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The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) was the official name of communist Russia from December 1922 until its collapse in late 1991. This self-proclaimed Marxist state was created out of the ruins of the Tszarist Empire following the Bolshevik Revolution of October 1917 and the ensuing civil war in Russia. In the view of many scholars, the USSR under Vladimir Lenin (1870–1924) and Joseph Stalin (1878–1953) evolved into a totalitarian dictatorship directly responsible for the deaths of millions of Soviet citizens. Here the nature and scale of the crimes against humanity perpetrated by the Soviet state from the October Revolution to the death of Stalin will be examined, along with differing perspectives on Leninist and Stalinist terror.

Historical Context

Before World War I the Russian Empire had been an autocratic monarchy presided over by Tsar Nicholas II, who formally claimed the divine right to rule single-handedly. Russian political culture lacked liberal or democratic roots and institutions, and for many centuries the state had dominated society, often using repressive methods carried out by a prototype secret police force. As a consequence of this police state and emergent modernization during the course of the late nineteenth century, social tensions ran deep in tsarist Russia. For various political and socioeconomic reasons, these tensions between peasants and landlords, urban industrial workers and their bosses, and alienated middle-class intellectuals and the anachronistic tsarist state grew in the decades before 1914. Indeed, in 1905 and 1906 a full-scale, but ultimately abortive, revolution had occurred that threatened to overthrow monarchical rule. The nail in tsarism's coffin came during World War I. Russia's largely unsuccessful efforts to conduct the war against Germany and Austria added significantly to internal discontent. The result was the February Revolution of 1917, which forced Nicholas II to abdicate in favor of a centrist provisional government.

Despite meaningful democratic reforms the provisional government was unable to win mass support and it was, in turn, removed from power by the 1917 Bolshevik October Revolution. The Bolsheviks, led by Lenin, were a small urbanized Marxist party whose political mentality and revolutionary goals are critical for an understanding of the later communist crimes against humanity. It would not be an exaggeration to argue that the Bolsheviks were utopian revolutionaries (some might say megalomaniac fanatics) who were utterly convinced that capitalism, liberalism, and parliamentarianism were dead, that socialism, and ultimately communism, represented the inevitable wave of the future, and that human society and individuals were perfectible by state engineering. They were deeply contemptuous of dissenting views and, more than any other Russian political movement, were prepared to countenance class-based violence in a society that was itself highly prone to violent confrontation. In short, the Bolsheviks' revolutionary "ends"—the destruction of capitalist exploitation, the emancipation of the working class, the transformation of "bourgeois" values, and the creation of a socialist state and society—justified any means of achieving these ends, including class discrimination, illegal arrest and incarceration, even mass executions. The origins of Leninist and Stalinist terror can thus be traced to this intransigent ideological orthodoxy.

After the Bolsheviks seized power, their many opponents rallied to contest the Marxist vision of Russia's future. A truly bitter and tragic civil war ensued, one that pitted the so-called Reds, the Bolsheviks and their extreme left-wing socialist allies, against the Whites, mainly ex-tsarist forces backed, half-heartedly, by several foreign states, the United States and Great Britain among them. The barbarity of the Russian Civil War, the class and ethnic hatreds exacerbated by the conflict, the arbitrary nature of both Red and White terror, and the sheer scale of violence must surely have brutalized Russian political culture, coming as they did on top of four years of world war and revolutionary upheaval. The civil war certainly engendered a siege mentality among the Bolshevik victors, who from that point on tended to see enemies everywhere, at home and abroad; a veritable "capitalist encirclement." Red terror under Lenin has thus been rationalized as a desperate last-ditch method of survival foisted onto an isolated and inward-looking band of revolutionaries in conditions of profound social, economic, and military turmoil.

