Very good piece because written thaughtfully instead of producing "tu quoque"- or whataboutism-style as usual among damned Late-Stalinists like Domenico Losurdo or Luciano Canfora with their unbearable relativism. Obviously one lesson to be drawn by socialists is to stop undervalue the rule of law and "checks and balances" (separation of powers, independence of media). Another lesson is to be aware of the continuity of Czarism, Stalinism and the contemporary regimen of the paranoid gerontocrats of the Russkij Mir.
One possibility is that the accusation levelled at most of the victims of the purges refered to a phenomenon that really existed: powerful networks of agents of the secret services of foreign powers, most notably British, French and, after 1933, Germany. Maybe Stalin thought that a World War was inevitable and that the USSR would not survive of Army, Intelligence, Party and State structures were heavily infiltrated (like Assad's Syria seems to have been infiltrated, but on a larger scale). So far, so rational. The problem is that Stalin did not know exactly who the real foreign agents were. Therefore he decided to liquidate all that could even remotely be associated with foreign espionage and subversion, plus their close friends and colleagues, plus those that could object or resist to the purges. Even if only one in each 10 or 50 victims were really a spy or "counter-revolutionary" element, maybe in his mind it was worth it, because the survival of the USSR depended on it. Merciless, but rational. And the USSR indeed survived the terrible schock of 1941-45, and held her own in the early decades of the Cold War.
"...maybe in his mind it was worth it, because the survival of the USSR depended on it. Merciless, but rational."
I think de Combourg is saying Stalin thought of his Great Terror as merciless, but rational. Clearly none of us here, commenting upon this, would agree with him.
What evidence of “powerful networks of agents” of foreign powers exists? It seems likely that there were some, but certainly not at the scale that explains so many state murders.
From AlterAI, see below. This came after the British likely planned the murder of Rasputin (who was leading the Czar towards a separate peace with Germany) and after the Western powers intervened against the Bolsheviks in the Russian civil war, 1918-23.
"Key points:
After the Bolshevik Revolution, MI6 (then known as the Secret Intelligence Service, SIS) kept permanent stations in the Baltic states, Finland, Poland, and Istanbul, dedicated to operations against the USSR.
The Riga Station was especially important — it functioned as Britain’s unofficial base for operations against the Soviets throughout the 1920s. (See records on Paul Dukes, one of MI6’s key Baltic agents.)
Operation Syndicate (1924–1925): A joint endeavor by British intelligence and anti-Bolshevik exiles to support insurrection networks inside Soviet territory. This operation was ultimately compromised by the infamous Trust deception run by the Soviet OGPU.
Operation Truster (1926) followed, attempting to infiltrate Soviet institutions again after the “Trust” collapse, showing Britain’s dogged persistence.
Declassified British Foreign Office files (such as FO 371 series) confirm SIS financing of Russian émigré intelligence circles based in Paris, Berlin, and Warsaw.
Suggested archival and secondary sources:
Nigel West, MI6: British Secret Intelligence Service Operations 1909–45 (2000);
Christopher Andrew, The Defence of the Realm (authorized history of MI5, for contextual British counter-Bolshevik activities);
Andrew and Gordievsky, KGB: The Inside Story (for cross-referenced Soviet view of British espionage).
🇫🇷 French Espionage & Subversion (Deuxième Bureau / SDECE predecessor)
Key points:
The French Deuxième Bureau (military intelligence) placed considerable priority on the Soviet Union after 1917, focusing on both intelligence gathering and ideological destabilization.
French intelligence cultivated White émigré networks and used Paris-based exile organizations (many run out of Montparnasse cafés) as both sources and agents provocateurs in the USSR.
Between 1922 and 1935, the Deuxième Bureau funds and coordinates several propaganda campaigns targeting the Comintern, and works closely with the Vatican and Polish intelligence against Soviet atheistic and revolutionary propaganda.
During the 1930s, the Sûreté Générale undertook counter-Communist operations but also funnelled intelligence to frontier anti-Soviet agents in the Caucasus and Central Asia (especially via the French consular network in Tehran and Istanbul).
Suggested references:
Stefan Martens, La France et la Russie soviétique 1917–1939;
André Tardieu and French parliamentary inquiries (1930s) dealing with “le danger bolchévique.”
🇩🇪 German Espionage (Abwehr / Political Police up to 1933)
Key points:
The Weimar Republic’s Reichswehr Intelligence (Abwehr) maintained continuous intelligence operations along the Soviet border despite the political-military cooperation under the Rapallo Treaty (1922)—an arrangement that masked active espionage on both sides.
After Hitler’s rise in 1933, German intelligence under Wilhelm Canaris escalated both espionage and covert reconnaissance in Soviet and Comintern organizations, framing them as prelude to potential war. Soviet archives mention German penetration attempts in Ukraine and the Baltic provinces already in 1934.
Sources:
Heinz Höhne, Canaris;
Michael Müller, Der geheime Krieg 1939–1945 (background context).
🇵🇱 & 🇫🇮 Regional Western Proxies
Polish and Finnish intelligence services worked hand-in-hand with Britain and France, often providing the front-line collection and courier routes.
Polish Defensywa files show coordination with British and French handlers to intercept Soviet communications across the Curzon Line.
Finland’s Etsivä keskuspoliisi (EK) was used by MI6 for indirect human intelligence operations into Leningrad."
Cusiosamente la KGB (Cheka) lanzó tambien muchas y muy efectivas misisones en occidente, pero en el Occidente liberal (EEUU, RU, Francia...) nunca hubo un Gran Terror!
That was certainly the case for many of the accused, according to the testimony of the US Ambassador to Moscow at the time. He attended the trials of men he had met personally or professionally and said their guilt was obvious and the testimony overwhelming.
There were 100,000 like Navalny and another 20,000 outright traitors.
My knowledge of the Great Terror isn't on par with yours even if I'm not exactly ignorant. I think you are looking at it from the wrong angle. The unpredictability and the "irrationality" was the point. He was creating an environment where anyone could be purged, sent to the Gulag, or taken to the House on the Embankment and killed at any time for any reason. He wanted it to be crystal clear that no one was safe, not even diehard loyalists like Bukharin and even Yezhov himself. One of the most darkly funny episodes of that whole dark period is involves Yezhov's shock at being arrested on fabricated charges and killed, in spite of having done this to countless thousands of other people. That whole time, he still didn't get it.
