THE GREAT TERROR By the Same Author History and Politics Power and Policy in the USSR Common Sense about Russia Courage of Genius: The Pasternak Affair Russia after Khrushchev The Great Terror The Nation Killers Where Marx Went Wrong V. I. Lenin Kolyma: The Arctic Death Camps Present Danger: Towards a Foreign Policy We and They: Civic and Despotic Cultures What to Do When the Russians Come (with Jon Manchip White) Inside Stalin's Secret Police: NKVD Politics 1936-39 The Harvest of Sorrow Stalin and the Kirov Murder Tyrants and Typewriters Poetry Poems Between Mars and Venus Arias from a Love Opera Coming Across Forays New and Collected Poems Verse Translation Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's Prussian Nights Fiction A World of Difference The Egyptologists (with Kingsley Amis) Criticism The Abomination of Moab THE GREAT TERROR A REASSESSMENT ROBERT CONQUEST THE UNIVERSITY OF ALBERTA PRESS «n association with the CANADIAN INSTITUTE OF UKRAINIAN STUDIES First published in Canada by The University of Alberta Press 141 Athabasca Hall Edmonton, Alberta. Canada T6G 2E8 in association with the Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies 1990 Copyright Robert Conquest 1990 First published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press, Inc. 200 Madison Avenue, New York, New York 10016 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be produced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any forms or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise. without prior permission of the copyright owner. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Conquest, Robert. The great terror: a reassessment / Robert Conquest. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references. ISBN 0-88864-222-9 1. Terrorism—Soviet Union. 2. Soviet Union—Politics and government—1936-1953. 3. Kommunisticheskaia partiia Sovetskogo Soiuza—Purges. 4. Stalin. Joseph, 1879-1953. I. Title. DK267.C649 1990 947.084'2—dc20 89-37810 Printing 987654321 Printed in the United States of America, on acid-free paper To Helena Alexandrovna and my other friends in the Soviet Union who showed that even these events did not destroy the spirit of the people PREFACE It is a particularly appropriate moment to put before the public a reassessment of the Great Terror, which raged in the Soviet Union in the 1930s. First, we now have enough information to establish almost everything past dispute. Second, the Terror is, in the immediate present of the 1990s, a political and human issue in the USSR. That is to say, it is on the most striking, the most critical, and the most important agenda of the world today. My book The Great Terror was written twenty years ago (though a certain amount of additional material went into editions published in the early 1970s). The brief period of Khrushchevite revelation had provided enough new evidence, in conjunction with the mass of earlier unofficial reports, to give the history of the period in considerable and mutually confirmatory detail. However, there was much that remained deduction, and there were occasional gaps, or inadequately verified probabilities, which precluded certainty. During the years since then, The Great Terror remained the only full histor- ical account of the period—as, indeed, it does to this day. It was received as such not only in the West but also in most circles in the Soviet Union. I seldom met a Soviet official or academic (or emigre) who had not read it in English, or in a Russian edition published in Florence, or in samizdat; nor did any of them ques- tion its general accuracy, even if able to correct or amend a few details. Moscow News lately noted that the overseas Russian edition had "come by unofficial channels to the Soviet Union, and quickly circulated amongst the intel- ligentsia, and was valued by them as one of the most significant of foreign re- searches into Soviet history."1 And finally it was serialized in the Soviet literary- political periodical Neva in 1989-1990, marking adequate confirmation of the book's status. But not merely its status as a work of history: Neva's editor-in- chief (who is also a People's Deputy), while describing it as "far the most seri- ous" research on the period, added that Neva "strives to promote the creation of the rule of law and a deepening of democracy in our society. We consider that the work of R. Conquest develops just this idea."2 But The Great Terror has been out of print for a number of years, and much viii I PREFACE new material has meanwhile accumulated: first in the samizdat writings of the late 1970s and early 1980s, and then, from 1987 on, in a mass of new evidence in Soviet publications of the glasnost period. The Great Terror still had to rely to a large extent on emigre, defector, and other unofficial material. As with the writing of ancient history, it was a matter of balancing and assessing incomplete, partial, and uneven material—and not, as with the writing of modern Western history, the deployment, in addition to these, of adequate and credible official archives. Some information was, of course, avail- able from Soviet official sources of the period, but all the main facts had been falsified or suppressed on a grand scale; and the Khrushchevite contribution, though of great importance, was far from exhaustive or decisive. 