The Great Terror

For at least two decades, Conquest’s book was the definitive account or the years 1937–38. But, starting in about 1988, Mikhail Gorbachev, the Soviet Union’s final ruler, launched glasnost, the policy of ‘openness’, and the first real open discussion of the crimes of Stalinism inside the USSR. Partly as a result of that discussion, the Soviet Union itself collapsed a few years later. In subsequent years, Soviet archives opened for the first time to both Russian and foreign historians. As a result, quite a bit more has been learned about Stalin, about the 1930s, and especially about the years 1937–38. It became possible to write about Stalinism in different and more precise ways, using sources that were not available in 1968. Conquest himself acknowledged this to be true. In the introduction that follows this foreword, written for the new edition of The Great Terror that appeared in 2008, he wrote of how Soviet scholars had in the past been ‘like modern historians of an ancient empire who have had to rely on a few inscriptions, some only recently deciphered, when a huge store of first-hand records is discovered under some pyramid. Enough for generations of archeologists.’ Indeed, numerous historians have since pinned down more accurate numbers, firmed up many details and added enormously to our knowledge of Stalin as well as his systems of repression and control. It’s now clear, for example, that Stalin’s court – his henchmen and collaborators – played just as great a role in perpetuating cruelty as did the Soviet leader himself.

The new research also shows, however, that the defectors and émigrés got the outline of the story right – and so did Conquest. The fundamentals of the story have not changed: in 1937–38, Stalin and his team inflicted fear and terror on their country and on their own party. Millions were imprisoned. Millions eventually died, either because they were shot by firing squads or because they perished, more slowly, in prisons and concentration camps all around the country.

The Great Terror remains the classic account of that era. It is a story of human suffering and cruelty, an exploration of the power of ideology, a historical narrative which cannot be forgotten. It should be read now for its literary power, for its language, and for its strong and clear evocation of an era whose lessons and warnings we are still trying to absorb and understand.

Anne Applebaum, August 2018

INTRODUCTION TO 2008 EDITION

1

How did The Great Terror come to be written? And, first published in 1968, and in a revised edition in 1990, how is it that the book is still often treated as a historical landmark? Indeed, various historians, writing in several languages, credit me with the first use of the phrase ‘the Great Terror’, which has since become the conventional term for the purges of the 1930s.

Though inviting some amendment on a few points, the period’s history as given here has been substantially validated. There has meanwhile been a huge amount of fresh information to add to our knowledge. It is in that perspective that this introduction tries to place the book. A complete rewrite, or even a full re-editing, would, as to details, require the processing of many thousands of documents, and hundreds of often erudite analyses and presentations. I have tried to cover everything among the materials I have looked through that truly adds to or illuminates the terror experience.1 So what follows is to be read largely as commentary and perspective.

What was the condition of our previous knowledge of Stalinist actuality before, let us say, 1956? We had for decades had a large amount of real information about the purges, all often rejected or ignored, while little truth and much falsehood had emerged from Moscow. We had long been faced, especially from the 1930s on, with delusions about the Soviet system, and we still need to bear in mind how Sidney and Beatrice Webb, deans of Western social science, leaders of the Fabian Society, founders of the London School of Economics, deeply ‘researched’ their Soviet Communism: a New Civilisation. Rather than repeat their particular errors (see Chapter I), let me note as further examples a few of their subheadings: ‘the Emergence of a Communist Conscience’; ‘the Vocation of Leadership’; ‘Ethical Progress in the USSR’; ‘The Maximising of Wealth’; and ‘The Success of a Soviet Agriculture’. They praised ‘the sense of freedom and equality’ found there, and used as sources the vast apparatus of Soviet falsification – thus fully ‘documented’. It would be tedious to go into the whole array of those in one way or another misled, though it is still astonishing to read the disgraceful record of Joseph Davies – US Ambassador to Moscow from 1936 to 1938.