Taking a position less sympathetic to the Bolsheviks, one may argue that state-sponsored class repression was inherent in Leninist ideology, predated the civil war, and was therefore not a consequence of the objective circumstances of the time. Indeed, Lenin almost welcomed the prospect of civil war as a means of purifying Russian society, purging it of "class enemies" and "traitors"—the landed gentry, capitalists, Orthodox priests, tsarist officials, bourgeois intellectuals, even kulaks (better-off peasants). The Bolsheviks' total belief in Marxism, which they regarded as scientific, assured them that they alone were right and everyone else was wrong, and their penchant for class discrimination transformed minor acts of nonconformity into "counterrevolutionary sabotage." Accordingly, the use of state terror became a conscious and deliberate instrument of governance under Lenin, arguably the principal method of maintaining and consolidating Bolshevik rule. Hence, it was Lenin who established the basis for later Stalinist atrocities.

Leninist Crimes

One of the first decrees of the Bolshevik regime in December 1917 was the creation of the Cheka, the original Soviet secret police force and forerunner of the much-vaunted KGB. The job of the Cheka was to root out all counterrevolutionary and antistate activities to bolster the fragile Leninist government. By June 1918 as the civil war got under way, reports of Cheka "excesses" began to reach Moscow. According to official statistics, the Cheka killed 12,733 prisoners between 1918 and 1920; unofficial calculations suggest a figure closer to 300,000. Lenin himself actively contributed to the wave of Red Terror. On August 11, 1918, shortly before an attempt was made to assassinate him, Lenin sent a now infamous telegram to local Bolsheviks, insisting that they "hang (hang without fail, so that the people see) no fewer than one hundred known kulaks, rich men, bloodsuckers. . . . Do it in such a way that for hundreds of versts [kilometres] around, the people will see, tremble, know, shout: they are strangling and will strangle . . . the bloodsucker kulaks" (Pipes, 1996, p. 50). One month earlier the tsar and his family had been murdered by local Bolsheviks in Ekaterinburg. The spiral of terror and counterterror was growing.

The arrest of large numbers of alleged counterrevolutionaries meant that they had to be detained somewhere. Decrees in September 1918 and April 1919 sanctioned the establishment of the first concentration and labor camps, the latter originally conceived as sites for rehabilitating petty criminals through physical work. The most notorious of these early Soviet camps was the prison on the Solovetskii Islands in the White Sea in the far north of Russia. The camp population there grew from 3,000 in 1923 to approximately 50,000 in 1930. Between 1931 and 1933 around 25,000 convicts perished building the White Sea Canal, one of Stalin's pet schemes involving forced labor. From these relatively humble origins emerged the vast system of Soviet labor camps, widely known as the Gulag Archipelago (Gulag being, in Russian, the acronym for Main Administration of Camps). These camps housed not only political prisoners, but also ordinary criminals. Generally, they lived in appalling conditions, often in the most remote and inhospitable locations of the USSR. Inmates were in essence slave labor, whose contribution to the Soviet economy, especially from the 1930s, should not be overlooked.

The communist state also launched attacks on organized religion in the USSR. In March 1922, for instance, Lenin ordered the confiscation "with the most savage and merciless energy" of valuables belonging to the Orthodox Church. According to Richard Pipes, the aim was twofold: to secure vital assets for the cash-strapped Soviet government and to smash the power of the Orthodox Church and its hold over the peasantry. Even at a time of relative liberalization under the New Economic Policy (1921–1929), Lenin advocated the execution of large numbers of "reactionary clergy . . . so that they will not dare even to think of any resistance for several decades" (Pipes, 1996, p. 153–54). Lenin, also in 1922, insisted on the death penalty for the arrested leaders of the Socialist Revolutionary Party, but he was overruled and finally relented, with the leaders instead given lengthy prison terms. Nevertheless, Lenin's implacable attitude toward political and ideological adversaries undoubtedly contributed to the formation of a one-party state in Soviet Russia, a major step on the road to which was the forcible dissolution of the Constitutent Assembly (the multiparty national parliament) as early as January 1918.

