The Great Terror: A Reassessment

Confessions were wrought by horrible torture. Wives and children of accused were held hostage and often shared their fate. Children under the age of 17 were despatched to NKVD settlements. Overflowing cells built for twelve held a hundred, so that prisoners had to pack down sideways like sardines-- and only in shifts. Most could not withstand round-the-clock beatings for more than a few months and succumbed, although a few exceptional individuals held out.

The horror of the gulag is beyond comprehension. Camps were brutal, soul-destroying, ruled on behalf of guards by hard-core criminals. The journey to the camps was deadly and could last months. Outside work was compulsory until temperatures dropped below -50 *C. Inmates were starved and savaged by epidemics. Perhaps the best thing about them was that one would not be expected to survive more than two years. In Kolymev only three out of every hundred survived. From Novaya Zembla, nobody returned at all.

It's unknown whether the Purges stopped because the courts were overstretched or because the geometric rate of denunciations would soon have implicated the entire population. Fully 5% of the population had been arrested, while 7 million people languished in camps. Of the original partisans and Bolsheviks no-one at all remained. The Terror machinery nonetheless continued at a more controlled pitch, and the gulag population would grow to 12 million at Stalin's death in 1953. Soviet science, technology, and the military were robbed of their best people. The cumulative psychological effect of the Terror nightmare on generations of Soviets is unimaginable.

Unfortunately, the West generally left these citizens to their fate. Driven by Communist idealism, foreign correspondents ignored, glossed over, or simply flat-out lied about the show trials. Jean-Paul Sartre and other intellectuals still denied the existence of the gulag long after its evidence was undeniable. A French literary journal called Victor Kravchenko's account of the camps a lie. The New York Times' Walter Duranty received a Pulitzer prize for his Stalin apologia.

The Left never let facts get in the way of an attractive ideology, and never understood that "not even high intelligence and a sensitive spirit are of any help once the facts of a situation are deduced from a political theory, rather than vice versa." That neither Stalin, nor his ideology, have ever been fully held accountable is maddening and a disgrace to the memory of his victims.


Chilling, it combats leftist "Holocaust denial" about Stalin's terror   April 22, 2008
Daniel Berger (Atlanta, GA USA)
15 out of 15 found this review helpful

Which is more terrifying? Stalin's 1936-38 terror, or Western liberals' inability to recognize it? Updating his original work "The Great Terror" with a vast amount of new data, Conquest scrupulously details and puts into context the purges themselves: the many players and defendants, the shifting political cross-currents, the rounds of trials and arrests.

And he does the same for the many Western observers - intellectuals, writers, journalists, and left activists - who were oblivious to it or actively sought to hush it up, even decades later when there were no longer any shreds of doubt. This is the equivalent of Holocaust denial.

And a Holocaust it was. While left-wing apologists pooh-poohed the numbers of purge deaths as in the thousands, the estimates of those killed politically in the people's progressive utopia are now solidly in the eight figures, with as many as 15 to 20 million arrested and executed, or worked to death in the camps, in the years up until Stalin's death in 1953. As many more died were starved by the Communists in the Ukraine to break the peasantry a few years earlier. Yet most people seem never to have heard of any of this.

In the Terror itself, Stalin and the NKVD prosecuted fictitious espionage, sabotage and subversion charges against millions of people. Those arrested would be tortured until they agreed to confess and implicate others. Most did, and quickly. It wound down only when the NKVD saw that, mathematically, every citizen of the nation would soon be implicated. But it flared up periodically until Stalin's death in 1953.

The purges served several purposes. They transformed the USSR from a dictatorship of the proletariat into Stalin's despotism. They removed most previous party members and high-ranking officials, suppressing alternate notions of what Communism was about, and replaced them with ruthless Stalinists. Those persecuted included those who had been non-Bolshevik leftists, even if they since had conformed; Bolsheviks who had subscribed to Lenin's agricultural compromise delaying collectivization to boost agricultural production; Trotskyites; and finally, Stalinists and the NKVD themselves, for no ostensible reason but merely to terrify and cow.

Stalin meanwhile could blame the country's Bolshevik-destroyed economy on the fictional sabotage "confessed to" in public trials, or to foreign spies. And he could blame the purge's excesses on the NKVD itself.

We see the breakdown of figures and how they were derived: those executed with or without trial, those deported to slave labor camps, those executed in the camps, and those merely worked to death within them. The death rate for those sent to slave labor camps was around 90 percent. There are some camps whose mere existence cannot be confirmed firsthand because no one is known to have survived them to give testimony.

This is an essential part of the anti-Communist canon, certainly on the top shelf. Conquest's work here confirms his original book and shows that its estimates, if off in any way, were too conservative.



HISTORY AS SURREALISM   May 23, 2001
JIM SHIVE (BLOOMINGTON, ILLINOIS USA)
23 out of 25 found this review helpful

When I read the first edition of this book back during the Cold War, it was difficult to believe the quality of scholarship and research effort that Conquest demonstrated throughout this book, written while the KGB was still running amok. What most general histories dismissed with a few sentences or paragraphs as "millions died or were imprisoned", Conquest gave us the names, the chronology, and the results of Stalin's paranoid Reign of Terror. Now that the archives have become more accessible, Conquest is able to update his work and further illuminate this darkest period of Russian (and perhaps world) history. ANYTHING written by Conquest is worth reading if you want to understand the workings of 20th century Soviet politics and society.


The Master Historian.   November 27, 2004
Bernard Chapin (CHICAGO! USA)
14 out of 14 found this review helpful

Let me begin by saying that Robert Conquest is an absolutely brilliant writer and scholar. I'd classify him as being at the top of our era's historians; which would put him alongside men like Anthony Beevor and Paul Johnson. I read this book about 10 years ago but studied it again this week. It is a concise account of one of the most horrific periods in the history of mankind. Few books will have the unexpected outcome of making you so grateful to live in the present age. Conquest is meticulous in his telling of the Yagoda/Yeshov/Beria schinas, and behind them all we find Stalin willfully exterminating his countrymen and consolidating his rule. No book that I've read has given a more thorough or readable accounting. I would give it 10 stars if I could. My only regret is that no photos were included. The rare photos offered in this year's "Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar" really accentuated the text.