I would like to thank Stephen F. Cohen for comments on an earlier draft and Roberta T. Manning and Robert C. Tucker for conversations on this subject, the University of Texas at El Paso's Minigrant and University Research Grant programs for financial help, and the Summer Research Laboratory of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign for resource assistance and support.

1. For such assessments by scholars see, for example, Ulam, Adam B., Stalin: The Man and his Era (New York: Viking, 1973), p. 433 Google Scholar; and Conquest, Robert, The Great Terror: Stalin's Purge of the Thirties, rev. ed. (New York: Macmillan, 1973), pp. 375–376 and 429–430Google Scholar. For treatments of theTerror that take this view and set the USSR into the theoretical context of totalitarianism, see Friedrich, Carl J. and Brzezinski, Zbigniew K., Totalitarian Dictatorship and Autocracy, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1965, p. 169 Google Scholar; and Dallin, Alexander and Breslauer, George W., Political Terror in Communist Systems (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1970), p. 5 Google Scholar. Terrorand fear are seen as integral parts, even the most essential characteristics, of totalitarian systems by Friedrich and Brzezinski, Totalitarian Dictatorship, p. 15 and passim; Arendt, Hannah, The Origins of Totalitarianism, new ed. (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1966), p. 344 Google Scholar; and Brzezinski, Zbigniew K., The Permanent Purge: Politics in Soviet Totalitarianism (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1956), pp. 17 and 27CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

2. Antonov-Ovseenko, Anton, The Time of Stalin: Portrait of a Tyranny, trans. Saunders, George, with an Introduction by Cohen, Stephen F. (New York: Harper & Row, 1981), p. 216 Google Scholar. For similarassessments in the memoir literature see Mandel'shtam, Nadezhda, Hope against Hope: A Memoir, trans. Hayward, Max (New York: Scribner, 1970, p. 57 Google Scholar; Kravchenko, Viktor, Chose Justice (New York: Atheneum, 1970, pp. 154–155 Google Scholar; and D. Kramarev, “Kak zhivut russkie krest'iane v kolkhozakh,” David Dalin [sic] papers, Bakhmeteff Archive of Russian and East European History and Culture, Columbia University [hereafter BA], p. 8.

3. Ulam, Stalin, p. 409. See also Conquest, Great Terror, pp. 427–428. Earlier works thatconcluded that a “system of terror” existed were often based upon the Harvard Project on the SovietSocial System, in which thousands of former Soviet citizens took part. Of this sample, up to 80percent (the figures vary from author to author) reported either their own arrest or that of a relativein the 1930s. See, for example, Moore, Barrington Jr., Terror and Progress USSR: Some Sources of Change and Stability in the Soviet Dictatorship (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1954, pp. 155–156 CrossRefGoogle Scholar. However, “a very high proportion” of the sample consisted of people who were “wellplaced in Soviet life,” Bauer, Raymond A., Inkeles, Alex, and Kluckhohn, Clyde, How the Soviet System Works: Cultural, Psychological, and Social Themes (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1956), p. 13 CrossRefGoogle Scholar. As will be shown, highly placed people were much more likely to be arrested. Moreover, on the basis of the same sample Alex Inkeles and Raymond Bauer concluded in their The Soviet Citizen: Daily Life in a Totalitarian Society (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1959), p. 37, that “although arrest affected one's hostility toward things specifically Soviet, prejudiced somewhat his job chances, and increased the probability of his fleeing the Soviet Union voluntarily, it had virtuallyno effect on his generalized political and social attitudes.” Later works on the Terror appear to haverelied on the earlier studies and on general statements in the memoirs about fear; such statementswill be reexamined here.

