Originally published in Challenge-Desafio Vol.20, No. 39, February 15, 1984, pp. 7-8.
We recommend the following bibliography for those interested in more details about the period of the "purges."
(1) Hough, Jerry F., and Merle Fainsod. How the Soviet Union Is Governed. Harvard University Press, 1979.
Chapter 5 deals with the pre-war Stalin period; pages 175-177, with the "purges." Hough refutes the idea of millions of casualties, and concludes:
A figure in the low hundreds of thousands [number of deaths] seems much more probably than one in the high hundreds of thousands, and even George Kennan's estimate of "tens of thousands" is quite conceivable, maybe even probable.The reference to Kennan is to his Soviet Foreign Policy, 1917- 1941 (Princeton: Van Nostrand, 1960), p. 89.
In general, Hough's book is the best example of bourgeois scholarship on the USSR. He at least applies standards of evidence which are routinely applied by bourgeois historians in other fields, but virtually never to the study of the USSR during Stalin's time.
(2) Getty, John Arch. The "Great Purges" Reconsidered. The Soviet Communist Party, 1933-39. Unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, Boston College, 1979: order University Microfilms No. 79- 20473.
This is a thorough study of the whole question. One has to read it to get a feel for how completely the "accepted" (Conquest- Solzhenitsyn, et al.) version of the "purges" must be rejected, how completely dishonest their "scholarship" is, how poor their use of evidence.
Getty concurs with Hough (not his advisor or anything, by the way) in the "numbers game" of how many died; cf. Appendix, pp. 560-62, and reviews the major scholarship on it at the time.
But his main service is in going over all the evidence for what was going on in the USSR during this period. See the review in PL Magazine, Vol. 14, No. 1 (Spring, 1981), pp. 70-73, for a brief summary of his thesis.
(3) Getty, John Arch. "Party and Purge in Smolensk: 1933-37," Slavic Review, Vol. 42, No. 1 (Spring, 1983), pp. 60-79; Also, Getty's "Reply" in the same issue.
Getty lays out the new view of the "purges" and replies to Robert Tucker and N. Rosefield, two Conquest-types. Getty pulls his punches, though, in this article in the leading US Soviet studies journal. It is in no way a substitute for his dissertation.
Getty will have a book coming out, based upon his dissertation, one of these years. [Editor's note, 1996: the book was published by Cambridge University Press in 1985: Origins of the Great Purges: The Soviet Communist Party Reconsidered, 1933-1938.]
But read the dissertation: you'll never be the same.
(4) Wheatcroft, Stephen G., "On Assessing the Size of Forced Concentration Camp Labour in the Soviet Union, 1929-56," Soviet Studies (Glasgow), Vol. 33, No. 2 (April, 1981), pp. 265-295.
In attacking an article by S. Rosefielde in the previous issue of Soviet Studies (one that came to Conquest-type conclusions), Wheatcroft analyses and demolishes not only the use of evidence by Rosefielde but, more significantly, of Robert Conquest in his often-cited tome The Great Terror. Again, one has to read this careful examination to believe the depth of chicanery the anti-Stalinists have stooped to.
Wheatcroft cuts down the estimate of the population of labor camps greatly. He estimates the range of possibilities as between "under two million in forced labor camps on the eve of the war" (p. 283) to a maximum number of "some four to five million" in 1939 (p. 286). He discusses the "purge' within the Soviet Union extensively and concludes "the quantitative significance of the 1937-38 purge has also generally been exaggerated" (p. 286).
He has many other fascinating things to say about the "evidence" (émigré and otherwise) used -- or, rather, misused -- by such as Conquest. In general, the whole article should be read carefully.
See also the very weak reply by Robert Conquest, who recognized that Wheatcroft's article was basically an attack upon him, in Soviet Studies, Vol. 34, No. 3 (July, 1982), pp. 434-439. He is reduced at one point to saying that we should believe whatever Andrei Sakharov has said on the subject!
