SOURCE: "Stalin's Archipelago," in Terrorism: From Robespierre to Arafat, by Albert Parry, The Vanguard Press, Inc., 1976, pp. 187-202.

From Lenin and Trotsky the path of terror led to Stalin and Stalin's heirs. Over these decades the character and organization of Soviet terror underwent certain changes. The transformation can be traced through the vast literature by survivors and scholars, available not in Russian alone but also in other languages, especially by such writers as Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Roy Medvedev, and Robert Conquest.¹

In the reminiscence of one little-known survivor of the Lenin-Stalin camps, Nikolai Otradin, now residing in the United States, we find a concise analysis of the Red terror from Lenin on up to the end of Stalin's rule as consisting of essentially three periods.²

During the first period, that of the civil war of 1918-21, the arrests, executions, and other repressions were the combined result of both the spontaneous anger of the lower classes against the middle and upper ones and the calculated action of the revolutionary government. Many shootings were done by men of the masses, on the spur of the moment, with neither trials nor formal sentences. Yet there is no doubt that Lenin and Trotsky deliberately fanned such mob outbursts so as to create and intensify the revolutionary atmosphere.

As in Robespierre's terror, so in this first Lenin-Trotsky period, all classes were represented in prisons and on execution rolls. Otradin recalls: "We were rounded up both selectively and nonselectively." And so numerous were the arrested that during the civil war there were not enough old Tsarist jails to hold these new Soviet captives. So, in addition, barges moored on the rivers, monasteries lost in the forests or on northern islands, and other makeshift detention sites were used.

Amid the cruelty of it all there was still a chance and thus a hope. If a victim escaped the firing squad by drawing a 10- or 20-year sentence, and if somehow he did not succumb to starvation or epidemic in those cells, barge-holds, or barracks, he could perhaps gain freedom in just a few months—thanks mainly to the energetic pleas, influence, or bribes by their kin or friends still at large. In many cases, Cheka commissars accepted (or even demanded and received) bed-services of the female relatives of the political convicts as payment for the latter's release.

The terror's second period lasted from the end of the civil war in 1921 to the First Five Year Plan of 1928. Early in this period, with the Red victory won over the Whites and foreign foes, voices were raised by the more humane Communist leaders that perhaps the Cheka should be abolished and the Red terror at last terminated.

These would-be humanists were overruled. Yet through the 1920s and their New Economic Policy until 1928-29, there were in the Soviet Union but two large concentration camps: in the sequestered monasteries of Solovki, the island in the White Sea north of Arkhangelsk with branch barracks on the nearby mainland; and on the Vishera River shores on the continent, in the Perm region of the European slope of the Urals. From these two camps thousands of men were sent to various railroad- and canal-building or other work areas throughout the north. The total of all such convicts up to 1919 was no more than some 20,000, although outside the camps, all over Russia, the numbers of those shot by the Cheka were by that time in the hundreds of thousands.

Compare this with the estimated millions of victims in Stalin's time, most of whom were killed during the third or main period of the Soviet terror, lasting from 1928-29 to the dictator's death in March 1953. Otradin states that the mass terror of this third phase was no sudden development. It had been carefully prepared during those comparatively mild 1920s when the New Economic Policy gave the Communist leadership an opportunity to pretest and organize the terror of the succeeding decades quietly. Thus the gigantic Archipelago of Solzhenitsyn's description—of thousands of concentration camps, of millions destined to die of slave work and malnutrition if not by firing squad—would become the awful reality of the third period.

To these three periods we should add the fourth, from 1953 well into these mid-1970s, the time of Nikita Khrushchev and Leonid Brezhnev, which Otradin does not discuss and which stands quite distinctly separate from the first three phases. At a later point of this narrative it will be discussed.

II

Born on December 21, 1879, as Iosif Dzhugashvili, the son of a hard-drinking Georgian shoemaker in the small Caucasian town of Gori, Stalin³ in his boyhood was sent by his pious mother to a theological seminary in Tiflis (now Tbilisi). He later claimed he was expelled for his early revolutionary activity, but his mother denied this, saying she removed him from the seminary because of his weak health.

Becoming a clerk in the Tiflis observatory, he devoted most of his effort to underground work for the Russian Social Democratic Party, which he joined in 1898, when he was not yet 19. The Tsarist police soon knew him as an agitator and strike organizer; his first arrest came in 1902. It was in Siberia, to which he was exiled in 1903, that he learned of the split between the Bolsheviks and the Mensheviks, and chose the former as the more militant. Escaping from Siberia in early 1904, he returned to the Caucasus to resume his revolutionary activity. He adopted the name Stalin, meaning Man of Steel.