1 printed in The Great Terror a long bibliographical note, in which I ex- plained why and to what extent I accepted (not always in every detail) Nicolaev- sky, Orlov, Barmine, Krivitsky, Weissberg, and other material published in the West. Since such accounts have now been overwhelmingly confirmed in recent Soviet publications, it has not been thought necessary to print such a note in the present book, for it appears in the period when glasnost has confirmed the general accuracy of such testimony and put the long-suppressed facts of the Terror beyond serious controversy. It is true that this has not yet, as I write, been done system- atically, but rather in series of scattered articles. But these have accumulated suf- ficiently to make a full reappraisal of the Great Terror both useful and necessary. This is especially true of specific events like the Tukhachevsky Trial, the 1937 "February-March plenum," the fate of Yezhov, the developments in late 1936, and similar important phenomena. Yet, while the new material extends our knowledge, it confirms the general soundness of the account given in The Great Terror. And while in this resassess- ment I have thus been able to give a greatly enhanced account of these years, I have not made any changes for their own sake. In the preparation of this book, my thanks are due above all to Professor Stephen F. Cohen and Dr. Mikhail Bernstam; to Nancy Lane, for endless help and encouragement; to Irene Pavitt, for her editorial skills; to Kate Mosse; to Delano DuGarm, for irreplaceable research and other assistance; to Semyon Lyandres; to Susan Rupp; once more to Amy Desai, for her ever-admirable sec- retarial work; to the John Olin Program for the Study of the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe at the Hoover Institution; and, as always, to my wife. Stanford January 1990 R.C. CONTENTS BOOK I, THE PURGE BEGINS Introduction, The Roots of Terror I 3 1 Stalin Prepares I 23 2 The Kirov Murder I 37 3 Architect of Terror I 53 4 Old Bolsheviks Confess I 71 5 The Problem of Confession I 7 09 BOOK II, THE YEZHOV YEARS 6 Last Stand I 135 7 Assault on the Army I 182 8 The Part)'Crushed I 214 9 Nations in Torment I 250 10 On the Cultural Front I 291 11 In the Labor Camps I 308 12 The Great Trial I 341 13 The Foreign Element I 399 14 Climax I 419 BOOK III, AFTERMATH 15 Heritage of Terror I 445 Epilogue, The Terror Today I 484 Notes / 49 7 Bibliography / 545 Index / 555 BOO K I THE PURGE BEGINS This fear that millions of people find insurmountable, this fear written up in crimson letters over the leaden sky of Moscow—this terrible fear of the state . . . Vasily Grossman Introduction THE ROOTS OF TERROR The remedy invented by Lenin and Trotsky, the general suppression of democracy, is worse than the evil it was supposed to cure. Rosa Luxemburg LENIN'S PARTY The Great Terror of 1936 to 1938 did not come out of the blue. Like any other historical phenomenon, it had its roots in the past. It would no doubt be mislead- ing to argue that it followed inevitably from the nature of Soviet society and of the Communist Party. It was itself a means of enforcing violent change upon that society and that party. But all the same, it could not have been launched except against the extraordinarily idiosyncratic background of Bolshevik rule; and its spe- cial characteristics, some of them hardly credible to foreign minds, derive from a specific tradition. The dominating ideas of the Stalin period, the evolution of the oppositionists, the very confessions in the great show trials, can hardly be fol- lowed without considering not so much the whole Soviet past as the development of the Party, the consolidation of the dictatorship, the movements of faction, the rise of individuals, and the emergence of extreme economic policies. After his first stroke on 26 May 1922, Lenin, cut off to a certain degree from the immediacies of political life, contemplated the unexpected...
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