The Road to Terror: Stalin and the Self-Destruction of the Bolsheviks, 1932-1939

Annals of Communism

by J. Arch Getty, Oleg V. Naumov, Benjamin Sher (Translator)

This gripping book assembles and translates into English for the first time top secret Soviet documents from 1932 to 1939, the era of the Stalin purges. The nearly 200 documents -- dossiers, police reports, private letters, secret transcripts, and more -- expose the hidden inner workings of the Communist Party and the dark inhumanity of the purge process.

Genres: History, Russia, Soviet History, Nonfiction, Soviet Union, Russian History, Politics

635 pages, Hardcover

First published August 11, 1999

About the author

John Archibald Getty III was an American historian and professor at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), who specialized in the history of Russia and the history of the Soviet Union.

Reviews

[Brandon Prince · Rating 5 out of 5]

Of the many different versions of this often told tale, J. Arch Getty's is one of the best.

Eschewing the simplistic portrait of Stalin as an evil mastermind, Getty instead stages a complex discursive analysis of inner party documents, central committee minutes, and private letters (documents made available for the first time in the 1990s). The picture revealed is hardly one of monolithic totalitarian power, but rather that of a fractured party and state power with only a tenuous grasp on control of the country. Stalin emerges as a major central player, but not the sole agent of events.

Getty shows that the events leading to the terror were a complex process involving many vacillating and often contradictory politics and policies, as well as competing political camps. Getty shows how the party, responding to threats both real and imagined, engaged in terror not as an expression of their political hegemony throughout the Soviet Union, but rather as an expression of its lack. The image is one of Moscow lashing out defensively, truly believing itself to still be in a state of civil war. And as Getty reminds us, many of the players in this drama, steeled as they were in the crucible of the Soviet Civil War (1917-22), carried over into these new circumstances a siege mentality formed during this earlier period.

Getty tells of how the various terrors of the 30s were hardly streamlined and organized, but often blind, chaotic and only minimally controlled by Moscow. Stalin and the politburo are seen frequently jockeying for power with regional party fiefdoms; the NKVD (secret police) often running their own operations, exceeding orders from Moscow and frequently improvising. In short, this was hardly a situation controlled by the demonic whim of a central power, let alone the external expression of one man's demented mind, nor even an a posteriori proof of the common sense truism that 'power corrupts...'.

This is a dense history: a challenging web of political necessity (both perceived and real), unprecedented social revolution, political sincerity as well as opportunism, lies, accusations and killing. As the terror reaches its height in the years of 1937-38, the reshuffling of alliances becomes increasingly difficult to follow, and the content of political accusations and crimes more and more incredible. Getty navigates this history with a sure hand, and conveys these events in an accessible and highly readable language. Although it is an academic text and not a work of popular non-fiction, the story Getty unfolds is not without its dramatic tension and sense of epic history. I even hoped against fate that this time they would not kill Bukharin. But alas, they always do.

[AC · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book is not bad -- probably closer to 4-stars. It is a survey of Stalin's Road to Terror.
The book suffers from some of the flaws of modern scholarship - an occasional need to quote Foucault, e.g., without spending the hundreds of pages needed to analyze the doctrines that Foucault espouses; a revisionist theory, influenced by the 'functionalist' school in Nazi-studies, whereby Stalin "fell" into the terror because the elite (polycracy) was fearful of its position -- and not simply out of a psychopathic malice; finally, sometimes it feels like he is talking to graduate students, without realizing it.

Anyway, a fairly good summary, based on the vast archival horde that was released after the fall of the USSR.

The book sets out clearly the current thinking on numbers -- by the end of the 1930's, there were some 4 million people in prisons/gulags -- not that many more than are inprisoned today in the US (though on a smaller population base, and with a much higher mortality rate). Some 800,000 executions (not the 20 million of lore), of which 85% were during the years 1937-1938 (the Great Terror). On top of this, another 1.2 million died (leaving aside the starvations due to the Great Famine of the first 5-year plan in Central Asia and in the Ukraine. So, 2 million deaths (apart from the famine). This is, I think, the current consensus view of scholars without any political axe to grind.