He first met Lenin in 1905 at the Party conference in Finland. Two years later, with Lenin's secret approval, Stalin organized the first major Bolshevik terrorist act: on June 25, 1907, in Tiflis, his men attacked and robbed a State Bank carriage, causing bloodshed and getting away with 340,000 rubles ($170,000). Arrested in April 1908 in Baku, he was exiled again. Altogether, the years 1902-17 meant for Stalin six arrests, repeated imprisonments and exiles, and several escapes. The revolution and fall of Tsarism in March 1917 freed him from his last Siberian exile. He came to Petrograd to take charge of the Bolshevik newspaper Pravda and to join Lenin on his return from Switzerland in April.

In years to come, from his position of power, as he rewrote history, Stalin asserted that from the spring of 1917 he was Lenin's closest aide. In fact it was Trotsky, not Stalin, who shared Lenin's fame as his second-in-command and often as his equal. Stalin was obscure throughout the civil war, as Commissar of Nationalities; he also collected food supplies for the Red Army and played a role in the defense of Tsaritsyn on the Volga against the White offensive. (On becoming the Soviet dictator, Stalin renamed Tsaritsyn Stalingrad. After his death in 1953 and denigration by Khrushchev in 1956, Stalingrad became Volgograd.)

Stalin's gradual rise to power began in 1922, when Lenin made him secretary general of the Communist Party, with the task of bringing it out of its post-civil war disarray. Stalin shrewdly used the job to pull his aides—mostly nonintellectuals—up the bureaucratic ladder, thus creating his own political machine. This alarmed Lenin but, already on his deathbed, he could do little except to urge, in his last will, Stalin's removal. Lenin wrote: "He is too rude . . . insufferable." Stalin, now in command, suppressed the document.

Lenin died on January 21, 1924. From then on, for nearly 30 years, until his own death at the age of 73 on March 5, 1953, Stalin wielded his untrammeled and terrible tyranny over the vast empire. Sending multitudes to slavery and death, he was quoted as saying: "One death may be a tragedy, but millions of deaths are only statistics." He was frank about his sadism, on one occasion remarking that he derived the greatest pleasure from planning in detail precisely how he would do away with an intended victim and then going off to bed for his sweet and sound sleep, knowing that in the morning he would put the death sentence into effect.

At a whim, Stalin reclassified comrades as enemies to be executed. He turned upon his aides and staunchest supporters, either on what Khrushchev was later to call "distrustful" and "sickly" suspicion or on the cold-blooded premise that intimidation works best when terror is highly indiscriminate. Not a single one of Stalin's favorites was ever sure of his continued favor, nor of his own liberty or even life. These favorites were in mortal fright, trembling each time they were called into Stalin's presence. When thus summoned, they said their grim farewells to their families, not knowing whether they would return. Some, in fact, did not. Aware of their fear, Stalin played on it with relish, asking a henchman: "Why do you turn around so much today and avoid looking at me directly in the eye?"

Increasingly in his three decades of dictatorship, as he ordered a mass chorus of praise from the people high and low, he at the same time formalized on a grand scale the insanely cruel terror initiated in Russia by Lenin and Trotsky. Through the swirling madness of mass murder, he displayed for all the world to see the irrational purposes of this terror that, in a much more flagrant way than any other Soviet leader before or after him, Stalin used as the main basis of his power.

Not that the two leaders before him, Lenin and Trotsky, should be absolved to any degree. Nor should we concede that in their terror Lenin and Trotsky were more rational than Stalin. All three should be judged as one phenomenon. And far from being a late or sudden development, their rule of mass-scale murders from 1918 to 1953 had been largely predetermined by the trio's psyches (at the root of their politics), inherent and unfolding long before their coming to power.

And yet, in modern literature, very little has been done to show the necessary connections between the mentalities of Lenin, Trotsky, and Stalin. Thus, in The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness by Erich Fromm, we find that Stalin is classed with Hitler and Himmler in the chapters on "Malignant Aggression." Stalin and the two Nazis are described as sadists; in addition, Stalin is defined as possibly suffering "from paranoid tendencies in the last years of his life." With all that, Fromm's analysis of Stalin's aberration is quite inadequate—surely not so full or original as are his depictions of Hitler's necrophilia and Himmler's sadomasochism. Lenin is not even included in this company. Astonishingly, all that Fromm has to say about Lenin is that, like Marx, Engels, and Mao Tse-tung, Lenin had "a sense of responsibility." As for Trotsky, there is not a single mention of him in all the 526 pages of Fromm's book.

While we wait for a truly expert study of the dementia of the founders of the Soviet state and terror, we see that at least on the surface the aims of the Soviet secret police over their nearly six decades have been soberly practical. They have been threefold: First, to remove actual and potential enemies of the Communist dictatorship. Second, through this to intimidate the rest of the population. Third, to secure manpower for the work projects run by the secret police.

The "show trials" of the 1930s, where terrorized and often innocent defendants vied with one another to heap slander and malice upon themselves while confessing the most fantastic "crimes" invented by the secret police, did intimidate most of the populace. But they also convinced some gullible citizens that wholesale arrests and harsh punishment were truly deserved—until that time, of course, when these naive men and women were in their turn themselves arrested, starved, beaten, tortured, and sent to slave camps or shot dead.

