The Great Terror

As to truths about the terror, the first point is that the official material available to the public before 1956 was worthless. Even British Cabinet records may not jibe with first-hand memoirs. The past is full of worse. There are records cut in stone in which successive pharaohs ostentatiously reattribute, in great detail, various (often non-existent) triumphs (from Sahure to Pepi II, and from Tuthmosis III to Rameses II to Rameses III). This is akin to the Soviet rewriting of history. And as to longer term official distortion, or concealment, we should remember that the highest level of Soviet secrecy was ‘word of mouth only’.

Up to 1956, our real sources were almost entirely from émigrés, ‘defectors', and such a rare document as the local files of the ‘Smolensk Archives’, which was captured by the Germans in 1941 and eventually reached the USA. When it comes to research on this ‘unofficial material’, were these sources reliable? Even to ask the question is to distort the nature of historical research. No ‘source’ can, strictly speaking, be relied on.

In the Soviet case, as late as 1968 there was still much that had to be deduced from sources judged merely as ‘hearsay'. These did indeed tend to give much the same general story. Of the testimony given by the anti-Soviet defectors, one – Victor Kravchenko’s – took it that ‘one can only look into this or that corner and judge the whole from its parts’. Another, the physicist Alexander Weissberg, put it a little differently – that the outside world would note that his and others’ testimony were mutually confirmatory, and eventually draw the right conclusions. Yet they – and the similar evidence of Alexander Barmine, Ivanov Razumnik and all the others – were still neglected.

Concerning deeper secrets, one often had to consider material still thought to be even more disreputable by some. For example, Alexander Orlov’s The Secret History of Stalin’s Crimes was, for many, a thoroughly dubious source. A high NKVD officer who defected in 1938, he naturally aroused suspicion (and a later book of his was clearly an unreliable potboiler). And later still a further extraordinary revelation came – that he had written promising Yezhov not to give away any state secrets on condition that he and his family were left untouched – and Stalin had approved. The worst result being that the Philby spy ring was able to serve Stalinist nuclear espionage so effectively.

But Orlov’s Secret History (from deep inside the NKVD) was largely validated early on as to one or two points. Now, all his contribution to the Zinoviev Trial, and much elsewhere, is proven. Like all evidence of its type, Orlov is only reliable when he is repeating what he was told at first hand; and when giving more peripheral, indirect hearsay, he is often in error – as with, more recently, Sudoplatov. Yet just because a source may be erroneous or unreliable on certain points does not automatically invalidate all its evidence. It was none other than Edward Gibbon who said that ‘imperfect and partial’ evidence may contribute to a view of the whole, without making the historian ‘answerable… for all the circumjacent errors and inconsistencies of the authors whom he has quoted’.2

However, since 1956 and Khrushchev’s Secret Speech – followed by his openly published report to the Twenty-second Congress in 1961, with many accounts of torture and falsehood – it was (or seemed) indisputable that a regime of lies and terror had after all been in existence. And over the next few years, until 1962–4, the real fates – at one level – of high Party officials, the military and many intellectuals became known. There were many rehabilitations of those victims deemed never disloyal to the regime; and a number of books or booklets came out about some of the most important. There were also memoirs such as those of General Gorbatov. And above all, there came one of the main unforeseen cracks in the traditional Soviet story – the publication of One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, which, as Galina Vishnevskaya put it, let the genie out of the bottle, and however hard they tried later, they couldn’t put it back in’.3

Though much, nothing like the whole reality emerged. But by 1968 there was enough Soviet evidence, taken together with that given over a couple of decades by the various outsiders, to make a coherent whole.

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