[Nick · Rating 3 out of 5]

From a distance, the period in the Thirties when Stalin serially maneuvered to eliminate allies and potential rivals in the Politburo, the Red Army, the regional administration and even the police looks like a decisive and systematic rise to power. "The Road to Terror" by J. Arch Getty and Oleg V. Naumov, relying heavily on the Soviet archives, argue that the decision to focus on successive "traitors" was more improvisational and even, at the beginning, based on a real sense that conspiracy was being hatched within the Party. Getty and Naumov make clear just what a terrifyingly insular logic and language the Stalinists wielded. Those accused were not even guilty until proven innocent; the charges themselves were the proof, and the only recourse of those caught in the maw of Soviet justice was to acknowledge treasonous error in what Getty and Naumov characterize as a public rite of confession. There was no appeal and the Politburo did not make mistakes; if the campaign of arrest and execution it ordered had become excessive, it was the fault of those who carried out the directives. Last year's ally in defeating Trotsky or Zinoviev and Kamenev or Bukharin or in carrying out a terror campaign was this year's traitor. Three of the executed stand out: Nikolai Bukharin, who spent his long imprisonment writing incessantly, letters to Stalin, Marxist theory, even a novel; Marshal Tukhachevsky, a vicious hero of the Revolution, whose archived confession is spattered with blood (and whose loss was deeply felt when Hitler betrayed Stalin and invaded); and Nikolai Yezhov, the drunken head of the NKVD (predecessor of the KGB and its current incarnation, the FSB, where Vladimir Putin built the first part of his career), who gave his name to the 1937 terror, the Yezhovschina. The circular logic of the dialogue as the accused are confronted by the Politburo, including Stalin, is beyond even Orwell's harrowing rendition of the Soviet terror-state in "1984". Thus, Vyacheslav Molotov, to Bukharin, who had argued thatthere was no truth in the accusations against him: " You're always acting as a lawyer." And when Bukharin asserted the right to defend himself, Molotov continued, "I agree, you have the right to defend yourself, a thousand times over. But I consider it my right not to believe you. Because you are a political hypocrite." A key bit of evidence in a certain conspiracy was that two high-ranking Party members had gone to pick out a dog together, which Stalin turned into a surreal series of questions--was it for hunting or as a guard? Did they get the dog? Was it a good one? It is a stunning performance of power asserting itself, showing that whether or not the accusation was true or not is beside the point, trivializing any effort to discover the truth or dispute the charges. Even the medieval trial by ordeal at least admitted the possibility of innocence. One finishes the book astonished at how devalued the English vocabulary has become, that people use the word "tyranny" because they lose elections or dislike policy. No, Getty and Naumov show us what tyranny really is: the pandemic abuse of basic human rights, an environment in which facts do not matter, where doubt and due process are weakness, the deployment of a logical system in which something is true because the right person has stated it.

[jordan! · Rating 5 out of 5]

I used this for the primary documents, and oh my god it was BEAUTIFUL. As a backstory: the Moscow archives are almost completely sealed, only countries like the Ukraine, Estonia, Latvia, etc. have their archives of the time of Soviet occupation open. However, right at the fall of the Soviet Union, some Yale historians were able to sneak through the cracks and get full access to the archives. In this book are almost 200 primary documents translated into English with AMAZING information. I'm seriously so so impressed.

I'm doing a mock trial of Josef Stalin for my Stalinism class, and I desperately needed a book with primary documents connecting Stalin's policies to the Terror directly. This did this and more. Truly a wonder.

I'd recommend all of the Annals of Communism series from Yale University Press - they are phenomenal

[Joselito Honestly and Brilliantly · Rating 3 out of 5]

The Czarist rule was corrupt, inept and brutal so the Bolsheviks, with the people’s support, were able to overthrow the government. The Czar himself with his entire family were executed.

Now in power, the Bolsheviks know that if the Czar can be overthrown, so can they. They know precisely how rulers can lose power. A group of men, a political minority, rabble-rousers, can start as critics, oppositionists, then dissidents, and if they are lucky, with growing support, they could stage a successful revolution.

