellite states. This means that researchers have been able to work cumulatively to fill gaps in their knowledge on issues concerning the crimes against humanity perpetrated against different groups of victims and in different regions in Lenin and Stalin’s Soviet state.

In an evolutionary perspective, research is moved forward by rejecting ‘antiquated’ and ‘obsolete’ scientific interpretations, which are replaced by new interpretations that are thought to concur more fully with the historical ‘reality’ or with the relevant framework of interpretation as described by the appropriate authorities. Both these aspects apply to research on the crimes of communist regimes: improved access to relevant archives means that there is now much better expert knowledge on their criminal histories. At the same time, the major shifts in post-war scientific development in the 1960s and 1970s from history of political events to sociohistorical structural history, to what has in later years been called the linguistic and cultural turns of research, also clearly reflected in research on communist regimes.

A third, revolutionary perspective means that research and its conditions are radically and thoroughly altered, often as a result of an ‘exemplary’ scientific work that leads to a change of perspective in major research groups. A number of works of this nature will be identified, also in earlier research. In the context of the crimes of the Soviet communist regime, British historian Robert Conquest’s books on

3 Quoted from Werth 1999, p 116.

4 Chuikina 2006.

5 This term is investigated further in Viola 1993, pp 65–98.

the Great Terror 1936-1938 and what he called the ‘terror famine’ in Ukraine 1932-1933 will be analysed, not only because they have long been viewed as an authoritative interpretation of a factual sequence of events, but also and primarily because Conquest’s interpretations have had such authority that all other researchers in the same area have had to take up a position in relation to his results. The different schools of thought to which researchers belong have largely been determined by their position on The Great Terror.

RUSSIA AND THE SOVIET UNION

Klas-Göran Karlsson

Soviet communist criminal history

Early in the morning on 19 January 1918, with the help of soldiers loyal to the Bolsheviks, Lenin dissolved the inaugural assembly who had gathered in the Tauride Palace in Petrograd to elect a parliament for the new Russia, which was to replace the old Tsardom. The reason for this was that the Bolsheviks had not succeeded in mobilising enough popular support in a democratic way. No blood was shed during the action, however there was bloodshed in the unrest before and after the meeting was dissolved. There was no Soviet Union and no Russian communist party at this time, since the Bolsheviks did not take this name until more than a year later. Nonetheless, there is good reason to take this as the date of birth of the Soviet communist terror system.

In Russia, which was rechristened the Soviet Union in 1922, the all-powerful communist party and the Soviet state were to perpetrate crimes against groups of their own population over the next thirty five years, on a scale that is without historical precedent for an individual state. In a protracted and total internal war, millions of people lost their lives, not only in executions and through the inhumane conditions of life in prison and labour camps, but also through forced deportations and famine created or worsened by a regime that wanted to retain power and recreate society – and to begin with, the entire world – literally at any price. The ends were thought to justify the means, or, as expressed in 1919 in the magazine of the Ukrainian security police: “For us, everything is allowed, as we are the first in the world to raise the sword not to oppress and enslave, but to liberate mankind from its shackles’.3

Those who stood in the way of this double goal of winning power and radically transforming society – or those who were thought to stand in the way – were called byvsjie ljudi, or people of the past. This was a generally accepted term which was meant to indicate that these people were connected with the old regime and stood in the way of the communist society, which mean that they could be characterised as lacking the right to exist. However, a surprising number of ‘people of the past’ of aristocratic origins were forced, and managed, to create an existence after the revolution, in the grey area between memories of the past and the stigmatisation and demands they faced in the communist society, while others emigrated or were arrested4. The ideological term was flexible enough to be able to be used for anyone who, despite not having roots in the tsarist system, discovered that the Soviet state was not the utopia people had hoped for, and tried to oppose it5.

This statement of intent does not mean that the leading figures of the Soviet communist regime, Lenin and Stalin, literally signed the death sentences of all the victims, rather that they, through their political leadership, laid the

6 This penal code was not abolished until December 1958. It is quoted in translation in Conquest 1971, pp 486–490.

7 Cf Brent & Naumov 2003, p 191.

foundations for the practice of violence that was to penetrate all levels of the Russian and Soviet society. However, many acts of violence were ordered directly by the communist leaders, and were carried out by the terror institutions created by Lenin in conjunction with the Bolshevik seizure of power in November 1917: the secret police, the Red Army, a system of concentration camps and a legal system based on paragraph 58 of the penal code on various types of anti-Soviet activities6, revolutionary courts that judged on the basis of a ‘proletarian’ definition of justice, and show trials. Neither does this mean that the Soviet communist criminal history was uniform during this long period. The types of expressions of violence, victim categories and the underlying mechanisms altered in line with the major changes in the internal and external situation in Russia and the Soviet Union, from the ‘Red Terror’ of the early years to the ‘Great Terror’ of the Stalin era, and to the forced deportations of the ‘punished peoples’ during the years of the world wars.

The main outlines of this many-faceted history will be sketched in the following section. The idea is not to present new information on or interpretations of Soviet communist terror, but to offer a brief chronological description of the key events, processes and trends in the criminal history, along with a basic analysis of the driving forces and causes, which will hopefully serve as a background or context for the research review that is the main purpose of this report.

In this context, the date of the end of the Soviet communist criminal history has been determined as 5 March 1953, the day of Stalin’s death. This is not without its problems. After this date, the Soviet regime did not lead the country and its citizens with respect for human rights as defined in the UN declaration from December 1948. However, the communist powers of the post-Stalin Soviet Union did not perpetrate any crimes that can be unequivocally described as crimes against humanity. In the satellite states where Soviet-led communist parties took power after the Second World War, there were purges, and mass violence was directed against the former leadership and against specific ethnic groups and other actual or alleged opposition groups, although not to the extent of the purges in the Soviet Union between 1918 and 1953. In late 1952, Stalin carried out what would be his last major crime, the execution in Moscow of the 13 Jewish doctors who, according to the Soviet leader, has sworn an oath to murder him. At the same time in Prague, the trial of the Jewish former party chief Rudolf Slánský and 13 other leading communists, ten of whom were Jewish, began. Eleven of the accused were sentenced to death. The accusation was that they had plotted to kill the first president of communist Czechoslovakia, Klement Gottwald, with the help of ‘doctors from enemy circles with dubious backgrounds’7. However, it was not doctors with Jewish backgrounds, but the Soviet advisor to the Czechoslovakian secret police, who ensured that the terror was not limited to Lenin and Stalin’s Soviet Union. However, the focus of this research review will be on the crimes against humanity perpetrated by the Soviet regime within the Soviet state.

The Red Terror

Over the course of 1918, mass violence escalated in a Russia hit by war, revolution, famine and collapse, which Lenin and his party had taken power over in the previous year. At this time, the Bolsheviks’ position in power was far from secure. Their enemies, representatives of the Tsar and opposition parties, men and women of the church and the more affluent farmers who were called ‘kulaks’, were stigmatised as ‘class enemies’ or ‘socially dangerous persons’, and were persecuted to an increasing degree. Representatives of socialist ideas and parties that were not judged to be Bolshevik were hit hard. Uprisings in rural areas and demonstrations and strikes in the cities were met with violence. The death penalty was reintroduced, after having been abolished by the Bolshevik party in early 1917 when the Tsardom was toppled, and society was militarised both organisationally and linguistically. Problems with food supplies were to be remedied

8 Cf Pipes 1992, p 789ff, Pipes 1996.

9 “Postanovlenie SNK RSFSR o ’krasnom terrore’”, published in Kokurin & Petrov (eds.) 2002, p 15.

10 They were named the ‘green’ farmers because they hid in the forests. See Osipova 1997, p 167.

11 Jensen 2002, p 63.

12 Werth 1999, p 116.

13 See the order of the Central Committee issued on 24 January 1919, published in Danilov & Shanin (eds) 1997, pp 137–138.

using a ‘war communist policy’, the main thrust of which at this time was that farmers who refused to hand over food supplies to poor starving farmers in rural areas and workers and soldiers in cities (the main power base of the Bolshevik party) were hit by reprisals from the ‘food patrols’ that were sent out by the government.

Using terror, which seemed to Lenin and his aides to be a legitimate and indeed necessary policy, enemies of the revolution were to be forced to capitulate to the revolutionary power. The methods were executions, arrests and taking hostages. Extensive amounts of documentation exist that show that leaders of the Bolshevik party were prepared to annihilate all who were deemed to pose a threat to their position of power, and that terror was openly promoted as an effective tool of power8. At the same time, the fact that this mass violence was seen as a passing and revolutionary phenomenon is shown by the ‘extraordinary’ nature of the first communist terror organisation, called by its acronym, Cheka, a commission charged with neutralising counterrevolution, speculation and sabotage. However, the fact that it was ‘extraordinary’ also meant that the terror campaigns that the organisation carried out were run entirely without legal ground and outside the control of all except the highest ranks of the Bolsheviks. In the summer of 1918, Lenin ordered the local Cheka members in Yekaterinburg to execute the Tsar and his family. Only days later, an attempt was made on his own life, after the assassinations of several other leading Bolsheviks. At this point, the social unrest and violence in Russia was already on its way to full-blown civil war between the ‘red’ adherents of the revolution and the ‘white’ supporters of the toppled Tsar’s power.

The assassination attempt on Lenin marked the start of more organised and systematic use of mass executions, detention in newly created concentration camps, and other terror activities directed against ‘counterrevolutionary’ forces. This Red Terror, which was to include strengthening the work of the Cheka, isolation of class enemies in concentration camps, execution of all those with ‘white’ relations and publication of the names of all those executed, was ordered by the Soviet government in a decree issued on 5 September 19189.Both sides of the Russian civil war resorted to extreme brutality in their struggle for power. While the ‘whites’ persecuted individuals and groups with ‘Jewish-Bolshevik’ sympathies in pogrom-like activities, the ‘red’ Bolsheviks saw enemies of the people and anti-revolutionaries in more or less all political and religious groups and social categories. Post-revolutionary Russia was a society at war with itself.

Some groups were hit particularly hard and uncompromisingly by the Red Terror, although there is no clear-cut evidence that they belonged to the ‘white’ side. Rebellious ‘green’ farmers, who protested against both forced requisition of grain and forced conscription to the Red Army, were met with extreme violence throughout the period of ‘war communism’10. The same was true of the Cossacks of the Don and Kuban regions, whose villages were destroyed and whose inhabitants were killed or deported. This deliberate plan to ‘decossackise’ rural Russia – historian Bent Jensen points out that the term is reminiscent of ‘delousing’ and other mechanical destruction processes11 - claimed between 300,000 and 500,000 victims12. It was also a step on the way to larger operations to ‘dekulakise’ the same areas, carried out by the communist powers less than a decade later, not least in the sense that it divided victims into categories of ‘rich Cossacks’, who were to be exterminated altogether, and ‘middle Cossacks’, who were to be scared into submission using appropriate means13. A third vulnerable group in atheist Russia was the clergy, monks and nuns, who were killed or imprisoned by

14 Figes 1998, pp 745–751.

15 Gorsuch 1997, pp 564–580.

16 Cf Raleigh 2002, p 409. In 1994, chapter 8, Richard Pipes calls the NEP a ‘false Thermidor’ in order to underline the fact that this period of Russian and Soviet history, in contrast to post-revolutionary France, could not be described in terms of moderation and liberalisation except in an economic sense.

the thousand during campaigns against church and religion carried out by the regime14.

There are no reliable figures available for the total number of victims of the Red Terror. This is due not least to the difficulty of distinguishing terror victims among the several million people who were killed in the Russian civil war or who succumbed to the severe famine that hit Russia in 1920 and 1921. In 1921, the Russian civil war ended with a communist victory, and the terror lessened, although it did not cease altogether.

The following period between 1921 and 1928, characterised by a spirit of compromise and christened the New Economic Policy (NEP) by the history books, turned out to be a temporary ceasefire in the ongoing conflict between the regime and Russian society. Many communists, particularly young member of the Komsomol, were profoundly indignant that the confrontation policy of the civil war period had been abandoned, and demanded a return to what they perceived as the core of a communist policy15. Before the cerebral haemorrhage that was to end his active life, Lenin adopted several measures that were to facilitate the return of terror on a grand scale. With the Soviet leader as its driving force, a new penal code came into force in 1922, under which ‘counterrevolutionary crimes’ were given a much broader and more developed meaning than in previous years. The same year, the Cheka was replaced by a permanent secret police force known as the State Political Directorate or GPU, which was placed under the People’s Commissariat for Interior Affairs, without any major personnel changes. This measure was an expression of the intention to make political violence into a permanent instrument for the communist regime’s dictatorial leadership of the Soviet society. The other Soviet terror institutions that were to succeed the GPU had the same function – the OGPU, NKVD, MVD and KGB. Several experts on early Soviet society have underlined the fact that the country that was named the Soviet Union in December 1922 was already strongly characterised by a culture of political violence with roots in the Bolshevik exercise of power and the Russian civil war. More controversial is the question of whether the NEP was a route that could have led away from this society of terror, or whether the civil war and Bolshevik policy had already limited the possible routes to what Donald Raleigh, in his study of the south-western industrial town of Saratov during the civil war, has described as “no real alternatives to a Stalinist-like system” 16.

Dekulakisation

The continuation of the violent use of power also became clear when the farmers’ agricultural deliveries to the state began to decrease in 1928, despite a good harvest. For Lenin’s successor Stalin, who had strengthened his position of power at the expense of other would-be leaders, and who benefited from a much more stable economic and political situation than during the civil war, this constituted a reason to declare war on the agricultural class once again. This time, it was not enough to confiscate grain and pit rich farmers against poor farmers. Instead, Stalin enforced a social and economic revolution that put Lenin’s ‘war communism’ in the shade. One aspect of this revolution was state planning of the economy, and another was accelerated industrialisation. The third aspect concerned changes in rural society: individual farmers were to be removed from their land to establish gargantuan collective farms - ‘kolkhozes’ and ‘sovkhozes’ – in order to give the government direct control over agricultural production. An integral part of this agricultural policy was what Stalin described in 1929 as an ambition to ‘liquidate the kulaks as a class’.