An explanation of that terror was once given by a perceptive victim. A Russian engineer sentenced to a long term in a Stalinist concentration camp (we do not know whether he survived it) said to a fellow inmate (who did survive and brought his reminiscences to the West): "We are accused of wrecking. Wrecking there is, in fact, but it is the regime's own wrecking, not ours. Those power-hungry amateurs, those incompetents, have made such a mess of the nation's political body and above all of the nation's economy that they need scapegoats. We are the scapegoats for the years and years of their mistakes. Hence this terror."

At the same time we must remember that this terror, this slavery, was more than a purely political tool. It was and still is an important economic resource of the Soviet regime, or at least an attempt to make it such a resource.

The Red regime's need for labor was at certain times a predominant reason for terror. From a secret 750-page book of Soviet economics, published in Moscow in 1941, that fell into Nazi hands during the initial Soviet retreat in the Second World War and was eventually found in Germany by the American victors, we glean the following:

On the eve of that war, slave labor cut and finished 12.5 per cent of all Soviet timber, built 22.5 per cent of the country's railroads, and mined 75 per cent of its gold, 40.5 per cent of its chrome, and 2.8 per cent of its coal. The secret police were also in charge of all capital construction.

From other reliable sources we know that it was common for the headquarters of the secret police in Moscow to apportion in periodic instructions to its provincial offices the arrest of so many engineers of a certain specialty, so many lumberjacks or tailors or railroad men, so many skilled hands for whatever the secret police enterprises needed in the coming months of their own Five Year Plans.

Special slave laboratories, established for captive scientists and engineers, were meant to contribute toward the Soviet Union's technological progress. Thus, in the 1930s, one of the most valued Soviet sites of radioactive ore mining and processing was made into a property of the secret police, with large numbers of professors, engineers, and other experts arrested for the express purpose of this particular production. The extraction and processing of radium by highly qualified slaves was done in the extreme Arctic north of European Russia, in the Pechora region near the White Sea. The concentration camp contained radium mines, eight chemical plants, and three laboratories—chemical, radiometrical, and physiological—among other units.

The slaves manning this huge compound included Professors F. A. Toropov and G. A. Razuvayev, both celebrated chemists; engineers A. N. Kazakov, G. S. Davydov, S. A. Savelyev, and M. D. Tilicheyev; and many others, almost all eventually perishing in their cages. Kazakov was a renowned flyer and specialist in aeronautics; Davydov was a metallurgist, sentenced to ten years of hard labor on his return from a mission to the United States; Savelyev had pioneered in radio; Tilicheyev was well known in oil mining. Together with nonexperts, the number of prisoners here reached 1,000. Yet their total production was ridiculously low: by the testimony of a surviving slave of this camp who later reached the West, the annual output of radium totaled 4.7 grams in 1936 and 6 grams in 1937.

In 1938 the world-renowned Soviet aircraft builder, Andrei Tupolev, was arrested. On trumped-up charges he was sentenced to five years in jail—first in Moscow, then at Omsk in western Siberia where a sharashka, or a special design and test laboratory-prison, was established by the secret police for him and more than 100 other scientists and engineers to help Tupolev create his efficient airplanes for both war and civilian purposes. Mikhail Gurevich, one of the two inventors of the celebrated MiG plane, was among these slaves. So was Sergei Korolyov, the famous pioneer of Soviet rocketry.⁴

Solzhenitsyn's great novel The First Circle is about one of these prison-laboratories for Soviet slave-scientists and engineers of Stalin's era. It is based on the novelist's own experience as a mathematician-physicist incarcerated in a slave pen and forced to do research.

III

Today, side by side with such regular Soviet law agencies as the court system, the network of state attorneys known as procurators, the Ministry of Justice, and the Ministry of the Interior, but in actuality overshadowing all of them, there reigns the Soviet institution called KGB, which is the current embodiment of the secret police and which, as an organization, though under other names, realized its greatest power under Stalin.⁵

The initials stand for Komitet Gosudarstvennoi Bezopasnosti, or Committee for State Security; it is nominally attached to the federal Council of Ministers, but in reality subject to the Politbureau, which is the supreme organ of the Communist Party, and to its Secretary General Leonid Brezhnev. The head of the KGB is Yury Andropov, a personal friend of Brezhnev and a neighbor of his: Andropov's apartment is one floor below that of Brezhnev in one of Moscow's best sectors, on Kutuzov Prospect (Number 24). The two and a few of their intimates often get together in one or the other of the pair's apartments for supper parties, at which Brezhnev likes to cook.