Lenin may have been the initiator of many of the repressive measures undertaken between 1918 and 1923, but all leading Bolsheviks, to a greater or lesser degree, shared his intolerance of opposition and fundamental belief in a state-sponsored transformation of human society. Lev Trotsky, Grigorii Zinoviev, Nikolai Bukharin, and Stalin all supported harsh policies against real and perceived opponents of the regime. However, serious disagreements emerged among the Bolshevik hierarchy, especially as Lenin's failing health from 1922 on led to an internal party power struggle. Lenin was acutely aware of the dangers of internal party disunity and attempted, rather ineffectually, to paper over the cracks in leadership. A year before his death in January 1924 he dictated a document that became known as "Lenin's Testament," in which he evaluated the strengths and weaknesses of six top Bolsheviks. The most notable comments, given subsequent developments, related to Stalin. In April 1922 Stalin had been appointed General Secretary of the Communist Party (the Bolshevik Party had been renamed the Communist Party in 1918) partly as a result of his close cooperation with Lenin, who valued the Georgian as a tough, practical activist who got things done. However, relations between the two men soured in 1922 and 1923, and in his testament Lenin warned that Stalin was "too crude" to serve as General Secretary. He advised the Party to find a way of removing Stalin from his post.

Portentously, Lenin's strictures were ignored. In the course of the ugly internecine power struggles that transformed the Party during the 1920s, Stalin was able to build up majority support in his position as General Secretary. His successive rivals, first Trotsky, then Zinoviev and Lev Kamenev, and finally Bukharin, were all out-voted and out-manuevered; by 1929 Stalin had emerged as the clear leader of the Communist Party. His reliance on behind-the-scenes machinations, out-right slander, and administrative measures against his opponents concealed another of his characteristics: He was a workaholic who intervened in, and had practical solutions for, all the major and often secondary problems that confronted the Soviet state. What is more, he appeared to be a true Marxist dedicated to the construction of socialism in the USSR. Stalin was thus a very capable, not unintelligent, leader who commanded the respect of his followers. He was also, or at least became by the 1930s, a morbidly suspicious, capricious, and volatile man, who was possibly driven by an insatiable lust for power.

Stalinist Crimes

Stalin's regime was arguably the most repressive in modern history. As a result of his so-called revolution launched in 1928 and 1929—the forced collectivization and "dekulakization" of the countryside and the intensely rapid tempos of industrialization—millions of Soviet citizens, particularly peasants, endured dire living conditions and often direct persecution at the hands of Stalinist leaders whose overriding priority was to make the USSR economically and militarily secure. As many as eight million peasants, the majority Ukrainian, starved to death in the Great Famine of 1932 and 1933, which Robert Conquest has insisted was a man-made catastrophe deliberately engineered by Stalin in order to smash Ukrainian nationalism. Whether this controversial interpretation is correct or not, the scale of human suffering endured in the early 1930s beggars belief. There was hope that the relatively moderate policies of the years 1934 to 1936 would curtail the suffering, but by 1937 mass arrests and executions became the norm. Archival figures made public shortly before the demise of Soviet communism indicate that approximately 800,000 people were shot between 1921 and 1953, a staggering 681,692 of whom were executed during the Great Terror of 1937 and 1938. Official statistics suggest that around 3.5 million people were detained in labor camps and internal exile during the Terror, the number rising to 5.5 million at the time of Stalin's death in 1953. On both counts many scholars have speculated that the actual totals were significantly higher. In the absence of definitive data, however, it seems prudent to accept the archival figures as essentially accurate.

Horrendous as they are, the bald statistics cited above obscure the unimaginable depths of human misery, the families ripped apart, the countless orphaned children, the mental and physical torture of prisoners, the uprooting of entire peoples from their homelands, the trampling on human integrity and dignity. How can all this be explained? Was the Terror simply a product of the deranged mind of a power-hungry tyrant? Or was there a larger purpose behind the seemingly arbitrary mass arrests and executions? Scholars have debated these and related issues for many decades. Research conducted in the 1990s and early 2000s demonstrates that rather than being a unitary phenomenon possessing a single aim, the Great Terror was a multifaceted process composed of separate but related political, social, and "national" (ethnic) dimensions, the origins and goals of which were different, but which coalesced during the events of 1937 and 1938.

