In his speech, Khrushchev mentioned in passing that after reviewing the evidence of some particularly egregious cases of legal abuse, the Military Collegium of the Supreme Court had conferred reabilitatsiya, or “rehabilitation,” on 7,679 persons.9 This “exoneration” was defined initially as “revision of all legal consequences of a judgment pertaining to a person who was unlawfully prosecuted.” The proviso was that this individual was innocent of some or all the charges, in which case they might receive full or partial exoneration, as well as restoration of their reputation and civil rights. Some obtained compensation, such as the return of lost property or pensions, while others took up again their position in the bureaucracy. For all too many, however, exoneration came posthumously.10
To put the small number of those “rehabilitated” in some perspective, we need to recall the vast scale of the victims, for whom Stalin’s curse had immediate personal consequences: between 1929 and 1953, an estimated 18 million people were sent to the Gulag of the camps and colonies.11
For those who survived the ordeal, obtaining the official “certificate of rehabilitation” was both complicated and frustrating.12 Some wanted the official paper in order to get back their Party card, to obtain the benefits that went with it. Others had personal reasons or acted on behalf of a deceased relative. A total of 612,000 rehabilitations were granted between 1953 and 1957, but then the numbers dropped off, and they fell to almost nothing after 1962. Indications of the continuing pain felt by those who experienced the terror could be seen in the Soviet Union to the end of its days. Between 1987 and 1989, under Mikhail Gorbachev, close to 840,000 individuals were exonerated. Russia since 1991 has a new and improved federal law, and between 1992 and 1997 the government received 4 million applications for rehabilitation and granted around 1.5 million of them.13
What generated so many millions of arrests and sentences in the first place? The motor was Stalin’s ideology, part of which asserted that “the country was full of covert enemies posing as loyal citizens—assassins, saboteurs, and traitors—who were conspiring to destroy the Soviet system and betray the nation to foreign powers.”14 It was assumed anyone arrested on remotely political grounds must have been involved with like-minded others, and information about these supposed coconspirators was tortured out of the unfortunates in custody. In this process, Soviet citizens were denied the presumption of innocence.
The Stalinist regime also sent whole nations into banishment “for eternity,” between 1929 and 1953, a total of more than 6 million people. The rehabilitation of those who survived took a long series of decrees, which began in 1954 by lifting restrictions. Although their property was not restored, groups like the Karachays, Kalmyks, Chechens, Ingushetians, and Balkars eventually went back to their former homelands, in a process that lasted more than three decades. The Crimean Tatars, Volga Germans, and others have had even longer to fight for their rights. The resettlement of these evicted people led to disharmony, a situation that continues to this day.15
More generally, the post-Stalin Soviet Union found it impossible to live with freedom of speech. Even after Khrushchev denounced Stalin’s abuses in February 1956, that September Boris Pasternak was told that he would not be able to publish Doctor Zhivago, a novel that belongs among the best in all of literature. Pasternak tried to convince himself that the regime could not indefinitely postpone freedom of expression. However, Konstantin Simonov and a group of editors wrote him to warn that publishing the book “was out of the question” because the author believed that “the October Revolution, the Civil War and related subsequent social changes” had brought the people “nothing but misery.” The editors detailed their objections in a thirty-five-page letter that pointed out all Pasternak’s “political mistakes.”16
In spite of everything, the Doctor Zhivago manuscript found its way to Italy in 1957. The Communists there tried to prevent publication of the book, but it appeared anyway, and soon also in France. It became a best seller, and in 1958 the author was nominated for a Nobel Prize in Literature. Meanwhile back in the USSR, the Union of Soviet Writers held hearings to attack Pasternak. One Moscow writer said: “Get out of the country, Mr. Pasternak. We don’t want to breathe the same air as you.” Others called him a “traitor,” “warmonger,” “agent of imperialism,” and worse. The Pasternak case was one of many that indicate how little the Soviet system had changed after Stalin.
Khrushchev came under attack from hard-liners who thought him too soft in general and could not forgive what they saw as his mismanagement of the 1962 Cuban crisis. He also pursued dubious economic policies and harebrained schemes. Finally in October the next year, he was deposed by a group led by the colorless Leonid Brezhnev, who held on to power for eighteen long years until he died in 1982. The only person he wanted to rehabilitate was Stalin, and indeed the fallen leader officially came back into fashion for a time.
In sum, after Stalin died, the course that the Soviet Union would take for almost forty years was firmly in place. Soviet leaders and ruling elites continued to articulate their position very much along the lines he set, until the entire edifice of the once-mighty Red Empire came crashing down.17
THE SOCIAL COSTS OF STALINISM
The brilliant future promised by Communism, for which generations struggled and sacrificed, failed to appear. How big a price did the Soviet people and those in the satellites pay for the social experiment that was conducted with them and at their expense? In terms of the loss of life through repression and execution, impossibly high numbers have been given. However, Alexander Yakovlev, chair of Russia’s Presidential Commission in charge of looking into the matter, took a more sober approach. In his report given in February 2000, he concluded that the deaths that resulted inside the USSR were “comparable to the losses suffered during the Great Patriotic War.” That would put them in the range of 25 million, a staggering figure.18
According to Yakovlev, Lenin and Stalin had, in effect, led a war against their own people that was as destructive of human life as the Second World War. It should be noted that those like Yakovlev, who calculated the figures, had dutifully served in the war and once had believed in the faith. He had been a member of the party since 1943, became head of its propaganda department in 1969, and was made secretary of the Central Committee in 1986. The following year, he joined the Politburo, and as a Gorbachev supporter, he helped lead the reform movement until the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991. Today an organization he founded makes available to scholars a wide range of formerly classified documents, many of them used in this study.
It is impossible to calculate what 20 or 25 million people might have accomplished, but we can provide at least some measurement of the impact of the experiment in socialism on the economy. One way is to use the statistics of the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development in Paris. Angus N. Maddison, one of its economists, calculated the gross domestic product (GDP), or the value of everything a country produces in a year, and then divided that figure by the total population to get the GDP per capita, which is a reasonable measure of “economic prosperity.” Stalin himself insisted that the GDP was the ultimate test for any economy.
Finding all the numbers going back into the past is not as easy as it sounds because many governments misreported so much. With all due caution, however, using Maddison’s figures, we can trace increases and decreases in prosperity over time and compare and contrast nations.