大恐怖 (1968)

The Great Terror: Stalin's Purge of the Thirties is a book by British historian Robert Conquest which was published in 1968.

One of the first books by a Western writer to discuss the Great Purge in the Soviet Union, it was based mainly on information which had been made public, either officially or by individuals, during the Khrushchev Thaw in the period 1956–1964, and on an analysis of official documents such as the Soviet census. Many of The Great Terror’s primary sources were Information Research Department materials, which the agency used to shape political consensus in its favor. It also drew on accounts by Russian and Ukrainian émigrés and exiles dating back to the 1930s. The book was well received in the popular press and was read widely among dissidents in the Soviet Union, but its estimates started a debate among historians. Conquest defended his higher estimates of 20 million, which are supported by some historians and other authors in the popular press, while other historians said that even his reassessments were still too high and are considerably less than originally thought.

It gave rise to an alternate title of the period in Soviet history known as the Great Purge. Conquest's title was also an allusion to the period that was called the Reign of Terror during the French Revolution (French: la Terreur and from June to July 1794 la Grande Terreur, "the Great Terror"). A revised version of the book, called The Great Terror: A Reassessment, was printed in 1990 after Conquest was able to amend the text, having consulted the opened Soviet archives.

Synopsis

The first critical inquiry into the Great Purge outside the Soviet Union had been made as early as 1937 by the Dewey Commission, which published its findings in the form of a 422-page book entitled Not Guilty (this title referred to the people who had been charged with various crimes by Joseph Stalin's government and therefore purged); the Dewey Commission found them not guilty. The most important aim of Conquest's The Great Terror was to widen the understanding of the purges beyond the previous narrow focus on the Moscow Trials of disgraced All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks) leaders, such as Nikolai Bukharin and Grigory Zinoviev. The question of why these leaders had pleaded guilty and confessed to various crimes at the trials had become a topic of discussion for a number of Western writers and had underlain books, such as George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four and Arthur Koestler's Darkness at Noon. According to the book, the trials and executions of these former Communist leaders were a minor detail of the purges, which together with man-made famines had led to 20 million deaths according to his estimates. In the appendix of the original 1968 edition, Conquest estimated that 700,000 legal executions took place during 1937 and 1938, which was roughly confirmed by the 681,692 executions found in the Soviet archives for these two years. In the preface to the 40th anniversary edition of The Great Terror, Conquest wrote that he had been "correct on the vital matter—the numbers put to death: about one million" but lowered other figures, saying that the total number of deaths brought about by the various Soviet terror campaigns "can hardly be lower than some 13 to 15 million."

In the book, Conquest disputed the assertion made by Nikita Khrushchev and supported by many Western leftists, namely that Stalin and his purges were an aberration from the ideals of the October Revolution and were contrary to the principles of Leninism. Conquest posited that Stalinism was a natural consequence of the system established by Vladimir Lenin, although he conceded that the personal character traits of Stalin had brought about the particular horrors of the late 1930s. Neal Ascherson wrote: "Everyone by then could agree that Stalin was a very wicked man and a very evil one, but we still wanted to believe in Lenin; and Conquest said that Lenin was just as bad and that Stalin was simply carrying out Lenin's programme." Conquest sharply criticized Western intellectuals for what he described as their blindness towards the realities of the Soviet Union, both in the 1930s and in some cases even in the 1960s. He described figures, such as Beatrice Webb and Sidney Webb, George Bernard Shaw, Jean-Paul Sartre, Walter Duranty, Bernard Pares, Harold Laski, Denis Pritt, Theodore Dreiser, and Romain Rolland, as dupes of Stalin and apologists for his regime for denying, excusing, or justifying various aspects of the purges. A widespread story recounts that when he was asked to provide a new title for an anniversary edition, after his initial findings were verified by the opened Soviet archives, Conquest allegedly replied: "How about I Told You So, You Fucking Fools?" According to Conquest, this never happened and was a joking invention of writer Kingsley Amis.

Reception, impact, and debates

The Great Terror was the first comprehensive research of the Great Purge, which took place in the Soviet Union between 1934 and 1939 according to Conquest. Many aspects of his book remain disputed by Sovietologist historians and researchers on Russian and Soviet history. Many reviewers at the time were not impressed by his way of writing about the Great Terror, which was in the tradition of great men history, and attributed state violence to Stalin as a “master plotter." In 1995, investigative journalist Paul Lashmar suggested that the reputation of prominent academics such as Conquest was built upon work derived from material provided by the Information Research Department. In 1996, historian Eric Hobsbawm praised The Great Terror as "a remarkable pioneer effort to assess the Stalin Terror" but said that this work and others were now obsolete "simply because the archival sources are now available." According to Denis Healey, The Great Terror was an important influence, "but one which confirmed people in their views rather than converted them."