Shane Tomashot
Stalinist Terror: New Perspectives
J. Arch
Getty and Roberta T. Manning set out to reevaluate the era of the Stalinist
Terror in their edited book Stalinist Terror: New Perspectives. Drawing from archives that were opened just
prior to the tome’s printing in 1993, the scholars in this collection raise
“questions about how much the terror was fueled from above or below, the
efficiency or inefficiency of the state in this process, and the relative
influence of state and society” (p. 14).
Although these scholars have some trepidation about being labeled as
“revisionist historians,” they present evidence that challenges the often
widely accepted notions by authors such as Conquest and Medvedev that Stalin
was “an omniscient and omnipotent demon” who orchestrated every fine detail of
the Terror of the late 1930’s (p. 62).
Overall, the essays seek the source of the Terror, analyzing both social
and state characteristics in an effort to determine whether or not the Terror
was a result of the state vs. society or society vs. itself.
The opening
two chapters provide background and state official character analysis for the
overall state/society debate. Starkov,
in the first chapter, analyzes the role of Narkom Ezhov, Stalin’s top state
security official for much of the 1930’s.
Starkov contends that Ezhov played a key role in driving the Terror in
his efforts to maintain his own power as well as please Stalin. Ezhov created conspiracies and took great
care in informing Stalin of the so-called conspiracies. “Ezhov,” Starkov argues, “bears great
personal responsibility for the destruction of legality for the falsification
of investigative cases” (p. 29). This
finding directly challenges previous notions among Stalinist era scholars that
Stalin himself orchestrated the Terror and micro-managed its implementation. Archival correspondence between Stalin and
Ezhov indicate that Stalin actually became concerned that there were too many
expulsions.
Soviet
society by the mid 1930’s existed in an “atmosphere of contradictory
initiatives” (p. 54). As Getty
indicates, although Stalin was cruel, there was no “careful plan of terror,”
nor was Stalin “a master planner (p. 59, 62).
Some central authority officials were expelled from the party “for being
too fierce” in hunting for so called enemies of the state. Viola’s essay contends that the defining of
the Kulak class itself took on different dynamics in various villages, leading
some villages to get carried away in accusing and expelling one another. Many peasants simply sought revenge for past
wrongs committed by various village members, thus labeling them kulaks. The People’s Commissariat of Justice actually
“condemned the dekulakization of middle peasants in the Central Black Earth
Region” (p. 73).
Rittersporn,
Manning and Thurston argue that Communist Party practices and the
dekulakization propaganda campaign drove the citizenry to actively seek out the
enemy within. Manning contends that this
was exacerbated by the poor economy.
Because the central authority set nearly impossible production quotas for
the country side, regional leaders as well as local peasants sought people to
blame and accuse of “wrecking.”
Rittersporn claims state policies brought out deep-rooted animosities
amongst peasants in various villages.
The masses were often suspicious of office-holding bureaucrats as well
as next door neighbors. Thurston
contends Stakhanovism further divided society and played into the hysteria of
finding the enemy of the state within society.
Workers, jealous over the hard work of another worker, would often turn
in superiors and each other to state authorities.
The third
part of the book is a set of case studies investigating The Great Terror at the
local level in Moscow factories, in a rural district and the purge of the Red
Army. Hoffmann finds that the central
government was the catalyst in instigating the purges of Moscow’s factories in
the mid to late 1930’s. A top secret
letter sent to local party officials led to a cascade of accusations amongst
local industry managers who were subsequently purged and replaced, typically by
Stakhanovites and “newly educated specialists” (p. 167). Hoffmann also indicates that many of those
who were purged had Jewish names, indicating a tinge of “anti-Semitism fueling
the purges” (p. 166). The result of
these purges led to a decrease in labor discipline as well as a decline in
industrial production.
Manning
takes a bottom to the top approach, investigating the impact of the purges in
the rural Belyi Raion. Numerous
Communist managers were arrested and executed for “wrecking” in late 1937. Dozens more Communists and non-Communists
alike were also arrested, tortured, and/or executed within the region during
the purges of the late 1930’s. Manning
believes that this increase in executions and witch hunts was a product of
external issues that “created a tense political culture” (p. 196). The already tenuous political, social and
economic climate was exacerbated by German expansion in Europe as well as
Japanese expansion on Russia’s far eastern frontier. These issues made organizations such as the
NKVD work more diligently to find “enemies within,” real of not.
Reese
challenges previous accounts of the Red Army purge, arguing that officers were
not arrested and executed at the high amounts most often quoted by
historians. His numbers show “a more
limited impact on the military than previously thought” (p. 199). Red Army purges (chistki) typically removed a
military leader from the party, but not from the army itself. Moreover, after 1938, Reese contends that
“repression within the military was virtually negligible” (p. 213).
The fourth
and final section of the book takes an overall look at the purges and Stalinist
repression. Getty and Chase investigate
the repression of Soviet elite. They
contend the high-ranking party members who joined between the years 1912-1920
“were the most vulnerable to repression” since they held key political
positions by 1936 (p. 244). Old
Bolsheviks and Intelligentsia, however, were not targets of the purges as is
commonly believed. Fitzpatrick uses a
novel quantitative approach by utilizing Soviet Moscow phone books from 1937-38
to challenge the purge numbers of Conquest and Solzhenitsyn. Among other intriguing findings, she finds
that “senior NKTP officials were a highly vulnerable group in the Great Purges”
as were party officials and leaders in general (p. 256). Nove’s essay also takes a quantitative
approach to determine the actual number of disappearances during the
purges. He finds numbers well below the
estimates of previous Cold War Soviet researchers. In this same vein, Wheatcroft analyzes the
Gulag system population, finding that it was roughly “4 to 5 million” by the
late 1930’s, much lower than previous estimates (p. 290).
These
essays are a valuable contribution to the study of Soviet society during the
Stalinist era, especially during the Great Purges. Overall, the authors convey a theme that
Communist central officials gave orders of repression from the top. These orders were taken to the extreme by the
population and regional officials.
Moreover, these orders met an unfortunately perfect storm of
circumstances with famines in the early 1930’s, a harsh economic climate and
foreign scares by the late 1930’s.
Central official warnings of “an enemy within” played into long held
fears and animosity amongst the peasantry and working classes, leading to
numerous atrocities. These atrocities,
however, have been exaggerated over the course of time. These essays display the atrociousness of
Stalin’s Purges, but add specificity and accuracy to the numbers of victims in
the context of the time.
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