The Great Purge

4 Key excerpts on "The Great Purge"

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  eBook - ePub

  The Accused

  • Alexander Weissberg, Edward Fitzgerald(Authors)
  • 2016(Publication Date)
  • Hauraki Publishing

    (Publisher)

  THE ACCUSED

  CHAPTER 1—The “Great Purge”

  THE AIM OF THIS BOOK IS TO DESCRIBE HAPPENINGS WITHOUT PRECEDENT in modem history. From the middle of 1936 to the end of 1938 the totalitarian state took on its final form in the Soviet Union. In this period approximately eight million people were arrested in town and country by the secret police.{2} The arrested men were charged with high treason, espionage, sabotage, preparation for armed insurrection and the planning of attempts on the lives of Soviet leaders. After periods of examination which rarely exceeded three months, all these men, with very few exceptions, pleaded guilty, and where they were actually brought before the courts they confirmed their confessions in public. They were all sentenced to long terms of forced labor in the concentration camps of the Far North or of the Central Asiatic desert districts.

  They were all innocent.

  However, to protect myself from all-too-pedantic criticism, I must make two reservations. The one refers to the assassination of Kirov, the Secretary of the Leningrad Party organization, who was also a member of the Politburo. Kirov was shot dead on December 1, 1934, after a meeting of the District Party Committee by a young student named Nikolayev, who was himself a member of the Party. The background of this murder has never been satisfactorily explained. Many people believe that the motive was jealousy, i.e., that it was personal and not political. Others, including Trotsky, believe that it was a provocation organized by the G.P.U. But in any case, Kirov was murdered almost two years before the beginning of The Great Purge. During that purge millions of people were accused of having planned attempts on the lives of Soviet leaders, but only one Soviet leader, Kirov, was ever killed. Despite their “confessions,” the men arrested during The Great Purge had nothing whatever to do with his death.

  My second reservation refers to the espionage activity of foreign powers. Of course, such activity was carried on during the years in question, though its agents certainly had a more difficult task than elsewhere. The Soviet Union is almost hermetically sealed off. A Soviet citizen guilty of espionage could not hope to escape abroad. Money would not greatly attract him as a reward. He could not spend it without immediately making himself suspect. At one time Russians ready to spy for a foreign power for ideological reasons and not for hope of reward could have been found among the formerly well-to-do classes, but by that time those classes had been broken up. Their members had lost all courage and all belief in the ultimate victory of their cause. A man is seldom prepared to risk his life for a cause he believes lost.

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  Russia in the Twentieth Century

  The quest for stability

  • David R. Marples(Author)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  The Origins of The Great Purge questioned some of Conquest’s figures and argued that the purges were far from being the initiative of a single dictator, as Conquest had suggested. According to Getty, the chaotic conditions in the USSR in the 1930s did not allow for the planning of a systematic purge, while Stalin’s subordinates had considerable leeway in their local domains. In a new edition of his book published in 1990, Conquest retorted that his statistics had in fact been underestimates, as newly opened Soviet archives now revealed. A group of social historians has also provided new insights into various aspects of Russian history, from the Revolution to The Great Purge, and encompassing the works of scholars such as Sheila Fitzpatrick (Fitzpatrick, 1996, 1999) and Lynne Viola (Viola, 1998). Much of their work has focused on grassroots life in a calculated attempt to steer clear of the “top-down” analyses of more traditional scholars. Robert Thurston has argued persuasively but controversially (Thurston, 1986, 1998) that Soviet citizens for the most part led relatively normal lives in the mid-1930s, and that the purges did not cause widespread fear among the population.

  The various reactions to arrest . . . suggest that general fear did not exist in the USSR at any time in the late 1930s. Usually, only those who were actually arrested came to understand that the innocent were being widely persecuted. People who remained at liberty often felt that some event in the backgrounds of the detained individuals justified their arrests. The sense that anyone could be next, the underpinning of theoretical systems of terror, rarely appears. If by the “Great Terror” we mean that many innocent people suffered at the hands of the state, that is an acceptable statement; to say that all, or probably even the majority, were terrorized is as unacceptable for the USSR in the 1930s as it is for Germany at the same time.