This is Machiavellianism of a different sort. The absence of a discernable order or strategy to it just broadcasts the people who will be killed will be done at Stalin's whim and makes sure everyone knows that's exactly what is going on. These systems create rules which it is impossible to be in total compliance with, and even if someone tries to they just make up crimes out of thin air. That's the entire point. It concentrates even more power at the top, because the rules simply do not matter. They can kill whomever they feel like, whenever they want to. That was Stalin's strategy.
I believe that to understand the dimensions of Stalinist terror, one cannot ignore factors ranging from Stalin's personality, a revolutionary activist inclined by his very basic education, surely his character traits and what his activity in the party had been, to the enormous complexity of the situation that the Soviet Union faced, firstly because the internal elements on which the revolutionary transformation had to be based were originally very precarious, in the sense that the organized class is a tiny fraction of the working population, and that the Russian State was a bureaucratic hierarchical organization, with which it was necessary to operate at the beginning and which, although it was gradually replaced, contributed to forming the new cadres. From the perspective of the international situation, the ever-present external threat, despite the victory against the invading forces, had become ominously evident both in the Far East, where the Japanese in Manchuria were prepared, and even attempted, to replicate their invasion of Eastern Siberia, and in the West, where Nazi Germany was beginning to deploy its forces. Just as the planning, relying on the self-serving collaboration of American companies and disregarding attempts at gradual evolution of the NEP, was going to provide the material basis for the regime's survival, unwavering obedience seemed essential in Stalin's eyes to guarantee victory against these threats. Socialism was relegated to the future.
"The ever-present external threat,"particularly the REAL genocidal threat from Germany-- and the resultant imperative to industrialize, modernize and militarize at unprecedented break-neck speed, which in turn was used to justify (rightly or wrongly, effectively or ineffectively) brutal agricultural collectivization-- was crucial for Stalin's discrediting more moderate development approaches (Bukharin), and gaining support in the early days when his power was far from absolute,.
Civil War (1921) to the beginning of World War II Stalin was
convinced that his country was under a nearly constant threat of
invasion from coalitions of anti-Soviet capitalist powers, though no
such threat existed before the late 1930s . 3 different war scares: 1927, 1931–32 and 1934–35 , plus Lenins theory of imperialism made it Stalins worldview that threats lurked at every corner(kinda like Israel rn ) , https://sci-hub.ru/10.1080/01402390701343490 ----> Really good into the breakdown of each of the different war scares
If I recall correctly, Engels once wrote Marx that he had traced the Reign of Terror in the French Revolution to the Reign of the Terrified. As a former specialist on the Soviet economy, that's an apt description of Stalinist terror too. The price controls that ruined the New Economic Policy catalyzed actions that Stalin's entourage interpreted as sabotage, etc.
People like Zinoviev were executed because they were actively plotting against him. I am not convinced the Bolsheviks killed 500,000 or 750,000 people in the purges because this figure is based on one document that may well have been produced by the Khruschev regime as part of their inner-party struggle against the Stalinists. There were, of course, many executions between 1937 8. The fear was of unrest among former Kulaks, many of whom had moved to the towns. See J. Arch Getty for confirmation of this stuff.
Why did Stalin suppress the Kulaks? As you have said yourself, an agricultural country that splits up its large, landed estates and distributes them among small peasants will stay poor, ceteris paribus. There must be some sort of consolidation. An alternative is you can just squeeze the small peasants with low prices and give them big incentives to work in fast growing manufacturing like South Korea. If you don’t, you end up like India, which is still very poor. (I know that its high economic growth rates are important in your world inequality models, but they are wrongly calculated-look at surveys of consumer goods ownership.)
I‘m really surprised you don‘t mention Stephan Kotkin‘s three-volume biography of Stalin, particularly volume 2, Stalin: Waiting for Hitler 1929-1941, which covers the purges. Aragon is ancient history and reflects the times, whereas Kotkin reflects the most recent scholarship. Khrushchev‘s Memoirs are also very insightful, even more so than his 1956 XX Party Congress speech. I think finding a rationale for the purges is a fool‘s errand. As you point out, Hitler‘s purges were much more limited and rational (although his Genozides were not).
More interesting questions are
1. how can one totalitarian leader get away for years with such obviously unjustified and self-destructive behavior without opposition, only stopped by his death (which might have been murder by four other Politburo members);
2. why does this appear to be a structural feature and not just a personal Stalinist idiosyncrasy of Communism, since Mao did exactly the same thing in the Hundred Flowers Campaign, Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution? And the Cambodian Pol Pot regime was not very different in its murderous war on its own people.
Here's an interesting excerpt from Sheila Fitzpatrick's review of "Stalin: Waiting for Hitler" in the LRB, for commenters like me who haven't read it yet:
"Nobody really has a good explanation for the Great Purges, including Kotkin. The most interesting aspect of his account is how firmly he disposes of arguments that Stalin initiated the terror because of some sense of overwhelming crisis or threat. Domestically, he faced ‘astonishingly little overt political opposition of any kind’. On the international scene, there was a possibility of war, but that had been around for a few years. ‘There was no immediate threat – social, economic, political – to the country or to the regime’s legitimacy or stability, no crisis. But then, suddenly, there was total crisis.’ When Stalin initiated mass (as opposed to elite) terror in the summer of 1937, ‘there was no “dynamic” forcing him to do so, no “factional” fighting, no heightened threat abroad. The terror was not spiralling out of his control. He just decided, himself, to approve quota-driven eradication of entire categories of people in a planned indiscriminate terror known as mass operations.’ [...]
"In the end, Kotkin may be on safer ground echoing the words of Adam Ulam, who wrote in 1982 that ‘there is in Stalin’s terror an element of sheer preposterousness which defies explanation.’ Oddly, given that Kotkin’s account of the Great Purges features Stalin so prominently as author and producer, he gives Stalin little credit for an equally striking achievement, notably closing them down at the end of 1938 without losing power or even reputation in the party. .. ‘We cannot definitively establish his motivations,’ Kotkin concludes."