4. Among those who believe that the Terror essentially affected the elite are Medvedev, Roi A., On Stalin and Stalinism, trans. de Kadt, Ellen (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979, p. 102 Google Scholar;and Maynard, John, Russia in Flux, ed. Haden Guest, S. (New York: Macmillan, 1948, p. 502 Google Scholar. Medvedev's position in the work just cited differs from the one. he took in Let History Judge: The Origins and Consequences of Stalinism, trans. Colleen Taylor, ed. David Joravsky and Georges Haupt (New York: Knopf, 1972), pp. 234–240, where he argued that the effects went much further. A moredetailed version of this work is Medvedev, R. A., K sudu istorii: genezis i posledstviia stalinizma (New York: 1974)Google Scholar. See also Khrushchev, Nikita S., The Crimes of the Stalin Era: Special Report to the 20th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, annotated by Nicolaevsky, Boris I. (New York: New Leader, 1962)Google Scholar [hereafter Khrushchev, “Secret Speech “], pp. S20, S25, S32–33, andS57. Another work on the period that takes the view that the effects of the Terror were far fromuniversal is John Arch Getty, “The‘Great Purges’ Reconsidered: The Soviet Communist Party, 1933–1939,” Ph.D. diss., Boston College, 1979. This work provides more information and analysisof the Terror itself than his Origins of the Great Purges: The Soviet Communist Party Reconsidered, 1933–1938 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1985). Also Manning, Roberta T., “Governmentin the Soviet Countryside in the Stalinist Thirties: The Case of Belyi Raion in 1937,” The Carl Beck Papers in Russian and East European Studies, no. 301 (1984)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Getty makes a careful but controversialdistinction between Soviet “purges,” which were routine operations to remove passive or criminalelements from the party, and the murderous operations of 1937–1938, in Origins, pp. 38–57. Thatdistinction will not be observed here, where popular use and practice in numerous memoir accountswill be followed.

5. On theories of terror see the works cited in the second part of note 1 and Walter, Eugene Victor, Terror and Reistance: A Study of Political Violence, with Case Studies of Some Primitive African Communities (New York: Oxford University Press, 1969 Google Scholar.

6. Some other works have been concerned with this question, though they have not explored itin depth. See Cohen, Stephen F., “The Stalin Question since Stalin,” in An End to Silence: Uncensored Opinion in the Soviet Union. From Roy Medvedev's Underground Magazine Political Diary, ed. Cohen, Stephen F., trans. Saunders, George (New York: Norton, 1982, pp. 22–50 Google Scholar. Many of the essaysin this collection are devoted to the same problems. Soviet citizens like Lidiia Chukovskaia, RaisaOrlova, and Lev Kopelev have made these the central intellectual and historical issues in their workscited in this article.

7. I am indebted for this phrase and this thought to Robert C. Tucker.

8. Vsesoiuznaia kommunisticheskaia partiia (bol'shevikov). Smolenskii oblastnoi komitet, the Smolensk Archives. This source will be cited here as SA with a box number, reel number if appropriate, WKP (file) number, and list.

9. The only account left by someone close to the decision-making process in the 1930s is Khrushchev, Nikita S., Khrushchev Remembers, with an Introduction, Commentary, and notes by Crankshaw, Edward, trans, and ed. Talbott, Strobe (Boston: Little, Brown, 1970)Google Scholar. But Khrushchev states that even though he was a member of the Politburo by the late 1930s, “if you weren't toldsomething, you didn't ask.” Stalin carefully selected information before passing it on to the Politburo;Khrushchev learned about Nazi Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop's visit to Moscow to signthe Nazi-Soviet Non-aggression Pact one day before he came (pp. 133, 127). It may well be that Khrushchev was trying to protect himself from the charge of deep involvement in the Terror; nonetheless, we are left with little information on how decisions were made. A classic account that hasbeen heavily relied on in the west is Orlov, Alexander, The Secret History of Stalin's Crimes (NewYork: Random, 1953 Google Scholar. Orlov, a secret police functionary, was not even in Moscow during much ofthe period before his defection in 1938; he was based in Spain.

10. Beck, F. and Godin, W. [Shteppa, Konstantin], Russian Purge and the Extraction of Confession, trans. Mosbacher, Eric and Porter, David (New York: Viking, 1951, p. 21 Google Scholar. These two writers, one Soviet and one German by origin, were both highly educated.

11. Shul'man, Mikhail, Butyrskii dekameron (3 vols; Tel Aviv: Effect Publications, 1979–1982)1: 248–251 Google Scholar.

12. Smith, Andrew, I Was a Soviet Worker (London: R. Hale, 1937), pp. 254–255 Google Scholar. Smith was aradical worker who fled the United States to escape a political trial.