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  On Stalin's Team

  The Years of Living Dangerously in Soviet Politics

  • Sheila Fitzpatrick(Author)
  • 2015(Publication Date)
  • Princeton University Press

    (Publisher)

  FIVE

  The Great PurgeS

  THERE WAS “SOMETHING GREAT AND BOLD ABOUT THE POLITICAL idea of a general purge”; it was a “world-historic mission” beside which individual guilt and innocence was trivial. That comment came from, of all people, Bukharin, on his way to becoming one of the victims of The Great Purges. Perhaps he didn’t really see it like that—he was writing one of his many appeals to Stalin, after all—but just thought Stalin and the team saw it that way, which is significant in itself. Bukharin wasn’t sure, judging by his letter, whether the point (or what Stalin thought was the point) was a preemptive strike in light of the imminence of war or a “democratic” initiative to help ordinary people get rid of unworthy officeholders, no matter how eminent. Molotov opted later for the “imminence of war” argument, which has since become the favorite of historians, despite being something of a cop-out. Without The Great Purges, Molotov later said, the Soviet Union would have lost the Second World War. He knew the opposite argument, that it was just because of the savage purges of the military that the Soviet Union initially did so badly in the war, but he had something else in mind. The purges meant “that during the war we had no ‘Fifth Column.’” Who constituted that potential fifth column? Molotov did not, as you might expect, point to the disaffected and injured in the Soviet population, of whom, as a result of collectivization and the purges, there were many. Instead, he focused on the apparently loyal party faithful: “After all, even among Bolsheviks there were and are people who are good and committed when everything is going well, when no danger threatens the country. But if something starts, they tremble, they desert.”

  We will never have a definitive answer to the question of what The Great Purges were meant to achieve. What can be said with some certainty is that to the degree that there was a firm political intention, that intention was Stalin’s. The team went along, Molotov at least with some conviction, but they were executants (and potential victims), not initiators. They were frightened, like the rest of the Soviet political elite. But, as with collectivization, there was also a degree of admiration within the team for Stalin’s boldness. Who else would have thought of initiating something so huge, dramatic, and risky? Only Stalin could have come up with it, Molotov rightly said, looking back.

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  Ruling Russia

  Authoritarianism from the Revolution to Putin

  • William Zimmerman(Author)
  • 2016(Publication Date)
  • Princeton University Press

    (Publisher)

  CHAPTER 4 The Great Purge T HE PRIMARY FOCUS OF the terror shifted by 1935 from the class-based “elimination of the kulak as a class” to the generic “enemy of the people.” At the same time, major changes, similarly, took place in incentives, norms, and controls and what the central leadership valued. (Some initial steps in this direction overlap chronologically with the Cultural Revolution.) These changes were such that Nicholas Timasheff was largely, but not completely, correct when more than half a century ago he maintained that something akin to a Great Retreat had occurred. One recent critic has faulted him for failing to recognize that the goal of constructing socialism 1 never changed. This seems to me tilting at a windmill of the author’s own construction. The concept of “retreat” implies a tactical withdrawal and is entirely compatible with unchanged goals. What most certainly happened was that some key bases for mobilization were transformed, often quite dramatically. Rather than mobilize through symbols and institutions that bespoke of Marxism, the regime rediscovered Russia, rejected egalitarianism, adopted measures that had been previously scorned as bourgeois, and strengthened Party and secret police controls in almost every sector of society. But Kenneth Jowitt and Gail Lapidus are right in faulting Timasheff for failing to note the impact of the mobilization and violence of collectivization and the Cultural Revolution which, as it were, paved the way for what Timasheff reported. 2 Moreover, it bears reminding the obvious: that is, the measures taken to provide incentives to those whom the regime favored were coterminous with use of “terror as a system of power.” 3 The years after collectivization, the first Five-Year Plan, the famine of the winter 1932–33, and the termination of the Cultural Revolution, witnessed dramatic changes in urban life for all

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