In fact, all these aspects of Stalin’s revolution were closely interlinked: Market forces were to be eliminated by the introduction of economic planning, farmers’ land was to be expropriated and deported farmers were to be forced into tough

17 “Postanovlenie TsIK i SNK SSSR ‘Ob ochrane imusjtjestva gosudarstvennych predprijatij, kolchozov i kooperatsii i ukreplenija obsjtjestvennoj (sotsialistitjeskoj) sobstvennosti’”, published in Danilov et al. (ed) 2001, pp 453–454.

18 “Projekt postanovlenija Politbjuro TSK VKP(b) o likvidatsii kulatjestva kak klassa, podgotovlennoj komissiej Ja.A. Jakovleva”, published in Ivnitsky (ed) 2000, pp 123–126.

19 Zemskov 1991, pp 3–20.

20 Ivnitsky 2000, p 27. According to Ivnitsky 1994, p 257, over 2 million people were deported to special settlements between the years of 1930 and 1933. This figure does not include farmers who were forced to move within their own regions. See also Davies, Harrison & Wheatcroft (eds) 1994, p 68.

forced manual labour in peripheral and inaccessible parts of the Soviet territory, according to prearranged plans and established quotas. Soviet economic planning was therefore highly dependent on forced labour, and required a regular supply of new slaves. Society was to be mobilised and disciplined using economic means, regardless of the human cost. A law passed on 7 August 1932 made all kolkhoz property, including livestock and the grain in the fields, state property. Misappropriation of these goods was punishable by death, or if there were mitigating circumstances, ten years in prison and loss of all personal property17.

Collectivisation of agriculture and dekulakisation, which reached their peaks between 1929 and 1933, claimed millions of lives among the agricultural class. In accordance with a regulation drawn up by a commission within the Central Committee in early 1930, the kulaks were to be divided into different categories, depending on the degree of resistance to collectivisation they were judged to have displayed18. Some of them were executed immediately, but many more were subjected to forced deportation, often to special kulak settlements in inhospitable, uninhabited areas. Lack of coordination between the links in the deportation chain led to extreme hardship, not least for the families and children of the kulaks. According to Russian researcher Zemskov, during the most intensive period of dekulakisation in 1930-1931, 381,026 kulak families or 1,803,392 people were subjected to forced deportation. When the authorities counted the number of dekulakised in 1932, the official figure was 1,317,02219.This does not mean that half a million people died during the deportations or upon arrival to the deportation destinations over this two-year period, since it is likely that a significant number of those who were fit and healthy managed to escape. Another Russian researcher, Ivnitsky, claims that in the special settlements to which many kulaks were sent, more than 100,000 people died in 1930 alone20. As has been mentioned, the deportations formed part of a centrally organised campaign, but the actual responsibility for arresting and deporting kulaks lay with local three-man committees, known as troikas, who did have central quotas to meet, but who also sometimes used their responsibility to settle conflicts in their local societies or to exploit the situation purely for their own benefit.

It was not only the agricultural class who were affected by the return to terror campaigns around 1930. Spetsy, groups of ‘bourgeois’ specialists with their roots in the administration and commerce of the Tsar period, were made scapegoats not only for the hatred of the Soviet society’s ‘people of the past’, but also for the widespread fear of a war against the West. In May 1928, over fifty mining engineers from the Shakhty region in Donbass faced trial in Moscow for having sabotaged equipment and for being in the pay of Western powers. This was the first in a long series of show trials against well-educated groups in industry and science. At the same time, the communist regime made great efforts to create a new ‘red’ technocratic intelligentsia, who could fulfil the functions of the old specialist groups in the drive towards industrialisation, through investing in education and promoting social advancement.

The terror famine

In 1932 and 1933, the Soviet Union was hit by a severe famine that claimed more than six million lives. It differed from the famine that hit Bolshevik Russia in 1920 in that it was not recognised by the authorities, and no international help was allowed access. Instead, the Soviet Union continued to export grain throughout the years of famine.

21 Commission on the Ukrainian Famine: Report to Congress 1988, p VII.

22 Conquest 1988.

23 For the latter view, see Davies & Wheatcroft 2004.

24 Conquest 1988, p 219.

Ukraine was the Soviet Republic that was worst affected, but fertile agricultural areas in other parts of the Soviet Union were also affected since these areas were under the most pressure from the food seizure campaigns directed against the kolkhozes. The small harvest in 1931 and 1932 made the demands from the state unrealistic, and brutal methods were used in order to tackle the ‘fight against sabotage’. In addition, when the famine was looming, one escape option that had been used on a grand scale in 1920 was no longer available: taking refuge in the cities. This was because the Soviet leadership introduced domestic passports in December 1932, along with requirements for registration of all city residents, in order to limit migration from the kolkhozes. In practice, this was a major step backwards towards the feudal system that Tsar-ruled Russia had abolished seventy years earlier.

The causal relationship between the major upheavals in rural Russia and the crop failure and famine is thus quite clear: the Soviet regime’s deliberate work to eliminate the traditional agrarian structure, disperse the kulak families that had been the most productive, and confiscate the harvests of the kolkhozes, led to a major food shortage. Somewhat less clear is the conclusion drawn by the 1988 US Congress commission on the Ukrainian famine, which, with strong backing from Ukrainian-American organisations, maintained that the famine was man-made and that Stalin and his closest advisors were guilty of genocide against the people of Ukraine. 21This view essentially concurred with the interpretation expressed by Robert Conquest a couple of years earlier, although he placed more emphasis on Stalin’s guilt for not intervening to eliminate or alleviate the famine. 22One point of controversy is whether it really was a planned and deliberately created ‘terror famine’ or an unintentional and ‘natural’ famine, combined with policies that recklessly prioritised other areas, in particular the expansion of heavy industry.23 Another question is whether the victims should be defined first and foremost in ethnonational terms, as Ukrainians, whose alleged nationalism was a thorn in Stalin’s side, or in class terms, as the farmers that had long been the main enemies of the communist regime. Conquest does not take a clear-cut stand on this question, but refers to Stalin’s own simple solution to the problem: “The nationality problem is, in its very essence, a problem of the peasantry.” 24

Gulag

The system of concentration camps that the Bolsheviks began to construct as early as 1918 was not only intended for the political opponents of the regime. During the first decade or more, the idea of penal labour went hand in hand with a didactic notion that individuals, through hard work in labour camps, would be encouraged to become good communists. However, when the more extensive camp system of the 1930s was filled with kulaks, political opponents of the regime, clergy, criminals and ‘ordinary’ citizens who had fallen victim to an increasingly indiscriminate wave of repression, it was not the re-education aspect of the camps but the economic aspect that was most prominent.

In gigantic camp complexes, often but not always situated a long way from densely populated areas, prisoners were to contribute to the modernisation of the Soviet Union through working in primitive conditions to build canals and railways, extract gold, clear forests or break virgin soil and mine coal. Even technologically and scientifically advanced activities took place in special camps, particularly during and after the war years. Moscow University and the capital city’s subway system were also the work of camp prisoners.

The decision by the Politburo on 5 May 1930 to begin building a canal between the White Sea and the Baltic Sea with 19 sluices, using forced labour, was a pilot project on a colossal scale, carried out under the leadership of the OGPU by more than 100,000 prisoners in the record time of 20 months. The project acted as an example and had an accelerating effect on the creation of camps, since it

25 Cf Khlevniuk 2003, pp 46-47. Documentation of the political and administrative decisions concerning the building of the canal are compiled in Dmitriev 2003.

26 Ivanova 2000, p 187.

27 Khlevniuk 2004, p 344.

showed that forced labour could produce good results.25 The creation of the White Sea Canal cost the lives of tens of thousands of people, but only brought limited economic benefits as a result of the crude and defective construction of the canal.

Gulag, which is really an acronym for the Chief Administration of Corrective Labour Camps and Colonies, Glavnoe Upravlenie Ispravitelno-Trudovych Lagerej, has come to be used to refer to the camp system itself. The man who popularised the term Gulag all over the world was author Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, who on the basis of his own experience of being held prisoner for eight years after calling Stalin the ‘ringleader of a band of thieves’, published several books exposing the reality of camp life, including One day in the life of Ivan Denisovich (1962) and The Gulag Archipelago (1973-1975). Today we do not only have the personal, partly literary memoirs provided by Solzhenitsyn or Varlam Shalamov, but also large parts of the Gulag’s extensive archives which are now available.

The ‘archipelago’ of labour camps reached its peak in the early 1950s, when over 2.5 million people lived their lives in barracks, often kept in by barbed wire. 26The fact that the number of prisoners peaked at this time is linked to a lack of discipline in the workforce, which led to tougher punishments, and the war that gave rise to whole new groups of people to imprison: prisoners of war, deserters and collaborators. Only a few years later, the camp system began to be dismantled, and people were gradually able to leave the camps. This was not only a result of the death of the dictator, but also of increasing problems with supervision, discipline and economic productivity. However, many of those who had lived in the camps for a long time remained there, since after all their years of imprisonment they had nothing to which to return. The fact that a series of Russian towns were born out of camps is just one piece of evidence that the Gulag formed a cornerstone and integral part of the malaya zona or little zone of the Soviet society’s bolshaya zona or big zone, long after the camp system had been formally laid to rest. In his well-documented history of the Gulag, Khlevniuk summarises the role of the camp system in a similar way:

Thus the Gulag spread beyond the barbed wire. Society absorbed the criminal mindset, the reliance on violence, and the prison culture. This spread of the Gulag is a real problem – as real as the monstrous price paid by millions for the establishment and expansion of Stalinism. 27

The Great Terror

In the same way that the Red Terror and famine in 1920-1921 was followed by the liberalisation of the NEP period, before Stalin’s major revolution pushed terror back up the agenda, after the war against farmers and the famine of 1932-1933 there was a short-lived period of liberalisation, followed by a massive escalation of the violence that, since the publication of Robert Conquest’s book, has generally been referred to as the Great Terror. This pattern suggests a system that regularly demanded real or imagined enemies to destabilise the social and political situation, meaning that power constantly had to be captured and recaptured. In other words, political stability in the Soviet Union had become dependent on crises and the use of terror in crisis management.

28 Knight 1999, p 19.

29 Cf Samuelson 2000, chapter 8. See also Samuelson 1999, pp 216–225.

30 Medvedev 1973, p 93.

31 The figures were presented in Nikita Khrushchev’s secret speech in 1956. See note 67.

32 Conquest 1992, p 233.

33 Conquest 1992, p 446.

History repeated itself in another way: while the assassination attempt on Lenin in 1918 was a driving force in the initiation of the Red Terror, the murder of Leningrad party chief Sergey Kirov on 1 December 1934 gave Stalin a pretext for the initiation of the Great Terror. The question of the extent to which Stalin was involved has been the object of much speculation. There are two opposing opinions here. According to the first, Kirov’s popularity within the party posed a thread to Stalin’s leadership, causing Stalin to order his murder in secret. The other opinion is that there is no evidence for Stalin’s involvement. Two official investigation commissions, under Khrushchev and Gorbachev, supported the latter view, that the murderer acted on his own initiative. 28

However, one aspect of the Great Terror between late 1936 and the end of the 1938 was something new in a qualitative sense: many of the terror victims were active communists. This was certainly the case for over seventy party officials and Stalin’s competitors to the right and left, who were put on trial in three major show trials in Moscow, accused of seeking to undermine and topple the Soviet regime, and subsequently executed. This was also the case for the high-ranking officers who, with Marshal and Deputy Commisar for Defence Mikhail Tukhachevsky at their head, were put on trial and executed in 1937 after accusations of espionage for the German Wehrmacht and planning a coup d’etat. 29This was also the case at all levels of military and civilian cadres. In some locations, such as Ukraine and Leningrad, the party structure was purged particularly effectively. There was a link between the Red Terror and the Great Terror in another sense: the first Leninist generation of Bolsheviks, who led the process of establishing Soviet power in the years following 1917, formed one of the main groups of victims of the Stalinist Great Terror. The few opposing voices that remained within the party disappeared in the Great Terror, and a new generation faithful to Stalin took over what had become an increasingly monolithic party.

The Great Terror is usually referred to as ‘Yezhovschina’ in Russian, since the mass violence coincided with the term of office of NKVD head Nikolai Yezhov. This does not mean that Stalin and the Politburo were outside the spiral of violence; the Soviet leader’s notes in the margin and signature can be found, along with those of his associates Lazar Kaganovich, Vyacheslav Molotov and Kliment Voroshilov, on a remarkably large number of decrees relating to purges and mass killings over these years. Yezhov himself was one of the final victims of the Great Terror, in the culmination of a process initiated after the Great Terror by Stalin and the new head of the secret police, Lavrentiy Beria, in order to punish the NKVD officers who had obeyed orders in 1937. After the terror was over, all traces of it were to be erased by murdering the murderers.

During these dread-filled years, the Great Terror reached all political levels, all social strata, and all geographical areas of the Soviet society, from military leadership to authors’ unions, from the party organisations of Soviet Union republics to industry and kolkhozes. Of the 139 members and candidate members of the party’s Central Committee who were elected at the 17th party congress in 1934 – the ‘Congress of the Victors’, in reference to Stalin’s ‘victorious’ collectivisation process – 100 were arrested before the 18th party congress in 1939.30 Of the 1966 delegates who participated in the 17th congress, 1108 were arrested.31 Only 59 of these were present five years later. In Ukraine, where Nikita Khrushchev became first secretary of the party in 1938, only three of the 86 Central Committee members survived the Great Terror, all three of whom were non-political honorary delegates.32 Total continuity of members between party congresses was less than two percent.33 Hardly anyone who had ever belonged to

34 Mironov & Werth 2004, pp 632–633.

35 This is also emphasised by Brown 2007, p 76.

36 ”Operativnyj prikaz NKVD SSSR No 00447 ’Ob operatsii po repressovaniju byvsjich kulakov, ugolovnikov i drugich antisovetskich elementov’”, published in Kokurin & Petrov (eds) 2002, pp 96-104. The document is available in translation to English in Getty & Naumov 1999, pp 473-480. The ‘mass operations’ are analysed in detail in Jansen & Petrov 2002, pp 79–102.