13. Berger, Joseph, Nothing But the Truth (New York: John Day, 1971, p. 55 Google Scholar.

14. Avtorkhanov, Abdurakhman, Memuary (Frankfurt, A.M.: Posev, 1983), p. 443 Google Scholar. Avtorkhanovwas from a small Caucasian mountain village. The famous “Letter of an Old Bolshevik” notes thatthe trial “came upon us like a thunderbolt.” This document is supposedly the record of a conversationbetween Nikolai Bukharin and Boris Nicolaevsky in Paris in early 1936; it may be found in Nicolaevsky, Boris I., Power and the Soviet Elite: “The Letter of an Old Bolshevik” and Other Essays, ed.Zagoria, Janet D. (New York: Praeger, 1965 Google Scholar. The quotation is on p. 26. The “Letter” has beenwidely relied on in the west as a key source for the purges, but it has been heavily criticized by Getty, “ ‘Great Purges’ Reconsidered,” pp. 29–37. Indeed, since the trial began in August, Bukharincould not have commented on its effect in the spring of 1936, the latest time he was abroad.

15. Kravchenko, Viktor, Chose Freedom: The Personal and Political Life of a Soviet Official (New York: Scribner, 1946, p. 206 Google Scholar; see Medvedev's similar opinion in K sudu, p. 336; and seeacceptance of all the show trials’ charges by Petrov, Vladimir and Petrov, Evdokia, Empire of Fear (New York: Praeger, 1956), pp. 47 and 131Google Scholar. Kravchenko's family was poor before the revolution;his father was a revolutionary railroad worker. Medvedev was born in 1925; his father was a Marxistphilosopher. Vladimir Petrov was from a very poor Siberian peasant family; he and his wife workedas managerial employees and translators for the NKVD in the 1930s.

16. Weissberg, Alexander, The Accused (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1952, p. 7 Google Scholar; he alsowrote that “a period of emotional recuperation was interrupted in August 1936” by the announcementof the trial, p. 1. Weissberg was an Austrian engineer.

17. Shul'man, Butyrskii, 1: xiii-xiv.

18. Berg, Raisa, Sukhovei. Vospominaniia genetika (New York: Chalidze, 1983, p. 49 Google Scholar; on p. 32 she speaks of “four blessed years,” from 1935 to 1939. Berg's father was a professor and academician;she was a geneticist. Ivan N. Minishki, “Illiuzii i deistvitel'nost',” BA, pp. 131 and 136–137. In April 1937 Minishki, who had been technical director of a factory, was very happy about a substantialpromotion (p. 137).

19. Antonov-Ovseenko, Time of Stalin, pp. 228 and 231.

20. Kosterina, Nina, Dnevnik Niny Kosterinoi (Moscow, 1964), pp. 9–31 Google Scholar. Kosterina had a goodtime on the holiday of 7 November 1936, for example; she enjoyed herself a great deal as late as1 May 1938 (pp. 17–18 and 43). She is aware that “something is happening” as arrests take place inthe summer of 1937 but indicates no fear about them (p. 29).

21. Agranovich-Shul'man, Klara, Neobyknovennaia zhizri odnoi zhenshchiny: Memuary (NewYork, 1981), p. 87 Google Scholar. Agranovich-Shul'man was an actress and theater producer. The Timbres, a Quaker family from the United States, had many good times with each other and with Soviet citizensfrom October 1936 until the father fell ill in May 1937: Harry, and Timbres, Rebecca, We Didn't Ask Utopia: A Quaker Family in Soviet Russia (New York: Prentice-Hall, 1939), to p. 267 Google Scholar. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn had fun as late as the summer of 1939, when he and a friend traveled on the Volga ina small boat. Scammell, Michael, Solzhenitsyn: A Biography (New York: Norton, 1984, p. 96 Google Scholar. Valentina Bogdan enjoyed a trip to the seashore in August 1937; Mimikriia v SSSR: vospominaniia inzhenera 1935–1940 godov (Frankfurt, a.M., 1982), pp. 123–124.

