The Great Terror

What was my personal decision to tackle the missing history? When I first started to publish on Soviet subjects, one sceptic held that I was not qualified to write on these themes, since my two earliest books were a volume of poetry (Poems) and a science fiction novel (A World of Difference). I would argue that they both contribute to, or are signs of, the imagination’s grasp and scope. (And the first reference to me in the USSR is in the Large Soviet Encyclopaedia Yearbook for 1957, as a poet and anthologist.)

But I was able to plead other inputs. I had direct experience of Stalinism. In 1944–8 I was in Bulgaria, at first attached to the Third Ukrainian Front and later as Press Attaché to the British Political Mission. There, after a period of optimism, we saw the horrible realities of a Stalinist takeover.

Then, in the Foreign Office, I worked on the whole – as yet little understood – phenomenon, and briefly at the United Nations, as a First Secretary attached to the United Kingdom Delegation, visibly serving in the Security Council. I helped draft a speech by Barbara Castle – there as a (very ‘left-wing’) Minister in the Labour government – on the Gulag, with data secret from the Soviet point of view, to the Economic and Social Committee. I even passed by that fearful villain Andrei Vyshinsky – next but two or three to me in the General Assembly. And I rejoiced as President Truman gave his uncompromising speech (on the Korea aggression).

Back in London, I covered Soviet internal politics, finally switching to a fellowship at the London School of Economics – to research and write a book on that subject, which became Power and Policy in the USSR. Though the CPSU does not emerge in a very favourable light, that book was concerned above all to discover the realities behind the Kremlin fog bank: to satisfy a curiosity, to provide a light. Meanwhile, I had written a number of books, with general, or highly particular, themes – such as an account of The Pasternak Affair (1962).

In 1964–5 I was at Columbia University. I had just finished a book – Russia after Khrushchev. In New York, I got to know some of the older, and some of the younger, writers and thinkers on Russia – from Boris Nicolaevsky himself to Stephen Cohen – and later, in California, Bertram Wolfe. Cohen was to be especially helpful over the years that followed.

So in 1964 or 1965 it had become plain that a huge gap in history needed to be filled, and that the facts released over the past few years, plus the often denied testimony of some of the regime’s hostile but increasingly justified witnesses, could be put together, if carefully done, to produce a veridical story, a real history. Back in London, as a freelance writer, I began to assemble The Great Terror.

The other great incitement to Stalin studies was Tibor Szamuely (nephew and namesake of the great Hungarian terror chief of 1919). Tibor had been in the Gulag, but was later released. Defecting from Accra to London, he became a splendid adviser. I still relish his reply when I said that one could see why Stalin had Marshal Tukhachevsky shot, but why Marshal Yegorov? Tibor’s answer was ‘why not?’.

When the book came out in 1968, the publishers were surprised to have to reprint it time and time again to meet demand. Reviews, from left and right, were almost all very favourable. And it was soon published in most Western languages – though also Hindi, Arabic, Japanese and Turkish.

Let me note here, to illustrate the scope of opinion, that the book, and my other work in the field, was soon warmly praised by (of course) Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan, but above all – and earlier – by ‘Scoop’ Jackson and then Daniel Patrick Moynihan, the latter of whom wrote that my role was to ‘sense that the democratic contest with the Marxist-Leninist regime was not just a struggle over ideas but also over facts’. Nor did the book fail to have an effect further to the left. I learned, much later, that it was a set book, and compulsory reading, for Christopher Hitchens and James Fenton (perhaps England’s finest poet of that generation), as teenage members of a Trotskyite study centre.

From Russia there was much praise from Andrei Sakharov and Elena Bonner, and also Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn who (when I flew to Switzerland to meet him after his expulsion from the USSR) asked me if I could translate a ‘little’ poem of his into English verse. It was Prussian Nights4 – nearly two thousand lines in ballad metre! And there were too, on our whole theme, the praises of other poets: Czeslaw Milosz (especially warmly) – and Octavio Paz (who wrote that The Great Terror had ‘closed the debate’). So we come full circle …

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