So the Bolsheviks have to watch out for these. They need to stay in power. First they had Lenin, but Lenin died so it’s Stalin’s turn. This psychopath was able to remain in power until he died of illness by doing these:

a. anyone who actually opposes him, he kills;

b. anyone he SUSPECTS of opposing him, he kills;

c. anyone he doesn’t like, for any reason, he kills; and

d. like a garden owner pruning the shrubs in his garden, he would every now and then order purges in the provinces with specific quotas for each of them (like Province No. 1 must have 1,000 executions and 500 deportations to the gulags; Province No. 2 must have twice as much, etc.).

The victims include not just ordinary Russians, but even government functionaries and his fellow Bolsheviks. How are they chosen? Guilt has absolutely nothing to do with it. A joke, a whispered intrigue, a misunderstanding, a wrong look, an unfortunate choice for a reading material or of a friend, an unpleasant relative or association, even for no reason at all, one could end up in a gulag or before a firing squad. Stalin does not spare even his own family members.

He has, of course, his henchmen. Those who implement his bidding. But what happens if they themselves fall out of Stalin’s graces? They are denounced. Guilty or not, if they would have any chance of surviving at all, they would have to own up to their mistakes or crimes and promise to mend their ways. Sometimes, indeed, they’d be given another chance (“rehabilitated,” demoted to a lowly position, sent to a labor camp or just exiled).

But why would they confess if they are absolutely innocent of what they are accused of? Well, first it is because they themselves did this before (make innocent victims confess guilt). Secondly, the theory here is that the greatest good is that of the State. That the individual exists only for the State; and that if you deny the charges levelled against you by the State, then you are in effect accusing the State (or Stalin) to be a liar and you are therefore undermining it/him.

Confessing, then, is but part of the individual’s contribution to the strengthening of the State. Dying (if death be the penalty) is part of the victim’s contribution to society. This is ingrained deeply in the political consciousness of those days that even killing oneself (after he is accused of wrongdoing) is considered a treasonous act. For if the State has found you guilty, then it becomes your duty and obligation to save yourself, remain alive, before your execution.

This book (almost 700 pages) is the first comprehensive study of Stalin’s Reign of Terror (1932-1939) based on previously top secret Soviet documents.

[Bruce Overby · Rating 4 out of 5]

Whenever I read a tome of a history book—this one runs a full 594 pages plus appendix and index—I am always searching for relevance to current events. In the case of The Road to Terror: Stalin and the Self-Destruction of the Bolsheviks, 1932-1939, I found that relevance to be sweeping, and quite painful.

The book, published in 1999, is based on just a portion of the massive trove of archives released to the world's historians after the fall of Soviet Union in 1989. In particular, Getty and Naumov focus on transcripts from the highest levels of Soviet power: the plena of both the Politburo and the Central Committee of the Communist Party, similar meetings of District and Territorial Committees of the party, and letters from highly placed Bolshevik officials to these committees and directly to Joseph Stalin. The picture the authors reveal through these archives is one of terror, certainly, but a kind of terror unfathomable to those of us in the modern West.

It is the story of what casual readers of history know of as "the purges" that occurred under Stalin's rule in the early years of the Soviet Union. Also referred to as "The Great Terror" and "The Great Purge," the program is generally understood as Stalin's effort, in 1937, to eliminate dissenting members of the Communist Party. But what Getty and Naumov reveal is something much deeper and more insidious that actually began in the earliest days of the Bolshevik Revolution and continued through 1939.

Stalin and Lenin had fallen out with their former comrade Leon Trotsky over the extent to which the state should doggedly pursue pure communism through forced economic collectivization. Stalin and Lenin were the purists, while Trotsky favored a capitalist impulse in some pockets of the economy. After Lenin's death in 1924, the rift between Stalin and Trotsky continued, leading to Trotsky's exile in 1929. Over subsequent years and into the 1930s, Stalin's paranoia only grew, eventually merging with a culture that had, through the course of Tsarist oppression and violent revolution, reflexively devalued human life. The documents in The Road to Terror show how Stalin and his closest deputies, over the course of the 1930s, gradually built that culture into one of mutual fear, suspicion, and mistrust, thus setting the table for the brutal persecution that followed: persecution of anyone who, at any point in the entire revolutionary period, may have uttered a word or allowed an affiliation that suggested support for Trotskyism or dissent toward Stalin's and Lenin's more pure form of collectivism. This culture, in time, became so deeply engrained that a system of show trials was created, resulting in the executions of hundreds of thousands of rank-and-file party members, and in the end, the destruction of the very Bolshevik leadership that created it. And remarkably, this all occurred during a period when the Communist project in the Soviet Union was an abject failure for average citizens. Food shortages, famine, and starvation were rampant, and efforts at rapid industrialization proceeded, at best, in fits and starts. Paranoia at the highest levels and widespread oppression served not only as a useful distraction, but also as a strong message to anyone who might consider rising up in search of a better way.