37 “Operativnyj prikaz Narodnogo Komissara Vnutrennych del SSSR No 00486 ‘Ob operatsii po represssirovaniju zjen i detej izmennikov Rodiny’”, published in Vilenskij, Kokurin, Atmasjkina & Novichenko 2002, pp 234-238. The document is available in translation to English in Yakovlev 2002, pp 29–31.

38 Jansen & Petrov 2006, p 591.

39 Solzhenitsyn 1974, pp 15-30. See also Applebaum 2003, chapter 7.

40 Getty, Rittersporn & Zemskov 1993, pp 1022–1024.

an ‘opposition’ or ‘faction’ within the party or the state mechanism avoided being drawn into the purges.

Nonetheless, researchers, now with access to more extensive source material, are agreed that the majority of the victims of the mass operations of the Great Terror were more or less arbitrarily selected ‘ordinary’ citizens, who for various reasons were not judged to belong in the Stalinist social system. Even in 1937, no more than a fraction of almost a million people affected by the mass operations were punished for counterrevolutionary offences. Much larger groups were found guilty of ‘ordinary’ crimes like theft, assault and hooliganism. The proportions in the figures for 1938 are no different.34 Relatively many belonged to ethnic groups that were regarded as suspect, or that had immigrated to the Soviet state during the communist period. They were deported to face an uncertain future, or executed and thrown into mass graves on the outskirts of cities and in forested areas all over the Soviet Union. The fact that the Great Terror affected so many ‘ordinary’ people, who were probably poorly educated and socially marginalised, shows that the Gulag’s connection to purely political repression should not be over-emphasised.35

The extreme expansion in the use of terror meant that the mechanisms of violence had to be extended and their work rationalised. Quotas were issued for the number of people to be executed or deported from different regions. The notorious order 00447 from 30 July 1937, signed by Yezhov, established the number of people from different regions of the Soviet Union, in hundreds, thousands or tens of thousands, who either belonged to the first category and thus should be shot immediately, or who belonged to a second category of ‘less active but nonetheless hostile elements’ who were to be imprisoned and put on trial before troikas. A total of 268,950 people were arrested, 75,950 of them were killed and 193,000 were imprisoned in camps.36 In order 00486, issued just weeks later, instructions were given on how the wives and children of traitors to the country were to be dealt with.37 The work of the legal authorities was often reduced to abbreviations: KRD stood for counterrevolutionary activities, TjSIR for family members of traitors to the country, while ASA(b) meant that the guilty party had committed anti-Soviet agitation and spread Nikolai Bukharin’s banned ‘right-wing’ ideas. The NKVD submitted lists of those involved to the Politburo, and Stalin and his associates decided the cases by writing za for (execution) after the name, and adding their signatures.38 Official show trials were also retained, probably to function as a deterrent. At the beginning of The Gulag Archipelago, Solzhenitsyn describes how the practical act of imprisonment was automated and became a scientificised ‘arrestology’.39 Apart from the mass operations carried out against entire groups, which have already been mentioned, almost 1.6 million individuals were arrested by the NKVD between 1937 and 1938, only 1 percent of these for counterrevolutionary crimes. Almost half of these, or 681,692 people, lost their lives. Hundreds of thousands more died in the camps as a result of disease, cold, starvation and accidents.40

Naturally, the mechanisms of terror permeated every level of Soviet society during these dramatic years. No-one felt safe. Even the members of the Politburo were armed. Informing and denial of social origins flourished. A large number of secret agents or seksoty supplied the NKVD with ‘negative’ information on their colleagues and party chiefs. As

41 See Davis 1997, Rittersporn 1992, pp 101–120.

42 Quoted from Fitzpatrick 2000, p 195.

43 An outline of Soviet deportation history is given in Polian 2001.

44 Cf Martin 1998, pp 813–861.

45 The document is published in Bugai & Vada 1992, pp 220-221. For the deportation of the Soviet Korean population, see also Gelb 1995, pp 389–412.

46 Ochotin & Roginsky 1999, pp 63–66.

47 A total of 209,430 Soviet Germans were deported. See Bugai 1991, pp 172–180.

has become clear, not least from cultural products and the language constructions used, people saw scapegoats and spies everywhere.41 The harvest was poor in 1936, and Stalin did not miss any opportunities to call attention to the international vulnerability of the communist Soviet Union, surrounded by hostile powers. Traditional Russian perceptions that terror is something perpetrated by ‘them’ against ‘us’ became difficult to maintain in a society where those in power had suddenly fallen victim to purges, and where the arbitrary violence seemed to have taken over from the violence perpetrated against the class enemies that people had learned to recognise and hate. In this context, who were ‘the people’, and how did this relate to the newly defined category of ‘enemy of the people’, to which it seemed the former Soviet leaders belonged? In October 1937, in a toast to the glory of the revolution, Stalin referred to this distinction: “Leaders come and go, but the people remain. Only the people are eternal.”42

The ‘punished peoples’

The part of the Second World War that was fought on Soviet territory, called the Great Patriotic War in Russian, changed the nature of the terror campaigns. In actual fact, this change took place in the years leading up to the declaration of war. It is best described as an increasingly ethnic definition of the terror of the Soviet regime, illustrated by the increasing use of the aforementioned term ‘enemies of the people’, to stigmatise not only general opponents to the regime, but also specific ethnonational groups within the Soviet state. The other side of the same coin is that ethnic Russians were increasingly presented as the foundation of the state, the ‘first among equals’, and that the link between the Soviet Union and Russian history and orthodox Christianity was presented in a positive light, in diametrical contrast with the first Soviet decade.

The terror weapon that had already been used against the kulaks, but which was made more effective and systematic at this stage and which came to involve not only large groups of victims but also significant numbers of NKVD troops, was forced deportation.43 First to be affected were a number of ethnic groups that were judged to be or to have potential to be unreliable in the event that the Soviet Union went to war against its aggressive neighbours to the west and east, Germany and Japan respectively. Among the first victims of the process of mass operations that in modern terminology could be called ethnic cleansing, were Poles and Soviet Koreans.44 Over 170,000 of the latter people group were deported from their traditional home area around Vladivostok to Central Asia. After the task had been carried out to his satisfaction, Yezhov informed the Kremlin that the transportation process had gone well, but that the recipients were unprepared, which had placed the deported individuals in “a vulnerable situation”.45

Early on in the Great Terror, in 1937-1938, Germans in the Soviet Union were singled out as potential traitors of the country and subjected to mass operations: 55,000 were punished, 42,000 by death.46 When the war against Germany began in the summer of 1941, almost half a million Soviet Germans from the Volga area were loaded into railway carriages for transportation to Siberia, collectively accused of being Germany spies. At least as many Germans from other parts of the Soviet Union met with the same fate in the following year, in the midst of raging war.47 This German people group had lived in Russia since the 18th century.

The Molotov-Ribbentropp Pact of august 1939, which led to the annexation of the Baltic republics and western parts of Ukraine and Belarus, also brought about major migrations. Just prior to the war, around 400,000 Poles and Jews were forced to move eastwards from Ukraine and Belarus. In the

48 Kokurin 2004. See also Köll 2005, pp 218–255.

49 Figures taken from Bugai 1989, pp 135-144. The term ‘the punished peoples’ was coined by Nekrich 1978. Cf also Conquest 1970 and Burds 2007, pp 267–314.

50 Avtorkhanov 1992, p 147.

51 According to Bugai 1990, p 22, 144,704 people or 23.7 percent of all North Caucasians died in the camps between 1944 and 1948.

52 For documentation of the Jewish people’s ‘imprisonment by the red pharaoh’, see Kostrychenko 1994.

irony of history, they were therefore spared the horrors of the Nazi Holocaust machinery. In Katyn and its surroundings in 1940, on Stalin’s orders, 15,000 Polish officers were killed who had been captured when the Soviet Union attacked Poland in September 1939, in accordance with the German-Soviet Pact. In the Baltic States, deportations primarily affected individuals who had had prominent positions in the free Baltic States during the interwar period, and who were thus viewed as nationalists. Only the progress of the Nazis on the eastern front was able to put a temporary stop to the deportations. However, once the communists secured their power over the Baltic region in 1944, new and more extensive waves of deportation were to follow. As a result of a decree issued by the Soviet Council of Ministers on 29 January 1949 on ‘deportation of kulaks, their families, bandits, nationalists and their families’, the Baltic States lost a total of 94,779 people in the largest deportation in March 1949. The largest group, 42,129 people, were from Latvia. The end station for these deportations was Siberia, and the areas of Irkutsk and Omsk for the majority of deportees.48

These deportation stories are very much ‘living history’. In February 1944, the entire Chechen people (362,282 people) were deported from their home area in the North Caucasus to Central Asia, as one of eight ‘punished peoples’ from Crimea and the Caucasus, who Stalin wanted to eliminate as a result of their long-term resistance to the Soviet powers and their lack of loyalty in times of war.49 The Chechens were accused of collaboration with the Germans, despite the fact that during its occupation of the Soviet Union the German army never reached the Chechen territory.50 Roughly one quarter of the North Caucasians died during the deportations or shortly thereafter in camps.51 However, hundreds of thousands of Chechens also grew up in exile and learned to hate the Russians in Moscow who had destroyed their lives and the lives and society of the Chechen people. For generations of Balts and Chechens, these stories of ruthless deportation of their people have strengthened their national identities and their hatred for what they see as the eternally repressive regime in Moscow.

Anticosmopolitanism

The ethnic dimension is also prominent in the persecution of Jews that became a characteristic of the post-war Soviet terror society. This was not a matter of large-scale mass killings of the nature described above, but of a series of murders and arrests of individuals and small groups as well as anti-Jewish policies primarily in the areas of culture and medicine. Nonetheless, this issue has been discussed in a research context.52 The main reason for this is that the persecution of Jews in the Soviet Union has raised questions on the relationship between Soviet communism and Nazism, and on the place of the traditional Russian antisemitism in the context of Soviet history.

In 1948, two incidents occurred which marked the start of a Soviet terror policy with antisemitic overtones. However, the discourse of the regime stated that the policy was dictated by ‘anticosmopolitanist’ and ‘anti-Zionist’ concerns, indicating that the repression was a legitimate reaction to the general rootlessness of the Soviet Jews and their preference for the state of Israel, founded in 1948 and recognised by the Soviet Union. During this year, the members of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee, a body established in 1942 to facilitate American aid to the Soviet Union and promote anti-Nazi propaganda during the war against Nazi Germany, were arrested. Their successful work during the war was used six years later as proof that the committee sought to spread the evil message of American imperialism in the Soviet Union. The committee, which had become a hub for Soviet Jews and whose work included pushing for recognition of the Holocaust, was no longer allowed to function and its members were

53 Brent & Naumov 2003. See also Vaksberg 1994, p 241ff. For a discussion of the knowledge available in terms of Stalin’s plans for forced deportation of the Soviet Jews, see Brandenberger 2005, pp 198–202.

54 Cf e.g. Gerner 1996, pp 307–333, Olsson & Åker 2002, Blomqvist & Ekdahl 2003, and Alm 2005, pp 19–49.

55 Cf Pollack 2005, pp 50-84, and Leth 2005, pp 85–140.

56 Karlsson 1985/1986, pp 44-59. See also Johansson 2004.

57 Popoff 1925, p 7.

58 Goldman 1924, pp 5, 14.

executed by firing squad in 1952. In 1948 the leader of the committee, Jewish actor Solomon Mikhoels, had been killed on the streets of Minsk by secret police agents.

A short time after the execution of the committee members, TASS and Pravda ‘revealed’ a conspiracy among the Jewish doctors who were responsible for the medical care of Stalin and several other political and military leaders, but who were in fact ‘murderers in white coats’. Like those accused in the Moscow trials, the Jewish doctors confessed under torture that they had been part of a global conspiracy to use drugs to kill the Soviet leaders. Soviet workplaces began to compile lists of Jews, and plans for mass deportation were developed. There is much, including the historical patterns described in this background, to suggest that these terror operations against the Jewish people would have been realised if Stalin, who was busy engineering the ‘doctors’ conspiracy’ in his last days, had not died. As researchers have noted, the ground had been prepared since 1948, if not earlier. In early 1953, the Soviet press had launched a major campaign to stigmatise the Jews, and there are signs that the MVD had made preparations for deportation and built new labour camps.53

Sources and archives

Even during the 35-year period when the Soviet regime perpetrated mass physical violence against its own people, it was possible to find information in Sweden regarding events on the other side of the Baltic Sea. This knowledge process was characterised by strong ideological elements: The Soviet Union was either a role model or a vision or horror, a promise or a threat.54 Newspapers contained news items and features on the terror, but with the exception of the spectacular Moscow trials reports from the Soviet Union were fairly infrequent.55 History textbooks described the Bolshevik revolution and its brutal consequences,56 in the 1920s and 30s often in drastic and deprecating terms, and visitors to the Soviet Union and others recorded their impressions of Lenin and Stalin’s society in writing. A number of them, on fleeting visits and often without any grasp of the Russian language, were presented with the propaganda ‘truth’ and the Potemkin villages that had been created just for them, and on return gave thoroughly positive reports from this ‘society of the future’. Others were well-prepared and had already gained personal experience of the Bolshevik terror institutions. As early as 1925, it was possible to read foreign correspondent George Popoff’s inside account of the Cheka, the Bolshevik secret police, which he presented as a hybrid of eastern brutality and western systematic effectiveness, as ‘the bearer of the Asian spirit, which, when united with the western doctrine of Marxism to create a peculiar whole, forms the current reality of Soviet Russia’.57

Other eye witness accounts were written by people who had travelled there with positive expectations on the basis of ideological convictions and who had stayed in the country for a long period, but who returned disillusioned. In 1924, Swedish readers could acquaint themselves with revolutionary Emma Goldman’s realisation that ‘the Russian Revolution was steeped in blood and was dead’. Goldman, who was deported from the USA to Russia in 1919 as a political prisoner, was no stranger to the idea that a revolution must allow room for temporary elements of violence, but that did not mean that she accepted Lenin’s policy to ‘make terrorism a principle or elevate it to an institutional function and allow it to take on the greatest significance in the social battle’.58 More than a decade later, Finland-Swedish engineer Hjalmar Andersson spoke bitterly of his three years in the Soviet society that had recently gone through forced collectivisation:

59 Andersson 1935, p 125.

60 Cf Karlsson 2003, pp 218–222.

61 Tolczyk 1999.

62 Cf Kelly 2005.

63 Cassiday 2000.

64 Argenbright 2002, p 252.

65 Blum 1994, pp 39–40.

Inside the barbed wire fence around the provisional concentration camps in Siberia sit formerly free farmers. The self has disappeared – together with livestock, fields and meadows. Soldiers stand outside with their bayonets fixed on: the forced conscripted soldiery of the communist party, the governing minority. Is this really the goal of ‘every idealist’s most audacious hopes’?”59

In the 1920s and the first half of the 1930s it was not difficult to find information on and expressions of the terror present in Soviet society. This information was open and easily accessible, but did not refer to the use of violence as such. Many contemporary commentators did not perceive the available ‘sources’ as relating to the mass violence. The context in which terror activities were placed were often social-hygienic and didactic, which meant that the purpose of camp imprisonment and forced labour was presented as both progressive and necessary: educating people to become good communists and Soviet citizens, and fostering positive characteristics such as cleanliness, high morals and good health. A common name for this activity was chistka, cleaning or purging, an administrative word referring to control of party membership but which gained another meaning, both figuratively and literally, of mass violence.60 This didactic intention was highly prominent in the camp literature written in the 1920s that culminated in 1934 with the collective work Belomorkanal, in which Maxim Gorky and over a hundred other authors told the story of how the White Sea Canal had been built by camp prisoners who, through their humanitarian efforts, were seen to have undergone a successful transformation from enemies of the people to well-integrated members of the Soviet collective.61 The greatest hero of terror-related didactic literature was Pavel Morozov, a young boy from Western Siberia who was killed by relatives in 1932 after having denounced his father as a ‘friend of kulaks’. Despite his youth, little Pavel did manage to show that the most important loyalty of Soviet citizens lies not with their own families and fathers, but with their greater Soviet family, led by their ‘little father’, Stalin.62

Open court proceedings, pokazatelnye protsessy, were not only or even primarily designed to fulfil a legal function, but aimed to use a graphic didactic process to show the way towards the communist future. Agitsudy, agitational trials, were not only acted out in courts but also in theatres and film in the Soviet Union of the 1920s, in order to stress not only that the Soviet society had many enemies, but also that there was potential for these people to be made new, if they went through the ritual stages of confessing their sins, doing penance and begging for reintegration into society.63 It hardly needs to be mentioned that this didactic process was not actually intended to make ‘people of the past’ into functioning Soviet citizens, but to justify the terror campaigns against enemies of the Soviet powers in the eyes of society and the surrounding world, and perhaps also in the eyes of the victims. Besides, laws and regulations were in a process of constant change, keeping pace with changes in the ‘party line’, thus creating an increased need to communicate these changes to the population at large.64

From the mid-1930s, as this didactic discourse was given less and less space, openness also declined. It became difficult to dress up the forced deportation of farmers and mass killings of political opponents as didactic acts. After the Great Terror, the Soviet Union entered the Great Silence, a period during which the violence of the regime was no longer allowed to make an impression in media, culture, or academia. One drastic expression of this new policy of silence was Stalin’s intervention into the population statistics. At the party congress in 1934, when he declared that Soviet population development showed strong positive results, his declaration lacked any factual basis in the demographic results of statisticians.65 Hardly surprisingly, the Soviet population census carried

66 Poljakov, Zjitomirskaja & Kiselev, no. 6, 1990, pp 3–21, no 7, 1990, pp 50–70, no 8, 1990, pp 30–52.

67 Khrushchev 1956.

68 Medvedev 1973, chapter 3.

69 See e.g. Inkeles 1950 and Inkeles & Bauer 1959.

86 See e.g. Khlevniuk 2003, pp 21–33.

material and publication opportunities. These three paradigms can be described analytically as reactions to each other, and as such they follow each other chronologically, although this means that there are no current advocates of the earliest paradigm. In the light of this, it seems appropriate to outline these paradigms in a chronological sense, before moving on to a more thematic perspective in order to illustrate how some central points of conflict and sets of problems have been interpreted and developed.

Totalitarianism

The first paradigm is that of totalitarian theory. This theoretical structure has a broader analytical scope than theories that only apply to the Soviet society and terror system. Later in this text, the ambition to compare communism to Nazism under this heading will be reviewed, but ‘totalitarianism’ has also been compared in a research context to ‘authoritarianism’, to name two kinds of interwar dictatorships. The first is a ‘totalitarian’, forward-looking dictatorship, seeking to radically and permanently recreate the old society, while the other is an ‘authoritarian’, backward-looking dictatorship that seeks to re-establish an almost feudal social order. However, during the Cold War, it was mainly the parallels between the regimes of Stalin and Hitler that were in focus, with the Soviet Union as the primary focus.

The starting point of the totalitarian framework of interpretation that has been drawn up to explain and understand the criminal history being analysed here is that Bolshevik Russia and the communist Soviet Union, from its origins in 1917, was a terror state whose leaders chose from the start to exert total control over the population using open and brutal violence, and succeeded. The major Soviet communist projects were ‘revolutions from above’. There was a watertight seal between government and society. The highest-ranking Soviet leaders and their closest associates are singled out as being responsible for the process of violence, while the citizens are presented as passive victims and faceless cogs in the machinery of the totalitarian society. The explanatory model of totalitarian theory is simply intentionalist, in other words, it is based on the notion that the perpetrators within the Soviet state and the communist party harboured the intention, before the terror broke out, to eliminate every form of opposition A particularly important role is attributed to the NKVD, which managed to appropriate power over the party while implementing the party purges ordered by Stalin at the outset of the Great Terror.86 They succeeded with this ambition to eliminate all resistance partly because of the strength of their own ruthlessness and desire for power, and partly because of the lack of resistance from citizens and society. The terror perspective is unambiguously political in the sense that the communist regime is thought to have been motivated in its criminal activities by a primary desire to conquer, consolidate and strengthen the position of power of the state and the party. The notion of a secondary goal of establishing a strong Soviet economy with the help of forced labour is compatible with this emphasis on the primacy of the political incentive. Adherents to totalitarian theory do not agree with researchers who see Soviet criminal history as a result of good and progressive ideological ambitions which, for different reasons, came to nought. Neither do they agree with a functionalist interpretation, which sees the terror as a more or less unintentional consequence of various kinds of social processes.

According to the interpretation of totalitarian theory, Stalin is placed in immediate succession after Lenin, who is presented as the founder of the party dictatorship and the terror campaigns. Advocates of totalitarian theory sometimes see the Russian-Soviet symbiosis of power and violence that culminated under Stalin’s leadership as originating even further back in history, with the Russian Tsardom or the forefathers of socialism. Leninism is the end product of Marxism, and Stalinism is nothing other than the end product of Leninism. However, this emphasis on continuity does not prevent a clear boundary being drawn between the pre-revolutionary era and the period following the Bolshevik seizure of power, when the spiral of violence escalated drastically, the extent of the terror increased radically, and the leaders’ ambition to reform society totally, in line with revolutionary values and whatever the cost, formed

87 These include Conquest 1960, 1970, 1978, 1985, 1986, 1989 and 1992. Cf also Karlsson 2008

88 Fainsod 1958, pp 228–251.

89 Conquest 1992, pp 484–489.

a clear historical turning point. From this perspective, parallels with the partly simultaneous Nazi regime in Germany seem more relevant than historical continuity. The crimes committed by these two related totalitarian regimes constitute the most catastrophic events of the 20th century, which claimed innumerable lives.

This totalitarian theory, which found its opposite number in the Stalinist writing of history in the Soviet Union, although with inverted values, can be linked partly to a state idealist writing of history in which ‘major’ figures and ideas are judged to create and propel history. It can partly, and indeed primarily, be ascribed to a ‘power realist’ writing of history, focusing on political events and processes that express the struggle between political powers and to a certain extent also between economic interests. It is also well adapted to – or indeed necessitated by – a specific source situation where historical individuals, political drama, statements of goals and intentions, and top-down perspective in general, appear in much sharper focus than the underlying social and cultural processes and structures. From a critical perspective, as opponents have frequently established, it could be claimed that the advocates of totalitarian theory, on the basis of fairly thin and insignificant documentation, assume a far-reaching, a priori agreement between what the Soviet leadership wanted to achieve with their policies, and the impact that these policies actually had on society. Finally, one more central characteristic of an interpretation based on totalitarian theory should be mentioned, namely the notion that the terror was kept secret for a long time, not only in the Soviet Union but also in supporter groups in the west, who it was thought would not wish to allow Soviet criminal history to compromise the Soviet regime and communism.

Research practice

The perspective of Robert Conquest’s interpretation Soviet communist criminal history, as it appears in the abovementioned pioneering work on the Great Terror, is strongly characterised by totalitarian theory, as are his other books on the terror.87 In the same way, this perspective permeates Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago. In Merle Fainsod’s Smolensk under Soviet Rule from 1958, which builds on documents from the abovementioned party archive in Smolensk, the party organisation is presented according to the totalitarian model as a strictly hierarchical structure, where the leaders’ recurring decisions on purges, which are issued from Moscow, are conveyed directly to obedient party representatives at a lower level who duly implement them. On the other hand, the analysis of the collectivisation of agriculture in the agrarian-dominated Smolensk region differs from the prevailing totalitarian interpretation, by referring to the reluctance of the rural population to cooperate, sometimes taking the form of direct resistance to collectivisation and the treatment of the kulaks. What the party had not anticipated, according to Fainsod, was the fact that many kulaks were respected and influential agricultural leaders. What is more, they could take advantage of a strong sense of solidarity between different farming groups, which came to expression in joint, sometimes physical, resistance to the grain seizures. Fainsod shows that sympathy for the situation of the kulaks was also expressed at lower levels in the party and Soviet structure.88

However, totalitarian theory is not a historical framework of interpretation in the sense that it has been abandoned by the academic community. It is still used by researchers and still evokes discussion with opponents, and has in recent years gone through a revival, which will be shown later in this research review. In 1991, an updated edition of The Great Terror was published, in which Robert Conquest essentially sticks to his interpretations from 1968.89 Among the current researchers who concur with this interpretation as an explanation of the Soviet communist terror is Nicolas Werth, author of the section on the Soviet terror in The Black Book of Communism, and leading Russian researcher Oleg Khlevniuk, who, in his book on the history of the Gulag, maintains the unequivocal position that the terror was ‘a centrally organized

90 Werth 1999, pp 40–277, Khlevniuk 1992, and Khlevniuk 2004. Quote is in the latter publication on p 148.

91 Jansen & Petrov 2002, Zhukovsky 2001, Knight 1993, and Khlevniuk 1996.

92 Jensen 2002, p 14.

93 Jensen 2002, p 410.

94 Revisionism can be dated relatively exactly to the middle of the 1980s and the debate sparked by Fitzpatrick 1986, pp 357–373.

95 Elman 2005, pp 823-841. Quote on page 824. Italicisation Ellman’s. Vozhd is the Russian word for Leader.

96 Davies & Wheatcroft 2006, pp 626–627.

punitive action, planned in Moscow, against a potential fifth column perceived as capable of stabbing the country in the back in the case of war’.90 In some cases, when the purpose of the research has been to examine the main protagonists of the terror, such as the heads of the secret police Nikolai Yezhov, Semyon Zhukovsky (one of Yezhov’s deputies) and Lavrentiy Beria, or Stalin’s associate Sergo Ordzhonikidze, the perspective can be said to be more in line with the biographical method.91 In Gulag og glemsel (Gulag and oblivion) from 2002, Bent Jensen presents an interpretation of the Soviet criminal history which follows the framework of totalitarian theory closely from its introductory statement of purpose: ‘This book will concentrate on Lenin’s and the Bolsheviks’ utopian and murderous notions of devastating, breaking down and liquidating entire social classes as the necessary prerequisite to enable the construction of a socialist utopia.’92 By way of conclusion, after having presented an extremely well-informed and detailed analysis of the terror, a severe critique of Danish and western sympathisers, and intermittently related Soviet communism to Nazism, he is less clear on the nature of the total breakdown of civilisation that he describes the Soviet Union under Lenin and Stalin’s regimes as:

‘Communism’ in this form as the realisation of Marxism, became a system that gathered all resources and all potential in the hands of a ruthless government, controlled by a monolithic and ‘scientifically’ ideologised and fanaticised party, that was prepared to use boundless terror in order to be able to control not only politics and the state, but also the entire economic process and thereby the life of society and even the private existence of individuals. This really was something entirely new, and it exceeded all existing notions of political power.93

Revisionism

In the 1980s, criticism of totalitarian theory grew stronger.94 It came from a new generation of radical and revisionist researchers who, without having an interpretation perspective that was as cohesive as the representatives of totalitarian theory, wanted to replace the traditional focus on political history and top-down perspective with a sociohistorical interest in ‘ordinary’ people’s history and perspectives, from the bottom up. Some of these were historical materialists and others just had a general interest in the history of social movements and everyday structures that did not necessarily reflect political power in a simple and straightforward way. All were critical of what they perceived as a traditional conservative and anti-communist writing of history, long distorted by the Western Cold War perspective.

