In 1964–5 I was at Columbia University. I had just finished a book – Russia after Khrushchev. In New York, I got to know some of the older, and some of the younger, writers and thinkers on Russia – from Boris Nicolaevsky himself to Stephen Cohen – and later, in California, Bertram Wolfe. Cohen was to be especially helpful over the years that followed.
So in 1964 or 1965 it had become plain that a huge gap in history needed to be filled, and that the facts released over the past few years, plus the often denied testimony of some of the regime’s hostile but increasingly justified witnesses, could be put together, if carefully done, to produce a veridical story, a real history. Back in London, as a freelance writer, I began to assemble The Great Terror.
The other great incitement to Stalin studies was Tibor Szamuely (nephew and namesake of the great Hungarian terror chief of 1919). Tibor had been in the Gulag, but was later released. Defecting from Accra to London, he became a splendid adviser. I still relish his reply when I said that one could see why Stalin had Marshal Tukhachevsky shot, but why Marshal Yegorov? Tibor’s answer was ‘why not?’.
When the book came out in 1968, the publishers were surprised to have to reprint it time and time again to meet demand. Reviews, from left and right, were almost all very favourable. And it was soon published in most Western languages – though also Hindi, Arabic, Japanese and Turkish.
Let me note here, to illustrate the scope of opinion, that the book, and my other work in the field, was soon warmly praised by (of course) Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan, but above all – and earlier – by ‘Scoop’ Jackson and then Daniel Patrick Moynihan, the latter of whom wrote that my role was to ‘sense that the democratic contest with the Marxist-Leninist regime was not just a struggle over ideas but also over facts’. Nor did the book fail to have an effect further to the left. I learned, much later, that it was a set book, and compulsory reading, for Christopher Hitchens and James Fenton (perhaps England’s finest poet of that generation), as teenage members of a Trotskyite study centre.
From Russia there was much praise from Andrei Sakharov and Elena Bonner, and also Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn who (when I flew to Switzerland to meet him after his expulsion from the USSR) asked me if I could translate a ‘little’ poem of his into English verse. It was Prussian Nights4 – nearly two thousand lines in ballad metre! And there were too, on our whole theme, the praises of other poets: Czeslaw Milosz (especially warmly) – and Octavio Paz (who wrote that The Great Terror had ‘closed the debate’). So we come full circle …
3
In the late sixties when The Great Terror came out, it was still true that, as that great historian François Furet noted after the war and the demise of fascism, ‘All the major debates on post-war ideas revolved round a single question: the nature of the Soviet regime.’ He adds the paradox that Communism had two main embodiments – as a backward despotism and as a constituency in the West that had to be kept unaware of others’ reality. Those who had a generally favourable attitude to Communism were disinclined to face the truth. And, up to the last, this was often accompanied by a view of the ‘Cold War’ as an even exchange – with the imputation that any denigration of the Soviet regime was due to peace-hating prejudice.
This long-standing success of a false, or toned-down, version of events had been in part due to a large funding from Moscow, about which we had only had full accounts lately – just over $42 million to the CPUSA alone in 1953–84.5 But the weight of the Soviet version had also been in part due to the reality being understandably incredible to Western minds habituated to an inadequate perspective. This now largely crumbled. Meanwhile in the USSR the dissidents were viciously persecuted – but not silenced.
4
Khrushchev’s anti-Stalinist offensive had produced inter alia a number of investigations into the terror. That chaired by N. Ya. Shvernik was given much, though inadequate, material from the KGB (its figures of victims can be shown from its own records to be far lower than the actualities for 1938–40, for example). Aleksei Snegov’s large-scale GULAG prisoner rehabilitation, with its many subcommittees, was effective, though incomplete. Olga Shatunovskaya of the Party Control Committee was more productive (but from 1962 her work was abandoned, then suppressed). Their evidence became known – and in general validated – later and has recently (2006–7) been usefully reassessed by Sergei Mikoyan and others.6
After 1964, and Khrushchev’s fall, there was a serious attempt to clear Stalin’s name publicly, as well as by implication (Raskolnikov, for example, was de-rehabilitated!). The old apparat still remained in charge of all the sources of knowledge. Most of the recorded facts stayed in the millions of secret files of the Party, State and Secret Police, and in myriads of minds.
Over the twenty years that followed, ‘the period of stagnation’ as it became known in Russia, there was little further public addition to our knowledge – or to that of the Soviet citizen. The numerically and institutionally dominant part of the apparat establishment was more than content to keep its – and the country’s – eyes closed to what seemed to invalidate their whole raison d’être.
Though fairly competent in the necessary sub-Marxist wordplay, the apparat had long been, as Weissberg put it, ‘morally and intellectually crippled’. And the sequence Lenin-Stalin-Khrushchev-Brezhnev was like (even physically, though that may be accidental) a chart illustrating the evolution of the hominids, read backwards.
But now there came many breaches of the official silence. Solzhenitsyn ‘illegally’ gave us Gulag Archipelago. From Sakharov came striking interviews and interventions. (The former was expelled from the country, the latter sentenced to internal exile.) There was flowering of samizdat and, to counter it, many arrests (and putting into penal ‘psychiatric’ wards – like my friend Vladimir Bukovsky and others – as well as GULAG). And there was Roy Medvedev’s Let History Judge – from, what is more, a devoted Leninist: a deeply detailed blow at the Stalin terror. There was a liberalism of the catacombs. Above all, the old falsifications lost credibility among anything describable as an educated class in Russia. The public acceptance of what they knew to be not merely falsehoods, but stupid and long-exposed falsehoods – the mere disgrace of it ate into the morale of even the official intelligentsia, as I remember noting in conversations with Soviet diplomats.
Meanwhile the original 1968 edition of The Great Terror had been published in a Russian version (in Florence in 1972) and was soon being smuggled into the USSR where it was welcomed by many outside – and, as we now know, inside – official circles.
5
In the early 1980s came the realisation in Moscow that the whole regime had become non-viable economically, ecologically, intellectually – and even militarily – largely because of this rejection of reality. Records of Politburo meetings from 1985 on show that the highest leadership itself could not manage to find the facts about the fate of their own relatives! It has long been known, in much the same context, how the documents on the Katyn massacre, showing the whole case to have been falsified, were only found in a secret file sealed in the safe of the General Secretary.
When it came to Soviet history, and Stalin’s Terror, there was, as on other themes, some sharp disagreement in the Politburo – later to produce the attempted coup of 1991. It is only now that records of these disputes have been published.7 Much of this centred in the rehabilitation of Bukharin. It was even urged (in Gaidar Alley’s words) that ‘the liquidation of the kulaks as a class was a political concept, that did not imply the physical annihilation of people’!