The Great Terror: A Reassessment

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

For us, there has vanished and the family is sickly. More and more, the small closed community means the professions, the interest groups, and the academic disciplines. Common sense suggested that a lot of people were killed in Stalin's terror, or that the Soviet Union of Brezhnev still did not look like a "pluralist" system with "extensive political participation." But within the field the field of Soviet studies, with its wider sources, its special methods, its refinements, and its distinctive ingroup psychology, we were unable to enunciate these truths clearly or, if we did, we paid the prices Conquest paid. Likewise the concept "sexual harassment" seems to common sense to lump together actions of unequal seriousness, but to the "women's movement" it is a closed matter. Affirmative action looks a bit dubious to common sense, but obviously right to the "civilrights community." To the "arts community" it is obvious that any obscene self-exhibition is art and deserves public funding, and so on.

Thus, there is an intrinsic compatibility between specialization and the agenda of the Left, which sees society as a mosaic of minorities, each exacting from the public the tribute due: that its particular obsession of jargon pass unreviewed by some wider American or Western or human awareness. And, since the New Deal, the word "expert" has been essentially synonymous in America with "Democrat." Finally, the political defeat of the New Left, from McGovern to Reagan, forced its retreat into the ivory fortresses of the universities and the boggy fastness of the mainline churches. From here the Left has now embarked on a new offensive under banner such as multiculturalism, post-modernism, and deconstructionism.

In our time it is only a few rare human beings like Robert Conquest who defy the iron law of specialization. What will become of his lifework now? For the rest his lifetime, he can rightly feel a sense of triumph. With the revelations of glasnost, almost everything Conquest wrote about the terror has been confirmed, and his work has become popular in Russia. It is his old critics who are now embarrassed and out of tune with the times, and the verdict of Russian opinion will react in turn on the Western field of Soviet studies. Sadly, the world judges by success, and the excuses Western scholars made for Communism will not long survive the collapse of Communism. For those of us who feel the need to rethink the meaning of the twentieth-century totalitarian experience, Conquest's works will offer an enormous resource and a direction to pursue.

But for the remoter future, isn't all this purely academic? Totalitarianism in its twentieth-century form is clearly doomed, and Stalin may become what Attila and Genghis Khan have become: a joke. The Gulag will turn into Hogan's Heroes.

This outcome would be regrettable. It presupposes that the possibility of totalitarianism is excluded in the future. To assume this is to forget that totalitarianism is that curious double of modern democratic civilization, the secret sharer in our normal life.