(5) Davies, R.W., and S.G. Wheatcroft," Steven Rosefielde's Kliukva," Slavic Review, Vol. 39, No. 4 (December, 1980). This is a briefer version of the work by Wheatcroft cited directly above.
Note: Davies is the head of CREES (Center for Russian and East European Studies) at the University of Birmingham, England. The work of the scholars there is the best in the world on the USSR in a bourgeois scientific sense. Davies also co-authored the final volumes of E.H. Carr's work with Carr until the latter's death. Wheatcroft is one of the leading researchers at Birmingham [Editor's note, 1996: Wheatcroft has since moved to Australia and continues to do research.]
(6) Wheatcroft, S.G., "Towards a Thorough Analysis of Soviet Forced Labor Statistics," Soviet Studies, Vol. 35, No. 2 (April, 1983), pp. 223-237.
This is Wheatcroft's response to the Conquest piece mentioned above. It contains valuable additional criticism and information. It also mentions Getty's dissertation in a note (note 24), but doesn't make much use of it. However, it demolishes Conquest.
These works will give the reader, in addition, the bibliography of the other important recent scholarly works which re-evaluate the "purges" period
There is a lot of research on the earlier Stalin period that also completely revises the portrait of "totalitarianism" and is not mentioned in these works, however. For example:
Finally a note on the causes of the "purge" of 1937-38. Getty shows that it came about very suddenly, without any build-up or lead-up to it at all. This does two things. First, it goes against the entire Conquest (and others, e.g. Leonard Shapiro, the consecrated reviewer of all books about the USSR for the New York Review of Books and author of the widely praised, but completely unscholarly book The Communist Party of the Soviet Union) thesis that Stalin carefully planned and orchestrated the "purges" in advance throughout the 1930s to get rid of his enemies.
Second, it points up the crucial nature of the so-called "Tukhachevskii Affair," the purported discovery of a plot within the highest levels of the Soviet armed forces. As Getty shows, the whole "terror" began suddenly, immediately after the generals, led by Tukhachevskii, were arrested and executed.
As Getty says (dissertation):
It seems inescapable that something happened after February and before June 1937 to convince Stalin to unleash Ezhov on non- oppositionists. (p. 423).
The final trigger concerned relations between the Party leadership and the military command. (. 426)
Although no comprehensive tally had ever been made, it seems that the vast majority of important Party, Soviet, and economic leaders who fell in the Ezhovshchina were arrested in the summer or early fall of 1937 -- that is, coincident with or immediately after the military affair.As Getty hints later on:
Trotsky believed that an autonomous, entrenched, rightist (but nominally party) bureaucracy had been using Stalin as a kind of front man, but there was always the danger that it would make a dictatorship. It is not unreasonable to argue that in general outline something like this nearly happened, but that Stalin moved first.The "Tukhachevskii Affair" is important in all of this, as well. There is good, though not conclusive, evidence that a plot of some kind between the Soviet military men and the German General Staff did in fact exist.
[Editor's note, 1996.
Since this article was written in 1984 there has been a lot more excellent research from a bourgeois perspective that helps debunk the anti-Communist -- really, fascist -- attacks on Stalin as "worse than Hitler," etc.
We recommend the articles in the index to the supplements to our weekly newspaper Challenge-Desafio, including the two series on the "Hoax of the Man-Made Famine in the Ukraine" and the critique of the PBS "Stalin" series of 1990. There are plenty of references in those articles, and in their footnotes, to more recent bourgeois research on the USSR, as well as some cautionary words about the limitations of this same research.
We also point out two further works of bourgeois research, available on Internet, that support this view. The first is an article from the Village Voice in 1988 which attacks Conquest and one of his books. The second is a timidly-written article on the Tukhachevskii Affair which shows that there is excellent evidence to support Stalin's and the Bolshevik leadership's claim that Tukhachevskii was in fact involved in some kind of plot against the Soviet government, as Getty also argues (see above).
The lesson of all this is clear: NEVER believe what the capitalist murderers and their "scholars" write about the history of the Communist movement!
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