Also, on the idea of "Holodomor," she notes:
"Kotkin accepts that the famine was Stalin’s responsibility, in that he had refused to lower procurement pressure even when reports came in that peasants were starving, but concludes that the famine, though it derived more from Stalin’s policies and ruthlessness in implementing them, ‘was not intentional’. This is an unambiguous rejection of the view widely held by Ukrainians and reflected inter alia in Anne Applebaum’s recent account of famine in the Ukraine. In Kotkin’s view, Stalin’s actions ‘do not indicate that he was trying to exterminate peasants or ethnic Ukrainians ... There was no “Ukrainian” famine; the famine was Soviet.’ Kazakhs in fact suffered proportionally much more than Ukrainians, with up to 1.4 million deaths out of a total population of 6.5 million, compared to Ukraine’s 3.5 million deaths out of 33 million"
I think the issue is not what motivated Stalin, which we will never really know, but what allows a single head of state to initiate and ruthlessly carry out such policies with no opposition and no corrective feedback. Something is really wrong with such a system for two reasons. One, there seems to be a natural selective bias in the Bolshevik system for malignant narcissists like Stalin and Mao to eliminate their rivals and rise to the top. Two, once in power, there is no way to stop them except their natural or unnatural deaths.
As to the Holodomor, the basic issue is less whether Stalin wanted to exterminate Ukrainians per se, but that Soviet managers in their greed and to meet quotas requisitioned not only the whole Ukrainian grain output but even their seed corn, as Khrushchev pointed out. Thus they could not only not feed themselves but not replant for the next season. This is just economic incompetence, but there was no way to get this point back to the top before millions had died. It was exactly the same during the disastrous Kharkiv campaign, when Khrushchev desperately called Stalin to call off the attack but Stalin refused to take his call. Stalin thought he knew everything and took no advice. But he still stayed in power.
I do not pretend to have an answer and have thought about it too. I do not buy the hypothesis of killing the old guard. My hypothesis is the following: the Bolsheviks and Stalin had no real idea what they were engaging in. Under "war communism", some thought initially that communism had been reached quickly when they were " just " experiencing hyperinflation. Contrary to Bukharin and Preobrazhensky, Stalin thought that non market methods needed to be used to finance industrialization. This led to drastic increase in supply of grain and reduction in output at the same time, leading to the collectivization and famine. This famine was so horrible that it created a situation of extreme tension within society, leading to paranoia by Stalin. The combination of that tension and his paranoia led to the purges. One element in favor of my hypothesis is that something similar happened in China. Mao made the same mistake as Stalin with the Great Leap forward (excess grain deliveries leading to output collapse and famine) and the aftermath was the Cultural Revolution, which was the equivalent to stalinist purges. This can be debated, but in both cases there was a horrible mistake leading to famine of millions, which would be difficult to digest for any politician so for idealistic bolsheviks this was the world upside down and they lost any clue to what was happening. The response (1936-38 purges and cultural revolution) can be seen a form of social catharsis in response to the horros of the famine. I am not a social psychologist, but this is the most reasonable hypothesis I came up with.
The aftermath of the Great Leap Forward in China did not directly lead to the Cultural Revolution, there's about a decade in between. What happened in that intervening decade included the Party's first broad experiments with marketization. Some regions had implemented policies during the famines that allowed farmers to sell their excess products, and those regions were faring better. Within the Party, Mao lost major influence & prestige for a time, and the "capitalist roaders" like Deng were ascendant, because they had championed such policies
I think it's wrong to suggest the Party was confused or blinded by idealism to the ("difficult to digest") reality -- surely Mao's grip on control slowed the response to the famines, but the Party was, in fact, changing & "digesting" the failures of the Great Leap Forward, to the point where they were already starting on the trajectory we see today (& they had effectively demoted Mao). As for the people waging Cultural Revolution against the bureaucrats of the Party & PLA, I'm not the most well-read here, but I'm not aware of any citing the famines as justification
Overall, I think comparing USSR & PRC on this will lead you astray. The ideological tendencies at play in the Great Leap Forward & Cultural Revolution are the ones least resembling Soviet-style Marxism -- namely, Mao's voluntarism: his emphasis on radical democracy, his belief you might be able to "skip stages" of typical capitalist development, and especially his anti-bureaucracy tendency. The Soviets never suggested peasants should smelt steel in their own backyards
Yes, there are differences but also commonalities. The cultural revolution was a direct response to Mao's loss of power following the Great Leap forward. There were not that many years before the realization of the folly of the Great Leap forward and Mao's revenge on Liu Shaoqi (4-5 years). ALso, what you did not pick up was the extreme tension in society and the party both in USSR and PRC following the extreme famines. These famines were the direct consequences of policies to "accelerate" growth and industrialization, not of natural disasters. I could say much more about this, but it is hard to exaggerate the effect of these famines on society at large as well as on the Party.
In criminology and forensic medicine there is the concept of "overkill" or "overkilling": a homicide where the injuries suffered by the victim greatly exceed the injuries necessary to cause death. For instance, there may be up to hundreds of stab wounds on the victim's body although the first few wounds had already caused death. Overkill is associated with some types of psychiatric disorder, but there seems to be no one "big" explanation for it. Maybe the irrationally large scope of Stalin's purges was a kind of political version of it?
(It is perhaps interesting that in the medical literature, the first recorded case of overkilling in history was the assassination of Julius Caesar, who had 23 wounds inflicted, according to the Roman doctor Antistius who performed an autopsy.)
Comment cette panique morale peut-elle affecter à un tel degré des gens convaincus d’être une élite allant dans le sens de l’histoire et de libérer l’espèce humaine ?
The way I've made sense of this period (which admittedly may be wrong) is to see it as a confluence of two things, which both fed on and worsened each other in a feedback loop- factional maneuvering "on top" in the realm of high politics, and a moral panic "at the bottom" about wreckers, saboteurs, and spies in the realm of the everyday amidst the pressures of the USSR's breakneck industrialisation.
From this perspective there's a slight similarity to Mao's cultural revolution- a project initiated by a leader to ruthlessly shore up his authority that then picked up its own momentum as it filtered to the rest of society with disastrous consequences.
But the Cultural Revolution was different. It was anarchy and freedom unleashed/stimulated from the top. The Great Terror was nt anarchic but systematic murdering. Plus, the Cultural Revolution is understandable b/c it is in sync with Mao's view of "continuous revolution". So, I think, we can more or less fully understand its logic.
That's true, I think the similarities between the cultural revolution and the great purges do not go very far- as you say there is a big difference in the actual content and intention of the cultural revolution.
