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J. ARCH GETTY and WILLIAM CHASE (Chestnut Hill, Mass., U.S.A.)

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J. ARCH GETTY and WILLIAM CHASE (Chestnut Hill, Mass., U.S.A.) J. ARCH GETTY and WILLIAM CHASE (Chestnut Hill, Mass., U.S.A.) The Moscow Party Elite of 1917 in the Great Purges All of the current interpretations of the Great Purge of the thirties in Soviet Russia are, for better or worse, bound up with the various views of Stalin's personality and his relations with the Old Bolsheviks. In every scenario, Sta- lin directs the terror primarily against the Old Bolsheviks (of his own genera- tion) whom he has, for various reasons, always mistrusted, envied, or feared. The pre-1917 emigrd Bolshevik intelligent is specifically seen as a primary "target" of the Purge. At this point, opinions diverge somewhat on the ques- tion of Purge "selectivity." According to one view, Stalin directed the Purge in a premeditated, calculated, and planned way against a more or less specific group of opponents. This is the opinion of Roy Medvedev and perhaps of Bukharin himself (via the Letter of an Old Bolshevik). Another view, most re- cently expressed by Solzhenitsyn, sees the Great Purge as an example of gen- eralized, random, and irrational terror. In addition to Solzhenitsyn's "waves" of indiscriminate slaughter, Robert Conquest speaks of Stalin's "caprice," and, concerning the selection of victims, Adam Ulam assures us that the "on- ly explanation can be found in Stalin's whim." In general, it is agreed that Old Bolsheviks were particular targets and that there was no legal or evidential basis for their repression. The only major question still apparently unresolved is whether or not Stalin was insane '1 Unfortunately, there has been no systematic analysis of purge victims- 1. See Roy A. Medvedev,Let History Judge (New York: Knopf, 1972), pp. 190, 234, 308. Boris I. Nicolaevsky,Power and the Soviet Elite: "The Letter of an Old Bolshevik" and Other Essays (New York: Praeger, 1965). Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn, The GulagAr- chipelago (New York: Harper and Row, 1973). Robert Conquest, The Great Terror (New York: Collier Books, 1968). Adam Ulam, Stalin: The Man and His Era (New York: Viking, 1973), p. 439. Robert C. Tucker, Stalin as Revolutionary, 1879-1929 (New York: Norton, 1973). Medvedevputs forward most strongly the theory of Stalin's jealous hatred of Lenin's (and his own) pre-revolutionary comrades-in-arms.Approaches which purport to be more "systemic" are really quite similar in that the "system," whether "totalitar- ian" or "autocratic," still revolves analytically around the persona of the leader. See ZbigniewBrzezinski, The Permanent Purge(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1956); and John A. Armstrong, The Politics of Totalitarianism (New York: Random House, 1961). 107 partly because of a perceived lack of information,2 and partly because most historians have assumed that no patterns existed. Although no truly compre- hensive study of purge victims is possible at present, an analysis of the fates of the 127 Old Bolsheviks in the sample of the 1917 Moscow party elite, dis- cussed in the previous paper,3 does shed some light on this crucial problem of twentieth-century Russian history. To be sure, this group is very small and specialized: it includes only Old Bolsheviks who had joined the party before 1917. At the time of the Great Purge, this qualification surely applied to a small (but unknown) fraction of the party.4 Nevertheless, interesting patterns emerge which do challenge some central assumptions about the Purge, and which certainly warrant further supplemental study of purge victims outside this small and unusual sample. Collective biography, upon which this paper relies, permits the examina- tion in detail of life histories of groups of individuals in order to find if cer- tain patterns exist. In this study, those among the sample who were purged (and the group of survivors) were examined according to the following criteria: nationality, education, social origin, pre-Bolshevik political affiliation, age, sex, "party age" (the length of time one had been a Bolshevik), emigration history, oppositional past, location within the Soviet bureaucracy, and occu- pation. In this way, it was possible to see whether the appearance of common characteristics within, for example, the group of purge victims, might suggest patterns of criteria behind the Great Purge itself. Of course, not all the tests yielded significant results. For example, correlations within the groups of purge victims and survivors based on nationality, education, social origin, and pre-Bolshevik political affiliation produced no useful information.5 That is, in 2. There is little basis for this perception. For example, in addition to the biographical data used here, there is a wealth of primary material on the Purge in the Smolensk Ar- chive (including local case studies) only lightly touched by Merle Fainsod. Further, Robert H. McNeal in "The Decisions of the CPSU and the Great Purge," Soviet Studies, 23, No. 2, (Oct. 1971), 177-85, has shown that merely a careful reading of long-published official resolutions, decisions, etc., can suggest drastic revisions in our current views of the Great Purge. J. Arch Getty is currently working on a dissertation based on these ma- terials. 3. Cf. the preceeding paper by William Chase and J. Arch Getty, "The Moscow Bol- shevik Cadre of 1917: A Prosopographic Analysis" for a discussion of this sample, how it was selected, and precisely who was included in it. Footnote 5 of that paper lists the sources from which the statistical data in this article has been derived. 4. Membership in the party before the mass influxes of 1917, the CivilWar, and the Lenin Enrollment of 1924 would appear to be the most reasonable definition for an "Old Bolshevik." The title nearly always connoted pre-revolutionary party membership. What percentage of the party in the mid-thirties was comprised by this group is a matter of speculation. 5. Crosstabulation correlations between these variables and cause of death produced no significant groupings. In each case X2 was less than 3.5 and significancelevels all ex- ceeded 0.5. .
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