The Great Terror: A Reassessment

National Review, Feb 17, 1992 by Charles H. Fairbanks, Jr.

I USED to challenge my students to identify the following words: "It's probable that, as regards religion, we are about to enter an era of tolerance. Everybody will be allowed to seek his own salvation in the way that suits him best . . . We are entering into a conception of the world that will be a sunny era, an era of tolerance. Man must be put in a position to develop freely the talents that God has given him." The answers were all over the map - from Jimmy Carter to Eleanor Roosevelt - and there was some consternation when I revealed the author was Adolf Hitler. I used this example to show the peculiarly confusing or disorienting character of modern politics, the difficulty of drawing clear lines between systems that, in hindsight, appear utterly different.

Our century will be forever remembered in history as the century of totalitarianism, which came to power out of World War I and is now collapsing with the end of the century. The horrors that distinguished earlier centuries - the Mongol invasions, the black death - were easy to recognize, but ours were not. Communism and Fascism had not only millions of sympathizers and apologists, they gained from the tolerance of establishment figures like Secretary of State Cyrus Vance, who said that "Leonid Brezhnev is a man who shares our dreams and aspirations." Totalitarianism kept fading from view and reappearing, and this was no accident.All the ideas of totallitarianism originated in the West; socialism and nationalism were, in various Western countries, the very definitions of respectability.

On a mission to the government of Nicaragua in 1983, I was struck to find that the head of the North American department of the Sandinista movement had been a graduate student at Yale just when I taught there. Conversation revealed him as a typical Third World student of typical Western doctrines - Marxism, the dependencia theory, the arms race - good-natured, confused, harmless. But put hundreds like him together with a few fanatic killers like Thomas Borge and you have a complete totalitarian regime, ready to begin the "resettlement" of minorities. Likewise the gentle and idealistic Mensheviks created an atmosphere in Russia and abroad where the serious and conscientious people were those who respected the ideas later carried by Stalin to murderous extremity. The dignified German conservatives who were anti-Semitic out of snobbery or tradition turned out to clear the way for Hitler.

In fact, totalitarianism is the product not only of what is worst in us, but of what is best in us: of idealism, commitment, loyalty, hope. It was hard to recognize, hard to respond to, hard to fight because it was in some way a mysterious double of Western civilization, a kind of secret sharer.

Now that totalitarianism in its twentieth-century form is expiring, we owe a special debt to those who helped us to distinguish it as something different and frightful when doing so was still unpopular. Robert Conquest is one of those rare human beings. The publication of his long-anticipated biography of Stalin, and of the revised, paperback edition of his classic The Great Terror, is a good opportunity to assess his lifework.

Conquest's more than twenty books related to Soviet totalitarianism cover an enormous range of specific topics. Politburo politics, literary policy, the nationalities, the Soviet future, the terror, Lenin, and the differences between "despotic" and "civic" culture are only some of the Soviet issues he covered. Throughout his writings, Conquest grasps the suffering of ordinary people with the imagination of a poet and the endless contention of powerful men with the weary recognition of someone who knows its from the inside. Unlike many of our scholars, Conquest is worldly.

Apart from a graceful, unpretentious style and an astounding range of historical reference, Conquest has a gift for the telling fact and the phrase that brings it decisively to our awareness. In the new Stalin biography, for instance, we read that "On 12 December 1937 alone, Stalin and Molotov approved 3,167 death sentences, and then went to the cinema." Lysenkoism (the crank genetics of Stalin's court biologist) appealed because it "promised the submission of the plant world to the orders of the Party."

Unlike his massive The Great Terror, Conquest's new book, shorn of most scholarly apparatus, is one of the shortest biographies of Stalin. Yet it may be one of the most interesting. It of course uses the glasnost evidence unavailable to Ulam or Souvarine, although readers fascinated by Stalin may crave all the hidden archives dug out by General Dmitri Volkogonov in his four-volume biography and used sparingly by Conquest.

In Stalin: Breaker of Nations "the character of Stalin," writes Conquest, "has been displayed rather than dissected." The picture that emerges is of a Stalin who was "psychologically abnormal. . . . [H]e was by nature cruel." He differed from other despots, though (and this is perhaps Conquest's most brilliant insight), in ruling