Origins of the Great Purges : The Soviet Communist Party Reconsidered, 1933-1938

by J. Arch Getty

Release Date: 30 January, 1987

Edition: Paperback

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Revisionist Spin on a Cruel Era

J. Arch Getty's Origins of the Great Purges is a work that makes important and original points about the era of Soviet terror. It is the author's means of arriving at such points, and the many inauspicious conclusions that often follow from them, that is such a source of stupefaction. The reader is left wishing Getty had stuck with his most important idea and developed it further: that the terror was truly, as common sense might lead any Soviet scholar to hypothesize, a monster of many heads and many tails. This single point, if argued cogently, would have taken much of the force out of earlier writings of this period, which led to the author's own questions of it. Those writings depict a totalitarian state in which Stalin's words were heeded without question practically from the moment they left his mouth. It just wasn't so, according to Getty. Many Politburo members and upper level henchmen such as Ordzhonikidze, Yezhov, and Yagoda, acted according to their own resolve. Furthermore, the rapid rate of industrialization, and indeed the rate of socialization, created a confused and inefficient state of affairs at all levels. Following the author's lead, we are meant to question how any one man could have designed the Purges in light of such chaotic conditions.

There is more in this vein, such as what is suggested by the high rate of electoral turnover of local Party committees; Stalin and his retinue would have had very little or no impact in deciding the outcome of votes. Also convincing is the author's argument that the purging of Party members was merely a symptom of a Union-wide Augean stable in which managers and workers at all levels ratted on one another in order to account for lapses in the state's absurdly high productivity standards. The persecution of innocents was a tragic, though perhaps unintended, by-product of the corruption and inefficiencies that went along with a backward nation so hastily modernizing in the wake of a revolution.

This work, however, is fraught with theoretical and analytical problems. From the preface, the author argues that "interpretations based on critical use of the internal records of the participants are better grounded than those that rely on the literary memoirs of ... exogenous victims of the process" (vii). He later in the introduction suggests that such writings were written with "dubious intentions" (p.4). The term "exogenous" could be debated, although most published memoirs of victims were written by individuals who had experience working and living within the Soviet Union. Their accounts, it would seem, reflect a general knowledge of the policies of the state from this time and, more specifically, a certain inside look at the terrorist methods imposed by the NKVD. Such accounts cannot be compared, however, with that organ's internal records, since such records are still unavailable. Although, because such accounts are typically critical of the state's policies of arrest, interrogation, prosecution, 'trial,' imprisonment, and forced labor, it follows that their intentions are remarkably indubitable: they were written for the purpose of denouncing the state's policies.

It would be one thing if the author were to suggest that such memoirs were written by embittered souls who, because they had fallen victim of a state in the throes of a cataclysmic development, simply lashed out against it. However, when such memoirs are cross compared, the stunning parallels and similarities of experiences lend cogency to the arc of each narrative. Two ideas are suggested by such similarities: that such memoirs accurately depict the experiences they convey, and that the authors were the victims of a well-organized and efficiently functioning terror.

It is odd, as well, that the author would stack internal records against such accounts, since it is possible such records reflect data the recorder believed his superiors might expect from him. In such a high pressure environment, in which workers were often purged for failing to meet highly expected standards, it must be difficult to tell which records are accurate reflections of past reality, and which have been adjusted by the recorder in order to cover [himself].

In another chapter, the author notes that "[I]f a member were [purged] he or she still had recourse. An elaborate appeals procedure extended through various levels... to which any expellee could finally appeal" (p. 43). This much is true. Although, this is as good a place as any for the author to advance his knowledge of the state's inefficiencies, for memoir accounts of appeals depict a snail's pace procedure without accountability. Appeals often took years, and quite often then were rejected in the course of a cursory review.

There are numerous other logical inconsistencies, such as the author's overall suggestion that Stalin would not have had the means to pull off such a large scale terror single-handedly, while at the same time arguing that [I]f he had wanted...to construct a plot to implicate everyone ... he could have done so without embarrassing dead-end investigations, censored and contradictory trial transcripts, and acquittals followed by convictions" (p. 127). The suggestion is that blunders that went along with the terror are indicative of an inefficient state going about its business, rather than the unavoidable trip ups involved in prosecuting certain difficult innocents.

Most important, the author's overall argument fails to account for the possibility of a trickle-down terror that very likely began with Stalin. His cutthroat demands of Yagoda, Yezhov, Molotov and others in high places could have effected their own demands of subordinates, and so on down the line. For instance, at one point the author notes that Molotov called for increased criticism of leaders. If Stalin had instilled fear in his men in order to raise productivity norms while at the same time quelling what were, or what were imagined to be, counterrevolutionary activity, this would have been a sensible demand to make of his henchmen. The resultant chaos that followed was a likely consequence of persons at all levels wishing to cover their [themselves].