MacKenzie, David, and Michael W. Curran. Russia and the USSR in the Twentieth Century. 4th ed. Wadsworth Group. 2002.

The Great Terror: Old and New Approaches

One of the most difficult periods of Soviet history to comprehend, and one of the most complex and controversial, is the period of the mid-1930s, when the Stalinist regime subjected the Soviet population, and especially the Communist party, to unprecedented levels of violence. The horrifying events of 1935-1938 led to the total destruction of the Leninist Party. Why did Stalin elect to pursue such a policy against the party over which he enjoyed almost total control? Why did he resort to such brutal and merciless cruelty?
A common explanation is that Stalin suffered from a debilitating mental disorder, that he was deranged. The traditional view has been to hold Stalin solely responsible for the terror, whether sane or insane. The recent opening of Soviet archives has, however, provided the basis for new and sometimes controversial interpretations of that dark period.

Who Was Responsible?

Martin McCauley, a British historian, identifies two schools of thought that characterize the study of Stalinism as a whole and the period of the Great Terror in particular. He labels the two schools the "totalitarian and the pluralist, or the intentional and the structural."9 The totalitarian school emerged during the Cold War, and focused attention on the Soviet state and primarily on the personality and mind-set of Stalin himself. In this view, he alone bears responsibility for the deaths of millions and the imprisonment of millions more. This school argues that Stalin was a ruthless leader who imposed his will on the party and on society, destroying millions of people in the process. The pluralist approach, on the other hand, argues in favor of multiple causes for the terror, and suggests that the state served as a kind of mediator among competing interests in society. Those competing groups, in an atmosphere of siege, created conditions in which violence was inevitable. Pluralists argue that Stalin was not a ruthless dictator, but merely a leader who shifted support, often abruptly, among various conflicting groups within society, playing one faction or group against another.
The standard "totalitarian" treatment of Stalinist terror is Robert Conquest's The Great Terror, published originally in 1968 and revised in 1990. It originally relied on unofficial sources, but with the release during Gorbachev's glasnost of long-secret archival material, the author rewrote his study. He added many new details but retained his original conclusion that the terror was largely the product of Stalin's personal ambition, his vindictiveness, and his thirst for glory, adulation, and unrestricted power. Conquest repeatedly argues that Stalin's was the crucial role in the great terror:
Over this major sector of the Purge [of the central Party hierarchy], Stalin and Yezhov themselves presided. They received valuable help from Molotov and Voroshilov when required, but on the whole Stalin kept an extremely tight personal grip on proceedings, working through Yezhov alone.
In 1937 and 1938, Yezhov sent to Stalin 383 lists, containing thousands of names of figures important enough to require his personal approval for their execution. As Yezhov was only in power for just over two years . . . this means that Stalin got such a list rather more often than every other day of "persons whose cases were under the jurisdiction of the Military Collegium." A samizdat historian of the 1970s indicated that the lists included 40,000 names. However, a Soviet periodical now tells us that at a recent plenum of the Central Committee, the total number shot, whose names appeared on lists signed by Stalin, Molotov, Kaganovich, and Malenkov, though perhaps over a longer period, was given as 230,000. At any rate, we can envisage Stalin, on arrival in his office, as often as not finding in his in-tray, a list of a few hundred names for death, looking through, and approving them, as part of the ordinary routine of a Kremlin day. We are told in recent Soviet articles that on 12 December 1937 alone, Stalin and Molotov sanctioned 3,167 death sentences, and then went to the cinema.11
Conquest concluded that The Great Terror left the country ". . . broken, and henceforward a limited number of arrests of men who had given some sort of cause for suspicion of disloyalty was sufficient to maintain the habit of submission and silence."12
Roy Medvedev, a former Soviet dissident and now a Russian liberal historian, agrees in large part with Conquest's view of Stalin's ultimate responsibility for the Great Terror.
His [Stalin's] main motive [for the terror] was lust for power, boundless ambition. This all-consuming lust appeared in Stalin much earlier than 1936. Even though he had great power, it was not enough—he wanted absolute power and unlimited submission to his will. He understood at the same time that the generation of party and government leaders formed in the years of underground work, revolution, and civil war would never become totally submissive. They too had taken part in the creation of the party and the state and demanded a share of the leadership. But Stalin did not want to share power.13
Edvard Radzinsky, a well-known Russian playwright and biographer of Nicholas II and, most recently, of Stalin,14 agrees that the Gensec bears full responsibility for the bloodletting unleashed in the mid-1930s.
The Seventeenth Congress [1934, "Congress of Victors"] had finally convinced Stalin that they [the old Bolsheviks] would never let him create the country of his dreams—a military camp where unanimity and subservience to the Leader reigned. Only with such a country could the Great Dream be realized.15
A tremendous task confronted him. The creation of a Party united in obedience to himself, Ilyich [Lenin] had seen the need for it, but experience showed that he had left the task unfinished. Now Stalin resolved to complete it.16

