CONTENTS
Cover
About the Book
About the Author
Also by Robert Conquest
Dedication
Title Page
Foreword by Anne Applebaum
Introduction to 2008 Edition
BOOK I, THE PURGE BEGINS
Introduction, The Roots of Terror
1 Stalin Prepares
2 The Kirov Murder
3 Architect of Terror
4 Old Bolsheviks Confess
5 The Problem of Confession
BOOK II, THE YEZHOV YEARS
6 Last Stand
7 Assault on the Army
8 The Party Crushed
9 Nations in Torment
10 On the Cultural Front
11 In the Labor Camps
12 The Great Trial
13 The Foreign Element
14 Climax
BOOK III, AFTERMATH
15 Heritage of Terror
Epilogue, The Terror Today
Notes
Acknowledgements
Bibliography
Additional select bibliography for 2008 edition
Index
Copyright
ABOUT THE BOOK
Robert Conquest’s The Great Terror is the book that revealed the horrors of Stalin’s regime to the West. This definitive fiftieth anniversary edition features a new foreword by Anne Applebaum.
One of the most important books ever written about the Soviet Union, The Great Terror revealed to the West for the first time the true extent and nature Stalin’s purges in the 1930s, in which around a million people were tortured and executed or sent to labour camps on political grounds. Its publication caused a widespread reassessment of Communism itself.
This definitive fiftieth anniversary edition gathers together the wealth of material added by the author in the decades following its first publication and features a new foreword by leading historian Anne Applebaum, explaining the continued relevance of this momentous period of history and of this classic account.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Robert Conquest (1917 – 2015) was one of the twentieth century’s greatest historians of the Soviet Union. Publication of The Great Terror: Stalin’s Purge of the Thirties in 1968 brought him international renown, as did his revelatory later history The Harvest of Sorrow: Soviet Collectivisation and the Terror-Famine published in 1986. As well as holding academic posts at various universities, including the London School of Economics, Columbia University and Stanford University, he was an acclaimed poet, critic, novelist and translator.
Also by Robert Conquest
Non-fiction
Power and Policy in the USSR
Common Sense about Russia
Courage of Genius: The Pasternak Affair
Russia after Khrushchev
The Great Terror
The Nation Killers
Where Marx Went Wrong
V. I. Lenin
Kolyma: The Arctic Death Camps
Present Danger: Towards a Foreign Policy
We and They: Civic and Despotic Cultures
What to Do When the Russians Come (with Jon Manchip White)
Inside Stalin’s Secret Police: NKVD Politics 1936–1939
The Harvest of Sorrow
Stalin and the Kirov Murder
Tyrants and Typewriters
The Great Terror: A Reassessment
Stalin: Breaker of Nations
Reflections on a Ravaged Century
The Dragons of Expectation
Poetry
Poems
Between Mars and Venus
Arias from a Love Opera
Coming Across
Forays
New and Collected Poems
Demons Don’t
Verse Translation
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s Prussian Nights
Fiction
A World of Difference
The Egyptologists (with Kingsley Amis)
Criticism
The Abomination of Moab
For my sons, John and Richard
FOREWORD
BY ANNE APPLEBAUM
More than four decades ago, back when the Soviet Union still existed and the Berlin Wall still stood, the KGB searched the apartment of a Russian friend of mine. Inevitably, they found what they were looking for: his large collection of samizdat – illegally printed magazines and books. They pounced on the bleary mimeographs, rifled through them, put some aside. One of them held up my friend’s contraband copy of The Great Terror in triumph. ‘Excellent, we’ve been wanting to read this for a long time,’ he declared. Or words to that effect.
Nowadays, it’s difficult even to conjure up the background necessary to explain that scene. Can anyone under forty imagine a world without satellite television and the Internet, a world in which television, radio and borders were so heavily patrolled that it really was possible to cut a very large country off from the outside world? In the Soviet Union, that kind of isolation was not only possible, it was successful. Soviet leaders controlled and distorted their history so much so that their own policemen were unable to find out the truth from their own writers, in their own language. There was always a vast gap between the official versions of the past on the one hand, and the stories that people knew from their parents and grandparents on the other. That gap made people curious, hungry to know what had really happened – even people who worked for the KGB.
In that world, a single book could have an enormous impact. From the time of its publication in 1968 – a moment when it went very much against the grain – Robert Conquest’s The Great Terror was one of those that did. Of course the story that it told was hardly unfamiliar inside the USSR. In 1956, the Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev had made his famous ‘secret speech’, denouncing the mass arrests, especially mass arrests of party members, that Stalin had carried out in 1937–38, the era of the Great Terror. But the speech was never officially published, and its catalogue of Stalin’s crimes was incomplete. More importantly, the impact of the speech, although electrifying at the time, did not last. Khrushchev’s reign as Soviet leader was relatively short, and by 1968 Leonid Brezhnev had begun imposing a new version of Stalinism. History inside the Soviet Union had once again been stultified, public debate had stopped, and the brief literary and artistic ‘Thaw’ had come to an end. At that moment, despite Khrushchev, the true history of the terror of 1937–38 still could not be told. The details were once again in dispute. For Soviet citizens who had access to it, or who managed to hear about it, Conquest’s book once again opened a closed door.
But Conquest was also writing for the benefit of the West, which was in 1968 still engaged in a real struggle against the temptations of Soviet totalitarianism. In 2008, Conquest himself reminded his younger contemporaries of just how existential this struggle had seemed. He quoted the French historian Francois Furet: ‘All the major debates on post-war ideas revolved around a single question: the nature of the Soviet regime.’ This idea – that all important political debates once revolved around communism – is now as hard to understand or believe as the closed world of the USSR itself. But in the 1960s, the history of the Soviet Union mattered to Western Marxists, and indeed to Western anti-Marxists, far more than we now remember. It mattered because it had implications for the present. Was the tale of Lenin’s revolution a story of success and triumph, or was it a tale of tragedy? Did the Soviet Union therefore herald a new paradise on earth, or was it a macabre charade? Conquest always knew that The Great Terror would play a role in this urgent and important public debate. By documenting the terror of the 1930s, the arrests and executions, the prisons and the torture chamber, Conquest made a powerful argument for tragedy – and for the fundamental falseness of the Soviet vision as well.