The Enigma of Terror

Part 1: A House Divided

Introduction

What is dubbed "The Great Terror" is one of the most puzzling events of the century; a lurid, hyper-violent nightmare that entirely decimated Soviet society for reasons which have continued to perplex historians. Conventional narratives about the terror describe it as a top-down series of purges directed by an increasingly paranoid Stalin to "purify" the state-apparatus of a fifth column. Historians such as Robert Conquest and Richard Pipes have popularized an understanding of the terror that centers the actions of Stalinist leadership as the sole driver of the purges.¹ While this certainly captures a major dimension of terror, recent scholarship in Stalinist historiography, particularly the work of David Priestland, James Harris, Wendy Goldman, J. Arch Getty, and William Chase, highlights how terror unfolded through the popular participation of everyday people, and notably included state-initiated campaigns of mass mobilization and democracy.² This is not to suggest that the Great Terror was initiated or led “from below,” but rather that institutional power struggles unleashed a dynamic of terror that involved a complex interplay between the state and local participants.

Getty writes that the purges were not the result of “a petrified bureaucracy stamping out dissent and annihilating old revolutionary radicals. In fact, it may have been just the opposite … a radical, even hysterical, reaction to bureaucracy.”³ Terror tended to flow upwards against management, bureaucrats, and specialists, as state repression converged with organic populist backlash.