But in terms of the systematic murdering element of the great purges- I am quite drawn to the revisionist interpretation of J. Arch Getty who argues that the purges were much more chaotic and reactive than conventional accounts would have it.
I would say that the killings were indeed systematic in the sense of being carried out by the state rather than mostly at random by mobs of red guards as in the case of the cultural revolution, but that the actual process of deciding who would be killed was often very chaotic in the sense of being the product of climate of fear and mutual suspicion that had some of the characteristics of a moral panic.
Citation de Robespierre dans la rubrique Terreur de Wikipedia : „Dans son Rapport sur les principes de morale politique qui doivent guider la Convention nationale dans l’administration de la République du 18 pluviôse, Robespierre fait allusion aux « affaires », entre autres celle de la liquidation de la Compagnie des Indes, à quoi il oppose la vertu. Il écrit que : « la première maxime de notre politique doit être que l’on conduit le peuple par la raison, et les ennemis du peuple par la terreur. Si le ressort du gouvernement populaire dans la paix est la vertu, le ressort du gouvernement populaire, en révolution est à la fois la vertu et la terreur. La vertu, sans laquelle la terreur est funeste ; la terreur, sans laquelle la vertu est impuissante. La Terreur n’est autre chose que la justice prompte, sévère, inflexible : elle est donc une émanation de la vertu ; elle est moins un principe particulier qu’une conséquence du principe général de la démocratie appliqué aux plus pressants besoins de la patrie. »
Question : la Terreur dure 2 ans maximum - 1792/94. Comment expliquer la durée du Stalinisme… ou celle de l‘URSS ?
I haven't read her book yet, but I heard an interview (on Eurasian Knot) with historian Wendy Goldman, who does argue that The Great Terror was an "excess of democracy" type of situation. This blurb from a review of her book certainly does remind me of the accounts I've read of life under high Maoism (see the collection, "Maoism at the Grassroots"), like struggle sessions at the factory:
"In the unions and the factories, repression was accompanied by a mass campaign for democracy. Party leaders urged workers to criticize and remove corrupt and negligent officials. Workers, shop foremen, local party members, and union leaders adopted the slogans of repression and used them, often against each other, to redress long-standing grievances, shift blame for intractable problems in production, and advance personal agendas. Repression quickly became a mass phenomenon, not only in the number of victims it claimed, but also in the number of perpetrators it spawned."
This is an interesting post. Do you think Stalin was just really bad with using violence, contra Machiavellia, since in his early life he was a criminal or gangster? He just had an indiscriminate and near-destructive love of violence, like a criminal who destroys himself because he is too liberal with using it? (Think Tony Soprano.) And do you think he was poisoned by Beria? I remember a theory that his death may have been a poisoning, because everyone feared he was about ready to do a big purge again, either against fellow communists, Jews, or even start a war against the United States?
He actually died b/c he put in jail all his doctors and every other doctor was afraid to tell him anything. So he basically killed himself through lack of health care.
I don't believe in either. He was not a gangster in his youth but he did participate in several actions of "expropriation". Funds were to the Party. There was nothing unusual in that. But he did believe that violence & killing is a way to solve problems. Yet he was also very systematic and not impulsive. So the Great Terror was not an impulsive action. On Beria, there is zero evidence Stalin died from poisoning.
There was a big bank heist led by Stalin in early 1900s in the Caucasus that led with scores of dead, including civilians, and with the money ultimately lost... Wasn't really an expropriation...
There are probably many causes, but Wendy Goldman's strikes me as most to the point (Stalinist terror and democracy, the 1937 union campaign). And that is about the conspirationist mentality that begun to spread in the mid 30s: "We made a revolution to get it better, but it didn't. It must be someone's fault!".
Because they didn't get it better. Some did, particularly the skilled technicians who were upgraded to engineers (Moshe Lewin: The making of the Soviet system). For others it became worse – for example of the textile workers in the Ivanovo district who got their salaries halved and their quotas doubled in 1932 (Jeffrey J Rossman: The Teikovo cotton workers’ strike of April 1932).
So I suppose the party people did their best to deflect the accusations. Nobody wanted to be identified as "someone", but tried to get the popular ire to hit somebody else.
The other explanation I have heard of was, I think, offered by Sheila Fitzpatrick (Stalin's peasants). After the disastrous collectivization of the agriculture it was necessary to make peace with the peasants, and accusing their low level tormenters was one obious way. These trials were serious and based on testimonies of the victims.
One thing is certain: Stalin cemented an incredible level of personal cult like control of every aspect of Soviet society through his orgy of violence
For someone who grew up as a violent revolutionary and had a good sense of how fragile power can be that must have been attractive
You can say that Hitler and Mussolini did the same thing without the extent of purges etc. But the fascist leaders rose to power based on an explicitly personalist ideology that already celebrated their personal power. Stalin came to power through a collectivist Party apparatus so he had some work to do
“What was the objective of the Great Terror? Why did Stalin want all these people killed?” As you say, it was irrational in the normal sense of the word and badly damaged both economic progress and military performance in Word War 2. It went far beyond what was necessary to keep Stalin in power.
I freely admit I am guessing.
Stalin was born to a poor family, and hence university was not an option for him - his formal education was in a theological seminary.
The leadership of radical left-wing parties is often dominated by people who struggle to agree on anything. Intellectual arrogance and a refusal to listen to alternatives abound. Although undoubtedly able, well read and with a prodigious memory, Stalin felt looked down on by other leading Bolsheviks as not being of their academic calibre. He had a strong Georgian accent, which perhaps strengthened that perception. Stalin must have bitterly resented this.
A common phenomenon in organisations is the over-promoted manager. They may have a morbid fear of anyone lower in the structure who may outshine them. They deliberately surround themselves by people who appear less able than they are. Their subordinates feel similarly threatened. Khrushchev seems to have survived by being good at playing the country bumpkin. His parents were poor peasants.
Perhaps deep-down Stalin profoundly doubted his ability and that’s a reason for the crazy purges. Maybe his subordinates were all too happy to add the names of people who they regarded as threatening to the list.
Very good piece because written thaughtfully instead of producing "tu quoque"- or whataboutism-style as usual among damned Late-Stalinists like Domenico Losurdo or Luciano Canfora with their unbearable relativism. Obviously one lesson to be drawn by socialists is to stop undervalue the rule of law and "checks and balances" (separation of powers, independence of media). Another lesson is to be aware of the continuity of Czarism, Stalinism and the contemporary regimen of the paranoid gerontocrats of the Russkij Mir.