22. Margarete Buber did note that her husband, the prominent German Communist HeinzNeumann, feared arrest even before arriving in the Soviet Union in early 1935. She found that inthat year the “atmosphere in Moscow was already stifling. Former political friends no longer daredvisit each other.” Buber-Neumann, Margarete, Under Two Dictators, trans. Edward Fitzgerald (London: V. Gollancz, 1949), p. 15Google Scholar. Buber's comment, however, may have been colored by the latercarnage among German Communists, and she gives many cases of Communists arrested in 1937 or 1938 who had not felt any fear or sense of impending arrest before they were incarcerated. Some ofthese cases will be noted below. Avtorkhanov reported that he had expected his own arrest for twoyears before it finally occurred in October 1937, yet he also said that he was not even sure then thathe would be picked up; Memuary, p. 505. As already noted, Nadezhda Mandel'shtam claimed thateveryone felt fear in the 1930s. Various passages in her memoirs, however, indicate that when shespoke of “everyone,” she really meant the intelligentsia, especially the literary world. See Hope Against Hope, pp. 51–54, 96, 162, and 332–333. She also reports cases of ordinary citizens whobelieved in the necessity for the purges: pp. 33, 132, 309, and 336.

23. A typical view in the literature is that the period from December 1934 until early 1937 wasone of constantly increasing tension; see, for example, Fainsod, Merle, Smolensk under Soviet Rule (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1958), pp. 222–237 Google Scholar; and Rigby, T. H., Communist Party Membership in the U.S.S.R., 1917–1967 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1968), pp. 200–201 and 210Google Scholar. Getty disputes this in Origins, pp. 58–91. He argues that central party authorities specifically ordered that the purges of 1935 and 1936 not be conducted as political witchhunts.He further argues that the purges were largely bookkeeping measures to straighten out horriblymuddled records and to get rid of drunks, passive members, and incompetents. Most of the accountscited here would tend to support his view insofar as people rarely recorded a sense of rising tensionin 1935–1936.

24. Shatunovskaia, Lidiia, Zhizri v Kremle (New York: Chalidze, 1982, p. 92 Google Scholar.

25. Ibid., p. 95. This account and others suggest that witnesses considered the execution of the officers the beginning of a process, not the culmination of a long period of rising tension. See also Solzhenitsyn, Aleksandr I., The Gulag Archipelago 1918–1956: An Experiment in Literary Investigation, trans. Whitney, Thomas P. (2 vols.; New York: Harper & Row, 1974), 1–2: 68 Google Scholar, where he reports that, “Old prisoners claim to remember that the first blow allegedly took the form of mass arrests” in August 1937. Evgeniia Ginzburg wrote, “So it began—that accursed year [1937] … “ in her Journey into the Whirlwind, trans. Paul Stevenson and Max Hayward (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1967), p. 35. Ginzburg was a member of the party elite and a university teacher in Kazan'.

26. A version of this joke may be found in Medvedev, On Stalin, p. 102. Another sardonic jokefrom this period is in Agranovich-Shul'man, Neobyknovennaia, p. 93; see also Ehrenburg, I'ia, Memoirs: 1921–1941, trans. Shebunina, Tatiana in collaboration with Kapp, Yvonne (Cleveland: World, 1964, p. 421 Google Scholar. Boikov, Mikhail in his Liudi sovetskoi tiur'my (2 vols.; Buenos Aires: Seiatel', 1957), 1: 359 Google Scholar, remarked that “In no [other] state of the world is there such a quantity of popularexpressions of humor and satire directed against the government as in the Soviet Union.” Boikovwas a young journalist at the time of his arrest in 1937.

27. Beck and Godin, Russian Purge, p. 146.

28. Shatunovskaia, Zhizri, p. 102.

29. Ibid., p. 101. Bailes, Kendall E., Technology and Society under Lenin and Stalin: Origins of the Soviet Technical Intelligentsia, 1917–1941 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1978), p. 422 Google Scholar, notes that the old technical “specialists,” those with higher technical education obtained before the revolution, who were usually nonparty, fared relatively much better in the Terror than other prerevolutionary elites. Valentina Bogdan and her husband, both nonparty specialists, werenot arrested; Bogdan, Mimikriia, passim.