In contrast to the homogenous depiction of the monolithic communist regime’s merciless repression of its citizens and the population’s absolute submission to this regime, as presented in totalitarian theory, the revisionists sought to focus on various kinds of ‘fracture areas’, changes and disparities: shifts and inconsistencies in communist policy, conflicts between government authorities and groups involved in terror campaigns, and issues of how external threats affected the internal development of terror campaigns. On the issue of the Ukrainian famine, instead of emphasising ‘the perception of the situation by the vozhd himself’, and the similarities to the agricultural policy introduced by Lenin at an earlier date,95 researchers with a revisionist interpretation have chosen to talk about ‘the major misconceptions of agriculture that influenced Soviet policy’, emphasising that the Soviet leaders, when they discovered the extent of the agricultural crisis, tried to do something – although not enough – to alleviate the famine.96

97 See e.g. Getty 2002, pp 113–138.

98 Cf Hoffman 1993, p 167.

99 Fitzpatrick 1997, pp 107–110.

100 Kozlov 1997, p 133ff.

101 See Davies 2006, pp 80–82.

Revisionism has brought a perspective of social response to the terror campaigns and the unintentional consequences that could occur, which sometimes forced the perpetrators to change or modify their terror strategies. One such social response consisted of purely physical uprisings, such as when farmers met the collectivisation process with violence. Social responses could also be of a rhetorical or symbolic nature, as when farmers and workers protested by reporting their seniors for abuse of power. Another could be a bureaucratic group or nomenklatura that used terror campaigns to promote their own collective or individual interests, in competition with other bureaucratic groups. Still another social response could be the panic and hysteria in local societies that gave the terror campaigns a kind of escalating dynamic all of their own.97

The terror process did not have the same definitive and straightforward nature when it was shown that the orders and decrees issued from above were met and changed by various expressions of interest from below. The purges of the party, industry and other bodies caused by the Great Terror were of course catastrophic for those affected, and in the short term for the work of the body concerned. However, at the same time, they created many vacancies that could be filled by vidvizhentsy, young and technically trained individuals seeking social and professional advancement, who formed the backbone of the Stalinist state.98 The practice of reporting a person to the authorities, in other words, voluntarily and deliberately and reporting the ‘incorrect’ deeds, thinking or background of a person or collective in writing, was therefore not only dictated by the citizens’ moral duty to the state, but also by much more selfish and manipulative motives.99 These kind of bottom-up information activities in the Soviet terror society have been called ‘informing with an interest’.100

The dominant revisionist perspective on the terror is a functionalist one, which means that instead of being portrayed as a result of a deliberate and malicious intent, terror is analysed as a response to different stimuli, interests and processes – which could have been lawful and even ‘progressive’ – in the context of a particular period. One particularly prominent factor in this interpretation is the growing international threat from capitalist and later fascist states, and the resulting perceived threats, which to some extent shifts the responsibility for these crimes from the Soviet communist regime to an outside world that was hostile to the regime. Another shift that comes into focus is the shift from Soviet ideology as a motivating factor, which in totalitarian theory is ascribed a crucial role as an underlying continuum, to much shorter-term interests on the parts of different groups who were beneficiaries of the terror process. A third shift relates to the increasing interest in the consequences of the terror campaigns, such as the Yezhovschina’s discarding of technologically and economically important personnel, which had a particularly negative effect on technology and industry in which the state was not actively interested. The slight autonomy given to politically and economically significant groups had a negative effect on modernisation in general and in particular on the industrial development that the political system sought to promote in other ways.101

This major change in perspective has also been undoubtedly significant in terms of the image of the Soviet leaders. In leading revisionist John Arch Getty’s character sketch, Stalin is transformed from the omnipotent, omniscient evil genius who steered the Soviet Union towards the Great Terror with an iron grip, to a representative of what Hannah Arendt in the 1960s called ‘banal evil’:

Stalin was a cruel but ordinary mortal unable to see the future and with a limited ability to create and control it. He was not a master planner, and studies of all of his other policies before and after the 1930s have shown that he stumbled into everything from collectivization to foreign policy. Stalin’s colossal

102 Getty 1993, p 62.

103 Thurston 1996, p 15.

104 Thurston 1996, pp 57, 132.

105 Hough & Fainsod 1979, p 177. The term ‘beneficiaries of the purges’ is used in a similar argumentation by Sheila Fitzpatrick, a close colleague to Hough, in Fitzpatrick 1992 p 177ff.

felonies, like most violent crimes everywhere, were of the unplanned erratic kind.102

The most radical revisionists have not hesitated to absolve Stalin and his immediate associates from the terror campaigns of the 1930s. For them, the first half of the 1930s was a period of positive social development, when ‘progress was being made toward a fairer, more consistent, and less political application of law’. 103 What followed is described as a social mobilisation, where actual political opposition to Stalin grew, but where there was also a significant rallying of support for the leader and the regime. This was against a background of the mass fear or mass hysteria that took possession of the Soviet society as a result of a real increase in the threat of war. In the mobilisation process that the Great Terror is presented as from a revisionist perspective, Stalin and his closest associates are not key players but objects who react passively to, are propelled by, and occasionally panic in the face of, developments that they neither planned nor anticipated. This is a pattern that the revisionist school of thought also seeks to apply to the earlier process of forced collectivisation. When they finally manage to stop the Great Terror, it is necessary to instigate a policy of silence, since it would be much too damaging for their own political legitimacy to confess to the mistakes made when the leadership lost control of the terror campaigns and allowed them to take on a life of their own104

In an extension of the same line of argument, but not always expressed as such, there is often a perception that the Soviet Union, even under Stalin’s regime, showed much greater similarities with other countries than is suggested by totalitarian theory. This perception always went hand in hand with the idea, popular at the time, that Western capitalist society and Eastern communist society were moving towards convergence. Both systems were characterised by processes of industrialisation and modernisation, which, despite differences in different countries, showed broadly similar features. Links in the same chain include a questioning of the extent to which Stalin and his associates’ were responsible for the terror campaigns, and of the high numbers of victims of the Soviet communist terror alleged by Conquest and others.

Research practice

The revisionist line of argument reached its most exaggerated expression in the late 1970s, when Jerry Hough published a radical revision of Merle Fainsod’s classic work of totalitarian theory, How Russia is Ruled (1953) renaming it How the Soviet Union is Governed. In the latter work, Soviet communist terror is universalised and portrayed as a change of generation which, although drastic in nature as Stalin was a brutal leader, ‘only’ claimed tens of thousands of lives, or a hundred thousand at the most, while the ‘beneficiaries of the purges’ were much more numerous. In this context, important factors underlying the Great Terror are described as ‘the desire to utilize the newly trained products of the engineering institutes in administrative posts and a fear that a peaceful purge would leave far too large a pool of discontents with organizational experience’.105

In Arch Getty’s Origins of the Great Purges from 1985, generally regarded as the fundamental and ‘exemplary’ work of the revisionist paradigm, the author directs sharp criticism at the previous ‘journalistic’ and ‘anecdotal’ manner of writing the history of the Soviet Union in the 1930s. In particular he scrutinises the traditional perception of a monolithic communist party, characterised by a hierarchical decision-making procedure. Instead Getty describes an unstructured, contradictory and occasionally chaotic political process, full of conflict between the centre and the periphery and opposition to centrally-made political decisions. As a result, in Getty’s eyes, the Great Terror was not the coherent and homogenous process evoked by previous research. For him, the Soviet society of the 1930s was indeed dictatorial but not totalitarian, since the latter would demand a technological and

106 Getty 1987, p 198.

107 Getty 1983, pp 60–79.

108 Viola 1996. Interestingly enough, Viola’s perspective is radically different from that of her revisionist colleague Sheila Fitzpatrick who, in Fitzpatrick 1994, p 48, has an entirely different view of how the Soviet peasants met the threat of collectivisation: “The peasants, on their part, responded with wailing and lamentations and all manner of passive and furtive resistance, but on the whole they bore it fatalistically, signed up for the kolkhoz when they saw no other choice, and did not erupt into outright rebellion.”

109 Fitzpatrick 1999.

110 Fitzpatrick 1993, pp 299–320. For a different perspective, see Ellman 2001, pp 1221–1233, and Ellman 2003, p 1308ff.

111 Viola 2002, p 1. See also Fitzpatrick 2000b, p 3, Getty 1999, pp 15–24, and Siegelbaum & Sokolov 2000.

administrative effectiveness that simply did not exist.106 He had already shown this in a revised analysis of the Smolensk archive. In contrast to Fainsod, Getty did not find any trace of the mass violence forced on the local party structure in Smolensk in a totalitarian and top-down manner. Instead, he made a sharp distinction between a process of relatively ineffective and non-political purges within the party between 1933 and 1936, and a later process, from mid-1937, in which Smolensk was hit by the full force of the Yezhovschina.107

In the 1990s another leading revisionist, Lynne Viola, carried out several analyses of the dramatic reorganisation of Soviet agriculture around 1930. She took advantage of increased access to relevant source material to draw up similar perspectives on peasant resistance and what she describes as universal agrarian conflict strategies or the culture of resistance in the ongoing war between the Soviet state and the peasants. This perspective could of course be attributed to Fainsod’s abovementioned analysis of the collectivisation of agriculture in the Smolensk region, but Viola shows that the peasants’ resistance was so extensive, so deliberate and so articulate that it is appropriate to speak of a specific peasant policy, built on strong cultural notions of the peasant society as characterised by cohesion and solidarity, and of Stalin’s policy as a deadly threat to this, which had to be met with vocal protests and active resistance.108

The revisionist paradigm, with its emphasis on broader social and cultural processes, brought a widening of the boundaries of Soviet criminal history, and the beginnings of the establishment of a multidisciplinary perspective. From a more critical perspective, it can be stated that precision in the research area decreased, when the terror campaigns were brought together with what Sheila Fitzpatrick called ‘everyday Stalinism’. This included analyses of everything from informant activities, denial of social origin and other ‘mechanisms of terror’, which undoubtedly formed part of terror history, to things like consumption patterns and family problems, which were not so clearly related to the terror campaigns.109 The show trials in rural parts of the Soviet territory in 1937 were changed from manifestations of political power to carnivals in which peasants could witness the humiliation of their previous superiors and see existing power structures turned upside down.110 This revisionist expansion of the synchronous social frameworks of terror is in stark contrast to the diachronic time framework, which instead was tightened up in comparison to totalitarian theory. Revisionist accounts of the terror history rarely go back to the period prior to the Revolution, and rarely bring Lenin into this history. On the other hand, Viola, Fitzpatrick and their successors have often pointed out that new research on Stalin’s regime sees ‘Stalinism’ as a specific culture or ‘way of life’, a self-contained discursive system, or, in the words of Viola, an entire world within the Stalinist dictatorship, a semiautonomous world of many layers, cultures, and languages of existence, experience, and survival that coexisted with, evolved within, interacted with, and at times bypassed the larger and seemingly omnipresent reality of Stalinism.111

As a result the terror of the 1930s, including its precursors during the agrarian revolution of the late 1920s, is more or less disengaged from the wider historical context, which is one of the key points of totalitarian theory. This is not so much a matter of actively writing Lenin out of the context of Soviet

112 Cf Brovkin 1997, p 3.

113 One of the revisionist researchers who most clearly questioned the applicability of the term communism to Soviet conditions, by demonstrating that the term worked as a cover for a nationalist, agrarian despotic, statist or state capitalist ideology, or simply a ‘brutally repressive police state’, is Moshe Lewin. See Lewin 1995, chapter 8. Quote from Lewin 1985, p 311.

114 Solzhenitsyn 1975, p 12.

criminal history, but more about simply choosing not to deal with the issue of his possible participation. A consequence of this has been that the objects of the Red Terror, non-communist or anti-communist collectives or institutions, have not received much attention in this research either.112 In general, as will become clear later in this research review, there is a marked difference in scope between research on the Leninist period and studies on the Stalinist era, a difference which remains to this day.

In this context, there is good reason to problematise the term ‘revisionism’, which can essentially be used to refer to every attempt to revise a previously established framework of interpretation, not through modification but through replacement with a paradigmatically new framework. Also in the context of interpretations of Hitler, the Nazi regime and Holocaust there is a revisionism that is often linked with Holocaust denial, and a revisionist school of thought that has appeared as a protest against an older interpretation paradigm. However, these two revisionisms are diametrically opposed. German revisionism, a reaction to earlier attempts to see Hitler’s regime as a divergence from or parenthesis within German history, builds on the idea of a German Sonderweg, a special path that can be traced back to the Wilhelmian, Imperial Germany of the 19th century, and which led to the birth of the Nazi regime. Revisionism in the case of Stalin, communism and the crimes of the Soviet regime has developed as a reaction to attempts to show the deep roots of Stalin’s regime in Soviet, and to an extent even Romanov, Imperial history. In this case, the revised perception has been, as far as possible, to lift out the mass violence of ‘Stalinism’ from Soviet history, and to show that this violence was a deviation rather than a norm, or something completely different from ‘true’ communism.113

It is difficult to say how much the revisionist project has been based on a hidden ideological desire to ‘vindicate’ Lenin, his Leninist communism and the positive foundations of the Soviet project that are thought to originate from Lenin, or whether the primary motivation has been to establish a scientific alternative to the fundamental criticism of the Soviet regime that characterises the totalitarian theory paradigm, or whether both are true. The revisionists’ answer to this question is that this is clearly a revolutionary scientific paradigm shift. For Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, one of those personally affected by ‘Stalinism’, who has used the rest of his life to describe, analyse and criticise it from a perspective of totalitarian theory, it became clear as early as the mid 1970s that the term ‘Stalinism’ was being used in left-wing revisionist circles in order to ‘shift onto it the whole bloody burden of the past to make their present position easier’.114

Postrevisionism

During the 1990s, conflict between totalitarian theorists and revisionists began to be toned down and defused. This was a result of three things – partly the emergence of new source material that rendered some of the classic points of contention obsolete, partly new perspectives in scientific theory that focused researchers’ attention on issues that neither totalitarian theory nor revisionism had seen as primary problems, and partly that a new generation of researchers who were not entrenched in the intellectual and scientific perspectives of the Cold War were able to break down the locked positions that had made a large amount of the research carried out on Soviet communist terror both predictable and unproductive. This new generation also included researchers from Russia and other post-Soviet states, many of whom had no connection whatsoever to the two major interpretation paradigms. With a few notable exceptions, however, the participation of Russian and post-Soviet historians in research development is primarily in the roles of document presenters and descriptive, purely empirically oriented researchers,

115 Despite an essentially very positive assessment of new developments in Russian research, this is a perception that is shared by Lennart Samuelson in the review of Russian research he presented in ‘Old and new writings of the history of the rural Soviet Union – the significance of the ‘archive revolution’ since the 1990s’ and (with Andrei Sokolov) ‘The archive revolution and writing the history of rural Russia’, both in Samuelson (ed.) 2007, pp 27–41 and 241–255 respectively.

