‘Was There a Rationale for the Great Terror?’

Tutorial 1: ‘Was there a rationale for the Great Terror?’

The study of the Great Terror as a historical phenomenon has attracted much attention over the last 40 years, from the seminal work by Robert Conquest who is widely attributed with coining the term “Great Terror” to describe the widespread purges and repressions in the Soviet Union in the late 1930’s, to more recent studies incorporating oral testimony and archival evidence. Various factors are listed as the inspiration for the Great Terror, ranging from traditional personality and politics-focused approaches to revisionist accounts that incorporate the importance of social undercurrents in the USSR at the time. My aim in this essay is to evaluate the suggested rationale for the Great Terror and argue that the figure of Stalin was instrumental in shaping the policies that resulted in the particular implementation of the Great Purges of the Communist Party and Soviet society.

Firstly, I think it is important to identify the two elements of the Great Terror – that is the purging of the Party ranks on the one hand, and the much more broad-ranging prosecution and indictment of vast swathes of Soviet society that were deemed to be ‘counterrevolutionary’ and ‘enemies of the people’, i.e. the mass terror. The reason for this distinction is that it seems plausible to argue that a consistent ‘review’ of party leadership and membership is the hallmark of many a political organisation, though in most cases, admittedly in a less violent manner than that encountered in the Soviet Union between 1936 and 1938. On the other hand, the social dislocations caused by the repressions of many other elements of society, often in a seemingly arbitrary manner, were less obviously expected, and the excesses associated with that eventually drew the most dramatic part of the Great Terror to its conclusion (as can be seen in the Plenum of the CC of the VKP(B), On the Mistakes of Party Organizations in Excluding Communists from the...