As in the historiographical controversy among Germanists over ‘intentionalist’ vs. ‘function-structuralist’ interpretations of the Holocaust, this debate raises some complex and profound issues: the process of decision-making at the highest levels, the role of Stalin himself, popular attitudes and participation, the actual quantitative scale of the repression, and its immediate and longer-term psychic effects. Neither orthodox nor revisionist, Moshe Lewin suggests that the terror was a function of Stalin’s unwillingness to be bound by the system he himself had built and presided over. This system had brought to the fore new social groups, especially state functionaries, who though powerful, lacked security of office and sought it in greater social stability and ‘socialist legality’. It was just this craving that threatened Stalin’s role as unfettered autocrat. Thus, two models coexisted uneasily and at some point collided. In the long run, the bureaucratic model, relying on the nomenklatura, would prevail; but during 1936–8, the autocratic model, consisting of the cult, the police, and a demonological mentality, was in ascendance.
That mentality was not Stalin’s alone. Gabor Rittersporn has argued that attributing political conflict and the shortcomings of daily life to ‘plots’, ‘wrecking’, and the ‘intensification of the class struggle’ was not simply a matter of scapegoating, but reflected real belief. Subjected to a public discourse that postulated the achievement of socialism and the ubiquity of subversion, many people understood irregularities, shortages, or other deviations from what was supposed to happen in Manichean terms. They knew that they were not enemies or conspirators, but had no way of being sure about their bosses, colleagues, neighbours, even friends and relatives. Bukharin, who believed the accusations against Kamenev, was no different from Lev Kopelev and other ‘true believers’ convinced of the need for unrelenting cruelty to deal with enemies. Those lower down the social hierarchy, including many workers with grievances against their bosses and peasants still angry over collectivization, evidently considered the reprisals against party and state functionaries to be just retribution.
Even those who knew that innocent people had been arrested recoiled from the idea that Stalin condoned such action. ‘We thought (perhaps we wanted to think) that Stalin knew nothing about the senseless violence committed against the communists, against the Soviet intelligentsia’, the novelist and journalist Ilia Ehrenburg recalled. Many blamed Ezhov, whose removal as People’s Commissar for Internal Affairs in December 1938 prompted one self-described ‘ordinary citizen of the USSR’ to write to the Central Committee urging it to ‘correct the Ezhovite mistakes so that the NKVD will really begin to fight against elements hostile to Soviet power, and honest working people will be guaranteed normal and peaceful work’.
Such letters—and there are many in recently opened archives—should not be construed as prima facie evidence of popular support for the terror. But they do suggest that the machinations in the Kremlin were not the whole story. In Belyi Raion of the Smolensk district, the defining political issues were not ‘Trotskyite and fascist wrecking’, but the crop failure of 1936, shortfalls in procurement targets, admission of former kulaks into collective farms, and other local issues. But at a certain point in 1937 local élites responsible for economic failures or bossism could find themselves so labelled.
As to the number of people arrested and shot by the NKVD, research by Russian and Western scholars in recently opened archives has produced estimates that are considerably lower than those previously posited. According to Viktor Zemskov, slightly less than one million people were confined in NKVD run camps on 1 January 1937, a number that rose to 1.3 million by 1939; another 315,000 people were in ‘corrective labour colonies’ in 1940. These figures are a good deal lower than earlier estimates (for example, Robert Conquest’s number of seven million in the camps by 1938), but they do not include people incarcerated in prisons, special resettlements, or other places of detention. It also remains unclear how many were ‘politicals’, convicted of engaging in ‘propaganda or agitation’ against the Soviet state, a crime punishable by five to eight years in a camp; an archival document indicates that the GULAG population sentenced for ‘counter-revolutionary offences’ was 12.6 per cent in 1936 and 33.1 per cent in 1940. As for executions by order of military tribunals, ‘troikas’, and other special bodies, official figures show 1,118 executions in 1936, 353,074 in 1937, 328,618 in 1938, and 2,552 in 1939. According to information released by the KGB in 1990, the total executed in 1937–8 represented 86.7 per cent of all death sentences carried out ‘for counter-revolutionary and state crimes’ between 1930 and 1953. Mass burial sites, recently uncovered at Kuropaty in Belarus and elsewhere in the former Soviet Union, constitute one of the most horrifying relics of the Stalin era.
Who were the victims? We have long known about the prominent party officials, military officers, and members of the scientific and cultural élites. The publications of Conquest and Roy Medvedev in the early 1970s added more names, notably from the non-Russian republics. More recently, thanks to greater archival access and innovative research, the sociology of victimization has become more precise. It now seems clear that the most vulnerable groups were the party élite, former oppositionists, high-ranking economic officials, and military officers. Contrary to earlier assumptions, Old Bolsheviks—those who joined the party before the October Revolution—and members of the intelligentsia were not disproportionately repressed.
Several conclusions are in order here. First, vulnerability or risk must be correlated with proportionality: even if the majority of camp inmates were peasants and workers, those in élite positions were at greater risk if the data are compared to their numbers in the population at large. Second, the tragic fate of family members—vividly and movingly described in the memoirs of Nadezhda Mandelshtam, Anna Larina (wife of Bukharin), and others—must be taken into account in any overall assessment of the purges. Notwithstanding Stalin’s earlier injunction (‘sins of the fathers should not be visited upon their sons’), said in reference to the offspring of dekulakized peasants, family members—sons, daughters, wives, and even more distant relatives—were frequently subjected to interrogation and incarceration in orphanages and camps. Third, no amount of statistical work is likely to explain why so many individuals were summarily executed in 1937–8 and why this ‘ultimate sentence’ was prescribed more sparingly after Lavrentii Beria became the NKVD’s commissar. Finally, to comprehend the repression of these years, use of a term like ‘the Terror’, with its implication of unitariness, tends to obfuscate the overlapping patterns and cross-currents of repression.
The Enemy Without/The Enemy Within
Corresponding to the Great Turn of the late 1920s, the Comintern directed communist parties to expel ‘Right opportunists’ from their ranks and abandon tactical alliances with Social Democrats, henceforth labelled ‘social fascists’. This ‘class war’ strategy, which persisted until the mid-1930s, disorganized working-class opposition to fascism and proved particularly disastrous in Germany. The call by the Commissariat of Foreign Affairs (Narkomindel) for total disarmament evoked nothing but scepticism in European capitals, but the Soviet Union did succeed in normalizing relations with neighbouring countries and establishing full diplomatic relations with the United States in 1933.