116 Getty 2004, p 234.

117 Cf Jansen & Petrov 2002, pp 92–93.

who widen the social and geographic framework of the terror.115

This new paradigm can be called a postrevisionist paradigm. However, this term should not be understood as a further development solely of the revisionist paradigm. Rather, it describes an evolutionary development of both previous paradigms, or a synthesis that develops and integrates the elements of earlier ideas that are still seen as fruitful and worthwhile interpretation perspectives. All the same, several features of the revisionist paradigm have survived postrevisionism, and several of the most prominent representatives of the revisionist paradigm have, in recent years, presented tendencies that can best be described as postrevisionist. The notion that the crimes of the Soviet communist regime were one-way, hierarchical processes in which a despotic leadership exercised violence on a defenceless and passive population has now been rejected in favour of a revisionist framework of interpretation that credits broader swathes of society with a will of their own and the power to resist, and ascribes a certain degree of autonomy to bureaucratic and professional groups in relation to the Soviet centre of power. Few would now oppose Getty when he summarises his position:

Powerful as he was, Stalin had to function within a matrix of competing interests and powers. Local leaders had to obey him, of course, but they were also able to press their cases with him; and to some extent, he had to listen. He was not stupid; he needed them to run the country, and they were closer to the ground than he was.116

At the same time, the new source material has made it quite clear that it is impossible to leave politics and the highest political leaders out of the history of terror, and that Josef Stalin as an individual, along with his closest associates, had a great deal of influence over the decision to initiate the purges and over their implementation, carried out by the Ministry of Internal Affairs and the secret police – as claimed by adherents to totalitarian theory. This influence reached all the way down to regional and local levels, but that does not mean that regional departments of the NKVD were not able to take initiatives of their own during the years of the Great Terror, within certain parameters. This could take expression in a kind of ‘socialist competition’ to see which departments could fulfil and exceed centrally determined quotas most effectively.117 One consequence of these new insights is that political historians increasingly widen their framework of interpretation to include the social mechanisms that made it possible for the terror process to reach out into Soviet society, while social historians are becoming more inclined to include the political decisions made in the top echelons of party and government in their analysis.

In the same way, there is growing agreement in the academic community that the Stalinist terror period was determined by the specific circumstances of the Second World War and the interwar period, as claimed by revisionists, but that the Leninist period also contributed many of the institutional and politico-cultural conditions of the Stalinist terror period, as has long been emphasised by totalitarian theorists. At the same time, there is significant acceptance of the idea that that the structural conditions for Lenin’s Red Terror and Stalin’s Great Terror were fundamentally different: while the Red Terror was carried out in a society ravaged by revolution and war, where power relations were unclear and the politics of the Bolsheviks met strong resistance, Stalin’s society at the time of the Great Terror was characterised by much more stability in terms of societal development and power relations, although Stalin sought to depict it otherwise.

118 Haynes & Husan 2003, p 52. See also Mayer 2002, who, not quite so unequivocally, points out: “The Furies of revolution are fuelled above all by the resistance of the forces and ideas opposed to it. This confrontation turns singularly fierce once it becomes clear that revolution entails and promises – or threatens – a thoroughly new beginning or foundation of polity and society.” (p 23).

119 Haynes & Husan 2003, p 48.

120 Brovkin 2004, p 3.

121 Rummel 1996, p 1.

122 These are also mentioned in an often cited article on the extent of the Gulag system during the prewar period, Getty, Rittersporn & Zemskov, pp 1017–1049.

In terms of who bears the responsibility for the Red Terror of the first few years following the Revolution, however, there is not the same consensus. The question is whether there are the right conditions for a consensus to be reached on the issue of responsibility, given that both ‘red’ and ‘white’ warfare against various groups of the population between 1918 and 1921 claimed many lives. An underlying issue is the historical question of the extent to which the October Revolution was a seizure of power from above that implied dictatorship and repression from the start, since the Bolsheviks had few supporters, or whether it was more of a broad social transformation process which stimulated the Bolsheviks and which they were able to lead. On top of this, there is the basic ideological question of the extent to which it is justifiable to use mass violence to topple an autocracy like that of the Russian Tsar. While a number of researchers who have investigated the early post-revolutionary period have underlined the disproportionate and institutional violence used by the Red regime against groups that did not belong unequivocally to the white resistance armies, such as peasants, Cossacks and priests, representatives of revisionist ideas have proposed a radically different thesis, built on reverse causality: ‘the civil war was an attempt by the old order to restore its reign, an attempt that was supported by Western intervention’.118 See how it happened in Finland, where the ‘white’ representatives of the old order were successful in their uprising, and much blood was shed in 1918 when the revolutionaries were crushed by counter-revolutionary forces!119 This revisionist interpretation, with ‘white’ and foreign troops as perpetrators of violence, and the ‘reds’ and the ordinary people legitimately defending the revolution, is identical to the traditional Soviet interpretation. If there is a postrevisionist interpretation that reconciles the two previous interpretations, it is represented by historians like Vladimir Brovkin, who emphasises the open and chaotic situation that reigned in Russia after the Bolshevik seizure of power, and who puts the Russian civil war in plural in the title of his book:

It is time to move beyond the assumption that because the Bolsheviks won they had social support. We must abandon the assumption that during the civil war there was the Party, the State, and Society in Russia. In fact, there were many parties and movements; there was no state, only pieces of the old state warring with one another; and there certainly was no one society during the civil war, but at best a society torn to pieces.120

Another issue that continues to create discord between representatives of the different paradigms, although there is less polarisation here due to the emergence of more documented evidence, is that of the death toll. As has been seen, there have been major differences between the results presented by radical spokespeople for the different paradigms. While Jerry Hough suggested Stalin’s terror claimed tens of thousands of victims, R.J. Rummel puts the death toll of Soviet communist terror between 1917 and 1987 at 61,911,000.121 In both cases, these figures are based on an ideological preunderstanding and speculative and sweeping calculations. On the other hand, the considerably lower figures in terms of numbers of Gulag prisoners presented by Russian researchers during the glasnost period have been relatively widely accepted.122 Some of these figures have been mentioned in the historical section of this report, and will not be repeated here.

In terms of the total number of victims of the crimes of the Soviet communist regime, however, the figures still vary widely. There are two main sources: the documentation of the Soviet authorities and the secret police, and the census statistics.

123 Some of these problems were investigated constructively in Ellman 2002, pp 1151–1172.

124 Davies, Harrison & Wheatcroft 1994, p 77.

125 Conquest 1991, p 951.

126 Yakovlev 2002, p 234.

127 Weitz 2003, pp 64, 83.

128 Weitz 2003, p 97. See also Weitz 2002, p 3.

129 Hirsch 2002, pp 30–43.

130 Weiner 2002, pp 52–53.

131 Cf Hanson 1997, Brandenberger 2002.

Neither of these sources offers exact information for the entire terror period and all its institutions and processes, and it is notoriously difficult to draw a line between ordinary deaths and ‘excess deaths’.123 On the basis of these sources, a number of qualified demographers and economic historians have, using a revisionist framework of interpretation, indicated that there were circa 10 million ‘excess deaths’ in the period between 1927 and 1938.124 Robert Conquest’s figure for the same period is 16-18 million deaths.125 On the basis of his work in the Russian rehabilitation commission under President Yeltsin, Alexander Yakovlev has estimated that 20 to 25 million people died for political reasons and in prisons and camps during the regimes of Lenin and Stalin. This total does not include all those who died during the famine, over 5.5 million who died in the civil war, and a further 5 million who died in the 1930s.126

Contradictions and paradoxes

There are aspects of the postrevisionist paradigm that point clearly towards totalitarian theory. One such aspect is the newly awakened interest in the communist ideology and its relation to crimes against humanity. This revived aspect will be illustrated in detail in the following section on comparisons between communism and Nazism. Only one such issue will be dealt with here, since its only link to Nazism is in terms of its consequences. It relates more to the structure of the Soviet ideology and the criminal history of the Soviet communist regime.

In his book A Century of Genocide, Eric Weitz establishes that Soviet citizens were categorised according to two opposite and fundamentally incompatible ideological principles: on the one hand, on the basis of the idea that all individuals can change and become good Soviet citizens, regardless of class and ethnic background, and on the other hand, on the basis of an understanding that this background would forever determine an individual’s or group’s relationship with the Soviet project. In the period from 1937 to 1953, the latter principle took the upper hand when the Soviet regime ‘defined certain nations as suspect and dangerous, and those characteristics were seen to inhere in each and every member of the group’.127 According to Weitz, this ideological shift makes it easier to comprehend the treatment of the ‘punished peoples’ during the Second World War and the treatment of Jews during Stalin’s last half decade in power. Weitz concludes, therefore, that despite the Soviet ideology’s explicit rejection of the notion of race, there were nonetheless ‘traces of racial policy’.128

In a subsequent debate, he was criticised by several fellow researchers. One of them claimed that the discrimination and exclusion inherent in Soviet policy during the late Stalin era was not based on racial biology, but on sociohistorical arguments. At the same time, she stressed that the Soviet example shows that there may not necessarily be any differences between these two lines of argument in terms of respect for human life.129 Another referred, somewhat superficially but from a clearly postrevisionist point of view, to the tension between social and biological categorisation, which was never resolved in the Soviet Union, and to the fact that the terror was multifaceted, ambivalent and arbitrary.130

Furthermore, there are several aspects of postrevisionism that can be seen as developments of the revisionist paradigm. One such aspect is the emphasis on Soviet criminal history as a part of what was fundamentally a modern project, but a project with disruptive ‘premodern’ or ‘Russian’ elements. Marxist, modernist theory could not be brought into harmony with Soviet practice.131 As a result, the Stalinist period of Soviet history is often described in analytically or morally contradictory or paradoxical terms, such as those we have just discussed on the possible racism of Stalin’s Soviet

132 Cf Shearer 1996, and several chapters in Gregory & Lazarev 2003. Cf also Baron 2004, pp 439–462.

133 Weiner 1999, pp 1114–1155, Weiner 2001, Martin 2001.

134 Goldman 2007, p 130.

135 See ‘Materialy fevralsko-martovskogo plenuma TsK VKP(b) 1937 goda’, no 2–12, 1992, no 2 and 5–10, 1993, no 2, 6, 8, 10 and 12, 1994, and no 1–8 and 10, 1995.

136 Shearer 2001, pp 507–509, Hedeler 2003, pp 34–55.

Union: the violently accelerated industrialisation process contrasts with concentration camps, forced labour and destruction of the agrarian economy, social advancement for ‘new’ groups contrasts with liquidation of the ‘old’, increased literacy contrasts with reduced freedom, and a cultural revolution that went hand in hand with the breakdown of cultural values. On the issue of the Soviet economy, which also included the Gulag system, tension is depicted between, on the one hand, the aspiration towards economic rationality and effectiveness, and on the other hand, various kinds of political and social goals, which were expressed in class wars and terror campaigns against ‘opposing’ groups. The system included both ‘carrots’ and ‘whips’, but the latter came to be used as the dominant instrument during the 1930s.132 Already mentioned, and by now well analysed in a research context, is the contradictory transition from ‘class enemies’ to ‘enemies of the people’, and the continuation of this idea in specific ‘enemy nations’.133

In the light of all this, the idea that terror and democracy under Stalin’s regime could be brought together in a book title is not as remarkable as it may first seem. During the first half of the 1930s, more and more leaders within the party and the trade union movement spoke up for increased democracy in the organisations. By democratisation, they meant secret ballots between several party candidates, and more opportunities for workers on the shop floor to criticise the management of workplaces and industry, as well as the upper echelons of the trade union movement. In 1936 and early 1937, after the NKVD and the party leadership had set up a number of trials against supposedly negligent and autocratic groups of leaders in industry, a veritable ‘democratic orgy’ broke out, in which dissatisfied workers openly criticised and accused the intermediate levels of industry and the trade union movement. For Stalin, this process fulfilled the double purpose of justifying the elimination of ‘opposition’ groups, and making the mobilised working class more involved in the industrialisation process:

Democracy was not peripheral, not a smoke screen, not a collection of meaningless slogans designed to mask the ‘real’ meaning of events. It was the very means by which repression spread to every union, factory committee, and primary party organization. If the hunt for oppositionists ignited a fire within the Party and the unions, the campaign for “democracy” served as the gasoline.134

A consequence of this research initiative is a renewed and diversified postrevisionist interest in both the perpetrator groups and victim categories of the terror. In both cases, this interest is directly related to the fact that new documentation has been made available for research. This reawakened interest in the perpetrator perspective is largely associated with the fact that the minutes of the plenary meetings of the Central Committee from December 1936, February-March 1937 and June 1937 have become available and published. The contents of the minutes of the first Committee meeting in 1937, published over the course of several years in the historical journal Voprosy istorii, have been discussed in particular, since this material is judged to contain important clues as to the immediate antecedents of the Great Terror, especially the central role of NKVD head Nikolai Yezhov135 At this meeting, Yezhov, who was chairing the meeting with Stalin, launched an attack on his predecessor Genrich Yagoda, who was arrested shortly thereafter and put on trial in the last of the 1938 Moscow Trials and subsequently executed. The main accusation was that the NKVD had neglected its political activities in favour of ordinary police activities focusing on fighting crime and social unrest.136 On the basis of this plenary meeting, Oleg Khlevniuk believes it is possible identify a change in the power balance between the party and the secret police, in the sense that the

137 Khlevniuk 2003, pp 21–33.

138 Lih, Naumov & Khlevniuk 1995.

139 Chase 2001.

140 See e.g. Viola 2002.

141 Fitzpatrick 2005, p 8.

142 Fitzpatrick 2005, pp 14–18.

NKVD, in the context of an intensified paranoid atmosphere, managed to appropriate more and more power over the appointments and purges of the nomenklatura in the party and the state machinery over the course of a couple of years.137 Newly released letters have also contributed to illuminating this political process. In a collection of Stalin’s letters to one of his closest associates, Vyacheslav Molotov, his conspiratorial tendencies come to light: activities seeking to undermine Soviet society, led by subversive individuals and groups, were ubiquitous. In his letters, Stalin specified the trials in which he wanted the defendants to be tortured to make them confess the truth about these activities and the guilty parties to be shot.138

