The Great Terror: A Reassessment

In late 1918 Schumpeter, (quoted in “Prophet of Innovation” – McCraw) discussed the Bolshevik triumph in Russia with his companions: ‘Marxism would have a practical test’. “Weber replied that the result was likely to be catastrophic, because the Bolsheviks were so brutal”. No one offered any disagreement, and Weber, after more discussion, posited: “A laboratory heaped with human corpses!” (pg. 94).Precisely. Lenin, and then Stalin produced exactly that outcome. Followed by Mao, Pol Pot, and the Kims. Those Communist dictators (and there are no Communist rulers who are not dictators) who haven’t managed to murder most of their population are doing their best to drive them to, or keep them in poverty. Communism is a failure everywhere and every time it has been ‘enforced’ (it would not exist without ‘enforcement’).Conquest does a good job on a difficult subject, but even with his efforts, this is not an easy read. We are treated, on turning nearly every page, with sub-human viciousness, not to say bestiality, which pretty much defines the ‘experiments’ in Communist systems, whether they are attempted in Eur-Asia, the Far East, or the West; every one of them becomes a murder factory to some extent.Tony Judt, who is nobody’s idea of a “capitalist tool”, states in “Post War” (pg 561): “In light of twentieth-century history the state was beginning to look less like a solution than the problems, and not only or even primarily for economic reasons. What begins with centralized planning ends with centralized killing”. Just so; there has yet to be a counter example. The twenty-first century Communists have proven to be, in percentage, as deadly or worse.I did find it surprising that, early on, there existed some slight opposition to Stalin and that Stalin spent even a minute of his time making any attempt at all to provide some scintilla of legal justification for his mass-murders. But it quickly becomes clear that the opposition promptly ‘disappeared’ and whatever legal strictures were supposed to limit such murderous thuggery were then either ignored or changed by fiat. Any fantasy of a civilized USSR government is shown to be just that: A fantasy. My surprise is itself not surprising; such opposition was fleeting; worthless in the general murderous progression.Conquest guides us through the entire outrageous process, from scurrilous ‘accusation’, through arrest, then what is claimed to be ‘trial’, often enough resulting in an immediate bullet to the head. If you were ‘fortunate’ enough, you are jailed but with a good chance of a slow death there of starvation or thuggery. Or perhaps sent to the camps where you had a good chance of dying in transport, only to arrive and find circumstances as likely to kill you at your destination. Again, like the accusation and arrest, the cause of your death was as random, but much more likely, as getting hit by lightning; a huge number more died in the Terror than ever died by lightning. And a shot to the head may well have been the most humane result; I’ll admit to skimming over some of the descriptions of torture.Chapter 12, “The Great Trial”, should be an embarrassment not only to those in the West who were on-site observers, but to those who read such blatant nonsense and continued to fantasize that Communism was (and is) something other than the murderous thuggery it has always been; Stalin “won” the PR campaign because the “useful idiots” were only too happy to lie to themselves and others.There is no lack of reliable literature on the subject: Pipes – “The Russian Revolution”, and “Russia Under the Bolshevik Regime”, Applebaum – “Gulag: A History”. Even that apologist Figes - “A People's Tragedy: The Russian Revolution: 1891-1924”. And many, many more. Most all are authoritative, all are well supplied with footnotes and bibliographies but we still find pathetic apologists, hoping to salvage some gloss of decency for the horror of Communism, often claiming Conquest’s victim counts are wrong, and they do so by citing ‘new’ data, as if being ‘new’ were to automatically make it more accurate than what Conquest cites.It doesn’t. There is no reason to believe the ‘new’ numbers haven’t been equally fudged by other apologists, and the whole attempt stinks to high heaven: It’s as if, by citing some ‘new’ account claiming Hitler only directly murdered 5 million innocent people rather than 6 million, he is somehow less of a monster.We are lead through the final rounds of the horror, some bureaus purged several times over, until the incoming managers must have known that they were handed their death warrants; foreigners murdered in Russia, Russians murdered in foreign countries, the youth league terrorized into a ‘Stalinjugend’ (sic), until even Stalin realizes the inefficiency of it, never finding the least concern for the brutality of it. ‘The banality of evil’ was rarely so evidentConquest spends a good bit of the last chapter discussing the apologists of the time and attempting to explain the (sometimes admitted) denial of plain and obvious facts; he is far more generous than, for instance, those exposing Hitler’s supporters would be. The fantasies and lies of the Webbs, J-P.Sarte, Davies, Owen Lattimore, GBS, Durante, the French Communist press and more get a look lacking in deserved acrimony.The last several pages make it clear that Stalin’s bestiality were built into Communism from the start, and the attempts to ‘de-Stalinize’ while still being the USSR could only be cosmetic.Even now, well into the twenty-first century, you’re left wondering how long it will take for Russia to somehow outgrow that horrible, maiming disease it suffered for more than 70 years.A difficult but worthwhile read.

