The Great Terror: Stalin

Robert Conquest “The Great Terror: Stalin” Oxford University, 1990, 489 pp.

To my knowledge, this work of Conquest’s is the most recent detailed account of the 1930’s terror by Stalin against his people.  Furthermore, this book is an update of his previous 1968 work and contains much more information that came available when the USSR crumbled.  This book was considered the definitive account of the period and to my knowledge still is.

Conquest provides accounts of everything from the three great "Moscow Trials," to methods of obtaining confessions, the purge of writers and other members of the intelligentsia, and life in the labor camps.  It’s hard to believe the psychotic behavior Stalin practiced on his own people.  For whatever reason, the purge worked almost entirely on confessions, possibly because there was little or no evidence of the crimes alleged.

From the accounts of former OGPU officers, the methods used to extract the confessions involved repeated beatings, simulated drownings, making prisoners stand or go without sleep for days on end, and threats to arrest and execute the prisoners' families.  The attack on families was very effective in getting confessions.

The purge of the Red Army and Military Maritime Fleet removed three of five marshals (then equivalent to five-star generals), 13 of 15 army commanders (then equivalent to three- and four-star generals), eight of nine admirals (the purge fell heavily on the Navy, who were suspected of exploiting their opportunities for foreign contacts), 50 of 57 army corps commanders, 154 out of 186 division commanders, 16 of 16 army commissars, and 25 of 28 army corps commissars.  At first it was thought 25–50% of Red Army officers had been purged; the true figure is now known to be in the area of 3.7–7.7%.

Eventually almost all of the Bolsheviks who had played prominent roles during the Russian Revolution of 1917, or in Lenin's Soviet government afterwards, were executed. Out of six members of the original Politburo during the 1917 October Revolution who lived until the Great Purge, Stalin himself was the only one who remained in the Soviet Union, alive.  Four of the other five were executed. The fifth, Leon Trotsky, went into exile in Mexico after being expelled from the Party but was assassinated in 1940. Of the seven members elected to the Politburo between the October Revolution and Lenin's death in 1924, four were executed, one (Tomsky) committed suicide and two (Molotov and Kalinin) lived.

According to the declassified Soviet archives, during 1937 and 1938, the NKVD detained 1,548,366 persons, of whom 681,692 were shot - an average of 1,000 executions a day.  Historian Michael Ellman claims the best estimate of deaths brought about by Soviet repression during these two years ranges from 950,000 to 1.2 million, which includes deaths in detention and those who died shortly after being released from the Gulag, as a result of their treatment.   

Finally, remember that this updated history of this period is still relatively old: 1990.  And, more depressing to me was the author’s misplaced optimism in 1990 that Russia was now changed and this sort of repression was now in the past.  The author just died in 2015 (he was born in 1917)  but I did not find any updates to his optimism now that Putin is in control.