In reading the swiftly growing postrevisionist research literature that refers to the key figures of the terror campaigns, it can be difficult to know whether the individuals or groups in question belong to the perpetrator category or the victim category. One example illustrates this analytical problem. The Great Terror of the Stalin period also affected the Comintern, the Communist International, an organisation founded in 1919 to lead the workers of the world to communism, headquartered in Moscow. Its main opponents were the social democrats or ‘social fascists’ and ‘lackeys of imperialism’, and the organisation stood firm behind of Stalin’s settlements with opponents on his left and right within the Soviet communist party. Stalin himself was on the executive committee of the Comintern. In the initial phases of the Great Terror, the organisation participated willingly in, and helped to justify, the search for ‘enemies’ or ‘suspects’, not least among the groups of foreigners and emigrants to which many of the members of the leadership and bureaucracy of the Comintern belonged. During the Great Terror, the leadership of the organisation was wiped out, as were many members of its vast bureaucracy, thus completing the terror process in which the Comintern played three roles: as perpetrator, instrument and victim.139

Victim studies and microhistories

The postrevisionist research of the last decade or more has also significantly increased our knowledge of the crimes committed against groups that can be called terror victims in a more unequivocal sense. This no longer directly concerns the more or less articulated grass-roots resistance to the terror regime, although some researchers with roots in the revisionist paradigm have continued during the 2000s to emphasise the popular resistance and its strategies.140 The ‘victim studies’ of postrevisionism take the reader to the micro level of history, where the arbitrary, contradictory and absurd nature of the terror is at its most visible. This research can be said to correspond to what Sheila Fitzpatrick has described as ‘Soviet subjectivity’, a school of thought that, according to Fitzpatrick herself, has turned from the large, totalising theories that focus on class, ideology and discourse, towards smaller-scale issues concerning people’s identities and self-perception in daily life and social practice.141 In the context of research practice, however, this issue is more about prioritisation or emphasis, where Fitzpatrick’s revisionist background still comes to light. For example, she establishes that people in the Soviet Union had ‘file identities’, linked to the administrative files and internal passports that the authorities used for supervision and control of the population, but that Soviet citizens could still manipulate these and create their own self-image by falsifying and purchasing new identity documents, changing their social group status through marriage or education, or protesting in court against being allocated an undesirable identity.142

This kind of identity-oriented research has, for example, drawn attention to the significance of family ties in the development of the terror process. Regardless of whether used against ‘class enemies’ or ‘enemies of the people’ as defined in ethnic or political counterrevolutionary terms, family ties

143 Alexopoulos 2008, pp 91–117.

144 Cf Viola 2000, pp 34–72.

145 Gorlizki & Khlevniuk 2004, pp 75–79.

146 Cf McLoughlin 2003, pp 118–152.

147 Schafranek & Musienko 2003, pp 208–224.

148 Sjosjkov 1995, p 49.

were judged to be highly relevant. One implication of this was that gender patterns became apparent: ‘enemies’ were the heads of families and were virtually always men, while women and children were stigmatised on the basis of their family ties. Using Pavel Morozov as an example, women and children were encouraged to inform against the heads of their families and distance themselves from their families.143 Children in particularly were affected by this unusual type of collective punishment, since it was necessary to ‘tackle evil at the root’.144 Not even the highest echelons of the Soviet leaders escaped this terror system: even foreign minister Vyacheslav Molotov’s wife, of Jewish origin, was arrested in December 1948, accused of treason. Molotov himself confessed his ‘political mistake’ of not supporting her arrest from the outset, and he maintained that her arrest ‘was in the interests of the party and the state’.145 This focus on family ties went hand in hand with a cultural and social revaluation of family relationships, moving from the ‘small’ nuclear family to the ‘big’ Soviet family.

This kind of study has also drawn attention to the ‘mass operations’ carried out during the Great Terror against socially and ethnically defined groups that were judged to disturb the social order of the Soviet society, or to constitute potential threats to the territorial integrity of the Soviet state.146 The numerous Germans in the Soviet Union – either those whose families had been in the country for centuries, or convinced communists seeking to escape the Nazi regime of their home country – were hit particularly hard, partly after the NKVD uncovered a ‘Hitler Jugend’ conspiracy in the capital in 1938.147 As in the case of family relationships, ethnic groups were also judged to have some kind of primordial and prioritised relationship to a root and an origin that was not Stalin and communist Soviet Union.

A number of studies of this nature have also been carried out on individual Soviet industries and their shop floors. The work of the Petersburg company Ostechbjuro focused on supplying weapons for the Red Army and the Soviet Navy, as part of a sector that was important for the Soviet government and that was framed in terms of science, experimentation and innovation. When the party discovered in 1936 that the employees of the Ostechbjuro included members of a ‘terrorist hub’ with links abroad and to Stalin’s major opponents, Trotsky and Zinoviev, many of the workers at the factory were accused of being ‘enemies of the people’. In his dealings with them, the local party secretary did not mince his words:

Guided only by a thirst for personal and careerist power ambitions, this pitiable and despised faction of fascist monstrosities and brutes have, in their animalistic hatred towards the land of socialism, feverishly prepared their attack on the leaders of the party and the state. Like beasts of prey, they waited for the moment in which they could destroy what workers all over the world treasure most of all – the life of our own Stalin, our beloved leader and the friend of all workers. These dirty fiends aimed for the very heart of the party. Through their political bankruptcy, which lacks any support among the masses, they have made terror their goal. Crooked dealings and deception have been oft-used methods in their fight against the party and the people. They have trained the sights of their poisonous weapons – hired from the arsenal of the fascist Gestapo – on the powerful Stalin and his closest disciples and colleagues, the party’s beloved comrades Voroshilov, Zhdanov, Kaganovich, Ordzhonikidze, Kosior and Postyshev.148

The accused disappeared from history in the same way they disappeared from the company archives. This information was released for the first time in 1990. In a book on Ostechbjuro, published by Memorial in St Petersburg, the victims are listed with photos and personal information.

Some other works fall into the category of ‘victim histories’, taking as their starting point the

149 Brooke 2002, pp 397–413.

150 Alexopoulos 2003.

151 Werth 2007.

152 Viola 2007, p 87.

‘forgotten’ categories and processes that have not yet received much attention in research on the Soviet communist criminal history. These books often have a stronger biographical, narrative side than revisionist writings of history, which is partly to do with access to concrete source material offering everyday perspectives on terror, and partly also a response to more major changes in perspective in terms of ways of writing history. Some of these works identify groups that have previously gone unnoticed in favour of the political groups that were in focus for totalitarian theory or the peasant and worker groups that formed the main interest of revisionists. One such group is professional musicians,149 another is lishentsy, the ‘bourgeois’ elements who were deprived of their civil and social rights, and to a greater extent their freedom, by the communist regime as part of a deliberate and brutal class policy.150

Another clear example of this postrevisionist genre is Nicolas Werth’s depiction of ‘Cannibal Island’, situated in the Ob River among the camps of western Siberia. In 1933, when the Soviet authorities purged Moscow and Leningrad of almost one hundred thousand ‘declassed’ and ‘socially harmful’ elements, many of them ended up in Siberian camps. Ten thousand of them, however, were dumped on the uninhabited and inaccessible island of Nazino, without food or shelter. The Siberian authorities were unwilling to accept this contingent, since they demanded material resources that were not available and it was feared they would cause social unrest. In a situation of increasing anarchy and chaos, the group of deportees were left to starve to death or eat each other. Werth emphasises that his coherent story – one of total disorganisation, lack of coordination and lack of preparation for receiving large groups of destitute people – could be told many times over to describe the kulak deportations of the early 1930s.151

One such ‘reproduction’ that combines a wider analytical perspective with glimpses of the fates of individuals, is Lynne Viola’s book on spetspereselentsy, the hundreds of thousands of kulak families who were ‘eliminated as a class’ at the peak of the deportations and who were used in the Soviet colonisation process, being placed in ‘special settlements’ around the Arctic Ocean, the Urals, Siberia or Kazakhstan The conditions of their transportation, and arrival in the often completely uninhabitable areas that were allocated to former kulak families, were not very different to the conditions on Nazino. In the Arctic Ocean area alone, the OGPU reported a death toll of 21,213 in 1930. The highest mortality rates were among children.152

This postrevisionist movement away from the ‘major’ political figures and events of the history or the terror, which were prioritised by advocates of totalitarian theory to the exclusion of all else, and from the overall socioeconomic processes and structures on which many revisionists mainly focused, towards microhistory and small-scale stories, has been expressed in two other ways. One of these is a focus on the development of terror at geographically local and regional levels. Issues relating to the causes, expressions and consequences of the terror in individual Soviet towns and communities have been illustrated both in their local contexts, and in relation to the centre of communist power, Moscow. If Merle Fainsod’s study of Smolensk was a prominent work of totalitarian theory, then the exemplary work of the postrevisionist paradigm is Steven Kotkin’s biography of the city of Magnitogorsk in the southern Urals. The city was built in record time – in three and a half years, the population grew from 25 to 250,000 – around a gigantic steelworks that was completed in the early 1930s. Like several revisionists, Kotkin sought to describe Stalinism as a civilisation, but he is careful to emphasise that he does not share his predecessors’ view of the destructive closedness of Stalinism in relation to, and in contrast with, more progressive and open development under Lenin, Leninism and the first decade of the Soviet regime. Neither does he believe what he describes as the common assumption of both totalitarian theory and

153 Kotkin 1997. Other works that belong to the same genre but that lack the theoretical and analytical sophistication of Kotkin include Boterbloem 1999 and Samuelson 2007. A large number of descriptions of how the terror affected people at local and regional levels are available in Russian. The criminal history of the Great Terror in Karelia is analysed thoroughly in, for example, Tjuchin 1999. See also Baron 2001 pp 615–648, and Baron 2002, pp 139–180.

154 Kotkin 1997, p 348.

155 See e.g. Garros, Korenevskaya & Lahusen (eds) 1995, Sokolov 1998, Hellbeck 2000, pp 77–116, Siegelbaum & Sokolov 2000, Hellbeck 2006.

156 Cf Hellbeck 2001, pp 340–359.

157 Figes 2007, pp XXXI–XXXII.

158 Brown 2003, pp 301–303. See also Kaznelson 2007, pp 1163–1177.

revisionism, that the Stalinist state was despotic. In contrast to this perspective, Kotkin turns to Michel Foucault’s notion that ‘individuals are made, and also make themselves, into subjects under the aegis of the state’.153 Therefore, he sets out to portray Stalinist civilisation from below and from within, using newspapers from the period, modern interviews and other sources that are ‘close to the people’. He takes seriously the language, experiences and ideology of the ordinary people who lived in Magnitogorsk and ‘built socialism’ during the terror period. Thus, the terror itself was to a large extent engineered by the citizens and ‘brought out both the basest and the noblest instincts in the population’.154 In fact, in Kotkin’s account, it is depicted as a result of people’s manipulated participation, based on a kind of revolutionary rationality and the logic that acts of terror were being committed for their own best, in response to Stalin’s will to discipline the people and eliminate all opposition.

Another far-reaching expression of the primacy of ‘small’ and ‘subjective’ history is the interest in ‘life stories’ from the terror period as they appear in diaries, private archives and present-day interviews with people who were involved in one way or another.155 Indeed it has been pointed out that the boundary between public and private in the Soviet Union was not always clear and unequivocal, since the Soviet leaders, in their efforts to subjugate the consciousness of the people, also used diaries or ‘autobiographies’ in order to encourage citizens to participate in the life of society. With this ‘subjectivisation technique’, they sought to remove the distance between the individual and the Soviet society as a whole. Nonetheless, a private sphere clearly still existed.156 Drawing on in-depth interviews and private archives, Orlando Figes has sketched out the little mental universe of the private life within Stalin’s Soviet Union, in relation to the ‘large-scale’ history that often made a brutal intrusion. The title of the book, The Whisperers, has a double meaning in its Russian form: shepchushchy is a person who whispers out of fear of being overheard, while sheptun is a person who informs against fellow men and women, in a whisper and behind their backs. The distinction is central to Figes’ book, whose main message is quite different from what advocates of the revisionist paradigm have long claimed: that one lasting consequence of Stalin’s time in power is a quiet and conformist population.157 Kate Brown offers a more positive conclusion on the effects of the terror. She shows that ethnic Poles who were deported from the western border areas of the Soviet Union to Kazakhstan, at least individually and in hindsight, saw themselves as colonisers on a mission to introduce a European civilisation – an attitude not entirely dissimilar to the official Soviet line.158

The cultural change

It is hardly surprising, and it has already been mentioned indirectly in this research review, that research on the criminal history of the Soviet communist regime has been influenced by the ‘changes’ in scientific theory in recent decades, towards phenomena relating to language, culture and memory. The perspective in this context could be described as double, and completely in line with the general framework of interpretation of postrevisionism: linguistic and cultural phenomena can, on the one hand, give those in power legitimacy in their governance and criminal activities, and on the other hand, provide safety, meaning and identity for ordinary people who live under what they perceive to be unsafe conditions in a society characterised by terror.

159 So far this problem has mostly been discussed in terms of the writing of the history of the Holocaust; see Friedländer 1992.

