SCHOLARS HAVE APPROACHED the enigma of the Great Terror in a variety of ways. Robert Conquest, who gave the episode its proper name (1968, 1990), remains the point of departure, having definitively shown Stalin’s central role decades before archives were declassified. Conquest, though, did not really attempt an explanation (he wrote more or less under the assumption that a Communist regime, and Stalin personally, would inevitably get around to inflicting mass terror in pursuit of ever-greater power).28 Alexander Gerschenkron, in a review of Conquest’s The Great Terror, quoted his argument that “the nature of the whole purge depends in the last analysis on the personal and political drives of Stalin,” then observed that all dictators exhibit a drive to increase their power, and that any modern dictatorship “which is supported neither by an ancient tradition (or close alliance with an ancient power, such as the Church) nor by the active consent of the governed must at all times justify its continuation in power.” Stalin’s dictatorship, too, would be expected to foster “a permanent condition of stress by creating enemies at home and abroad and/or by imposing upon the population gigantic tasks that would be unlikely to be carried out in the absence of the dictatorship,” as well as “a charismatic image of the dictator,” “a utopian goal, carefully kept in a remote future,” and “proscription of any deviating values, supported by threats and acts of repression.”29
Stalin instigated an epic version of the time-honored authoritarian device of trumped-up conspiracies linking internal with external “enemies,” but the Soviet case differed in more than just scale.30 Roy Medvedev, author of the other monumental work on the terror (1971, 1989), endeavored to separate Stalin from the sacred Lenin and depicted him as a traditional tyrant, but he similarly asserted that Stalin was motivated by “lust for power, boundless ambition,” as if all tyrants murdered their own elites not just on such a scale but also with forced confessions to fantastical crimes they had not committed.31 Trotsky imagined Stalin’s motivations as jealousy and pettiness, while the biographer Robert C. Tucker saw a pursuit of fame and glory. Moshe Lewin surmised that a paranoid “Stalin actually became the system and his personality acquired therefore a ‘systemic’ dimension,” an apt description, though not an analysis.32 Hiroaki Kuromiya incisively dissected Stalin’s cold-blooded logic regarding opponents and enemies, while Erik van Ree revealed Stalin as a Marxist-Leninist true believer, and Arfon Rees showed him to be a combination revolutionary and Machiavellian.33 These insights were not offered as explanations for the murderous episode of 1937–38. “There is in Stalin’s Terror an element of sheer preposterousness which defies explanation,” Adam Ulam conceded, after trying.34
A few analysts have stressed not intentions but the chronic dysfunctionality of the political system, as if all authoritarian regimes—which are all dysfunctional to a great degree—do what Stalin’s did.35 In Nazi Germany, Hitler went after the Jews (less than 1 percent of the population), Communists, and Social Democrats, but in the USSR Stalin savaged his own loyal elites across the board. To be sure, the greater number of victims were ordinary Soviet people, but what regime liquidates colossal numbers of loyal officials? Could Hitler—had he been so inclined—have compelled the imprisonment or execution of huge swaths of Nazi factory and farm bosses, as well as almost all Nazi provincial Gauleiters and their staffs, several times over? Could he have executed the personnel of Nazi central ministries, thousands of his Wehrmacht officers—including almost his entire high command—as well as the Reich’s diplomatic corps and its espionage agents, its celebrated cultural figures, and the leadership of Nazi parties throughout the world (had such parties existed)? Could Hitler also have decimated the Gestapo even while it was carrying out a mass bloodletting? And could the German people have been told, and would the German people have found plausible, that almost everyone who had come to power with the Nazi revolution turned out to be a foreign agent and saboteur?36 Even among ideological dictatorships, Communism stands out.