There is no doubt that Stalin was the prime perpetrator of the Terror, even if historians disagree on whether he had a long-term blueprint to eliminate his opponents. It is generally accepted, however, that the process of mass repression was set in motion by the December 1934 assassination of Sergei Kirov, the popular Leningrad Communist Party chief and, so it was rumored at the time, rival to Stalin. Although the jury is still out on Stalin's precise role in this assassination, it is clear that he used Kirov's murder to attack various opponents of the regime, including former Party leaders Zinoviev and Kamenev who were placed under arrest. Beginning in the summer of 1936, and more conclusively during the spring of 1937, Stalin extended these repressive measures, seeking, it appears, to eliminate any real or potential political opposition to his rule. In so doing, he broke an unwritten Leninist principle: never arrest Communist Party members and officials.

The list of actions to which Stalin provided direct input is long: The Soviet leader initiated and orchestrated the three great Show Trials of August 1936, January 1937, and March 1938, as a result of which his former Bolshevik rivals Zinoviev, Kamenev, and Bukharin, among others, were executed. In September 1936 Stalin appointed Nikolai Ezhov, a known hardline adversary of "anti-Party elements," as head of the NKVD (secret police). He oversaw the decimation of the Red Army command from May through June 1937. He signed numerous death warrants and ratified numerous executions, thousands of the condemned being loyal Party and state officials; he even ordered the arrest of several members of his own extended family and close relatives of his colleagues, presumably in an attempt to test the latter's loyalty. Together with his propagandists, he set the overall tone and atmosphere of the Terror: the xenophobic suspicion of foreign spies and agents; the all-pervasive fear of wreckers, saboteurs, and double-dealers; and the endless exhortations to uphold Bolshevik vigilance in the face of these "enemies of the people." In short, as one expert has written, Stalin's "name is all over the horrible documents authorizing the terror" (Getty and Naumov, 1999, p. 451).

Aside from these politically motivated aspects, another fundamental characteristic of the Great Terror was the social component. Studies conducted in the late 1990s document the interrelationship between, on the one hand, social disorder and evolving secret police strategies to contain it in the early to mid-1930s and, on the other, the onset of mass arrests in the summer of 1937. According to one historian, the Great Terror represented "the culmination of a decade-long radicalization of policing practice against 'recidivist' criminals, social marginals, and all manner of lower-class individuals" (Hagenloh, 2000, p. 286). The threat of social instability posed by criminals, hooligans, other "socially harmful elements," and even armed gangs of bandits was taken seriously by secret police chiefs. By 1937 the lethal triumvirate of political opposition, social disorder, and ethnic subversion had raised fears among the increasingly xenophobic Stalinist elite of a broadly based anti-Soviet "fifth column" linked to foreign agents and spies. In response, on July 31, 1937, Stalin and his co-leaders sanctioned the notorious NKVD Order No. 00447, which specified by region the number of people to be sentenced either to death (approximately 73,000) or eight to ten years in the Gulag camps (approximately 186,500).

The decree remained in force until November 1938. The intent of this massive purge of socially harmful elements was to destroy what appeared to the Stalinists to be the social base for an armed overthrow of the Soviet government. Thus, one of the most interesting conclusions of new research is that, contrary to conventional wisdom about the elite status of the Great Terror's victims, in strictly numerical terms the bulk of those repressed were ordinary noncommunist citizens, kulaks, workers, and various "social marginals": recidivist criminals, the homeless, the unemployed, all those suspected of deviating from the social norms of the emerging Stalinist system.

It is also now recognized that beginning in the summer of 1937 the NKVD launched national sweeps of specific categories of foreigners and Soviet citizens of foreign extraction. Central and East Europeans were particularly targeted, but so were Koreans, Chinese, Afghans, and many other minorities who were deported from their homelands or arrested en masse. The socalled Polish Operation, ratified by the Politburo on August 7, 1937, resulted in the arrest of approximately 140,000 people, a staggering 111,000 of whom were executed. Similar campaigns were directed against Germans, Finns, Balts, and numerous others who were perceived to be real or potential spies and agents of foreign anti-Soviet intelligence agencies, although the percentages of those killed were generally lower than in the Polish Operation. A significant proportion of the victims were Jews and members of national communist parties. Whether the former were targeted specifically because of their ethnic origin is unclear. Stalin's anti-Semitic tendencies appear to have been far more pronounced in the postwar period. Such was the scale of the "national operations" that from about February 1938 on they became the prime function of secret police activity, more pervasive than the campaigns associated with Order 00447. Indeed, ethnically based repression did not end in the late 1930s. Although the number of arrests and executions decreased significantly after November 1938, during World War II entire populations (Volga Germans, Chechens, Ingushi, Kalmyks, Crimean Tartars, and others) were deported from their homelands to Central Asia and Siberia, accused of subversive tactics, espionage, and collaboration with the occupying Nazi forces.