160 Kotkin 1997, p 227.

161 Figes & Kolonitskii 1999, p 3.

162 Timasheff 1946, p 354.

One currently popular perception in the academic community is that cultural phenomena can be illustrated in power-linked discourses and negotiations about the fundamental values in society, held in an independent cultural dimension, where the role of history's players is downplayed and the researcher is to a large degree a proactive participant. From this angle, language and culture come first in terms of analysis and they construct history, which is not the same as the perspectives of totalitarian theory and revisionism in which politicians or social categories respectively use language and culture as tools to satisfy their needs and interests. In its radical form, however, this approach has not gained acceptance in the research reviewed here. This may be connected to the ‘sensitive’ nature of the subject matter: reducing serious crimes against humanity to purely linguistic constructions and making real perpetrators and victims into constructed ‘perpetrators’ and ‘victims’ may strike many researchers, except the minority who deliberately seek to deny or trivialise these crimes, as both morally reprehensible and intellectually dubious.159 This does not stop many researchers from presenting the expressions of Leninist and Stalinist ideology in song, theatre, literature, film, poster art and ritual in Russia and the Soviet Union as sharp-edged and widely used weapons in seeking to influence society in the desired direction. However, this bird’s eye view must be supplemented with a bottom-up perspective in the context of the postrevisionist paradigm. Stephen Kotkin’s Stalinist civilisation, as reflected in the steel town of Magnitogorsk, was held together by the fact that the people there ‘spoke Bolshevik’. In this language, which in a postrevisionist sense must be taken seriously by researchers and not reduced to a pale reflection of ‘real’ political and social conditions, the leader and the led met:

Stalin’s speeches, his catechizing, his reduction of complexities to almost absurd simplicities and slogans, his logical mistakes, are easy to ridicule. But Stalin, who lived relatively modestly and dressed simply, like a “proletarian”, employed a direct, accessible style and showed uncanny insight into the beliefs and hopes – the psychology – of his audience.--- Stalin was transformed into a warm and personal figure of father, teacher, and friend.160

In a series of works on Soviet linguistic and cultural forms of expression during the age of terror, postrevisionist researchers have analysed how identities have been defined and symbolic meaning created in the interface between the ambitions of the state and people’s individual and collective needs to adapt and create meaning. Language and culture have become, in other words, ‘a code of communication, whose signals served to sanction and legitimize the actions of the crowd, to define the revolution’s common enemies, to uphold principles and generate authority for certain leaders’.161

In many cases, contemporary studies have reinforced the image of Stalin’s Soviet society as a specific culture or civilisation, but the cultural perspective has also renewed discussions on continuity and change over time. This cultural perspective has been applied to the relationship between Bolshevik Russia and pre-revolutionary Russia and the connection between Lenin’s Soviet Union and Stalin’s Soviet Union, the latter long defined by Nicholas Timasheff’s concept of ‘the great retreat’, now over 60 years old. According to this work, the Soviet leaders realised in the mid-1930s that communism had not taken root in the population at large. In the face of escalating external threats, they decided to increase popular support for the regime by seeking to unite communism with traditional Russian culture, reinstating institutions like the family, school and, as time went on, the orthodox church. Timasheff describes the result as ‘the amalgamation of traits of the historical and national culture of Russia with traits belonging to the Communist cycle of ideas and behaviour patterns’.162

163 Cf Brooks 2000, chapter 4, Hoffman 2003, pp 2–4.

164 Figes & Kolonitskii 1999, pp 30–70.

165 Volkov 2000, p 216.

166 Bonnell 1997, p 187.

167 Davies 1997, chapter 8, Halfin 2001, pp 316–339.

168 Martin 2001, pp 204–207, 249ff.

169 Tolczyk 1999, Kelly 2005, Cassiday 2000, Wood 2002, pp 235–248. The quote is from Fitzpatrick 1993, p 300.

Postrevisionist research has been unwilling to accept this notion of retreat. Although many researchers have presented the idea that religious, national or nationalist cultural traits linked with pre-revolutionary Russia became more prominent over the course of the 1930s, they have dismissed Timasheff’s idea by pointing out that use of these traditional institutions and cultural traits was modern and had a mobilising effect, aimed at stimulating support for the new revolutionary order.163 In one sense this is a fairly trivial comment, that history never repeats itself identically, because the conditions when history begins to approach a repetition are different the second time. This is the case not least because, as Karl Popper pointed out in a classic argument, the memory of the first time is a new variable that affects the result. The interesting question is whether Stalin made a conscious and politically instrumental attempt to use old cultural patterns at a time of mass mobilisation, and whether the language and culture of the revolution acted as a bridge to the past for leaders and the led alike. If so, a comparison with the period directly after the Bolshevik coup d’état may provide some enlightenment, since language and culture were used consciously at that time to create a contrast with the past, to implement ‘the symbolic revolution’.164 Or are cultural phenomena subject to other perspectives of change, mechanisms and periodisations than the political and social factors that were the previous focal points of research? Is culture best illuminated from a contemporary perspective, as has been suggested in a Foucault-inspired text, where culture and terror go hand in hand and complement each other: in contrast to terror as the arbitrary and negative use of power, culture was a disciplinary and positive dimension of power.165

Political poster art – which was of great significance in a country where literacy was long limited, visual pedagogics were greatly valued and figurative iconic culture had deep roots in the Russian orthodox culture – has been reviewed in this way, with links back to what is usually called the ‘binary model’ of Russian culture, with reference to semioticians Yuri Lotman and Boris Uspensky. In the Bolshevik demonology of visual propaganda, heaven is pitched against hell, all that is holy and pure against all that is sinful and dirty, Russia against the west, and true faith against false faith.166 Other research has taken as its starting point how the language of the terror society took form in effective dichotomies between ‘us’ and ‘them’, between the people and the elite, with the leader always unequivocally on the side of the people. Military expressions, such as front, fight and weapon, entered everyday vocabulary.167 Attention has also been given to written language and its relation to terror. In 1929 and 1930, language policy in Ukraine and Belarus was put on trial in two show trials against ‘national communist’ intellectuals who were accused of wishing to promote the national independence of the republics and westward orientation through their initiative of Latinising the Ukrainian and Belarusian languages. This ‘westward orientation’ mainly concerned the suspicion that they wanted to bring Ukrainian and Belarusian culture closer to Polish culture, thus distancing them from the Russian culture.168 During the interwar period, relations between the Soviet Union and Poland were hostile.

Naturally the didactic or social hygienic aspects of terror, based on the idea that the specific culture prevalent in concentration camps would encourage people to become good Soviet citizens and communists, have also attracted attention in this context, like the show trials, and described as ‘highly stylized productions involving fantastic scenarios of conspiracy and treason’.169 Cultural representations of terror can also include the spreading of rumours and conspiracy theories, denial of social origin and various types of informing, as researchers influenced by the postrevisionist school of thought have increasingly noted. Sheila Fitzpatrick in particular has

170 Fitzpatrick 1997, pp 85–120, p 86. See also Kozlov 2000, pp 117–141.

171 Fitzpatrick 2005, p 261.

emphasised the nature of informing as a cultural practice, by pointing out the duplicity in the Bolshevik understanding of the phenomenon: on the one hand, they rejected informing as an expression of the corruption of the old regime, while on the other hand, they believed revolutionary informing to be both a necessity and a virtue, since the purity of the revolution had to be guaranteed. She notes that the latter argument won, since ‘[t]here can be no secrets in the community of saints’.170 Thus, informing became a new expression of the social duties and morality of the Soviet citizen.171

Memories of the terror

reception history perspective

The last postrevisionist perspective to be dealt with here is the reception historical perspective. This means that the researcher turns his or her attention from the Soviet communist criminal history, its origin, implementation, historical context and consequences, to the interpretations, representations and use of this history in later eras. In contrast to the forward-looking development perspective that dominates the scientific writing of history and that has featured in this review thus far, a backward-looking perspective is applied, taking as its starting point the questions and interests expressed since the end of the terror period. These may stem from individual experiences and the memories of those who experienced and suffered under the terror, like those presented above in terms of ‘life stories’ and ‘oral history’. They could also be collective and indirect manifestations of memory, such as those expressed in the teaching of history, in public debate through the media, in film, monuments and museum exhibitions. This historiographical review, and the government commission of which it is a result, can and will probably be analysed from the perspective of reception history: How is the criminal history presented? Why is it being written in 2007-2008? Why has it been commissioned?

The two perspectives are not mutually exclusive. On the contrary, they are dependent on each other to a large extent: Increased knowledge of the crimes committed and a greater understanding of the mechanisms behind them can reasonably be thought to increase present-day interest in this history. An increased interest in the Soviet Union and Russia – a natural reaction to the dramatic process of transformation that has taken place during the last twenty years – has spurred the production of knowledge. This double-edged process is clearly an important background factor in researchers’ increasing interest in the reception history of the Soviet communist terror. Another is, once again, the reorientation of scientific theory towards linguistic and cultural factors, and towards historical MENINGSKONSTRUCTION. The culture studied in reception history is the culture of history itself. In and through it, a society chooses what it wishes to remember, document, debate, exhibit and celebrate from the past, as well as what it wants to forget.

For research oriented towards reception history, the Soviet glasnost period starting in 1985 was a veritable Eldorado. The historical revelations published on an almost daily basis by journalists and writers in reformist newspapers and journals, the process of breaking with old Soviet ideological interpretations of history in the glare of the media spotlight, and the many name changes of places that had previously borne the names of prominent figures of the terror period, were all elements in the conflict between the politics of reform and the reaction thereto and between the defenders of the Soviet state and advocates of national division, as well as being an accessible source for researchers with an interest in history’s role in society in general, and in late Soviet society in particular. Questions concerning the extent to which forced collectivisation and dekulakisation were necessary, why the Great Terror took place and so many communists and others were murdered and no-one opposed Stalin’s policies, what the point of the Gulag camps was, why the treatment of non-Russians was so unprecedentedly brutal, and why Soviet Jews were stigmatised, were dealt with in 172 Worth a mention in terms of major literature on the glasnost years and the historical debate of the first post-Soviet years are Kolstø 1989, Nove 1989, Davies 1989, Ito (ed.) 1989, Laqueur 1990, Nichol 1001, Remnick 1994, Davies 1997, and Karlsson 1999. See also Cerf & Albee (eds) 1990.

173 Cf e.g. D’Agostino 1998, pp 238–243, Karlsson 1999, p 97ff.

174 The term ‘the Great Silence’ is used and investigated from the perspective of reception history by Hochschild and Merridale 2000. The quote is from p 328. See also Adler 2002 and Gheith 2007, pp 159–175.

public debate and in literature. Over time, the question of Lenin’s responsibility also moved up the agenda of reception history.172

All these questions shared the feature that their answers had implications stretching far forward into the future: How did the terror in rural areas relate to the escalating problems in agriculture and the food supply system? Would the political alternatives recommended by the more moderate NEP-advocate Nikolai Bucharin, executed after the last of the Moscow trials, have been a better choice for the Soviet Union? Was there still a camp mentality and a ‘Stalin shadow’ over Soviet society? Were Hitler and Stalin united by their antisemitism, and why was this ideology still flourishing in Soviet society? Was the Soviet nations’ struggle for liberation from the Soviet state a result of the historical injustices that had been exposed? And: Was very basis of the Soviet society and state – Lenin, his ideology and his political practices – no longer stable and unimpeachable?

Research in reception history has focused to a large degree on presenting and chronologically or thematically systematising the ongoing historical debate, but it has from time to time posed more analytical questions connecting use of history to key figures and various types of interest. For example, why were professional historians so absent from the debate? How did the Baltic popular fronts’ cultural demands for a history of their own transform into a political struggle for independent Baltic states? How did Gorbachev, whose economy-based reform was inspired not by the atrocities of the Stalin period but by the stagnation of the Brezhnev era, handle the moral and critical break with the first decades of Soviet history that threatened to rob the entire Soviet project of legitimacy? The answer to the last question is that from Gorbachev’s perspective, until his final day as Soviet president, Lenin was infallible and the 1930s, despite the terror, was primarily a period of constructing a socialist society. Several researchers have noted the instrumental nature of the president’s relationship to Soviet history, and the ‘controlling’ openness whose main purpose was to preserve and legitimise the Soviet Union, although in a reformed state.173 However, Gorbachev and his politics became less and less synchronised with the general thinking and politics of the population, and the result is well-known.

Hand in hand with the major academic project that has characterised the post-Soviet era, that of documenting Soviet communist terror history and broadening its frameworks of interpretation from a postrevisionist perspective, researchers have also shown increasing interest in the memory of the terror. The primary purpose of this interest is not to accumulate further knowledge to add to the existing academic knowledge bank that is the main focus of this research review, but to gain new insights on the function and significance of the memory for individual and society, in relation to existentially, morally and ideologically traumatic phenomena such as the Soviet communist terror. For western researchers, the fall of the Soviet Union brought new opportunities to interview survivors of the terror, in order to understand how their lives were affected by the crimes to which they were subjected and by ‘the Great Silence’ that followed the Great Terror, which ‘prevented the bereaved and the frightened from rehearsing their stories, from sharing them, from the comfort that comes from discovering a social framework for events that otherwise retain the quality of a guilty dream’.174 The most successful methods of breaking this silence, namely the autobiographical ‘camp literature’ on life in and after the Gulag and Memorial’s work to gather, publish and honour the

175 Toker 2000, Adler 1993, Yaroshevski 1990, pp 5–31, and Smith 1996.

176 Adler 2005, pp 1093–1119.

177 Cf Smith 2002, the Russian obsession with the Great Patriotic War is analysed in Tumarkin 1994.

178 Karlsson 2003, p 245ff.

179 Williams 2000, pp 101–134. memory of individual terror victims, have been analysed.175

The development of the collective memory in post-Soviet Russia has also been subjected to analysis from a reception history perspective. The tendency of this literature has been well summarised in the title of an article by Nanci Adler: ‘The Future of the Soviet Past Remains Unpredictable: The Resurrection of Stalinist Symbols Amidst the Exhumation of Mass Graves’.176 On the one side there are still millions of people who have more or less direct memories of the terror society, and on the other side is a Russian government that chooses to fix its attention on collective memories that are more ‘patriotic’ that those of the Soviet communist terror, such as the Great Patriotic War.177 What the author of this review calls ‘the small silence’ is prevalent at this level – not a total and absolute silence but nonetheless a useful one for a state in search of national pride.178 However, as long as Memorial’s work to preserve memories continues, and as long as the Chechen conflict provides a reminder of Stalin’s ethnic cleansing in the North Caucasus, the small silence is unlikely to grow into a great silence.179

Paradigmes and transitions

In this review of the Soviet communist regime’s crimes against humanity under Lenin and Stalin, three comprehensive paradigms or explanatory models have been identified: the totalitarian theory paradigm, the revisionist paradigm, and the postrevisionist paradigm. The bases of these three paradigms can be illustrated in the following way:		REVISIONISM
TOTALITARIAN THEORY		REVISIONISM
General perspective	historical and comparative (with the crimes of the Nazi regime)	structural and comparative (with modern states)
Aspect	politics, ideology and economy	social processes and economy
Explanatory model	intentionalism	functionalism
Understanding of time	continuity	change
Direction of analysis	top-down	bottom-up
Themes	oppression and submission	conflict and resistance
Perpetrators	a monolithic party and state government	‘mini-Stalins’ with their own interests and power of resistance
Victims	party members, kulaks	peasants and workers
Death toll	extremely high	relatively low

The Start-Point / Home-Place from the former GPU / NKVD / KGB / FSB..... => ?

Moscow Picture from 1970

Terms

The Red Terror

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