Among the "pluralists" are J. Arch Getty and Robert W. Thurston. They have written studies that challenge Conquest's, Medvedev's, and Radzinsky's general accounts and conclusions. Getty suggests, in his study The Origins of the Great Purges, that the Bolshevik Party was far from being a totalitarian monolith, and while Stalin was a dominant figure he was not omnipotent, and the terror was not the product of his careful personal planning. He argues that the Great Terror was a bloody and ad hoc result of Moscow's efforts to centralize power in the country.
It is not necessary for us to put Stalin in day-to-day control of events to judge him. A chaotic local bureaucracy, a quasi-feudal network of politicians accustomed to arresting people and a set of perhaps insoluble political and social problems created an atmosphere conducive to violence. All it took from Stalin were catalytic and probably ad hoc interventions at three pivotal points—early 1936 (to reopen the Kirov investigation), November 1936 (to condemn Piatakov), and June 1937 (to unleash Ezhov)—to spark an uncontrolled explosion. That he did so intervene speaks for itself.17
Getty argues that the conditions within the party and the country were ripe for an "explosion" of terror. He concludes his study of the Party and the terror as follows:
The evidence suggests that the Ezhovshchina— which is what most people really mean by the "Great Purges"—should be redefined. It was not the result of a petrified bureaucracy's stamping out dissent and annihilating old radical revolutionaries. In fact, it may have been just the opposite. It is not inconsistent with the evidence to argue that the Ezhovshchina was rather a radical, even hysterical, reaction to bureaucracy. The entrenched officeholders were destroyed from above and below in a chaotic wave of voluntarism and revolutionary puritanism.18
Robert W. Thurston also represents the "pluralist" approach. His Life and Terror in Stalin's Russia, 1934-1941, which appeared in 1996, largely rejects the "totalitarian" interpretation of the Great Terror.
Stalinism in the second half of the 1930s was characterized not by reliance on any one practice [terror] but by a series of rapid, profound shifts. The pattern reflects the great ability of the country's leader to set policies in motion, if not to control their outcome. The Stalin of these pages was an evil man, but a man nonetheless. He did not emerge from childhood vindictive, opportunistic, and power hungry—in short, as the master plotter. Instead, he could and did change his behavior and political stance. The evidence is now strong that he did not plan the Terror. By 1935-36, the country had relaxed substantially in political terms. Coercion was steadily declining. Then came a huge new internal crisis and bloodletting. It too passed, although it left a gruesome trail. By late 1938, the regime admitted that many mistakes had occurred. Once more the leadership reduced tension and curtailed the political use of law. Without the sharpening international situation of the years immediately preceding the war, more liberalization would have taken place.19
Thurston also rejects Conquest's view that Stalin's Great Terror cowed and broke the spirit of the population:
. . . Terror affected many citizens and caused great tragedy. But when it struck people down, it did not necessarily shake their relatives' and acquaintances' faith in the regime. In any case, terror touched a minority of the citizens, albeit a substantial one, and the violence was concentrated among the country's elite. Many citizens, however, did not experience or even notice the Terror except in newspapers and speeches.20
Thurston concludes:
It is doubtful that any state could administer its people by imposing terror on them; assuming that a regime might try, severe contradictions and widespread avoidance behavior would quickly arise. Only an invading army might rule by terror, and then perhaps only for a limited time. Countries that become enemies of the West may be labeled systems of terror, but this judgment is of little help in understanding their internal workings or longevity.21
In 1999, J. Arch Getty and Oleg V. Naumov published a collection of top-secret KGB and party documents relating to the Great Terror, which they culled from recently opened Soviet archives.22