Let us look back at the list of the predecessors of the KGB and Andropov. The first such security force with arbitrary powers of life and death was established by Lenin on December 20, 1917, six weeks after his seizure of power. It was usually referred to as the Cheka, or Ch. K., after the Russian initials of the first two words of its long name, the Extraordinary Commission for Combating Counterrevolution and Sabotage. Dzerzhinsky, its first chief, was soon widely dreaded as a cold-blooded, ruthless exterminator. No regular trials were held by the Cheka; death sentences were decreed either by a three-man tribunal (troika) or by a provincial or regional head of the agency, each such powerful individual acting on his own. One report estimated the total of those executed in the four years of the Cheka's existence at more than 1,760,000. Sentences were usually carried out by shooting, in prison basements. (Executioners on the White side during the civil war sometimes used firing squads but, quite often, gallows as well.)

The adjective "Extraordinary" in the Cheka's official name was a near-ironic Red promise that terror was a temporary tool, to be discarded when the civil war ended and the new Soviet republic was certain of its survival. Indeed, on February 6, 1922, the Cheka was disbanded, but, as it turned out, only nominally. Now it was the GPU, later called OGPU, for the name Ob'yedinennoye Gosudarstvennoye Politicheskoye Upravleniye, or the United State Political Administration. In fact, it was the same Cheka merely rechristened in the direction of greater permanency, with the same deadly staff and under the same Feliks Dzerzhinsky.

After Dzerzhinsky's death in 1926, the OGPU was headed by another Russian-Polish Communist, Vyacheslav Menzhinsky. This man, a devotee of mathematics and Persian art, was once called by Lenin "the decadent neurotic." Between executions he read pornographic novels and wrote erotic poetry. His own death, in 1934, was reportedly arranged by his assistant and successor, Genrikh Yagoda.

On July 10, 1934, the OGPU was made part of the People's Commissariat of the Interior, at once feared as the sinister NKVD, the initials of the Commissariat's Russian name (Narodny Komissariat Vnutrennikh Del). Under Dzerzhinsky and Menzhinsky the old Cheka and the OGPU had already added to the terror at home an elaborate system of espionage in foreign lands. Now, under Yagoda, the new NKVD expanded its activities abroad at the same time extended enormously the use of slave labor in concentration camps in the country's northern and eastern provinces. [In addition, in 1934 a Main Administration of State Security was formed (within the NKVD) that, in time—February 1941—was made into the NKVD's twin—the NKGB, which after March 1946 became MGB, now KGB. At the same time the name Gulag emerged, for Glavnoye Upravleniye Lagerei, or the Main Administration of Camps; hence the title of Solzhenitsyn's book, The Gulag Archipelago.]

The son of an artisan, Yagoda first joined the Bolsheviks in 1907 at 16, was arrested by the Tsarist police at 20, and was drafted into the army during the First World War. In the civil war he held a noncombatant post in the Red forces and shifted to the secret police in 1920. Rising to the very summit, he became known and feared for his ingenious cruelty. It was he who prepared the first two major trials of such fellow Communists incurring Stalin's displeasure as Zinovyev, Kamenev, and others. Under Stalin's own guidance, Yagoda succeeded in exacting from these high-rank defendants astonishingly abject confessions of crimes they had not committed against Stalin and the Party—so starkly depicted in Arthur Koestler's novel, Darkness at Noon. Yagoda picked his staff shrewdly; one of his assistants was known to boast that with his methods of interrogation he could force Karl Marx himself to admit his guilt as Bismarck's agent.

Yagoda was removed by Stalin in September 1936, in Stalin's usual pattern of demonstrating his power by demoting and killing his most loyal aides. In March 1938, Yagoda was tried, along with some of the top-level Communist leaders he himself had earlier arrested and harassed. Among other charges of Stalin against Yagoda was that he had poisoned the writer Maxim Gorky. Soon afterward Yagoda was shot, along with those other fallen Old Bolsheviks.

His post at the NKVD pinnacle was assumed by Nikolai Yezhov, whom Stalin had discovered at a provincial post and brought to Moscow. A native of St. Petersburg, of humble origins, Yezhov joined the Bolsheviks in March 1917 at 23, later served as a Red Army political commissar, and moved into the secret police in the mid-1930s. Because of his phenomenal sadism and his short stature (only five feet), Yezhov was called—in frightened whispers—"the bloodthirsty dwarf." Among his practices was that of personally killing his victims in his office.

Always the secret police had the right, introduced by Lenin and continued by Stalin, to kill people at will. But in the great campaign of terror launched by Yezhov on Stalin's orders in 1936-38, death or jail sentences were formalized in a show of legality, which, however, was limited in its pretense. Even before the Yezhov period, Stalin gave the NKVD's Special Board the authority to mete out "administrative" terms of up to five years in exile or forced-labor camps, in the defendants' absence and with no counsel present to plead the victims' cases. In the purge period of '36-'38, the Board increased such sentences to 25 years. Death sentences were numerous. The entire mind-boggling span of these years became known colloquially as yezhovshchina: "the horrible time of Yezhov."

Then came Yezhov's own doom. In 1938 he was transferred by Stalin from his NKVD post to head the Soviet Union's water transport, and in 1939 he disappeared. Soon he was executed by his successors, although Stalin had the rumor spread that Yezhov had died in an insane asylum. This was clearly Stalin's clumsy attempt to disassociate himself from the terror he was in fact responsible for and to explain Yezhov's mass tortures and murders by Yezhov's sheer madness.