One possibility is that the accusation levelled at most of the victims of the purges refered to a phenomenon that really existed: powerful networks of agents of the secret services of foreign powers, most notably British, French and, after 1933, Germany. Maybe Stalin thought that a World War was inevitable and that the USSR would not survive of Army, Intelligence, Party and State structures were heavily infiltrated (like Assad's Syria seems to have been infiltrated, but on a larger scale). So far, so rational. The problem is that Stalin did not know exactly who the real foreign agents were. Therefore he decided to liquidate all that could even remotely be associated with foreign espionage and subversion, plus their close friends and colleagues, plus those that could object or resist to the purges. Even if only one in each 10 or 50 victims were really a spy or "counter-revolutionary" element, maybe in his mind it was worth it, because the survival of the USSR depended on it. Merciless, but rational. And the USSR indeed survived the terrible schock of 1941-45, and held her own in the early decades of the Cold War.
If you think that is rational it may be time to get a better psychiatrist.
"...maybe in his mind it was worth it, because the survival of the USSR depended on it. Merciless, but rational."
I think de Combourg is saying Stalin thought of his Great Terror as merciless, but rational. Clearly none of us here, commenting upon this, would agree with him.
What evidence of “powerful networks of agents” of foreign powers exists? It seems likely that there were some, but certainly not at the scale that explains so many state murders.
From AlterAI, see below. This came after the British likely planned the murder of Rasputin (who was leading the Czar towards a separate peace with Germany) and after the Western powers intervened against the Bolsheviks in the Russian civil war, 1918-23.
"Key points:
After the Bolshevik Revolution, MI6 (then known as the Secret Intelligence Service, SIS) kept permanent stations in the Baltic states, Finland, Poland, and Istanbul, dedicated to operations against the USSR.
The Riga Station was especially important — it functioned as Britain’s unofficial base for operations against the Soviets throughout the 1920s. (See records on Paul Dukes, one of MI6’s key Baltic agents.)
Operation Syndicate (1924–1925): A joint endeavor by British intelligence and anti-Bolshevik exiles to support insurrection networks inside Soviet territory. This operation was ultimately compromised by the infamous Trust deception run by the Soviet OGPU.
Operation Truster (1926) followed, attempting to infiltrate Soviet institutions again after the “Trust” collapse, showing Britain’s dogged persistence.
Declassified British Foreign Office files (such as FO 371 series) confirm SIS financing of Russian émigré intelligence circles based in Paris, Berlin, and Warsaw.
Suggested archival and secondary sources:
Nigel West, MI6: British Secret Intelligence Service Operations 1909–45 (2000);
Christopher Andrew, The Defence of the Realm (authorized history of MI5, for contextual British counter-Bolshevik activities);
Andrew and Gordievsky, KGB: The Inside Story (for cross-referenced Soviet view of British espionage).
🇫🇷 French Espionage & Subversion (Deuxième Bureau / SDECE predecessor)
Key points:
The French Deuxième Bureau (military intelligence) placed considerable priority on the Soviet Union after 1917, focusing on both intelligence gathering and ideological destabilization.
French intelligence cultivated White émigré networks and used Paris-based exile organizations (many run out of Montparnasse cafés) as both sources and agents provocateurs in the USSR.
Between 1922 and 1935, the Deuxième Bureau funds and coordinates several propaganda campaigns targeting the Comintern, and works closely with the Vatican and Polish intelligence against Soviet atheistic and revolutionary propaganda.
During the 1930s, the Sûreté Générale undertook counter-Communist operations but also funnelled intelligence to frontier anti-Soviet agents in the Caucasus and Central Asia (especially via the French consular network in Tehran and Istanbul).
Suggested references:
Stefan Martens, La France et la Russie soviétique 1917–1939;
André Tardieu and French parliamentary inquiries (1930s) dealing with “le danger bolchévique.”
🇩🇪 German Espionage (Abwehr / Political Police up to 1933)
Key points:
The Weimar Republic’s Reichswehr Intelligence (Abwehr) maintained continuous intelligence operations along the Soviet border despite the political-military cooperation under the Rapallo Treaty (1922)—an arrangement that masked active espionage on both sides.
After Hitler’s rise in 1933, German intelligence under Wilhelm Canaris escalated both espionage and covert reconnaissance in Soviet and Comintern organizations, framing them as prelude to potential war. Soviet archives mention German penetration attempts in Ukraine and the Baltic provinces already in 1934.
Sources:
Heinz Höhne, Canaris;
Michael Müller, Der geheime Krieg 1939–1945 (background context).
🇵🇱 & 🇫🇮 Regional Western Proxies
Polish and Finnish intelligence services worked hand-in-hand with Britain and France, often providing the front-line collection and courier routes.
Polish Defensywa files show coordination with British and French handlers to intercept Soviet communications across the Curzon Line.
Finland’s Etsivä keskuspoliisi (EK) was used by MI6 for indirect human intelligence operations into Leningrad."
Cusiosamente la KGB (Cheka) lanzó tambien muchas y muy efectivas misisones en occidente, pero en el Occidente liberal (EEUU, RU, Francia...) nunca hubo un Gran Terror!
That was certainly the case for many of the accused, according to the testimony of the US Ambassador to Moscow at the time. He attended the trials of men he had met personally or professionally and said their guilt was obvious and the testimony overwhelming.
There were 100,000 like Navalny and another 20,000 outright traitors.
My knowledge of the Great Terror isn't on par with yours even if I'm not exactly ignorant. I think you are looking at it from the wrong angle. The unpredictability and the "irrationality" was the point. He was creating an environment where anyone could be purged, sent to the Gulag, or taken to the House on the Embankment and killed at any time for any reason. He wanted it to be crystal clear that no one was safe, not even diehard loyalists like Bukharin and even Yezhov himself. One of the most darkly funny episodes of that whole dark period is involves Yezhov's shock at being arrested on fabricated charges and killed, in spite of having done this to countless thousands of other people. That whole time, he still didn't get it.