When we reflect on the terror of the 1930s and ask, "What made it possible?" we must look beyond Stalin's personality for answers. It is possible, after all, to analyze and even on some level to understand a homicidal maniac or serial murderer. Accounts of the deeds of such sociopaths are depressingly common in today's newspapers, and the tools of modern psychoanalysis give us quite a few clues to the motivations of these criminals. In the case of Stalin, a good bit has been written on his presumed personality. Yet to understand how a generalized terror erupted in the USSR in the 1930s we must look farther afield. Why were his orders carried out? Why was there fertile soil for terror to grow? Even if we decide that Stalin was always the main actor, unless we study society and the political system, the scale and spread of the terror must remain incomprehensible.23
Further:
Historians have often posed another question: How did one man manage to inflict such wholesale terror on an experienced political elite? The literature treats of Stalin's careful plans, his cunning, deception, threats, and blackmail. In some views, Stalin simply decided to kill a lot of people and then tricked or intimidated large numbers of otherwise intelligent people into helping him do it. ... The only factors worth mentioning are the plans of the ruler; everyone else was a passive recipient. Many basic accounts of the terror operate at this interpretive level: once one decides who is guilty, there are no more questions to ask, and research becomes the farther enumeration of foul deeds by the evil prince.24
The editors of this collection of documents try to look beyond Stalin's role in order to understand the Terror. They try to analyze the social, political, and economic system in which people lived and worked in the 1930s, and they seek to assess the actions of individuals as they interacted with their environments. The authors attempt to allow the available archival evidence to speak for itself, to demonstrate the complexity of the process.
In our study we have not asked the question: What caused the terror? Questions like What caused the Thirty Years' War? Or What caused the Great Depression? similarly invite easy answers to complex problems. To identify a single main "cause" would also introduce notions of inevitability or determinism: the existence of the causal factor appears to make the result seem preordained.
The main causal element in the literature has always been Stalin's personality and culpability. In most accounts there were no other authoritative actors, no limits on his power, no politics, no discussion of society or social climate, no confusion or indecision. Stalin gave and everyone else received. The actions of others, or the environment within which he worked, were largely irrelevant or impotent. As a result, these accounts came perilously close to falling into the literary genre of fairy tales, complete with an evil all-powerful sorcerer working against powerless victims.
. . . Even with Stalin in the role of master conductor, orchestrating from a prepared score, a more complete explanation of the terror must include other factors in the equation—to acknowledge that other powerful persons and groups had an interest in repression, that the social and political climate may have facilitated terror, that the road to terror may have been crooked and roundabout. . . . even a terrorist Stalin would have needed fertile soil to spread violence, and it is our contention that the environment was as important as the agent in explaining the phenomenon as a whole.
Other factors included:
. . . The tradition of party discipline, corporate mentality and self-interest of the nomenklatura elite, political relations and struggles among numerous groups within the party, elite anxiety and perceptions of state-society relations, and, last but not least, the "Stalin factor." It is our view that each of these elements, and others as well—foreign relations, social identities, and Russian cultural perceptions, for example—was necessary but insufficient to explain the terror. For the terror was more than a top down police operation; it involved people denouncing their bosses, their underlings, their comrades. Stalin played a major role in starting the violence, but we can begin to understand it as a historical phenomenon only by considering him among many factors.25

