The Great Terror: A Reassessment by Robert Conquest

The Great Terror is the title of a book by British writer Robert Conquest, published in 1968. It gave rise to an alternate title of the period in Soviet history known as the Great Purge. The complete title of the book is The Great Terror: Stalin's Purge of the Thirties. A revised version of the book, called The Great Terror: A Reassessment, was printed in 1990 after Conquest was able to amend the text, having consulted recently opened Soviet archives. Image File history File links The_Great_Terror. ... Image File history File links The_Great_Terror. ... Dr. George Robert Ackworth Conquest (born July 15, 1917), British historian, became one of the best-known writers on the Soviet Union with the publication in 1968 of his classic account of Stalins purges of the 1930s, The Great Terror. ... 1968 (MCMLXVIII) was a leap year starting on Monday (the link is to a full 1968 calendar). ... Motto: Пролетарии всех стран, соединяйтесь! (Transliterated: Proletarii vsekh stran, soedinyaytes!) (Russian: Workers of the world, unite!) Anthem: The Internationale (1922-1944) Hymn of the Soviet Union (1944-1991) Capital (and largest city) Moscow None; Russian de facto Government Federation of Soviet Republics  - Last President Mikhail Gorbachev  - Last Premier Ivan Silayev Establishment October Revolution   - Declared... The Great Purge (Russian: , transliterated Bolshaya chistka) is the name given to campaigns of political repression and persecution in the Soviet Union orchestrated by Joseph Stalin during the late 1930s. ...

One of the first books by a Western writer to discuss the Great Purge in the Soviet Union, it was based mainly on information which had been made public, either officially or by individuals, during the Khrushchev Thaw in the period 1956-1964. It also drew on accounts by Russian and Ukrainian émigrés and exiles dating back to the 1930s. Lastly it was based on an analysis of official Soviet documents such as the census. In Soviet history, Kruschevs Thaw or Khrushchev Thaw refers to the period between the end of 1950s and the beginning of 1960s, when repressions and censorship reached a low point. ... 1956 (MCMLVI) was a leap year starting on Sunday of the Gregorian calendar. ... 1964 (MCMLXIV) was a leap year starting on Wednesday (the link is to a full 1964 calendar). ...

Conquest's background

Educated as a historian at Oxford University, Conquest joined the Communist Party of Great Britain in 1937. During World War II he enlisted and worked for British intelligence in Bulgaria and later, having become disillusioned with communism, for the British Foreign Office in a programme that countered Soviet propaganda and misinformation. The University of Oxford, located in the city of Oxford in England, is the oldest university in the English-speaking world. ... The Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB) was the largest communist party in the United Kingdom. ... Combatants Major Allied powers: United Kingdom Soviet Union United States Republic of China and others Major Axis powers: Nazi Germany Italy Japan and others Commanders Winston Churchill Joseph Stalin Franklin Roosevelt Harry Truman Chiang Kai-Shek Adolf Hitler Benito Mussolini Hideki Tojo Casualties Military dead: 17,000,000 Civilian dead... This article or section does not cite its references or sources. ...

Context

The first critical inquiry into the Great Purge had been made as early as 1937, by the Dewey Commission, which published its findings in the form of a 422-page book entitled Not Guilty (this title referred to the people who had been charged with various crimes by Stalin's government and therefore purged; the Dewey Commission found them not guilty). The most important aspect of Robert Conquest's The Great Terror was that it widened the understanding of the purges beyond the previous narrow focus on the "Moscow trials" of disgraced Communist Party leaders such as Nikolai Bukharin and Grigori Zinoviev. The question of why these leaders had pleaded guilty and confessed to various crimes at the trials had become a topic of discussion for a number of western writers, and had underlain books such as George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four and Arthur Koestler's Darkness at Noon. Conquest claimed that the trials and executions of these former Communist leaders were a minor detail of the purges, which, by his estimates, had led to the deaths of somewhere between 12 and 20 million people. The Great Purge (Russian: , transliterated Bolshaya chistka) is the name given to campaigns of political repression and persecution in the Soviet Union orchestrated by Joseph Stalin during the late 1930s. ... 1937 (MCMXXXVII) was a common year starting on Friday (link will take you to calendar). ... The Dewey Commission was initiated in March 1937 by the American Committee for the Defense of Leon Trotsky. It was named after its Chairman, John Dewey. ... Nikolai Bukharin Nikolai Ivanovich Bukharin (Russian: ), (October 9 [O.S. September 27] 1888 – March 13, 1938) was a Bolshevik revolutionary and intellectual, and later a Soviet politician. ... Grigory Yevseevich Zinoviev (Григо́рий Евсе́евич Зино́вьев, real name Ovsel Gershon Aronov Radomyslsky (Радомысльский), also... Eric Arthur Blair (June 25, 1903[1][2] – January 21, 1950), better known by the pen name George Orwell, was an English author and journalist. ... Nineteen Eighty-Four (commonly abbreviated to 1984) is a dystopian novel by the English writer George Orwell, first published by Secker and Warburg in 1949. ... Arthur Koestler Arthur Koestler (September 5, 1905, Budapest – March 3, 1983, London) was a Hungarian polymath who became a naturalized British subject. ...