This is Machiavellianism of a different sort. The absence of a discernable order or strategy to it just broadcasts the people who will be killed will be done at Stalin's whim and makes sure everyone knows that's exactly what is going on. These systems create rules which it is impossible to be in total compliance with, and even if someone tries to they just make up crimes out of thin air. That's the entire point. It concentrates even more power at the top, because the rules simply do not matter. They can kill whomever they feel like, whenever they want to. That was Stalin's strategy.
I believe that to understand the dimensions of Stalinist terror, one cannot ignore factors ranging from Stalin's personality, a revolutionary activist inclined by his very basic education, surely his character traits and what his activity in the party had been, to the enormous complexity of the situation that the Soviet Union faced, firstly because the internal elements on which the revolutionary transformation had to be based were originally very precarious, in the sense that the organized class is a tiny fraction of the working population, and that the Russian State was a bureaucratic hierarchical organization, with which it was necessary to operate at the beginning and which, although it was gradually replaced, contributed to forming the new cadres. From the perspective of the international situation, the ever-present external threat, despite the victory against the invading forces, had become ominously evident both in the Far East, where the Japanese in Manchuria were prepared, and even attempted, to replicate their invasion of Eastern Siberia, and in the West, where Nazi Germany was beginning to deploy its forces. Just as the planning, relying on the self-serving collaboration of American companies and disregarding attempts at gradual evolution of the NEP, was going to provide the material basis for the regime's survival, unwavering obedience seemed essential in Stalin's eyes to guarantee victory against these threats. Socialism was relegated to the future.
"The ever-present external threat,"particularly the REAL genocidal threat from Germany-- and the resultant imperative to industrialize, modernize and militarize at unprecedented break-neck speed, which in turn was used to justify (rightly or wrongly, effectively or ineffectively) brutal agricultural collectivization-- was crucial for Stalin's discrediting more moderate development approaches (Bukharin), and gaining support in the early days when his power was far from absolute,.
^ This , From the end of the
Civil War (1921) to the beginning of World War II Stalin was
convinced that his country was under a nearly constant threat of
invasion from coalitions of anti-Soviet capitalist powers, though no
such threat existed before the late 1930s . 3 different war scares: 1927, 1931–32 and 1934–35 , plus Lenins theory of imperialism made it Stalins worldview that threats lurked at every corner(kinda like Israel rn ) , https://sci-hub.ru/10.1080/01402390701343490 ----> Really good into the breakdown of each of the different war scares
If I recall correctly, Engels once wrote Marx that he had traced the Reign of Terror in the French Revolution to the Reign of the Terrified. As a former specialist on the Soviet economy, that's an apt description of Stalinist terror too. The price controls that ruined the New Economic Policy catalyzed actions that Stalin's entourage interpreted as sabotage, etc.
People like Zinoviev were executed because they were actively plotting against him. I am not convinced the Bolsheviks killed 500,000 or 750,000 people in the purges because this figure is based on one document that may well have been produced by the Khruschev regime as part of their inner-party struggle against the Stalinists. There were, of course, many executions between 1937 8. The fear was of unrest among former Kulaks, many of whom had moved to the towns. See J. Arch Getty for confirmation of this stuff.
Why did Stalin suppress the Kulaks? As you have said yourself, an agricultural country that splits up its large, landed estates and distributes them among small peasants will stay poor, ceteris paribus. There must be some sort of consolidation. An alternative is you can just squeeze the small peasants with low prices and give them big incentives to work in fast growing manufacturing like South Korea. If you don’t, you end up like India, which is still very poor. (I know that its high economic growth rates are important in your world inequality models, but they are wrongly calculated-look at surveys of consumer goods ownership.)
Regards
Joseph
I‘m really surprised you don‘t mention Stephan Kotkin‘s three-volume biography of Stalin, particularly volume 2, Stalin: Waiting for Hitler 1929-1941, which covers the purges. Aragon is ancient history and reflects the times, whereas Kotkin reflects the most recent scholarship. Khrushchev‘s Memoirs are also very insightful, even more so than his 1956 XX Party Congress speech. I think finding a rationale for the purges is a fool‘s errand. As you point out, Hitler‘s purges were much more limited and rational (although his Genozides were not).
More interesting questions are
1. how can one totalitarian leader get away for years with such obviously unjustified and self-destructive behavior without opposition, only stopped by his death (which might have been murder by four other Politburo members);
2. why does this appear to be a structural feature and not just a personal Stalinist idiosyncrasy of Communism, since Mao did exactly the same thing in the Hundred Flowers Campaign, Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution? And the Cambodian Pol Pot regime was not very different in its murderous war on its own people.
Here's an interesting excerpt from Sheila Fitzpatrick's review of "Stalin: Waiting for Hitler" in the LRB, for commenters like me who haven't read it yet:
"Nobody really has a good explanation for the Great Purges, including Kotkin. The most interesting aspect of his account is how firmly he disposes of arguments that Stalin initiated the terror because of some sense of overwhelming crisis or threat. Domestically, he faced ‘astonishingly little overt political opposition of any kind’. On the international scene, there was a possibility of war, but that had been around for a few years. ‘There was no immediate threat – social, economic, political – to the country or to the regime’s legitimacy or stability, no crisis. But then, suddenly, there was total crisis.’ When Stalin initiated mass (as opposed to elite) terror in the summer of 1937, ‘there was no “dynamic” forcing him to do so, no “factional” fighting, no heightened threat abroad. The terror was not spiralling out of his control. He just decided, himself, to approve quota-driven eradication of entire categories of people in a planned indiscriminate terror known as mass operations.’ [...]
"In the end, Kotkin may be on safer ground echoing the words of Adam Ulam, who wrote in 1982 that ‘there is in Stalin’s terror an element of sheer preposterousness which defies explanation.’ Oddly, given that Kotkin’s account of the Great Purges features Stalin so prominently as author and producer, he gives Stalin little credit for an equally striking achievement, notably closing them down at the end of 1938 without losing power or even reputation in the party. .. ‘We cannot definitively establish his motivations,’ Kotkin concludes."