Authoritarianism hasn't gone anywhere in the century since The Great Terror, continuing around the world and leading to brutality, oppression, and even genocide. And now movements in the West, including one here in the U.S. that briefly gained the highest office in the land, are once again flirting with authoritarian impulses. What The Road to Terror tells us is that adherents to those movements would do well to carefully consider the parallels between the early Bolsheviks and modern movements like American MAGA. The culture of fear and mistrust, the castigation of any form of dissent, and the impulse toward intimidation and violence are common foundational elements not only in Bolshevism and MAGA, but in all authoritarian movements. Those aspiring to establish the primacy of such movements, and to perhaps take leadership roles in them, might want to think twice—and perhaps read a book once in a while.

[Katherine Kingma · Rating 5 out of 5]

200 pages or so in and I'm having an absolute ball of a time.

I don't know what I wouldn't give to go to the Soviet archives to see the real documents this book discusses, but this is the next best thing.

Getty and Naumov provide an excellent selection of documents and commentary so the reader understands how the Terror unfolded. In fact, overall, I am extremely impressed with Getty's ability to summarize and explain the complex historical context to readers unfamiliar with the period-- that's a triumph in itself.

[Beth Medvedev · Rating 4 out of 5]

It's amazing that these documents saw the light of day in the West at all, and though not a "novel" this is not such a difficult read. It's a really good book for anyone interested in understanding more about the Soviet state and what is now Russia, but also to taking the past and understanding current events and their motivations more clearly.

[Jeremy Andersen · Rating 3 out of 5]

A very information, in-depth book, however a lot of the materials referenced in later chapters refer to documents from previous chapters. Kept finding myself having to go back and re-reading the documents referenced.

[Steven R]

Deeply depressing analysis of how and why the terror happens in '37/38. Very good for dispelling the idea that Stalin was some omnipotent god. Does not let Stalin or the Centrist leadership off the hook though.

[Benjamin Britton · Rating 4 out of 5]

"But in another sense, the recourse to blind terror from the summer of 1937 was the opposite of the politics that had gone before. It was an abandonment not only of the varying hard-soft, moderate-radical, legalistic-repressive discourse but of policy discourse itself. In the preceding period, even the repressive trend had always implied the primacy of Moscow and had been aimed at securing obedience and central control. The 1937-38 terror was different. Although it specified centrally planned quotas and procedures, it did not specify targets and left selection of victims to local troikas and other bodies. Unlike the competing discourses about control and centralization in 1933-37, the 1937-38 terror was centrally authorized chaos. It was the negation of politics."

[Barry Smirnoff · Rating 4 out of 5]

The book is a combination of documents and editorial comments. About the extent and meaning of the Great Purge of 1936-37 of the Old Bolsheviks. Stalin had successfully put together a nomenclature who were loyal to him and who acted on the basis of Party purity. The economic failures that were blamed on sabatours and wreckers who were part of a nubulous opposition.

[Vanjr · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very interesting and believable read about the high level purges of the 1930s in the USSR. Spoiler-Stalin is not the omnipotent/omniscent one. I found this an absolutely engrossing book-even with its academic pedigree. Highly recommend if 20th century Russian history is your thing.

[Cybermilitia · Rating 3 out of 5]

Nomenklaturanın iç ilişkilerini ayrıntılarla anlattığı ve metin yorumculuğunu çok iyi yaptıkları için güzel. O verilerden Stalin dönemini aklayacak yorumlar çıkardıkları için kötü.

[Baris · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is mostly a collection of archival documents from the years of screenings, purge and executions between 1932 to 1939. A great book for the people, who are interested in the period.

[Leonardo]

Citado en Sobre la Violencia Pág.248