In 1938 the secret police chieftancy devolved upon Stalin's fellow Georgian, Lavrenty Beria.⁶ He remained at this job until a few months after Stalin's death in March 1953.

A peasant's son, Beria had some minor technical education and became a Bolshevik in 1917 at 18. In secret police work since 1921, within ten years he was Stalin's merciless satrap for all of Transcaucasia. Like Yezhov, he particularly enjoyed having important victims—Communists and others—shot in his presence in his own office. In 1935 he ingratiated himself with Stalin by writing a fraudulent history of the Caucasian revolutionary movement with outrageous flattery for Stalin's role. This proved to be the main factor in his transfer to Moscow and his replacement of Yezhov.

Thin-faced, wearing a pince-nez, Beria seemed an austere figure, but even before the promotion he had been notorious for hard drinking and lechery. Now, in Moscow, he gave full vent to his proclivities. Among other pastimes he would on afternoons cruise the streets of the Red capital, spot a pretty girl of a good family in her early teens hurrying from school or to her music lesson, and order his guards to seize and bring her to his bedroom. He would violate the captive, at times—in case of desperate resistance—first drugging her or making her drunk. After several days of his pleasure he would sometimes release the girl, upon warning her and her family to be quiet about it, but sometimes he would kill her and the family so as not to leave any possible complainants.

Prominent in Beria's activity was his organization of Trotsky's murder in Mexico in 1940. In time he received in his Moscow office and personally thanked on their return from Mexico his two chief aides in the assassination, one of them the Spanish Communist Caridad Mercader, the murderer's mother. He then presented her to Stalin, who bestowed a decoration upon her.

When, in March 1946, all the Soviet commissariats were renamed ministries (after the old Imperial and general Western custom), the NKVD became the MVD, or the Ministry of the Interior. By the MVD's side, the MGB, or the Ministry of State Security, grew into a mighty organ, the distribution of the police functions between the two never entirely clear, but both under Beria until just before his death in 1953.

On Stalin's death there was a distinct possibility that Beria, with the help of his plentiful special secret police troops, would seize all power in the land. But somehow he lacked the nerve to do this.⁷

In June 1953, Beria was grabbed by Khrushchev and his associates, charged with treason (including an accusation that he had spied for the British!), and condemned to death, his execution taking place in December 1953, according to an official communiqué, or several months earlier—in the summer of that year, immediately upon his arrest—according to other, informal accounts.

Heartbreaking reminiscences by survivors and by relatives of victims exist now for every phase of the Lenin-Trotsky-Stalin terror. But the greatest sufferings appear to have been experienced when, under Stalin's guidance, Yezhov was in charge. In his The Great Terror, Robert Conquest states that at the peak of the Stalin-Yezhov purges in 1937-38 some 8,500,000 people, or 5 per cent of the nation's population, were arrested, and that most of these were sent to slave camps where the annual death rate was 20 per cent. Nor was Yezhov's successor Beria much milder. At the height of the Beria period, the concentration camps held as many as 20 million people—according to the statement made on April 4, 1955, by John H. Noble, an American released from a Soviet slave camp after more than four years of imprisonment. This is more than three times the figure given later, for the same time, by Solzhenitsyn. As his source, Noble cited a statement he had heard from a Russian prisoner with access to such statistics because of his employment as a bookkeeper at the central Gulag headquarters.

Other Stalin-era reports estimate that about 10 per cent of this human mass of misery were women (most of them sentenced for being wives, daughters, and other kin of the imprisoned or executed men); and that 90 per cent of the captives were men of working age, representing 15 to 30 per cent of the country's total male working population. From his experience as a long-time American diplomat in the Soviet Union, George F. Kennan declares that in the purges of the 1930s there were destroyed "a full 75 per cent of the governing class of the country, a similar proportion of the leading intelligentsia, and over half of the higher officers' corps of the Red Army."⁸

A distinguishing characteristic of the Stalin reign was its mass slaughter of Communists by Communists, which had not been so common in the years of Lenin and Trotsky. So all-embracing, in the mid-1930s, were the arrests and executions of Communists in the Soviet Union that a French magazine printed a cartoon showing a demented man in a desert chasing himself with an ax, the caption below reading: "The Last Communist."

Torture of prisoners by the Soviet secret police, interrogators, and guards had already been known in the Lenin-Trotsky period, but under Stalin it was refined and expanded into regular, incessant practice. The methods of torture were many:

Placing a prisoner on the so-called "conveyor"—keeping him or her sleepless for days and nights at a stretch while being questioned by a series of interrogators taking their turns, until the victim signed a false confession.

Tearing off the prisoner's nails. Crushing his fingers between doors. Holding him and other prisoners in a tightly packed cell, with standing room only, for several days and nights, with neither food nor water, until the few survivors were taken out to sign whatever was demanded of them. Or putting the prisoner against a wall with arms raised, the guards beating him each time he dared to move, until the man's legs swelled and after several fainting spells he collapsed completely.

