Conquest’s moral and political commitment to anti-communism – his passionate belief that it mattered how the West perceived the USSR – shaped his book in numerous ways. For one, it changed the way he did research. At that time, there were no real archives available, because the Soviet state kept all of its records secret. Although the Soviet press, and official Soviet histories, were accessible, they were profoundly deceptive, distorted by official propaganda. They did not tell the story of 1937–38, did not explain what had happened to the Bolshevik elite during those years, did not tell the full story of the show trials or mass arrests. Conquest used what was available judiciously, but also used a third source: eyewitnesses, émigrés and defectors who were often, at the time, dismissed as ‘biased'. They didn’t understand great power politics, it was said; or they bore grudges; or they didn’t realise that they were unimportant casualties on the road to the communist utopia.
Conquest ignored these dismissive critics and relied, carefully, on the memoirs, letters and testimony of Stalin’s victims. These included survivors of the gulag and of Soviet prisons – Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Varlam Shalamov, Eugenia Ginzburg – as well as eyewitnesses like Alexander Orlov, an NKVD officer in Spain who defected when he realised that all of his colleagues were being arrested. Orlov’s book, The Secret History of Stalin’s Crimes, was considered dubious at the time. But as Conquest observed, ‘just because a source may be erroneous or unreliable on certain points does not invalidate all its evidence’. The great eighteenth-century English historian Edward Gibbon himself had, he noted, argued that ‘imperfect and partial’ evidence may contribute to a broader story.
Conquest’s commitment to his public was just as important as his commitment to his sources. From the beginning, he made it clear that he was not writing for specialists, or at least not solely for specialists. He was writing, rather, for the general reader. As one reviewer wrote at the time, the book was designed to appeal not only to ‘serious scholars of Soviet history and politics’, but also to ‘those seeking a better understanding of the fundamental political and social problems of our age’. The Great Terror was not a mere list of facts, it aimed higher, seeking to be a real work of literature as well as a history.
Conquest, who wrote poetry as well as history – the title of his unfinished memoir was Two Muses – certainly used literary language. He also told stories, used specific anecdotes to illustrate general points, and referenced particular details. He included long passages from Stalin’s show trials, and he quoted from prisoners’ memoirs in an effort to explain, for example, why so many innocent people had confessed to crimes that they did not commit, or why some even agreed to confess in public. He took this passage from a Polish communist: ‘After fifty or sixty interrogations with cold and hunger and almost no sleep, a man becomes like an automaton – his eyes are bright, his legs swollen, his hands trembling. In this state, he is often convinced he is guilty.’ He quoted the novelist Vladimir Voinovich’s description of the show trials: “‘In the dingy winter daylight and under the stale glare of the electric lamps,” a wide variety of prisoners sat in the dock.’ This kind of language transmits to the reader a deeper truth than could be obtained through the mere reading of archives or the gathering of statistics, and of course it made a deeper impression on readers too.
For at least two decades, Conquest’s book was the definitive account or the years 1937–38. But, starting in about 1988, Mikhail Gorbachev, the Soviet Union’s final ruler, launched glasnost, the policy of ‘openness’, and the first real open discussion of the crimes of Stalinism inside the USSR. Partly as a result of that discussion, the Soviet Union itself collapsed a few years later. In subsequent years, Soviet archives opened for the first time to both Russian and foreign historians. As a result, quite a bit more has been learned about Stalin, about the 1930s, and especially about the years 1937–38. It became possible to write about Stalinism in different and more precise ways, using sources that were not available in 1968. Conquest himself acknowledged this to be true. In the introduction that follows this foreword, written for the new edition of The Great Terror that appeared in 2008, he wrote of how Soviet scholars had in the past been ‘like modern historians of an ancient empire who have had to rely on a few inscriptions, some only recently deciphered, when a huge store of first-hand records is discovered under some pyramid. Enough for generations of archeologists.’ Indeed, numerous historians have since pinned down more accurate numbers, firmed up many details and added enormously to our knowledge of Stalin as well as his systems of repression and control. It’s now clear, for example, that Stalin’s court – his henchmen and collaborators – played just as great a role in perpetuating cruelty as did the Soviet leader himself.
The new research also shows, however, that the defectors and émigrés got the outline of the story right – and so did Conquest. The fundamentals of the story have not changed: in 1937–38, Stalin and his team inflicted fear and terror on their country and on their own party. Millions were imprisoned. Millions eventually died, either because they were shot by firing squads or because they perished, more slowly, in prisons and concentration camps all around the country.
The Great Terror remains the classic account of that era. It is a story of human suffering and cruelty, an exploration of the power of ideology, a historical narrative which cannot be forgotten. It should be read now for its literary power, for its language, and for its strong and clear evocation of an era whose lessons and warnings we are still trying to absorb and understand.
Anne Applebaum, August 2018
INTRODUCTION TO 2008 EDITION
1
How did The Great Terror come to be written? And, first published in 1968, and in a revised edition in 1990, how is it that the book is still often treated as a historical landmark? Indeed, various historians, writing in several languages, credit me with the first use of the phrase ‘the Great Terror’, which has since become the conventional term for the purges of the 1930s.
Though inviting some amendment on a few points, the period’s history as given here has been substantially validated. There has meanwhile been a huge amount of fresh information to add to our knowledge. It is in that perspective that this introduction tries to place the book. A complete rewrite, or even a full re-editing, would, as to details, require the processing of many thousands of documents, and hundreds of often erudite analyses and presentations. I have tried to cover everything among the materials I have looked through that truly adds to or illuminates the terror experience.1 So what follows is to be read largely as commentary and perspective.