Life and Terror in Stalin's Russia: 1934-1941.

IN his Life and Terror in Stalin's Russia, 1934 - 1941, Robert W. Thurston argues that "Stalin was not guilty of mass first-degree murder from 1934 to 1941." Thurston is thus very much a "revisionist" -- although, as Stephen Cohen has pointed out, today the word is a euphemism. What was called revisionism in the past accepted the data, old or recent, and reinterpreted them; and while there are, of course, "revisionist" scholars of Soviet matters who have enlarged our perspective in that way, now the term, as Cohen notes, usually applies to a particular school of thought that has accepted falsification, dismissed established evidence, and misinterpreted newer materials.

The current partial revival of Stalinist attitudes in Russia means that the issues raised by this form of revision have once more gained a certain actuality. Spokesmen for the new Communist leadership have, for example, asserted that Stalin killed fewer than a million people. For such reasons we should consider books like Thurston's -- if not so much on their own account, then as symptoms of a broader malaise.

It is to Thurston's credit that he nowhere descends to the fairly vicious tone that marks much "revisionist" writing. Nor does one find that rather guilty air of one who is seeking attention by pushing notions he knows in his heart to be untenable. Instead, one feels an honest naivete -- as when a certain partiality for Stalinism emerges in such comments as that under a 1932 decree peasants were sentenced for keeping small amounts of "public produce for themselves." In fact it was, of course, their own produce, which the state had stolen from them. He has elsewhere praised the "upward social mobility" found under Stalinism, while omitting the downward mobility into the execution cellars of the Lubyanka and the gravepits of Lelashevo that accompanied it; and, even more important, neglecting the nature of those so promoted -- the "negative selection," as they now say in Moscow, of the "morally and intellectually crippled," as Alexander Weissberg put it.

Other revisionists (like the Communists in Russia) are mainly concerned to keep the casualty figure as low as is remotely plausible. Thurston, while generally accepting this approach, is more interested in showing that the Terror did not have profound, or long-term, effects on ordinary life. His main themes are that the terror of 1937 - 38 was not all that pervasive; that the accusations against the victims were rational in terms of Stalin's paranoid character; that Stalin was not directly responsible for much of what happened; that Andrei Vyshinsky was a great legal reformer; and above all, that not many people felt much fear.

Let us first consider his figures. In his introduction, Thurston expresses warm gratitude to the two most visible of the far-out revisionists, J. Arch Getty and Gabor Rittersporn. In particular, he thanks them for providing him with "materials." Insofar as these materials are figures of the casualties, their provenance alone guarantees their inadequacy. A year or so ago, these two sent a letter to the American Historical Review with what they called the final, documented tally of the number of victims, based on material presented by the secret police to the leadership forty-odd years ago. Your reviewer was asked to comment, and pointed out that the 1990s spokesman for the Security Ministry, presenting the first of their two sets of figures, had himself emphasized that the reality had in fact been "many times greater"; while the second gave yearly arrest figures only a quarter as large as Gulag entry tables already accepted by the two contributors. The editor then decided that publication would not further our knowledge.

It is reasonably clear, if we collate other sources, that the probable figure from executions in 1937 - 38 is not the 681,692 given in such documents and accepted by Thurston, but some two and a half times as high. In any case, Thurston's argument is that his figure is not enough to constitute "mass terror." One imagines that if the equivalent half a million people had been shot in the United States over two years, it might have been thought of as having a large-scale effect, socially and otherwise. Indeed, Thurston compares the hysteria of the Stalin Terror to that of McCarthyism, and the Hiss case. The Americans did actually execute the two Rosenbergs. Still, the comparison would have been more apt if they had shot that half a million suggested above, including most of the government and three-quarters of Congress, hundreds of writers, thousands of military officers -- this might have intimidated the citizenry a little.

The author's 680,000-odd includes only those executed. He grants that, taking all arrests into account, even on his own figures about 5 per cent of the adult male population fell into NKVD hands -- and the percentage would, of course, have been larger in the cities. Stephen Cohen has pointed out that far lower rates of killing and arrest in certain Latin American countries have been shown to have caused mass fear.