Inevitably, these examples of Soviet ethnic cleansing have compelled some scholars to compare Stalinist and Nazi policies of extermination. The term Stalinist genocide employed by several specialists suggests a close relationship and moral equivalence between Nazi and Soviet terror. If one views the latter in an intentional versus functional framework, it appears that both elements of motivation were applicable: The intended victims were the traditional suspects (peasants, political opponents, and supporters of the tsarist regime) and the functional victims were those invented within the specific context of developments in the late 1930s, consisting of replaceable elites and alien nationals. Although it is important to recognize the enormity of Stalinist repression, it is critical, as many historians do, to emphasize the uniqueness of the Holocaust "the only example which history offers to date of a deliberate policy aimed at the total physical destruction of every member of an ethnic group. There was no equivalent of this under Stalinism" (Kershaw and Lewin, 1997, p. 8).

The key issue of motive remains. Why did Stalin order the mass arrest of loyal Party and state bureaucrats? Why was the terror extended to include socially harmful elements? Why did the vicious assault on ethnic minorities escalate in late 1937 and continue well into 1938? Traditional explanations for the strictly political aspects of the Great Terror stress Stalin's lust for power and his determination to liquidate all real and perceived rivals in a paranoiac drive for autocratic rule. Large numbers of "Old Bolsheviks," former opponents, and a host of unreliable double dealers, wreckers, and saboteurs were targeted in what became an arbitrary frenzy of bloodletting. By eliminating these undesirables and replacing them with devoted "yes men," Stalin's power base was mightily strengthened. However, beginning in the 1980s so-called revisionist historians challenged this Stalin-oriented approach, arguing that one man could not, and did not, decide everything. Moreover, to these historians a certain systemic rationale existed for the apparently irrational waves of repression, one linked to center-periphery conflicts, interelite rivalries, and the chaotic and dysfunctional elements of the highly bureaucratized regime.

Although Stalin's motives remain, and will continue to remain, obscure, it appears that the decision to launch the mass operations in the summer of 1937 was related to reverses in the European and Asian arenas. In particular, the lessons of the Spanish Civil War induced an atmosphere of panic in the Kremlin and incited the Stalinists to seek "enemies" at home and abroad. The Soviet leadership's fears of a fifth column among Party, state, and military elites, who in the event of war could rely on broad support from socially harmful elements and hostile national minorities in the USSR, seem to account for the dramatic rise in arrests and executions. To this extent the threat of war and a potential fifth column represent the crucial link between the three dimensions of the Great Terror: political, social, and national. Only in the context of the Stalinists' grave fears for the security and integrity of the Soviet state can the mass repressions of 1937 and 1938 be understood.

Although mass arrests and executions abated after November 1938, repression continued in the USSR throughout World War II. Portrayed in the Soviet media as a heroic war of patriotism, there were many grim sides to this life-and-death struggle between the two totalitarian giants. Internally, Stalin used the conflict to target and deport entire peoples accused of collaborating with the Nazis. The number of Gulag inmates may have decreased in these years as many were released to fight the Germans, but the living and working conditions of those who remained were nothing short of atrocious. Famine, epidemics, overcrowding, summary shootings, and inhuman exploitation for the war effort were commonplace. For instance, in 1942 the Gulag Administration registered 249,000 deaths (18 % of the camp population) and in 1943 it registered 167,000 deaths (17%). The "myth" of the Battle of Stalingrad and the euphoria of total victory in May 1945 have tended to obscure the horrendous suffering perpetrated by the regime on millions of Soviet citizens during World War II. It was not about to end.