Great Book! A difficult read at first, but great info.

Someone once told me, the one thing you can learn from history is that no one learns from history. The eternal question as to why this is so hangs in the thick fog of today's international political scene more ominously than ever. Conquest's research documents and substantiates how the Stalinistas reign of mass murder not only predated the holocaust by decades, but actually eclipsed the holocaust in total number of victims of purges and genocide that even today is glossed over by the intelligentsia.

Psychopathy is usually analyzed as an individual psychological phenomenon. The term describes individuals without conscience, with shallow emotions, who are able to impersonate fully developed human beings and mimic feelings of love, caring and other-regarding impulses to fulfill their deviant goals: be that stealing your money, stealing your heart or both. This phenomenon becomes all the more toxic, and dangerous, when such individuals rise to national power and manage to create totalitarian regimes ruled by mind-control, deception, lack of individual and collective rights and freedoms, and arbitrary displays of power.Psychopathic, or at least seriously disordered rulers, such as Hitler, Stalin, Mao and Ceausescu show what happens when (their) pathology spreads to a whole country. Given that psychopaths are estimated to be, at most, only 4 percent of the population, it's difficult to imagine how they manage to rise to positions of authority over more or less normal human beings to impose a social pathology in every social sphere: from education, to the police force, to the juridical system, to the media. Few books explain this strange and extremely dangerous political and psychological phenomenon better than Robert Conquest`s classic, The Great Terror. This book traces both Stalin's rise to power within the ranks of the Bolsheviks and, concurrently, the spreading of the totalitarian system like a fatal virus throughout Soviet society (and beyond).The book also exposes the underlying lack of principles even among seemingly ideological rulers like Joseph Stalin. When it suited his purposes, Stalin strategically oscillated siding with the left wing of the communist party (Trotsky, Kamenev and Zimonev) or the right of the Bolshevik party (Bukharin, Rykov and Tomsky), turning each side against the other, to weaken them both and consolidate his own power. He surrounded himself with equally ruthless, unprincipled and sadistic individuals who did his dirty work-Yakov, Yagoda and Beria-placing them in positions of power in the NKVD, or Secret Police.Stalin engaged in arbitrary displays of power, sending tens of millions of people to their deaths in prison or labor camps. Even his army leaders weren't spared. In a very poor strategic move that showed he cared more about acquiring total control than about his country's victory, Stalin decimated the ranks of his army elite right before the war against Hitler, when the Soviet Union would have needed them most. Nobody was safe from the gulag; nobody could maintain ideological purity. Anybody could be accused of deviationism from communist principles at any time.Totalitarianism is a pathological system imposed upon an entire country or area. Like a disease, it spreads through the healthy aspects of society. It conditions even ordinary human beings, through the inculcation of fear and through brainwashing, to lose their conscience, their empathy and their humanity. Robert Conquest's The Great Terror is a testament to human corruptibility. This magnificent book will continue to remain historically relevant for as long as we allow disordered individuals to have power over us, our families and our social institutions.Claudia Moscovici, psychopathyawareness

This is a seminal read for anybody interested in what the Soviet Union was like under Stalin and how he managed to develop absolute power in a nation of 130 million people. The justification was the Russian Revolution which promulgated an ideology that the state was always right and any 'deviationist' should be punished or eliminated. The real motive was to eliminate anybody who challenged him. The legacy continues under Putin and explains why palpable untruths continue to keep the populace quiescent. There are parallels in Hitler's Germany , Mao and President Xi in China, North Korea, Afghanistan and Iran.This was the first exposé of the purges and its consequence and is this over encumbered with detail - then necessary to prove the point - but you can skip most of this.

Horrible scary era, Yuk

One of the finest books on the subject. A work of great scholarship.

A must-read for anyone with even a cursory interest in politics or history.

a truly staggering account of the horrors of Stalin's orchestrated vendetta against each and everyone who he either took exception too or were no longer considered 150% loyal. Whether the number of victims of the various purges is entirely accurate, as some people have questioned, is beside the point; the fact remains that countless men women and children were shot or sent to die in camps. The sheer scale of the cruelty and the injustice is horrendous. Most people know of the horrors of Auschwitz but comparatively few are equally aware of what went on at the Kolyma camps and elsewhere in the Soviet wilderness. The reign of terror that Stalin created was as evil as Hitler's Reich and longer lasting