Before considering that, it is worth looking at the provenance of the 681,692 execution figure. It was made available to a party commission in the Khrushchev period, at a time when the KGB was covering its tracks: for example, by falsifying the dates and causes of death of rehabilitated victims, to imply that they had died naturally in prison when they had actually been shot.

This figure seems to have attracted some unwary scholars by its exactness, as compared with the vaguer 1,750,000 given by representatives of the Russian Archives and of the Security Ministry, which the author rejects as not constituting "substantial documentation." But of course, under Soviet conditions, documented exactness was far from an indication of reliability. We have had all this before, with the falsified squeaky-clean exactness of the 1939 Census.

Thurston covers fairly the issuing of instructions to provinces and republics in July 1937 to arrest and execute a specified number of enemies of the people, tens of thousands in all; and he tells of requests by local authorities for permission to increase the figure, sometimes by as much as eightfold.

But Thurston argues that this type of terror receded early in 1938. He quotes, from the early months of that year, a number of speeches, documents, and instructions calling for more legality. However, he omits the almost simultaneous sending out, on January 31, 1938, of a new set of planned figures for arrests and executions, from Stalin to the local Party authorities (finally increased to thirty thousand for Ukraine) -- just as in July 1937. His idea seems to be that the Terror lasted only a few months in 1937 and died down: operative, as against rhetorical, documents, thus tell the opposite story.

Thurston then argues that the Terror was largely confined to the intellectual and political elites, not much affecting ordinary people. To suggest that the slaughter of the intellectual elite hardly affects a population is anyhow a strange argument. The disappearance of some 1,500 writers surely had its impact on the population as a whole -- if only in replacing comparatively independent voices with a dull pounding of conformity in the whole social background. But in any case the notion of any more than a comparative shortage of victims among the ordinary population is false. In this connection, Thurston raises, but does not pursue, one line of evidence that evidently troubles him -- the lists, with occupations, of those shot in Leningrad in 1937 and 1938. The full text of the six-thousand-odd names of those shot there from August to September 1937 is now available (in Leningradskii Martirolog, No. 1). Taking the first ten and last ten pages, of 148 names, 51 are workers, 40 are peasants, 21 are office workers, 18 are without jobs, 6 are priests, 12 are of other professions.

It should be added that, of another random run of six hundred Leningrad victims, all but 23 were "non-Party" (some of these "former members of the Communist Party" until various dates, others until their arrest). Again, as against Thurston's questioning whether the charges in such cases were political: of the same run of six hundred, all but two were sentenced under Article 58, covering political crime.

IF one is writing about the Terror, it is surely necessary to familiarize oneself with the material. Examples of the contrary abound here. There is a reference to "the unidentified Litvin." M. I. Litvin, one of Yezhov's closest aides, was head of the NKVD's key Secret Political Department from May 1937 to January 1938, when he became NKVD chief in Leningrad. Similarly with E. G. Evdokimov: he is given here as one of those who survived. He didn't: he was shot with the whole Yezhov gang in 1940.

Thurston is even muddled about the fate of Yezhov himself, one of his leading characters. He notes Yezhov as present at a meeting of seniors before the Eighteenth Party Congress in March 1939, and can add only that he was arrested a few days later and, according to various sources, shot for "groundless repression" in July or some other date in 1940. In fact, we have long had the full documentation on his end: he was arrested on April 10, 1939, and shot on February 4, 1940. The accusation included illegal repression, but the main charges were of plotting to assassinate Stalin and of espionage for Britain and other countries.

The author gives much space to Ryutin, and to his famous anti-Stalin platform (describing it rather oddly as "virulent": in fact, given its Marxist - Leninist approach, its characterization of both the man and his dictatorship is hardly to be faulted). But of this major bugbear he can only conclude that, "sent to a labor camp, Ryutin survived until 1937 or 1938." In fact, he had been sent not to a labor camp, but to a "political isolator," and was brought back in the autumn of 1936 with a view to being put on public trial. In November, he signed a statement refusing to confess, and was shot in secret in January 1937, with other leading figures.