Also, on the idea of "Holodomor," she notes:
"Kotkin accepts that the famine was Stalin’s responsibility, in that he had refused to lower procurement pressure even when reports came in that peasants were starving, but concludes that the famine, though it derived more from Stalin’s policies and ruthlessness in implementing them, ‘was not intentional’. This is an unambiguous rejection of the view widely held by Ukrainians and reflected inter alia in Anne Applebaum’s recent account of famine in the Ukraine. In Kotkin’s view, Stalin’s actions ‘do not indicate that he was trying to exterminate peasants or ethnic Ukrainians ... There was no “Ukrainian” famine; the famine was Soviet.’ Kazakhs in fact suffered proportionally much more than Ukrainians, with up to 1.4 million deaths out of a total population of 6.5 million, compared to Ukraine’s 3.5 million deaths out of 33 million"
I think the issue is not what motivated Stalin, which we will never really know, but what allows a single head of state to initiate and ruthlessly carry out such policies with no opposition and no corrective feedback. Something is really wrong with such a system for two reasons. One, there seems to be a natural selective bias in the Bolshevik system for malignant narcissists like Stalin and Mao to eliminate their rivals and rise to the top. Two, once in power, there is no way to stop them except their natural or unnatural deaths.
As to the Holodomor, the basic issue is less whether Stalin wanted to exterminate Ukrainians per se, but that Soviet managers in their greed and to meet quotas requisitioned not only the whole Ukrainian grain output but even their seed corn, as Khrushchev pointed out. Thus they could not only not feed themselves but not replant for the next season. This is just economic incompetence, but there was no way to get this point back to the top before millions had died. It was exactly the same during the disastrous Kharkiv campaign, when Khrushchev desperately called Stalin to call off the attack but Stalin refused to take his call. Stalin thought he knew everything and took no advice. But he still stayed in power.
I do not pretend to have an answer and have thought about it too. I do not buy the hypothesis of killing the old guard. My hypothesis is the following: the Bolsheviks and Stalin had no real idea what they were engaging in. Under "war communism", some thought initially that communism had been reached quickly when they were " just " experiencing hyperinflation. Contrary to Bukharin and Preobrazhensky, Stalin thought that non market methods needed to be used to finance industrialization. This led to drastic increase in supply of grain and reduction in output at the same time, leading to the collectivization and famine. This famine was so horrible that it created a situation of extreme tension within society, leading to paranoia by Stalin. The combination of that tension and his paranoia led to the purges. One element in favor of my hypothesis is that something similar happened in China. Mao made the same mistake as Stalin with the Great Leap forward (excess grain deliveries leading to output collapse and famine) and the aftermath was the Cultural Revolution, which was the equivalent to stalinist purges. This can be debated, but in both cases there was a horrible mistake leading to famine of millions, which would be difficult to digest for any politician so for idealistic bolsheviks this was the world upside down and they lost any clue to what was happening. The response (1936-38 purges and cultural revolution) can be seen a form of social catharsis in response to the horros of the famine. I am not a social psychologist, but this is the most reasonable hypothesis I came up with.
The aftermath of the Great Leap Forward in China did not directly lead to the Cultural Revolution, there's about a decade in between. What happened in that intervening decade included the Party's first broad experiments with marketization. Some regions had implemented policies during the famines that allowed farmers to sell their excess products, and those regions were faring better. Within the Party, Mao lost major influence & prestige for a time, and the "capitalist roaders" like Deng were ascendant, because they had championed such policies
I think it's wrong to suggest the Party was confused or blinded by idealism to the ("difficult to digest") reality -- surely Mao's grip on control slowed the response to the famines, but the Party was, in fact, changing & "digesting" the failures of the Great Leap Forward, to the point where they were already starting on the trajectory we see today (& they had effectively demoted Mao). As for the people waging Cultural Revolution against the bureaucrats of the Party & PLA, I'm not the most well-read here, but I'm not aware of any citing the famines as justification
Overall, I think comparing USSR & PRC on this will lead you astray. The ideological tendencies at play in the Great Leap Forward & Cultural Revolution are the ones least resembling Soviet-style Marxism -- namely, Mao's voluntarism: his emphasis on radical democracy, his belief you might be able to "skip stages" of typical capitalist development, and especially his anti-bureaucracy tendency. The Soviets never suggested peasants should smelt steel in their own backyards
Yes, there are differences but also commonalities. The cultural revolution was a direct response to Mao's loss of power following the Great Leap forward. There were not that many years before the realization of the folly of the Great Leap forward and Mao's revenge on Liu Shaoqi (4-5 years). ALso, what you did not pick up was the extreme tension in society and the party both in USSR and PRC following the extreme famines. These famines were the direct consequences of policies to "accelerate" growth and industrialization, not of natural disasters. I could say much more about this, but it is hard to exaggerate the effect of these famines on society at large as well as on the Party.
In criminology and forensic medicine there is the concept of "overkill" or "overkilling": a homicide where the injuries suffered by the victim greatly exceed the injuries necessary to cause death. For instance, there may be up to hundreds of stab wounds on the victim's body although the first few wounds had already caused death. Overkill is associated with some types of psychiatric disorder, but there seems to be no one "big" explanation for it. Maybe the irrationally large scope of Stalin's purges was a kind of political version of it?
(It is perhaps interesting that in the medical literature, the first recorded case of overkilling in history was the assassination of Julius Caesar, who had 23 wounds inflicted, according to the Roman doctor Antistius who performed an autopsy.)
Thanks for those interesting post. I‘d like to recommend to your readers this movie about the great terror
http://distrib.pyramidefilms.com/pyramide-distribution-catalogue/deux-procureurs.html . I hope you had the opportunity to watch it. What do you think about it?
Comment cette panique morale peut-elle affecter à un tel degré des gens convaincus d’être une élite allant dans le sens de l’histoire et de libérer l’espèce humaine ?
The way I've made sense of this period (which admittedly may be wrong) is to see it as a confluence of two things, which both fed on and worsened each other in a feedback loop- factional maneuvering "on top" in the realm of high politics, and a moral panic "at the bottom" about wreckers, saboteurs, and spies in the realm of the everyday amidst the pressures of the USSR's breakneck industrialisation.
From this perspective there's a slight similarity to Mao's cultural revolution- a project initiated by a leader to ruthlessly shore up his authority that then picked up its own momentum as it filtered to the rest of society with disastrous consequences.
But the Cultural Revolution was different. It was anarchy and freedom unleashed/stimulated from the top. The Great Terror was nt anarchic but systematic murdering. Plus, the Cultural Revolution is understandable b/c it is in sync with Mao's view of "continuous revolution". So, I think, we can more or less fully understand its logic.
