24. Soviet terror statistics are suspect, of course, but still indicate orders of magnitude. We will never know how many of those beaten to death during interrogations were recorded as dying from heart attacks, for example. Officially, executions were almost evenly distributed between the horrific years of 1937 (353,074) and 1938 (328,618). The number included both political and common crimes. These two years accounted for 91 percent of all the death sentences for political crimes handed down between 1921 and 1940. GARF, f. 9041, op. 1, d. 4517, l. 201–5 (report of late 1953); Vinogradov, Genrikh Iagoda, 26; Lukianov, “Massovye represii opravdany byt’ ne mogut,” 120 (data presented by a commission in 1962–3); Popov, “Gosudarstvennyi terror”; Ellman, “Soviet Repression Statistics”; Khaustov, “Deiatel’nost’ organov,” 477–8 (TsA FSB, f. 8, op. 1, d. 80, l. 57–8, 61–2). The number 1.575 million does not include arrests by the regular police (militia).
25. Davies, “Soviet Economy,” 11–37.
26. Davies, Popular Opinion, 35.
27. Many Soviet collective farmers preferred bribing the capitalists, with grain or whatever it took, to avoid war, and some were reportedly even ready to pay double tax if that meant war could be avoided for sure. ‘Esli mir obrushitsia na nashu Respubliku,’ 125 (citing TsDOOSO, f. 4, op. 5, d. 87, l. 111).
28. Conquest, Stalin’s Purge. “The nature of the whole purge depends in the last analysis on the personal and political drives of Stalin.” Conquest, Reassessment, 33. “The Soviet Union one sees in the archives is perfectly recognizable to people who have tried to understand it from the open sources alone,” wrote Joseph Berliner. Gregory, Behind the Façade, 6.
29. Gerschenkron, “On Dictatorship.”
30. Rees, “Stalin as Leader, 1937–1953,” 202–3.
31. Medvedev, Let History Judge, 585. Volkgonov largely echoed Medvedev. Lars Lih argued that Stalin pursued an “anti-bureaucratic scenario,” but also that Stalin recognized the necessity of the state, an unresolved paradox. Lih, Introduction to Stalin’s Letters to Molotov, 1–63.
32. Trotsky, Stalin; Tucker, Stalin in Power; Lewin, “Stalin in the Mirror of the Other,” 120. This represents a considerable improvement on the traditional Trotskyite formulation, whereby, in the misguided words of Deutscher, Stalin’s “own behaviour was now dictated by the moods, needs, and pressures of the vast political machine.” Deutscher, Stalin, 226–7.
33. Kuromiya, Stalin; Kuromiya, “Stalin in the Politburo Transcripts,” 41–56; Kuromiya, Freedom and Terror; van Ree, Political Thought; Rees, Political Thought from Machiavelli to Stalin. Harris depicted Stalin as a consummate misperceiver who never adequately understood that his own central policies were driving the phenomena he hated and struggled against—and so he murdered everyone. Harris, “Encircled by Enemies.” This misperception differs markedly from Harris’s earlier assertion that the terror arose “not because of the opposition to collectivization, high-tempo industrialization, or the leadership of Stalin,” but because regional officials, struggling to cope, had engaged in deception, blame-shifting, and scapegoating, which Stalin suddenly discovered—as if he had not known about inflated production reports before, and as if he needed such a pretext to attack. Harris, Great Urals, 189–90.
34. Ulam, “Price of Sanity,” 133.
35. Without embarrassment, Yuri Zhukov has asserted that the terror was forced upon a reluctant Stalin by regional officials, making Stalin a victim (meanwhile, all those who allegedly forced his hand were cremated). Zhukov, Inoi Stalin. J. Arch Getty has even suggested that the terror was provoked by “tensions” between the center and periphery, and fallout from genuine efforts to introduce democracy, a crackpot assertion he shares with Zhukov. “[I]t was a purely domestic event (the 1937 electoral campaign) that sparked the terror,” argued Getty, who added that the terror operations were “unplanned, ad hoc reactions to a perceived immediate political threat.” Getty, “‘Excesses are not permitted.’” See also Manning, “Government in the Soviet Countryside”; Getty, “State and Society.”
36. Kotkin, “Conspiracy So Immense.”
37. Kotkin, Magnetic Mountain, 286.
38. According to the recollections of S. Yakubovsky, the phrase “Stalin is the Lenin of our day” arose at an editorial meeting of Pravda. Lel’chuk, “Beseda I. V. Stalina s angliiskim pisatelem G. Uellsom,” 345.
