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

National Review, July 15, 1996 by Robert Conquest

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.