More fundamentally one finds Gorbachev telling his colleagues: ‘Millions rehabilitated – that is the great service done by Nikita Khrushchev.’ Why did this ‘stop short?’ he asked: ‘because Khrushchev too had blood on his hands.’ As to his successors, they had done their best to keep the truth unknown: ‘Under Brezhnev, under Andropov, under Chernenko even members of the Politburo had no information.’8
Gorbachev goes on to tell the full story of the Seventeenth Congress of the CPSU in 1934 (long rejected in pro-Soviet circles) with the number of votes against Stalin – and that there was indeed a serious attempt to remove him from the leadership. As to what followed, Stalin’s ‘use of the Kirov murder to bring in repression’, the only motive being ‘the struggle for power’ is described. And, Gorbachev adds, ‘Plots against him – that’s all rubbish (chepukkha).’9
He then speaks of ‘three million sentenced, and that the most active part of the nation. A million shot. And that is not counting the share of dekulakisation and the fate of people at the time of deportations. And this was Stalin. How can that be accepted, let alone forgiven?’10
But the whole direction of glasnost, among other things, brought a mass of officially banned knowledge out of hiding. The first public mention in Russia of my book was when Katrina van den Heuvel interviewed me for Moskovski Novosti (2–9 April 1989). When I was in Moscow later that year, it was all over. Through the decade there had been little reply to the book from the Party establishment. But now the Stalinist writer Aleksandr Chakovsky called me ‘anti-Sovietchik number one’ at the last plenum of the Central Committee. By that time the Russian edition was being serialised (in a million copies each month) in Neva.
Over the next four or five years I was welcomed in Russia, making many friends, speaking to cultural and other groups and at conferences hosted by the Soviet Foreign Ministry. Going into Izvestiya to collect payment for a contribution to a Moscow journal, I saw Bukharin’s portrait hanging along with those of the other former editors. I spent some weeks being filmed round the country for Red Empire, a documentary series made by Granada Television, which aired not only in the West in English, but also in the Soviet Union (in Ukrainian, Kazakh and Russian).11 Among those I had met earlier abroad, it was hard not to relish Andrei Voznesensky’s saying the could hardly believe I was there: could he pinch me to make sure? As to the breadth of reception, I was interviewed by Kommunist12 – though only later having interesting meetings with Gorbachev, Shevardnadze and others.
And now, for the first time in twenty years, the new openness had uncovered so much new material that it became possible, and even necessary, to produce a new edition of this book. The Great Terror: A Reassessment was published in 1990. Much had emerged seriatim in the years since the original 1968 edition, but particularly over the recent glasnost period.
6
The information now available – even what was available in the late 1960s – established the story clearly as to historical essentials, and in a generally correct way as to almost all crucial details. But we were soon like modem 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 archaeologists…
Even under glasnost we had to search for information, for evidence. Now, into the twenty-first century, there is so much of it that to produce a truly new ‘version’ of this book would require a regiment of researchers, to sift out and to boil down the available myriads of documents that researchers have meanwhile found. Much has been printed from the presidential, the State, the Party and the police archives, both central and provincial. Russia’s Federal Security Service is reported to have declassified over two million secret documents in the past fifteen years, but of course there are more.13 The sheer amount of material is such that there is still something new every week or so. It is only as I draft this introduction that those astonishing 1985–91 Politburo reports have become available in book form.
A point not adequately covered in The Great Terror was the huge volume of paperwork produced. Even for minor ‘criminals’ there are long-winded, highly formal orders for arrest and identifications by age, nationality, address and status, signed by a local NKVD man. Then there are pages of interrogation, question-and-answer sessions, also so signed, with a more senior NKVD officer’s counter-signature, then longish verdicts by Troikas or courts. In fairly important cases these run into volumes. They often include ‘confrontations’ where the accused are questioned with other suspects: a practice earlier known to have been used with Bukharin, Pyatnitski, etc. with Stalin present. All this was typed up, employing a large secretarial staff. There are several tens of millions of NKVD files of this type in existence and as many relevant party files.
One now has the records of interrogation of major victims – even Yenukidze from Stalin’s own past (sent to Stalin ‘for information’), and Yagoda, and (later) Yezhov. Typically, Yagoda’s interrogation on 26 April 1937 is described as ‘the result of prolonged interrogation’ with eyewitness confrontations, during which he denied what was testified by fellow conspirators such as ‘Pauker, Volovich, Gay and others’. But at a later session he gives nine pages of suitable evidence – an improvement over the first effort also noted of Yezhov, Frinovsky and others.
As to the major high-level victims in general there is, at last, the full list of those of that description shot at the end of July 1938: 139 of them (countersigned by Stalin).14 The cemetery records, with prison photograph, of myriads of such victims are themselves astonishing. The charges are mostly routine, but (for instance) it is odd to find of Kamenev’s widow that in addition to terrorism, she was shot for ‘a counter-revolutionary conversation with a foreign diplomat’.15
The victims even of the mass terror are registered, with each individual’s identification – in the files and publications of that splendid organisation MEMORIAL, and in such collections as Leningradskii Martirolog and local equivalents over the whole country. Each such volume appears with expert editorial prefaces and so on that are often most illuminating.
More generally, there are such collections as the fifty Rossiya XX Vek series, especially its Reabilitatsiya volumes 1–3. And, in addition to the new (for us) documentation, there are hundreds of well-researched books in the field, by Russian, Ukrainian, German, English, Dutch, French and Italian writers (though some excellent Russian research has been unbelievably mis-edited in an English version). Hundreds of sources are quoted, with thousands of footnotes – often to the archival number of fond, register and file page (the originals still, of course, in their old sites – though many of them are also copied to Western and other libraries). Some references are to Russian archives that are still, or again, restricted, and only quoted from researchers’ notes or memory.
The result is a long and highly detailed record of total and grotesque falsification, bringing us ever more deeply into the distance between untruth and reality. The sheer magnitude of the former stands out. It is a different world, a different universe.
7
By far the most substantial additions, or amendments, to our knowledge have been the set of decrees on ‘Mass Operations’ in 1937–8, of which I was not earlier able to present so coherent a picture.