Rehabilitation in the Post-Stalinist Soviet Union

Abstract

ON THE SCALE of peacetime human decimation, Stalinist purges of 1930's and 1940's in Soviet Union are perhaps unparalleled in all history. Yet it would be quite incorrect to think of purge as a Stalinist creation. Purges occurred in Bolshevik Russia before Stalin came to exercise anywhere near complete power, and they have occurred in years since Stalin's death. As Brzezinski has pointed out, process of purge is not an isolated instance, but a permanent process. Further, the purge is a technique of employed conscientiously by totalitarian government, a process which has both positive and negative aspects from point of view of leaders?. The current Soviet leaders would have us believe that purges have come to an end in their country. They have not. What have been done away with in last twelve years, however, are those features which differentiated Stalinist purges from those of preand post-Stalin periods. One such feature was size of purges. The first Stalinist purge, that of 1933-34, removed 315,000 members from Communist party, and only two years later Great Purge of 1936-38 saw expulsion of 850,000 full and candidate members, fully 36 per cent of total membership.2 Another feature distinguishing Stalinist purge from non-Stalinist variety is its relation to society as a whole. The general notion of a purge is that it is a cleansing of party, and this has been general rule, even under Stalin. But Yezhovshchina of 1936-38 is a significant exception, for in these years Stalin purged entire Soviet society. Every segment of population saw its ranks depleted by arrests, imprisonment, and executions. And this very point is third factor which makes Stalin's purges, and especially Great Purge, stand out: while purges in mid-twenties might be considered part of struggle for power, and those in post-Stalinist Russia are definitely so, Great Purge was extermination of people who had already been completely defeated and presented no threat to Stalin's grip on party and country. But feature which most sharply distinguishes Stalin's purges from others is punishment meted out: death. Both earlier and later purges have spared lives of those who were purged (with exception of Beria and his colleagues). Stalin's purges often resulted in death penalty. In order to understand Stalin purges more fully, and in order to understand patterns of rehabilitation which have occurred, it is necessary to delineate differing strands of purges of 1930's within Communist party. One