Numbers of Victims?

In the 1968 edition of his study, Robert Conquest attempted to assess the breadth and depth of the terror by giving estimates of the approximate number of casualty figures based largely on indirect sources. His Reassessment of 1990 cites his 1968 figures and argues that they were too conservative. The 1968 figures:

Arrests, 1937-1938 -- about 7 million
Executed -- ----------- about 1 million
Died in camps -------- about 2 million
In prison, late 1938 --- about 1 million
In camps, late 1938 --- about 8 million (assuming 5 million in camp at end of 1936)

His Reassessment raises the figure for arrests to 8 million, reaffirms the number of executions at about 1 million, deaths in the camps is increased by 600,000 to 700,000, and the number in prison at 1 million, although he reduces the number of prisoners in the camps in late 1938 to 7 million.
. . . The Great Terror was only peripherally concerned with the total casualties of the Stalin epoch. But it reckoned the dead as no fewer than 20 million. . . . And the general total of "repressed" is now stated as around 40 million, about half of them in the peasant terror [collectivization] of 1929 and the other half from 1937 to 1953.26
Thurston's figures for numbers arrested and executed in 1937-1938 are considerably lower than Conquest's:
Arrests -- 1,575,259
Executed -- 681,692 (27)

Getty and Naumov cite the same sources as Thurston. They add the following by way of a conclusion:
Finally, in 1962-63 and 1988 secret high-level government investigations produced results very similar to ours. On both occasions, the Politburo sought the most damning figures possible for use as political capital and commissioned blue-ribbon Politburo commissions to comb KGB files for data. In 1963, Khrushchev sought data condemning his current rivals Molotov and Kaganovich. In 1988, Gorbachev wanted to discredit Stalinism as part of a perestroika policy. In both cases, the results . . . published are analogous to those presented here.28
Robert Conquest has suggested, however, that full and complete accuracy on casualty figures for the Great Terror is unattainable. He cites Soviet analyses for this, which suggest that some records have been lost, and some never existed.29

Conclusion

In the end, it is clear that the Great Terror consumed frighteningly large numbers of Soviet citizens. We may never know the precise number. It is also clear that Stalin played a major role in unleashing the Great Terror, but the "pluralist" historians have forced us to look beyond Stalin's personal role to examine the complex historical environment of the party and society during the 1930s. We have much more information at our disposal now, and their work has brought us closer to the truth, although there remain many unanswered questions, contributing to a continuing controversy about this horrifying period of Soviet history. •

9 M. McCauley, Stalin and Stalinism, 2nd ed. (London, 1995), p. 78.
10 R. Conquest, The Great Terror; A Reassessment (New York, 1990).
11 Conquest, (1990), pp. 234-35.
12 Conquest, pp. 434—35.
13 R. Medvedev, Let History Judge: The Origins and Consequences of Stalinism (New York, 1989), p. 585.
14 Edvard Radzinsky, Stalin, trans. H.T. Willetts (New York, 1996).
15 Ibid., p. 320.
16 Ibid.
17 J. Arch Getty, Origins of the Great Purges: The Soviet Communist Party Reconsidered, 1933-1938 (New York, 1985), p. 206.
18 Ibid.
19 Robert W. Thurston, Life and Terror in Stalin's Russia: 1934-1941, (New Haven, CT, 1996), p. 233, emphasis added.
20 Thurston, p. 232.
21 Ibid., p. 233.
22 J. Arch Getty and Oleg V. Naumov, eds., The Road to Terror: Stalin and the Self-Destruction of the Bolsheviks, 1932-1939 (New Haven, CT, 1999). Used by permission.
Ibid., Introduction, p. 8. Used by permission. Ibid., pp. 9—10. Used by permission.
25 Ibid., pp. 570-71. Used by permission.
26 Conquest, (1990), pp. 485-86, figures cited from the 1968 edition.
Thurston, p. 63. He cites from the archives a report prepared in 1953 for Stalin's successors.
28 Getty and Naumov, p. 594. Used by permission.
29 Conquest, (1990), p. 487.