Urinating into the prisoner's mouth during his interrogation.

Administering brutal beatings to the children of prisoners in the parents' presence until "confessions" were signed.

Raping the prisoners' wives and daughters in the prisoners' full view, with similar results.

In the camps, allowing and even encouraging nonpolitical criminals to beat, rob, and rape political prisoners. One method of abusing a woman prisoner was poslat' yeyo pod tramvai, or "send her under a trolley car"—subject her to mass rape by 20 or 30 nonpolitical criminals and sometimes by guards.

IV

Following Stalin's death in 1953, arrests decreased greatly, a limited amnesty was announced, and, after Beria's downfall, measures were taken to treat prisoners more humanely. Gradually there came reviews of sentences and numerous "rehabilitations" of victims, in many cases—alas—posthumous. The reasons for the new Khrushchevian policy of mitigation and even apology were several:

Concessions to the people were essential, for hardly a family in the land had by 1953 remained unaffected by the state-decreed and -maintained terror. The many years of Soviet repression had had its calculated effect of intimidating the populace—but it had also rendered them so terrorized as to make them listless. People did their work poorly and ineffectively. Particularly in the slave camps productivity was low. Stalin's heirs in the Kremlin now knew that, economically, slavery did not really pay. Besides, the hardest job of pioneering in the north and east had already been accomplished—by the millions of slaves, so many of whom were by then dead. Free labor could now be induced by wages and bonuses, not by armed guards and vicious dogs, to migrate to those remote, poor-climate areas, to live in relative comfort in barracks built by slaves and to work in mines dug and improved by those who had perished.

The slaves' strikes and rebellions in Vorkuta in the northeast and in Karaganda in Central Asia in 1953, although bloodily quelled, were one more reason for Stalin's heirs to relax the repressions. For in those slaves' insurrections they saw a specter of nationwide uprisings.⁹

And there was the world's opinion, too. Stalin had not worried about it; so powerful he had deemed himself to be, and had indeed been. But the new leaders were not so sure. And by then, unlike Stalin's time (and the earlier Lenin-Trotsky years), the world knew and at last believed the stories brought West by the escaped survivors of the unprecedented terror.

Nor were only the people living in fear. The leaders were also afraid. Stalin's high-placed aides too, as it now became known, had not felt safe in the face of the terror machine they themselves were managing. Respite and assurance were needed by everybody in the nation, of all classes and stations. Beria's downfall was brought about by his Kremlin colleagues' apprehension that, unless eliminated, he would become another Stalin. And Khrushchev and his group also needed a scapegoat to offer to the now restless Soviet masses and classes for Stalin's crimes—and their own. What handier scapegoat than this hated chief of the dreaded secret police?

Thus in 1953 a new, milder policy was introduced, reaching its height in February 1956, when Khrushchev delivered his famous "secret" anti-Stalin speech to the Twentieth Congress of the Communist Party.

The danger of new arrests was diminished, first of all, for Communist Party members who, from the initial post-Stalin time on, could no longer be seized by the secret police without the knowledge and clearance on the part of their Communist superiors. The ill-famed troika, the three-man MVD tribunal with arbitrary powers to sentence Soviet citizens in secrecy and in the victims' absence, was abolished. As numerous surviving prisoners were released and fewer new slaves were brought in, certain forced-labor camps were closed. In some of the remaining ones, army guards took over from the MVD slave drivers, and the prisoners' treatment became noticeably more bearable.

From the mid-1950s, the KGB, or the Committee for State Security, as the successor of the MVD and MGB (and of the earlier Cheka, OGPU, and NKVD), has been the top organ of the Soviet secret police, in implacable charge of the continuing arrests and their victims as well as the never-ceasing espionage and sabotage in foreign countries the world over.

A watershed in the renewal of terror was the Hungarian revolt and its suppression by Soviet tanks in late 1956. Soon after the Budapest events, arrests of suspect or restless Russians and non-Russians were resumed in the Soviet empire. By 1958 such arrests, although not publicized, were occurring en masse. The new wave included not only "first offenders," but also rearrests of many of those freed only a short time before. Western researchers of the phenomenon estimated that in 1961 there were some three to four million prisoners in Soviet concentration camps. This figure was in time judged to remain constant for the next 14 years, except that by 1976 it also included the growing numbers of those political dissenters who were kept in the KGB's special insane asylums, even when such prisoners were entirely sane. Nor should we forget the additional contingents of prisoners in the jails and camps of Czechoslovakia (particularly numerous after the suppression of that country in August 1968 by Soviet tanks), Poland, East Germany, and other so-called "people's democracies," where the native secret police usually act with the guidance or at least cooperation of the Moscow KGB.