That's true, I think the similarities between the cultural revolution and the great purges do not go very far- as you say there is a big difference in the actual content and intention of the cultural revolution.
But in terms of the systematic murdering element of the great purges- I am quite drawn to the revisionist interpretation of J. Arch Getty who argues that the purges were much more chaotic and reactive than conventional accounts would have it.
I would say that the killings were indeed systematic in the sense of being carried out by the state rather than mostly at random by mobs of red guards as in the case of the cultural revolution, but that the actual process of deciding who would be killed was often very chaotic in the sense of being the product of climate of fear and mutual suspicion that had some of the characteristics of a moral panic.
Citation de Robespierre dans la rubrique Terreur de Wikipedia : „Dans son Rapport sur les principes de morale politique qui doivent guider la Convention nationale dans l’administration de la République du 18 pluviôse, Robespierre fait allusion aux « affaires », entre autres celle de la liquidation de la Compagnie des Indes, à quoi il oppose la vertu. Il écrit que : « la première maxime de notre politique doit être que l’on conduit le peuple par la raison, et les ennemis du peuple par la terreur. Si le ressort du gouvernement populaire dans la paix est la vertu, le ressort du gouvernement populaire, en révolution est à la fois la vertu et la terreur. La vertu, sans laquelle la terreur est funeste ; la terreur, sans laquelle la vertu est impuissante. La Terreur n’est autre chose que la justice prompte, sévère, inflexible : elle est donc une émanation de la vertu ; elle est moins un principe particulier qu’une conséquence du principe général de la démocratie appliqué aux plus pressants besoins de la patrie. »
Question : la Terreur dure 2 ans maximum - 1792/94. Comment expliquer la durée du Stalinisme… ou celle de l‘URSS ?
I haven't read her book yet, but I heard an interview (on Eurasian Knot) with historian Wendy Goldman, who does argue that The Great Terror was an "excess of democracy" type of situation. This blurb from a review of her book certainly does remind me of the accounts I've read of life under high Maoism (see the collection, "Maoism at the Grassroots"), like struggle sessions at the factory:
"In the unions and the factories, repression was accompanied by a mass campaign for democracy. Party leaders urged workers to criticize and remove corrupt and negligent officials. Workers, shop foremen, local party members, and union leaders adopted the slogans of repression and used them, often against each other, to redress long-standing grievances, shift blame for intractable problems in production, and advance personal agendas. Repression quickly became a mass phenomenon, not only in the number of victims it claimed, but also in the number of perpetrators it spawned."
This is an interesting post. Do you think Stalin was just really bad with using violence, contra Machiavellia, since in his early life he was a criminal or gangster? He just had an indiscriminate and near-destructive love of violence, like a criminal who destroys himself because he is too liberal with using it? (Think Tony Soprano.) And do you think he was poisoned by Beria? I remember a theory that his death may have been a poisoning, because everyone feared he was about ready to do a big purge again, either against fellow communists, Jews, or even start a war against the United States?
He actually died b/c he put in jail all his doctors and every other doctor was afraid to tell him anything. So he basically killed himself through lack of health care.
I don't believe in either. He was not a gangster in his youth but he did participate in several actions of "expropriation". Funds were to the Party. There was nothing unusual in that. But he did believe that violence & killing is a way to solve problems. Yet he was also very systematic and not impulsive. So the Great Terror was not an impulsive action. On Beria, there is zero evidence Stalin died from poisoning.
There was a big bank heist led by Stalin in early 1900s in the Caucasus that led with scores of dead, including civilians, and with the money ultimately lost... Wasn't really an expropriation...
There are probably many causes, but Wendy Goldman's strikes me as most to the point (Stalinist terror and democracy, the 1937 union campaign). And that is about the conspirationist mentality that begun to spread in the mid 30s: "We made a revolution to get it better, but it didn't. It must be someone's fault!".
Because they didn't get it better. Some did, particularly the skilled technicians who were upgraded to engineers (Moshe Lewin: The making of the Soviet system). For others it became worse – for example of the textile workers in the Ivanovo district who got their salaries halved and their quotas doubled in 1932 (Jeffrey J Rossman: The Teikovo cotton workers’ strike of April 1932).
So I suppose the party people did their best to deflect the accusations. Nobody wanted to be identified as "someone", but tried to get the popular ire to hit somebody else.
The other explanation I have heard of was, I think, offered by Sheila Fitzpatrick (Stalin's peasants). After the disastrous collectivization of the agriculture it was necessary to make peace with the peasants, and accusing their low level tormenters was one obious way. These trials were serious and based on testimonies of the victims.
Hannah Arendt « Sous Staline il n’est pas nécessaire d’avoir fait quoi que ce soit pour être déportéou exécuté. »
One thing is certain: Stalin cemented an incredible level of personal cult like control of every aspect of Soviet society through his orgy of violence
For someone who grew up as a violent revolutionary and had a good sense of how fragile power can be that must have been attractive
You can say that Hitler and Mussolini did the same thing without the extent of purges etc. But the fascist leaders rose to power based on an explicitly personalist ideology that already celebrated their personal power. Stalin came to power through a collectivist Party apparatus so he had some work to do
“What was the objective of the Great Terror? Why did Stalin want all these people killed?” As you say, it was irrational in the normal sense of the word and badly damaged both economic progress and military performance in Word War 2. It went far beyond what was necessary to keep Stalin in power.
I freely admit I am guessing.
Stalin was born to a poor family, and hence university was not an option for him - his formal education was in a theological seminary.
The leadership of radical left-wing parties is often dominated by people who struggle to agree on anything. Intellectual arrogance and a refusal to listen to alternatives abound. Although undoubtedly able, well read and with a prodigious memory, Stalin felt looked down on by other leading Bolsheviks as not being of their academic calibre. He had a strong Georgian accent, which perhaps strengthened that perception. Stalin must have bitterly resented this.
A common phenomenon in organisations is the over-promoted manager. They may have a morbid fear of anyone lower in the structure who may outshine them. They deliberately surround themselves by people who appear less able than they are. Their subordinates feel similarly threatened. Khrushchev seems to have survived by being good at playing the country bumpkin. His parents were poor peasants.
Perhaps deep-down Stalin profoundly doubted his ability and that’s a reason for the crazy purges. Maybe his subordinates were all too happy to add the names of people who they regarded as threatening to the list.