Suggested Additional Reading
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ANDREW, C. and V. MITROKHIN. The Sword and the Shield: The Mitrokhin Archive and the Secret History of the KGB (Boulder, CO 1999).
BAUER, R., A. INKELES, and C. KLUCKHOHN. How the Soviet System Works (Cambridge, MA, 1956).
BERMAN, H. J. Justice in the USSR (New York, 1963).
CARMICHAEL, J. Stalin's Masterpiece: The Show Trials • and Purges of the Thirties (New York, 1976).
CARR, E. H. The Bolshevik Revolution: Socialism in One Country, 1924-1926, 3 vols. (London, 1958-1964).
CONQUEST, R. The Great Terror (New York, 1968).
---------. Inside Stalin's Secret Police: NKVD Politics,
1936-1939 (Stanford, 1985).
-. Stalin and the Kirov Murder (Oxford and New
York, 1990).
DANIELS, R., ed. The Stalin Revolution (Lexington, MA, 1990).
DAY, R. B. Leon Trotsky and the Politics of Economic Isolation (New York, 1973).
DE JONG, A. Stalin and the Shaping of the Soviet Union (New York, 1986).
DEUTSCHER, I. Stalin: A Political Biography, 2d ed. (New York, 1967).
DJILAS, M. The New Class (New York, 1957).
ERICKSON, J. The Soviet High Command ... 1918-1941 (New York, 1962).
FAINSOD, M. How Russia Is Ruled, 2d ed. (Cambridge, MA, 1963).
-. Smolensk Under Soviet Rule (Cambridge, MA,
1958).
FITZPATRICK, S. Everyday Stalinism: Ordinary Life in Extraordinary Times: Soviet Russia in the 1930s (New York and Oxford, 1999).
---------. ed. Stalinism: New Directions (New York, 1999).
FRIEDRICH, C. J., and Z. K. BRZEZINSKI. Totalitarian Dictatorship and Autocracy, 2d ed. (New York, 1966).
GETTY, J. A. Origins of the Great Purges ... 1933-1938 (Cambridge, 1985).
GETTY, J. A. and O. V. NAUMOV. The Road to Tenor. Stalin and the Self-Destruction of the Bolsheviks, 1932-1939 (New Haven, CT, 1999).
GILL, G. Stalinism, 2nd ed. (London, 1998).
GITELMAN, Z., ed. Bitter Legacy: Confronting the Holocaust in the USSR (Bloomington, IN, 1997).
GLUCKSTEIN, D. The Tragedy ofBukharin (London, 1994).
HAZARD, J. N. The Soviet System of Government, 5th ed. (Chicago, 1980).
HOCHSCHILD, A. The Unquiet Ghost: Russians Remember Stalin (New York and London, 1994).
HYDE, A. M. Stalin, the History of a Dictator (New York,
1982). KATKOV, G. The Trial ofBukharin (New York, 1969).
KNIGHT, A. Beria: Stalin's First Lieutenant (Princeton,
NJ, 1996). ---------. Who Killed Kirov? (New York, 1999).
KOESTLER, A. Darkness at Noon (New York, 1951). (Novel relating to the Great Purge.)
KOTKIN, S. Magnetic Mountain: Stalinism as a Civilization (Berkeley, CA, 1995).
LEVYTSKY, B., comp. The Stalinist Tenor in the Thirties: Documentation from the Soviet Press (Stanford, 1974).
LEWIS, J. Stalin: ATime for Judgment (New York, 1990).
MARPLES, D. R. Stalinism in Ukraine in the 1940s (New York, 1992).
MARRIN, A. Stalin (New York, 1988).
MAWDSLEY, E. The StalinYears: The Soviet Union, 1929-1953 (Manchester, UK, 1998).
MCCAULEY, M. Stalin and Stalinism, 2nd ed. (London, 1995).
MEDVEDEV, R. A. Let History Judge: The Origins and Consequences of Stalinism (New York, 1971,1973).
NOVE, A. Stalinism and After, 3d ed. (London, 1989). ---------, ed. The Stalin Phenomenon (New York, 1993).
ORWELL, G. 1984 (New York, 1949). (Novel on totalitarianism.)
RESIS, A., ed. Molotov Remembers: Inside Kremlin Politics (Chicago, 1993).
ROGOVIN, V. Z. 1937: Stalin'sYear of Terror, trans. F. S. Choate (Oak Park, MI, 1998).
SCHAPIRO, L. The Communist Party of the Soviet Union, rev. ed. (New York, 1970).
SHEARER, D. R. Industry, State and Society in Stalin's Russia, 1926-1934 (Ithaca, NY, 1996).
SERGE, V. Memoirs of a Revolutionary, 1901-1941 (New York, 1963).
SOLOMON, P. H. Soviet Criminal Justice under Stalin (Cambridge, UK, 1996).
SOLZHENITSYN, A. The Gulag Archipelago, 1918-1956, 3 vols. (New York, 1974-1975).
---------. One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich (New York,
1963). (Novel about labor camps under Stalin.)
STOECKER, S. W. Forging Stalin's Army: Marshal Tukhachevskii and the Politics of Military Innovation (Boulder, CO, 1999).
THORNILEY, D. The Rise and Fall of the Rural Communist Party, 1927-39 (New York, 1988).
THURSTON, R. W. Life and Tenor In Stalin's Russia, 1934-1941 (New Haven, CT, 1996).
TROTSKY, L. D. The Revolution Betrayed (Garden City, NY, 1937).
---------. Stalin: An Appraisal of the Man and His Influence
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-. Trotsky's Notebooks, 1933-1935, trans, and ed.
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TUCKER, R. Stalin in Power: The Revolution from Above, 1928-1941 (New York, 1990).
---------, ed. Stalinism: Essays in Historical Interpretation
(New York, 1977).
TUMARKIN, N. Lenin Lives! The Lenin Cult in Soviet Russia. (Cambridge, MA, 1983).
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URBAN, G. R., ed. Stalinism: Its Impact on Russia and the World (New York, 1982).
VOLKOGONOV, D. Stalin: Triumph and Tragedy, trans. and ed. H. Shukman (New York, 1991).
VYSHINSKY, A. The Law of the Soviet State (New York, 1948).
WARD, C, ed. The Stalinist Dictatorship (New York, Oxford, 1998).
---------, ed. Stalinism: A Reader (London, 2000).