It is true that, although the prisoners' beatings, tortures, and killings in the prisons and concentration camps of the Soviet empire have not stopped completely, these now occur less frequently and in most cases are not perhaps as brutally sadistic as they commonly were in Stalin's era. On the other hand, the number of fresh arrests is higher, and the treatment of prisoners is harsher than in Khrushchev's time. Instances of inmates' suicide are on the increase.

The dominant role of the KGB over the nation's regular courts is once more quite definite. It is the KGB that decides which of the political trials in these mid-1970s are to be conducted behind closed doors, even if held in regular courts. Sentences by such courts in the defendants' absence are on the increase, sternly reminding the population of Stalinist times. A regular court sometimes swiftly turns over a prisoner to the KGB's keeping. Often there is not even a formal charge and any legal condemnation—only the court's finding that the prisoner must be demented since he does not like the Soviet regime. Such was, for instance, the case of the poetess Nataliya Gorbanveskaya when, in July 1970, the Moscow city court committed her to the infamous Serbsky Insane Asylum, which is within the KGB network, staffed by "psychiatrists" officially employed by the KGB, and even wearing their KGB uniforms and insignia as colonels and majors of the secret police beneath their unbuttoned white coats. Since 1970 such commitments of political dissidents to mental hospitals have been common. Treatment of these perfectly normal prisoners include forcible injections of drugs, in the KGB's hope that this will soon make the unfortunates truly insane.

The maximum term in present-day concentration camps appears to be 15 years, but cases are known where prisoners are being held well beyond this limit. The death penalty is still on the Soviet law books, for treason to the state (such as caused Colonel Oleg V. Penkovsky's execution in May 1963), and for major economic crimes (the law of May 5, 1961), as well as for murder and banditry. While a high court of the Ministry of Justice may be the agency that passes a sentence of capital punishment, the penalty is carried out by a firing squad of the secret police, as in the Stalinist era.

By the middle 1970s the protesting voices of Amnesty International and other Western organizations on behalf of Soviet dissidents became a strong chorus. The Soviet dictatorship has responded to it reluctantly and sparingly. Often it has disregarded the protests of Western intellectuals completely, though at times it has yielded by allowing a few dissidents to leave the Soviet Union for good. Sometimes it has deported them against their will. Thus, in February 1974, the KGB arrested Alexander Solzhenitsyn and at first threatened him with execution. Then, realizing the furor this would arouse abroad, the KGB expelled him to Western Germany.

Some Soviet and Western intellectuals attempted to use the détente, then being negotiated by the United States President Richard M. Nixon and the Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev, toward the lessening of the Soviet terror in its latest phase. In late June and early July 1974, as Nixon and Brezhnev met in Moscow and Yalta, the Soviet nuclear physicist Andrei D. Sakharov appealed to them:

Do what you can, at least for some of the prisoners—the women, the old people, those who are ill, those who have been tried more than once (the courts punish them with special perversity). Bring about the immediate release of all who have been incarcerated for more than 15 years, the maximum term fixed by law. Encourage international supervision of places of confinement in all countries—in these places human rights and humanitarian principles are violated most often.¹⁰

To strengthen his plea, Professor Sakharov went on a hunger strike that he kept up for almost a week. The only response from Brezhnev was his order to the Soviet television technicians to cut off at its very beginning the interview with Sakharov that American broadcasters tried to relay from Moscow to the world at large.

As for President Nixon, there is no evidence that he interceded with Brezhnev in any way on behalf of Soviet prisoners and other dissidents. On the contrary, in a public speech prior to his flight to meet with Brezhnev, the President warned that there should be no interference with the domestic affairs of any nation, no matter how much we may sympathize with the victims of such a nation's terror.

From August 1974 on, the new President Gerald R. Ford, having inherited Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, has on the whole continued this Nixon-Kissinger policy of noninterference with the severe repressive course of the Soviet government within that country.

But a welcome contrast came in October 1975, when a special committee of the Norwegian parliament awarded Sakharov the year's Nobel Peace Prize, citing the Russian scientist for his fearless advocacy of human rights, particularly the right to dissent and the right to freedom from oppression and terror: "His basic principle is that universal peace cannot have a lasting value if not based on respect for every individual in society."

V

There remains for humanitarians and demographers as well as for historians the grave problem of the exact or even approximate total toll of Soviet terror from Lenin's seizure of power in November 1917 to Stalin's death in March 1953.

On the eve of the revolution of 1917, political prisoners in Tsarist jails totaled fewer than 800. In the first volume of his Gulag Archipelago, Solzhenitsyn estimates that as many as six million political convicts were held in Soviet prisons and concentration camps at any one time (while another six million were nonpolitical inmates and slaves). This high figure, according to Solzhenitsyn, was reached just before Stalin's death. In his second volume, Solzhenitsyn writes that from late 1917 to early 1953 between 40 and 50 million humans passed through Soviet jails and slave camps, including men, women, and children who never came out alive. Those dead totaled between 15 and 25 million.