One of the more reprehensible features of Stalin's rule after World War II was his increasing anti-Semitism. Indeed, at the time of his death in March 1953 it appears that he was planning another vast general purge of Soviet society based on the fictitious anti-Jewish Doctors' Plot that broke in January of the same year. Already in 1948 and 1949 hundreds of Jewish intellectuals had been arrested, at least one of whom, the world-renowned actor and theater director Solomon Mikhoels, was murdered. As a leading scholar has written: "Jews were systematically removed from all positions of authority in the arts and the media, in journalism and publishing, and in medicine and many other professions" (Werth, 1999, p. 245). The campaign reached a peak in the summer of 1952 with the secret trial of the members of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee, thirteen of whom were executed. There is some evidence that the aging and ill Stalin was at this time preparing to expose a wide-scale "Judeo-Zionist conspiracy," which was to conclude with the mass deportation of Soviet Jews to Birobidzhan, a barren region in Eastern Siberia. A major part of this final Stalinist plot was the arrest of several high-ranking Jewish doctors accused, among other things, of complicity in the deaths of two Soviet luminaries. Their trial, it seems, was set for mid-March 1953. Stalin's timely demise on March 5 put an end to their suffering and brought to a close the era of mass repression in the USSR. His successors, notably Nikita Khrushchev, renounced terror, released large numbers of Gulag prisoners, and attempted, not altogether successfully, to "de-Stalinize" Soviet politics and society.

The historical legacy of Stalin has often been framed in the following way: he was a cruel, but necessary, leader who after 1928 industrialized and modernized the USSR and thus established the economic, social, and military basis for victory over the Nazis in World War II. Given Soviet Russia's "backwardness," this could only have been accomplished rapidly by means of state coercion and pressure. Few, if any, contemporary scholars would subscribe to such an apologist interpretation of the Stalinist regime. There can be no justification—political, economic, military, and certainly not moral—for the crimes against humanity perpetrated from 1928 to 1953. However, this does not mean no connection exists between Stalin's revolution from above and the mass repressions. Indeed, a convincing consensus is emerging that stresses the interrelatedness of the two phenomena. The terror, it is argued, was inextricably linked to the massive campaigns of industrialization and the forced collectivization and dekulakization of Soviet agriculture from 1928 and 1929 on. The intense social flux and dislocation, the rising crime levels, the peasant resistance to collectivization, the urban tensions resulting from rapid industrialization, the limited success of the initiatives on the "nationality question," and the contradictory pressures on the bureaucracies and other elites, which engendered insubordination, deceit, and local and regional cliques and networks, all these outcomes of Stalin's revolution from above created conditions that were propitious for the hunt for "enemies". Add to this equation Stalin's considerable goals for personal power and his paranoias, and the built-in need for scapegoats to explain the dire state of Soviet material consumption, and the origins of mass repression become more explicable.

Conclusion

Leninist and Stalinist crimes against humanity are not easily elucidated. A multiplicity of factors—internal and external, ideological and practical, personal and systemic—must be carefully weighed. It is not enough to simply point the finger at two "evil," power-hungry men, highly relevant though they are to the entire process of Soviet mass repression. What motivated them? What were their fears? In what concrete political, economic, and military contexts did they make their decisions? What role did other actors play in fanning the flames of state violence? To what extent did elite attitudes reflect and magnify broader social mentalities, such as anti-Semitism and chauvinism? Here it is suggested that the roots of Soviet terror lay not only in the personal ambitions and whims of Lenin and Stalin, but also equally in the ideologically driven utopian mission of creating the perfect communist society purged of the politically and socially unfit in circumstances of international isolation and perceived foreign threats.

SEE ALSO Chechens; Cossacks; Gulag; Kalmyks; Katyn; Lenin, Vladimir; Memory; Stalin, Joseph; Statistical Analysis; Ukraine (Famine); Utopian Ideologies as Motives for Genocide

Kevin McDermott