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Certainty, Probability, and Stalin's Great Party Purge

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Certainty, Probability, and Stalin's Great Party Purge McNair Scholars Journal Volume 8 | Issue 1 Article 3 2004 Certainty, Probability, and Stalin’s Great Party Purge Brett omkH es Grand Valley State University Follow this and additional works at: http://scholarworks.gvsu.edu/mcnair Recommended Citation Homkes, Brett (2004) C" ertainty, Probability, and Stalin’s Great Party Purge," McNair Scholars Journal: Vol. 8: Iss. 1, Article 3. Available at: http://scholarworks.gvsu.edu/mcnair/vol8/iss1/3 Copyright © 2004 by the authors. McNair Scholars Journal is reproduced electronically by ScholarWorks@GVSU. http://scholarworks.gvsu.edu/ mcnair?utm_source=scholarworks.gvsu.edu%2Fmcnair%2Fvol8%2Fiss1%2F3&utm_medium=PDF&utm_campaign=PDFCoverPages Certainty, Probability, and Stalin’s Great Party Purge ABSTRACT In 1936, Josef Stalin, General Secretary In 1935, Stalin decided to purge his own of the Communist Party of the Soviet party to consolidate power in the Soviet Union [CPSU], initiated a Party Purge, government. Since the inception of historical the extent of which, measured by the research about this event, a debate has numbers of deaths and arrests of Party developed regarding the number of arrests members and their affiliates, has proved and deaths of Soviets ordered by Stalin. This to be highly controversial. A long- study will examine the figures calculated simmering historical debate about this by Western historians to determine where issue surprisingly deepened after the fall correlation and discrepancy exist. The of the Soviet Union brought about the importance of this research is to assess partial opening of government archives the reasons why such dramatic statistical that many thought would answer all differences exist among various historians. questions. Part of the problem is that the The historians’ sources show the difficulty of numbers have ideological significance: determining accurate figures because of the for example, the lower the figures, secretive nature of the Soviet government the more “normal” the USSR appears, and only partial opening of Soviet archives. making it possible that it could have become a social democracy on the welfare state model. Conversely, the Brett Homkes higher the figures, the more “surreal” McNair Scholar the whole Soviet experience seems, making it virtually impossible to believe that it could have mutated into anything that would have prevented ultimate catastrophe. The most influential participants in the “purge debate” are J. Arch Getty and Robert Conquest. Getty’s numbers of deaths and arrests are low in comparison to Conquest’s vastly higher figures. Much has been made of Getty’s “revisionism” and Conquest has been pilloried as a “Cold Warrior,” but a study of the sources used by these two historians better explains how they arrived at their conclusions than do their politics and the rhetoric of their friends and enemies. In the late 1980s, when Mikhail Gorbachev’s policy of glasnost began the long-anticipated opening of the state archives, the dispute about the Soviet Union’s capacity to develop into a “normal” social democracy gained a new intensity. One of the key questions was, Edward Cole, Ph.D. and remains, the extent of the actual Faculty Mentor human cost of Soviet socialism. Basically, it was a question of scale. Many believed that the archives possessed the necessary evidence to settle this matter once and for all. GVSU McNair Scholars Journal VOLUME 8, 2004 13 The question of the extent of the the revisionist task was a body count people within and without the Party terror that Stalin’s Communist Party low enough to suggest the credibility of counter-revolutionary crimes. The unleashed upon the Soviet people of a Soviet Union on the road to height of the Purge was from 1937 to became a battleground for historians. social democracy. 1938 when most of the Old Bolsheviks, Those who believed that the USSR was The Party Purge was not the first Lenin’s closest associates at the time in the midst of evolving into a social episode of terror within the Soviet of the Revolution, were subjected democracy downplayed the harsh Union. Beginning with the severe to humiliating show trials ending in traits and ideology of Stalin’s regime. policy of War Communism under executions and long sentences to the These historians argued in favor of a Lenin, and continuing with Stalin’s growing prison camp system. paradigm centered on “grass roots” forced collectivization and mass After the fall of the Soviet Union mechanisms of modernization such as industrialization, the Soviet people had and the partial opening of the archives, upward social mobility coupled with already experienced extensive pain and Conquest and Getty both focused the problems of mass industrialization death at the hands of the Bolsheviks. their research on the Stalinist era, within a ten-year period. But the great Party Purge was unique specifically on the Purge. The most The problem of the