Such faults are, moreover, found in broader contexts. Thus, on the execution of Marshal Tukhachevsky and the other generals in June 1937, Thurston suggests, on the basis of vague rumors, that there was indeed a military plot against Stalin, even saying of one of the generals that "Putna was probably guilty of treason." Putna and the others were all fully rehabilitated nearly forty years ago, and more recent publication of interrogation and trial material shows that it was all a fake. In connection with this case, the author devotes several pages to the role of the White emigre General Skoblin, quoting from and approving a contemporary report in the London Times of his wife's trial in France which commented that the allegation that Skoblin himself (who had by now disappeared) was a Soviet agent "was not substantiated." It has always been clear that he was indeed a Soviet agent: and this is now proved (Moscow News, December 22 - 28, 1995). Smuggled out to Spain, he was liquidated surreptitiously, so that his wife might think him still alive -- a deception often practiced in the Soviet Union itself.

At every crux, something goes wrong with either Thurston's facts, or his interpretation, or both. The suicide or murder (officially heart attack) of Grigory Ordzhonikidze in February 1937 is a case in point. Thurston holds that Stalin "would not" have acted against an old and valued ally -- not a good analysis in view of Stalin's record. But we have a number of testimonies to their mutual discontent at this stage, one of which Thurston himself quotes. Even more striking is what Stalin said in his speech to the crucial "February - March" 1937 plenum. Thurston quotes the published version of the speech at length, though even a quarter of a century ago I was able to write of it that it was "believed to differ considerably," chiefly by omission, from what he had actually said. This is now confirmed by the publication of the original text. In this, one major difference is an attack on Ordzhonikidze, which Stalin reverts to twice, blaming him for having kept his contact with his old anti-Stalinist comrade Lominadze secret from the Politburo -- much the same offense as that of some of the 1936 "Trotskyites."

Thurston several times suggests that those who saw, and see, Stalin's hand in inflicting the Terror, and using it to consolidate a totalitarian order, believe him to have been following a "master plan," to have been the "cold master-mind of a plot to subdue the Party and the nation." Not at all: what was clear was that he had an unappeasable drive for power -- a very different thing.

That many people in the Soviet Union afterward called the Terror the Yezhovshchina, and blamed it on Yezhov more than Stalin, is true. But Thurston, making this point, broadens it to the quite different claim that Yezhov may have actually been to some extent the prime mover. For example, he suggests that in the interrogation preceding the execution of Marshal Tukhachevsky and the generals, Stalin saw Yezhov almost daily -- not to instruct him as to what to elicit from the accused (by torture), but to find out what he had "learned" from them!

Similarly, Thurston suggests that "it is possible that occasionally Stalin saw individual confessions." But we know he saw them -- for example, between September 1936 and February 1937, he received sixty protocols of the interrogations of various suspects. Again, a striking document lately published in Moscow (Rossiyskaya Gazeta, January 26, 1996) gives an account by Lev Sheinin, Vyshinsky's deputy and his chief "investigator," of "Specially Important Cases." He describes the Bukharin investigation as taking place under Stalin's "direct control," and writes that Stalin "directly controlled the case in the smallest detail," giving daily instructions to Yezhov and Vyshinsky, and editing all the "documents." Another archival discovery printed with this shows Stalin's changes in the testimony of the accused, including severe editing of Bukharin's final speech before it went into its printed version.

That the author's charity extends to Andrei Vyshinsky is a bad sign and is based on a similar confusion. He argues that Vyshinsky restored legal norms and forms, insisting on trials, with evidence, as against his rival Krylenko's notions of uninhibited revolutionary justice. This is merely to repeat Vyshinsky's own argument at the time. It simply confuses form with substance. Vyshinsky did not advance the rule of law: he regularized the application of terror. Stalin was always much concerned with forms and appearances, as with the "most democratic constitution in the world," initiated in 1937, and "elections" conducted with mass meetings and mass polling (even though with only one candidate).

