Harris , James The Great Fear: Stalin's Terror of the 1930s Vatlin , Alexander Agents of Terror: Ordinary Men and Extraordinary Violence in Stalin's Secret Police by Seth Bernstein (review)

Abstract

REVIEWS 781 impatient with political in-fighting and discussion. For them, as for Stalin, ‘democracy was something to aspire to, like communism itself — something for the distant future’ (p. 124). Ashortreviewcannotdojusticetotherichnessanddiversityofthiscollection, but it is hoped that the comments above will encourage a wide readership. Department of History Richard G. Robbins University of New Mexico Harris, James. The Great Fear: Stalin’s Terror of the 1930s. Oxford University Press, Oxford and New York, 2016. x + 205 pp. Notes. Bibliography. Index.£30.00. Vatlin, Alexander. Agents of Terror: Ordinary Men and Extraordinary Violence in Stalin’s Secret Police. Edited, translated and with an introduction by Seth Bernstein. The University of Wisconsin Press, Madison, WI, 2016. xxxiv + 171 pp. Illustrations. Notes. Index. $64.95. The Great Terror of 1937–38 was, according to its leaders, aimed at stomping out a vast conspiratorial network of counterrevolutionaries in league with foreign intelligence services. Yet nearly all of the charges of conspiracy and treason were false. Rather than strengthening the Soviet Union, the Terror disrupted it — leaving it more vulnerable to foreign attack on the eve of World War Two. But if the Terror was so destructive, why did Stalin and his councillors unleash it? Did they miscalculate? Or were they in control of it at all? Observers sought answers to these questions from the very outset of the massacre. In October 1937 Leon Trotskii described it as the death throes of a counterrevolutionary bureaucracy without social support, lashing out in a vain attempt to squash all opposition. As the Terror wound down Arthur Koestler penned Darkness at Noon, which attributed Communist confessions of treason to fealty to an ideology that placed the collective good above the individual: ‘If the party requires it, I will confess…’ In the 1950s and ’60s both Leninist reformers and anti-Communists focused on Stalin’s paranoia and hunger for absolute power. In these accounts, charges of counterrevolution and treason masked the real motive, of squashing all imaginable opposition to Stalin’s power. This was the tack Stalin’s successor Nikita Khrushchev took, thus evading wider Communist Party responsibility (including his own). In The Great Terror (1968), anti-Communist crusader Robert Conquest paradoxically took a similar position to Khrushchev’s, focusing on the demonic evil of Stalin and his NKVD deputies. In Conquest’s story, Stalin was the master-plotter, who had already planned the Terror by the autumn of 1933. SEER, 98, 4, OCTOBER 2020 782 As popular audiences devoured Conquest, scholars were shifting their analyses of the Terror away from Stalin’s personality and leadership politics. Scholars such as Graeme Gill and J. Arch Getty focused instead on tension between Moscow and provincial political machines, showing that the latter often evaded Central Committee directives and concealed information from the centre. In the run-up to the Terror, Stalin and other central authorities expressed increasing frustration with the problem. One aspect of the Terror, then, was an attempt by Stalin et al. to impose discipline on the periphery by force. Most of the Terror’s victims were not political elites. Yet neither high politics or Stalin’s tyrannical personality, nor even centre-periphery conflict, seemed to explain this reality well. From the 1970s onward a number of historians (among them Moshe Lewin, Gabor Rittersporn, Roberta Manning and Sheila Fitzpatrick),pointedtoacomplexofsocialandlocalpoliticaldynamicsthatthey believed accelerated the massacres. In an under-governed ‘quicksand society’ destabilized by gigantic state initiatives, government efforts to exert control by encouraging denunciations of corrupt officials, spies and class enemies led to contagious fear. The result was rapidly propagating waves of denunciations to the security organs. When central authorities gave the organs the green light for mass repression, terror ran amok. The opening of the Soviet archives revealed that Stalin had indeed ordered the arrests and executions of tens if not hundreds of thousands. He had also driven a process in which top NKVD officials set quotas for arrests by local offices. While the numbers do not quite add up — we cannot trace all of the deaths and camp sentences directly to central orders — the archives left no doubt of Stalin’s ultimate responsibility for the Terror. At the same time, the dynamics described by the social historians (Lewin et...