human cost of because it was the first time that the notable difference between the two socialism encompasses many subjects, target had shifted to the Party itself. historians’ respective works is the scale such as forced collectivization and As a means to further solidify his of their respective totals of arrests, slave labor, but the Party Purge of the own power, Stalin used the December camp populations, camp deaths, and late 1930s remains the emblematic 1, 1934 assassination of Kirov, the executions within the Soviet Union from focal point. Once seen by traditional Leningrad Party chief, as an excuse 1936 to 1938. scholars as “totalitarian,” in the hands to begin the cleansing. The project of revisionists, who began collecting slowly gained momentum as the NKVD evidence to discredit “the t-word,” the fabricated accusations of Trotskyite Purge took on a new look. Essential to and Zinovien conspiracies, charging Figure 1. Comparison of J. Arch Getty and Robert Conquest’s arrests, camp population, camp deaths, and executions for 1936–1938 Party Purge of the Soviet Union 8 7.5 7 6.5 6 5.5 5 Getty 4.5 Conquest 4 3.5 3 2.5 2 1.5 1 0.5 0 Arrest Camp pop. Camp deaths Executions 14 Certainty, Probability, and Stalin’s Great Party Purge Robert Conquest, who was born people remained in prison throughout say that Memorial’s agenda promotes July 15, 1917, attended Winchester 1938, and roughly eight million people higher figures of deaths and arrests in College, Grenoble, and Magdalen were confined in the system of NKVD order to demonize Stalin. College, Oxford. Conquest joined the labor camps administered by an organ Forensic work also uncovered mass Communist Party in 1937 and fought in now known simply as the Gulag. graves within the former Soviet Union. the British light infantry during World Conquest uses interviews with former In an article titled, “Unearthing the War II. After the war ended, Conquest inmates of the Gulag system as one of Great Terror,” Conquest says about left the Communist Party and joined the his main sources. The transcripts of the graves: “Revisionists’ estimates for Foreign Office, where he remained until these interviews are difficult to obtain the whole USSR could be tucked into 1956. He is the author of seventeen because Conquest fails to document a single corner of…one gravesite of a books on Soviet history and politics. His where they can be found. Nonetheless, single minor republican capital.”4 For best-known work, The Great Terror, was independent interviews with former evidence that Byelorussian executions published in 1968 and then again in Gulag inmates completed by the United numbered somewhere between 250,000 1990, in a revised edition.1 States Congress in 1970 confirm and 300,000, Conquest relies on several In The Great Terror, Conquest Conquest’s numbers. articles written about Soviet mass graves. attempts to explain Stalin’s motives and Conquest also relies on several Of course, owing to the impossibility methods as he began the Party Purge. newspaper and magazine articles from of exhuming all of the many suspected Regrettably, during the 1960s, when the Soviet Union and present-day modern mass burial mounds in the Conquest was researching his book, Russia. These sources include Russian Byelorussian region, these totals are the Soviet Union was a closed society, newspapers: Yunost’, Agitator, Moscow difficult to confirm. or in other words, was unwilling to News, and Sotsialisticheskaia Industriia. One of Conquest’s more unique share information with the international Although these papers and periodicals sources is the Japanese Navy’s record of community concerning certain events are not readily available in the United ships entering and leaving the enormous that had taken place within its borders. States, I was able to find two articles Kolyma camp region dedicated chiefly Although much had been learned from from Moscow News that Conquest uses: to mining gold in the Arctic wilderness Nikita Khrushchev’s famous 1956 XX one dated week number eighteen of of northeastern Siberia. While Kolyma Party Congress “Secret Speech” and 1988 and the other week forty-eight of was in operation, the only way to from the campaign of “de-Stalinization” 1988. From the week eighteen article, receive goods or export gold was for that followed, to estimate the true Conquest uses the number of executions Soviet ships to pass through Japanese scale of the Purge Conquest really had within Uzbekistan, approximately forty waters. The Japanese routinely stopped no choice but to turn to alternative thousand, to extrapolate figures for the these vessels to perform customs sources of information. However, the entire Soviet Union.2 Conquest also uses searches, thus recording estimates of rapid decline of the Soviet Union after the article of week forty-eight, written the populations of workers’ camps and Mikhail Gorbachev took power in 1985 by Roy Medvedev, a famous dissident the amount of gold Soviet prisons were opened up many sources of information who estimates that the number of Purge producing.
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