Vyshinsky's legalism did not extend to querying a request in February 1939 by Beria to sanction the arrests of Politburo members Postyshev and Chubar, who had actually been in custody since February 1938 and July 1938 respectively. But a mass of evidence has been published over the past forty years to show that Vyshinsky played a vicious role as a knowing accomplice in judicial murder. He is referred to several times in the trial documents published over the late Soviet years in the Izvestia of the Central Committee, for example back-dating testimony, rewriting the reports of expert committees, and in general abetting falsifications. In addition, he formed, with Yezhov, a "dvoika" which sentenced hundreds without trials or hearings. He is also quoted time and again as ordering harsh treatment in a mass of minor cases.

The use of torture Thurston neither denies nor palliates. He does, however, suggest that "another indication that the NKVD did not always fabricate evidence is that physical intimidation was far from universal, even at the peak of the Terror." He cites a few cases, including Alexander Weissberg (who was in fact beaten as well as being subjected to interrogation without sleep for periods of up to a week -- which he describes as "physical torture" and the pain as "excruciating").

In any case, Thurston holds that torture virtually ceased when Beria took over the NKVD late in 1938. This involves him in casting doubt on Stalin's January 1939 telegram insisting on its continued use. And, presumably, on the scores of accounts of torture employed on such prisoners as Meyerhold, continuing throughout the 1940s and 1950s, and culminating in the anti-Semitic cases of 1952 and 1953. It is true that fewer people were tortured, and that the frenzy of 1937 - 38 had eased off into routine. But when Thurston calls his post-Yezhov chapter "The Terror Ends," a more judicious way of putting it would be "The Superterror Ends: Normal Terror Resumes." More people were sent to the Gulag, and it had a larger population, in 1940 than in 1938. As to sheer general cruelty to innocent victims, we only have to read such memoirs as those of Anna Larina, Bukharin's recently deceased widow.

THUS our confidence is already shaken by the time we reach the book's main theme -- that the Terror had no great effect on the population as a whole, and that what effect it had was not lasting. These are more intangible matters.

The author holds that in the first phase of the Terror, ordinary people saw it merely as a struggle within the ruling party, which was of little concern to them; but also, inconsistently, that they also believed that a threat to the country had been exposed. In answering the broader question, Thurston relies on a number of quotations, mainly from memoirs. It is to his credit that he cites the classic first-hand accounts of Nadezhda Mandelstam, Weissberg, Berger, and others. Such records can be valuable if treated critically. They certainly show, what has never been doubted, that there was a stratum, mainly of younger beneficiaries of the regime, whose mentalities had been adjusted to seeing no evil, hearing no evil, and speaking no evil. They are more likely to have been members of the "New Class" than "ordinary" workers, peasants, or others, and, of course, survivors rather than victims. The ones he quotes show, he argues, that fear was not pervasive, and had little long-term effect. Sometimes his own evidence seems to tell rather against than for this view, as when one of his sources says that everyone he knew was frightened, though he himself was too young and indoctrinated to feel that way. Moreover, the author's selection of testimony is elsewhere highly problematical, as when he cites accounts of Poles welcoming the German invasion of 1939 -- which, if true at all, are quite evidently unrepresentative of the whole.

Thurston also points out, truly but irrelevantly, that, while criticism of the leadership was absolutely unthinkable, people were allowed, even incited, to speak up against junior officials -- though when he extends this to "even members of the Central Committee," he gives an infelicitous example: workers are quoted in early 1938 as speaking up quite sharply about Central Committee member K. V. Ryndin. But the latter was shot early in February, and so must already have been a sitting target (and the story was told to regale the CC Plenum some weeks later!). It was always possible to discuss local or individual problems. What was out of the question was to signify any doubts about the regime's alleged triumphs or the policies or ideology of the state.