Hitler's victims of gassing, gallows, firing squads, and other means of extermination (not counting those lost in battles and bombings) totaled between 10 and 12 million, of whom six million were Jews. But then, the Nazis had only 12 years to establish their grisly record, whereas the Lenin-through-Stalin period lasted more than 35 years.

In early 1974, Western intelligence sources put the Soviet prison population under the Brezhnev-Kosygin regime as anywhere between one million and 2,500,000, of whom only 10,000 were considered political convicts. But defectors and émigrés from the Soviet Union in 1974-76 ridiculed this figure as entirely too low.

The number of those politicals who are unjustly confined to Soviet insane asylums is unknown.

Thus the grand promise of Russia's terrorists, from the Narodniki through the Terror Brigade of the Socialist Revolutionaries to Lenin's launching of mass murders, which sought to justify their bloodshed by their aim of making mankind happy, was never even close to realization. In the Soviet Union and other Socialist-Communist countries there may have been economic gains, but even these could have been achieved by peaceful means. The human rights of the original dream and promise—equality, justice, personal liberty—have not been enhanced. Far from it; whatever such rights did exist in pre-terror times have by now been trampled into the bloody mire by the hobnailed boots of torturers and firing squads.

NOTES

¹ On the Stalinist period in Soviet terror, in addition to the pertinent parts of the already cited Solzhenitsyn's The Gulag Archipelago, see:

Roy A. Medvedev, Let History Judge: The Origins and Consequences of Stalinism, transl. by Colleen Taylor and edited by David Joravsky and Georges Haupt (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1971). Unfortunately, while blaming Stalin for terror, the author tends to exonerate Lenin.

Robert Conquest, The Great Terror: Stalin's Purge of the Thirties, revised edition (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1973). One of the best accounts and analyses of the Stalinist terror.

An earlier, thorough, and well-documented study is David J. Dallin and Boris I. Nicolaevsky, Forced Labor in Soviet Russia (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1947). More embracive geographically is Alexander Dallin and George W. Breslauer, Political Terror in Communist Systems (Stanford University Press, 1970).

Among the innumerable individual memoirs by survivors of the Stalinist terror, three of the latest and most impressive are:

Alexander Vardy, Das Eisloch [The Icehole], transl, from the Russian by Josef Hahn (Stuttgart: Henry Goverts Verlag, 1966).

Joseph Berger, Nothing But the Truth (New York: The John Day Company, 1971).

Alexander Dolgun with Patrick Watson, Alexander Dolgun's Story: An American in the Gulag (New York: Knopf, 1975).

Much of my knowledge and understanding of the Stalinist terror came from my acquaintance and long talks, over the years, with numerous survivors of the Soviet concentration camps. Among others, I am indebted to Alexander Vardy for the recollections he so readily and fully shared with me during our many get-togethers in his Munich home.

² N. Otradin, "Po ostrovam 'Arkhipelaga'" [On the islands of the 'Archipelago'], Novoye Russkove Slovo, March 3, 1974.

³ For biographies of Stalin, besides the already cited Trotsky, Stalin, and the relevant parts of Wolfe, Three Who Made a Revolution, see:

Boris Souvarine, Stalin: A Critical Survey of Bolshevism, translated by C. L. R. James (New York: Alliance Book Corporation, Longmans, Green & Co., 1939).

Adam B. Ulam, Stalin: The Man and His Era (New York: The Viking Press, 1973).

Robert C. Tucker, Stalin As Revolutionary, 1879-1929: A Study in History and Personality (paperback, New York: Norton 1974).

⁴ A. Sharagin (pseudonym of Georgi A. Ozerov, one of the victims), Tupolevskaya sharaga [Tupolev's secret camp-laboratory], (Frankfurt, West Germany: Published by the Posey House, [1971]), passim.

⁵ John Barron, KGB (paperback, New York: Bantam Books, 1974).

⁶ Despite the historical importance of Beria's life and activity, there is not a single comprehensive biography of him in any language. The book by Thaddeus Wittlin, Commissar: The Life and Death of Lavrenty Pavlovich Beria (New York: Macmillan, 1972), notwithstanding its size—566 pages—is a complete failure.

⁷ How close in those March days of 1953 Beria came to seize all power in the Soviet Union, may be seen from Harrison E. Salisbury, American in Russia (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1955), Chapter X, "The Seventy-five Hours," particularly pp. 170-72.

⁸ George F. Kennan, Memoirs: 1925-1950 (Boston: Little, Brown, 1967), pp. 503-04.

⁹ The fullest story of the slaves' uprising at Vorkuta is Joseph Scholmer, Vorkuta, translated from the German by Robert Kee (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1954).

¹⁰The New York Times, July 5, 1974, the Op-Ed Page, accompanied by Arthur Miller's short essay, "Sakharov, Détente and Liberty." For the role of Soviet courts as instruments of terror in the current Brezhnev period, see Telford Taylor, Courts of Terror: Soviet Criminal Justice and Jewish Emigration (New York: Knopf, 1976).