Controversy and hostility surrounding the book

The timing of the publication of The Great Terror, in the middle of the Vietnam War and the great upsurge of leftist sentiment in Western universities and intellectual circles (see The Sixties), guaranteed that it would receive a hostile reception. Combatants Republic of Vietnam United States Republic of Korea Thailand Australia New Zealand The Philippines National Front for the Liberation of South Vietnam Democratic Republic of Vietnam People’s Republic of China Democratic Peoples Republic of Korea Strength US 1,000,000 South Korea 300,000 Australia 48,000... Woodstock: the iconic Sixties event The Sixties in its most obvious sense refers to the decade between 1960 and 1969 (see: 1960s), but the expression has taken on a wider meaning over the past 20 years. ...

Hostility to Conquest's account of the purges was heightened by various factors. The first was that he refused to accept the assertion made by Nikita Khrushchev, and supported by many Western leftists, that Stalin and his purges were an aberration from the ideals of the Revolution and were contrary to the principles of Leninism. Conquest argued that Stalinism was a natural consequence of the system established by Lenin, although he conceded that the personal character traits of Stalin had brought about the particular horrors of the late 1930s. Neal Ascherson noted: "Everyone by then could agree that Stalin was a very wicked man and a very evil one, but we still wanted to believe in Lenin; and Conquest said that Lenin was just as bad and that Stalin was simply carrying out Lenin's programme." Nikita Sergeyevich Khrushchev (Russian: ; IPA: ); surname more accurately romanized as Khrushchyov; April 17, 1894 [O.S. April 5]–September 11, 1971) was the leader of the Soviet Union after the death of Joseph Stalin. ... Vladimir Lenin in 1920 Leninism is a political and economic theory which builds upon Marxism; it is therefore a branch of Marxism. ... Joseph Stalin. ... // Lenin was an author of several theoretical works in philosophy such as Materialism and Empiriocriticism which became fundamental in Marxist-Leninist philosophy. ... Charles Neal Ascherson, commonly known as Neal Ascherson (born October 5, 1931), is a Scottish journalist. ...

The second factor was Conquest's sharp criticism of Western intellectuals for what he saw as their blindness towards the realities of the Soviet Union, both in the 1930s and, in some cases, even in the 1960s. Figures such as Beatrice and Sidney Webb, George Bernard Shaw, Jean-Paul Sartre, Walter Duranty, Sir Bernard Pares, Harold Laski, D. N. Pritt, Theodore Dreiser and Romain Rolland were accused of being dupes of Stalin and apologists for his regime for various comments they had made denying, excusing, or justifying various aspects of the purges. Furthermore, Conquest's comment about the poet John Cornford, who had been killed in the Spanish Civil War and was a hero of the British intellectual Left, that "not even high intelligence and a sensitive spirit are of any help once the facts of a situation are deduced from a political theory, rather than vice versa," was widely quoted, and sparked its own controversy. A widely known anecdote says that later, when asked by his publisher how to name the revised version of The Great Terror, Conquest responded, "How about, 'I Told You So, You Fucking Fools'?"[1] Beatrice Webb Martha Beatrice Potter Webb (January 2, 1858 - April 30, 1943) (also called Beatrice Webb) was a British socialist, economist and reformer, usually referred to in the same breath as her husband, Sidney Webb. ... Categories: UK Labour Party politicians | British MPs | Peers | Secretaries of State for the Colonies (UK) | 1859 births | 1947 deaths | People stubs ... George Bernard Shaw (George) Bernard Shaw[1] (26 July 1856 – 2 November 1950) was an Irish playwright based in the United Kingdom. ... Jean-Paul Charles Aymard Sartre (June 21, 1905 – April 15, 1980), normally known simply as Jean-Paul Sartre (pronounced: ), was a French existentialist philosopher, dramatist and screenwriter, novelist and critic. ... Walter Duranty Walter Duranty (1884–1957), born in Liverpool, England, won a Pulitzer Prize in 1932 for a set of stories he wrote in 1931 as The New York Times’ Moscow correspondent, covering Joseph Stalins Five-Year Plan to industrialize the Soviet Union. ... Harold Joseph Laski (June 30, 1893, Manchester, England - March 24, 1950, London, England) was an English political scientist, economist, author, and lecturer, and served as the 1945-1946 chairman of the Labour Party. ... Theodore Dreiser, photographed by Carl Van Vechten, 1933 Theodore Herman Albert Dreiser (August 27, 1871 – December 28, 1945) was an American naturalist author known for dealing with the gritty reality of life. ... Romain Rolland (January 29, 1866 - December 30, 1944) was a French writer. ... Rupert John Cornford (27 December 1915 – 28 December 1936) was an English poet and communist. ... Combatants Spanish Republic CNT-FAI UGT POUM Soviet Union International Brigades Spanish State Falangists Carlists Fascist Italy Nazi Germany Commanders Manuel Azaña Francisco Largo Caballero Juan Negrín Francisco Franco Casualties Civilians killed/wounded = hundreds of thousands The Spanish Civil War, which lasted from July 17, 1936 to April...

Criticism

Some Communists continue to deny the claims made in The Great Terror, despite their vindication by Russian and other historians following the fall of the Soviet Union and the opening of the Soviet archives. In an attempt to discredit Conquest's work, communist writers accuse him of relying on "Nazi collaborators, émigrés, and the CIA," and characterize his work with British intelligence and the Foreign Office as "production of anti-Soviet propaganda." One communist critic of Conquest is Ludo Martens, whose book Another view of Stalin is available online. Ludo Martens (born c. ...

References

• Robert Conquest, The Great Terror: Stalin's Purge of the Thirties (1968)
• Robert Conquest, The Great Terror: A Reassessment, Oxford University Press, May 1990, hardcover, ISBN 0-19-505580-2; trade paperback, Oxford, September, 1991, ISBN 0-19-507132-8