Thurston faults earlier writers on the Terror for not mentioning the simple pleasures still available to and engaged in by the population. We must all have historical works on our shelves which contain no mention of meals, but we assume that does not mean that the authors thought their characters went unfed. I suppose that even my own books implicitly convey that sexual intercourse did not cease, for even my "low" population-growth figures at least mean a minimum of several million copulations in 1937 - 38. But Thurston certainly does make it appear that we were wrong to take such matters for granted.

A clear sign of the purge penetrating the whole population is the fact that after arrests not only were there condemnatory mass meetings at the place of work, but children were required to denounce their parents publicly at school sessions; we have records of such meetings, replete with lengthy imputations against the whole family from the self-righteous leaders of the local Pioneers or Komsomol, which turn one's stomach to read even now.

ONE could read much of the material Thurston quotes and come to conclusions quite different from his. Indeed, there is something rather disarming in the author's frequent presenting of facts showing how inhuman the Terror was, sometimes even giving striking evidence against Stalin himself, and then arguing the opposite. Similarly, the individual accounts he presents as proof that the population as a whole was not deeply affected are often mixed in with material suggesting the contrary. He himself seems to be contradicting his own thesis, as when he speaks of "a society that had gone half mad." But he does not draw what would seem to be the necessary conclusion. Nor does he seem to understand that intense fear may be accompanied by submission, even denial.

It is certainly difficult for a Westerner to put himself in the place of a Soviet citizen. But it was an Englishman, who knew it all only by report, who introduced the word "doublethink" into our language. It was, he saw, possible simultaneously both to believe and to disbelieve, to accept and to resent. It was a matter not only of terror in the ordinary sense, but also of the absence of any voice but that of the state -- pervasive, fortissimo, howling for blood. Nowadays, Russians often say how strange it was that Orwell understood where Western academics often failed: or (as one put it), "how much they know, how little they understand" -- though it is clear that, in the case of some revisionists, knowledge as well as understanding is often defective.

In a sense, the author's data, by their very contradictions, reflect the profound distortion of mind that was central to the whole experience. The disjunction and its accompanying contradictions were due to the combination on the state's part of mass repression and sanctimoniousness, of the attempt simultaneously to inflict terror and to deny its existence. A lot of reading has gone into this book, and, together with errors, omissions, and misunderstandings, some interesting material has emerged. One symptom of galloping academitis is that earnest hard work, apparatuses of notes, and so forth are held to be sufficient proof of scholarship.

A final chapter gives us the "Acid Test" -- the war in which Russian troops fought stoutly, after a few disasters. They did indeed. But as Stalin said to Harriman, they were fighting for Russia rather than for the regime. Vasily Grossman, like Pasternak, tells of soldiers who hope that their struggle will mean liberty from both despotisms.

Fighting well -- the Germans fought well too -- is thus not in itself a proof of "loyalty" to the Stalin regime, as Thurston suggests: though again, to be fair, he also cites a colonel who puts forward the Grossman - Pasternak view. But it seems that since either Hitler or Stalin was bound to win, one of them was bound to be validated.

On the other side of the coin, this was the first war in which a number of Russians joined the enemy. A recent article notes 1 Soviet lieutenant-general, 6 major-generals, 42 colonels, and so on, serving with the Germans (and totals of all ranks of about 630,000). Imagine that criterion applied to others -- Poles, for example. Nor had anything like it happened in Russia's earlier history. And Thurston rather neglects, or writes off, the large anti-Soviet guerrilla forces in Ukraine, which (as Khrushchev said) fought against both Hitler and Stalin.

The conclusion seems to be that Russian (rather than Soviet) patriotism was usually the deciding factor, even if it meant accepting Stalin, but that hatred of the regime could often destroy even that. Here again the author does not exactly disagree with the facts, but omits them from his generalized point.

All the above may appear as using a steam hammer to crack a nut, but the author has gravitated to, and been adopted by, a fairly well-dug-in, and often tenured, sect; and his book is published by a reputable press -- though I am understandably asked to differentiate it from the Yale research series on the USSR, which prints serious documentation.