Vol. 7 No. 18 · 17 October 1985
pages 3-5 | 3095 words
Stalin’s Purges
John Barber
- Origins of the Great Purges: The Soviet Communist Party Reconsidered 1933-1938 by J. Arch Getty
Cambridge, 275 pp, £25.00, May 1985, ISBN 0 521 25921 5
- The Making of the Soviet System: Essays in the Social History of Interwar Russia by Moshe Lewin
Methuen, 354 pp, £19.00, June 1985, ISBN 0 416 40820 6
Nothing in the history of modern revolution illustrates so vividly the contrast between the ideals of a revolution’s makers and the catastrophes it may be fated to endure as do the Great Purges of 1937-38 in the USSR. It was then that Stalin unleashed the NKVD in a murderous onslaught against all key sections of state and society: the Communist Party and the government apparatus, industrial management and the military, scientists and technical specialists, writers and artists, as well as ordinary workers and peasants. More Communists perished in the Purges, it has been remarked, than in the struggle against Tsarism, the 1917 Revolution and the Civil War combined – among them, many of Lenin’s closest comrades. The flower of the Soviet intelligentsia was destroyed and cultural life paralysed for two decades. Great damage was inflicted on both the Soviet Union’s economy and its defences. Meanwhile the last remaining vestiges of revolutionary Bolshevism were eliminated and a despotic regime created, buttressed by a grotesque cult of Stalin’s personality and by the powerful machinery of a police state.
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Letters
Vol. 7 No. 22 · 19 December 1985
From Jeff Weintraub
SIR: I have not yet read J. Arch Getty’s Origins of the Great Purges, but John Barber’s admirable review (LRB, 17 October) convinced me that I ought to read it. However, I was sorry to see him draw one conclusion which, while predictable, seems to me greatly misleading and depressingly trite. The book, he asserts, ‘also hammers a good many nails into the coffin of the totalitarian model of Soviet politics’. It is certainly true that the story Getty tells, as I understand it from Dr Barber’s summary, is incompatible with many of the vulgar or oversimplified versions of the ‘totalitarian model’. But if Dr Barber would take the trouble to go back and reread, for example, Hannah Arendt’s Origins of Totalitarianism, he would see that the bulk of Getty’s argument is quite compatible with – indeed, tends to support – the basic account of Soviet totalitarianism and its development given by Arendt. (Arendt, by the way, also made use of the Smolensk archives, both directly and via the work of Merle Fainsod before it was sanitised by Jerry Hough.) This is not to say that the arguments of Arendt, Richard Lowenthal and so on are without problems: but if any of Getty’s findings do them serious damage, this is not apparent from the review. Incidentally, some of the reappraisals which Dr Barber identifies as stemming from Getty’s book will seem less surprising to readers of, for example, the collection of essays on Stalinism edited some years back by Robert Tucker.
Jeff Weintraub
Harvard University Committee
John Barber writes: Mr Weintraub is quite entitled to question my assessment of J. Arch Getty’s Origins of the Great Purges, but it might help if he were to read the book. Unfortunately, he has failed to grasp its most important conclusion. Getty does not simply show, as others have indeed already done, that corruption, inefficiency, and resistance to official policies, existed in the Soviet Union in the 1930s: he also presents strong evidence to suggest that this was true of the Communist Party itself. Far from being an all-powerful monolithic apparatus, the Party suffered from real limitations as an instrument for imposing the regime’s will on society. This must call into question the ‘total dominance’ which Hannah Arendt and other theorists of totalitarianism saw as a central feature of the Stalinist political system. It is, however, highly misleading of Mr Weintraub to imply that Arendt made significant use of the Smolensk archive. A few references taken from Merle Fainsod’s Smolensk under Soviet Rule were included in the introduction to the third edition of The Origins of Totalitarianism, but that was all. Getty’s book is the first to make substantial use of the Smolensk archive since Fainsod’s preliminary survey of its contents nearly three decades ago.
