At the heart of Soviet history is the issue of Stalinist terror.

Those who had enthusiasm for

the emancipatory promises of the revolution have to deal with

the fact that actually what came into

being is a terrorist regime which murdered millions.

And those who had no attraction for whatever the revolution promised could think,

"Well, this is what Marxism and socialism means."

How are we to explain what happened?

What we can do is to describe how it came about,

could describe what are the preconditions which were needed.

But what we cannot do is to explain why it happened.

That remains elusive.

Stalin was different from Hitler.

We have perfectly clear understanding of why Hitler did what he did.

There is no mystery there.

It's a little reminder all the wickedness he articulated perfectly clearly.

Stalin is forever elusive.

Stalin was not an actor,

he was more of a puppeteer.

Why he did what he did,

we have no good understanding.

He did not give speeches,

he did not give many speeches,

he did not write an autobiography.

How did it come about?

We started the revolution.

The Bolsheviks did not regard themselves as terrorist but

they took it for granted that we show our revolutionary commitment

by taking harsh measures and there and the real revolutionary does not

askew cruelty, killing our enemies.

The Civil War of course.

The two sides, the Bolsheviks and anti-Bolsheviks each committed atrocities.

Whether the Bolsheviks were responsible for the larger number of deaths

than that the whites is not stuff that we've done but even if it was.

So, at the very outset,

really within the first few weeks of the establishment of the regime,

the regime created an instrument called Cheka Extraordinary Committee.

Which was used in the course of the Civil War and it was used in the course of the 1920s.

When I talk about what was necessity,

what was necessary for the establishment of this terrorist regime was an instrument,

which would carry out the terror and that was already in

existence from the very beginning.

In 1934 it was renamed and it became part of the Ministry of Interior.

It didn't matter that the instrument of terror has been there from the very beginning.

This was one needed.

Second remarkable feature of the terror were the show trials.

In the course of the show trials,

the Bolshevik leadership which created the revolution,

which administered the country in the 1920s were exterminated.

This is an unparalleled event.

The show trials also have a history, they also existed.

Already in 1922, show trials

were made against the Mensheviks and the socialist revolutionaries.

By show trial, I mean is that

people who are accused of crimes which they did not and could not have committed.

In the late 1920s,

with a series of show trials against intellectuals,

against the very people that the regime would need for the purpose of industrialization.

That too has a history.

Then, of course, a major prerequisite was the victory of Stalin.

That is it would be inconceivable of carrying

out the kind of acts which were carried out by a collective leadership.

That is they would not have allowed

their comrades to be destroyed the way they were destroying.

And then it seems to me

a more vague but necessary precondition

was the bloodiness of the first decades of the 20th century.

That is life was cheap.

Millions died in the course of the war and revolution,

then millions died during the famine of the 1920s,

and even more millions died as a result of Soviet collectivization and industrialization.

Now, how to describe the terror of what exactly happened?

The estimate among historians that something like

700,000 to one million people were actually sentenced to death by various tribunals,

and another 10 million were sent to camps where survival rates were very poor.

It is a remarkable event.

It really is up to that point,

it is unparalleled in the history of the modern world.

That the regime was destroying its own children.

In this respect, it was very different from the Nazi terror.

The Nazi terror was directed against

political opponents and against Jews and the gypsies.

A good German had no reason to be concerned about his survival.

The Soviet regime, however, nobody was safe.

Quite remarkably, the higher you were in the hierarchy,

the less chances of survival.

In 1934, party congress was called

and the party congress had something like 2,000- have 2000 participants.

By the next party congress in 1939,

half of them were already dead,

half of them were already killed.

Those Soviet Army leadership was destroyed which would have

unhappy consequences because the allies in

1939 believed that the Soviet army is not a very valuable fighting force and

therefore were less anxious to establish alliance against the Nazis.

The Nazis also were contemptuous of the Red Army because of the destruction of

the officer corps and consequently embarked on

that deck of the Soviet Union with greater confidence than otherwise they might have.

We can look at what groups were most likely to be hurt.

Foreign companies who came to Russia and

came to the Soviet Union were particularly hard hit.

It has been established that Stalin killed more German Communists than Hitler did.

The Polish Communist leadership in Moscow was destroyed.

Why? We do not have an answer.

The consequences of the terror.

The terror affected every aspect of life,

people talk to one another differently.

There are recorded incidents but there were two sisters,

each hated the communist,

each hated what was going on but they would not tell it one another.

Parents talk differently to their children.

Now, the consequence of the terror was also that

people took revenge, denounce one another.

We have enormous archives of denunciation.

That is if you wanted to get rid of

the husband of the woman that you actually like, you denounced them.

All living conditions were poor,

people were living in close quarters.

The regime did not invest in housing,

people lived in very close quarters and on

occasion four or five families lived in the same apartment.

If you denounce your neighbor,

you acquired a little more living space.

That is, the terror did not bring out the best of human being.

Terror

Russian History: from Lenin to Putin

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