30. Gorbatov, A. V., Years Off My Life: The Memoirs of General of the Soviet Army A. V. Gorbatov (London: Constable, 1964, p. 105 Google Scholar.

31. Grigorenko, Petro G., Memoirs, trans. Whitney, Thomas P. (New York: Norton, 1982, p. 44 Google Scholar.

32. A. T., “Tipy zakliuchennykh NKVD” [also called “Galereia tipov zakliuchennykhNKVD “], A. T. Manuscript, BA, p. 3. Apparently A. T. heard these stories while under arresthimself. Ginzburg wrote, “As we all knew, the closer you had been to prominent Communists, thelonger your sentence” (Into the Whirlwind, p. 318).

33. B. Ivanov, “Pochemu my ne khotim vozvrashchat'sia v SSSR,” David Dalin file, BA, p. 13.

34. Beck and Godin, Russian Purge, pp. 98–147. Weissberg, Accused, p. 5, gives a set ofcategories that could take in more than Beck and Godin's.

35. Kravchenko, I Chose Justice, pp. 196–197.

36. Akhmedov, Ismail, In and Out of Stalin's GRU: A Tatar's Escape from Red Army Intelligence (Frederick, Md.: University Publications of America, 1984), p. 104 Google Scholar. Akhmedov was from a poor Tatar family.

37. Scott, John, Behind the Urals: An American Worker in Russia's City of Steel (1942; reprint Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1973), p. 195 Google Scholar. Scott had been a student in Wisconsin beforetraveling to Magnitogorsk to work as a welder.

38. Grigorenko, Memoirs, p. 75.

39. See, for example, Fitzpatrick, Sheila, “Stalin and the Making of a New Elite,” Slavic Review 38 (September 1979): 396–400 Google Scholar; and Hough, Jerry F. and Fainsod, Merle, How the Soviet Union is Governed (Cambridge Mass.: Harvard. University. Press, 1979, p. 170–177 Google Scholar.

40. Meeting of the Shamilovo party cell for 14 November 1937, protocol number [blank], SA, box 49, reel 48, WKP 440, 1. 145.

41. Ibid., U. 143 and 170. I have not been able to locate later Shamilovo protocols.

42. Bogdan, Mimikriia, p. 238.

43. “A. Dneprovets,” untitled ms. in the Aleksandr Vozniuk-Burmin file, BA, p. 16. Theellipses in the last line of the quotation are in the original. “Dneprovets” worked in the local militsiia. The remark about conferences before promotion is not confirmed elsewhere. For other cases ofresistance to promotion or fear in connection with it, see Aleksandr Dmitrievich Belozerov, “Memoirs,” BA, p. III; and the story of a worker who reported his sense that it was dangerous to becomeprominent to Hanfmann, Eugenia and Beier, Helen, Six Russian Men: Lives in Turmoil (North Quincy, Mass.: Christopher, 1976), p. 64 Google Scholar. See also the story by Arkadii N. Vasil'ev, “Voprosov bol'shenet … ,” Moskva, no. 6 (1964): 64. In 1937 the relatively high-paying, but responsible, post of thedirector of the Baturinskii Machine Tractor Station was vacant for six months; Manning, “Government,” p. 26.

44. Of the respondents of the Harvard nonreturnee project, those with “administrative responsibilitywere twice as likely as their nonadministrative peers to report having been personally arrested.” Respondents assigned a particularly high-risk rating to factory managers and engineers, aparticularly low rating to workers. Inkeles and Bauer, Soviet Citizen, pp. 48–49 and 108.

45. This is the strong general impression produced by the sources used for this study, plus othersnot cited. See also statements on social composition of arrestees in particular situations or in generalin Panin, Dimitrii, The Notebooks of Sologdin, trans. Moore, John (New York: Harcourt, Brace Jovanovich, 1976), p. 28 Google Scholar; Orlova, Raisa, Memoirs, trans. Cioran, Samuel (New York: Random House, 1983, p. 181 Google Scholar; and Barmine, Alexander, One Who Survived: The Life Story of a Russian under the Soviets (New York: Putnam's, 1945), p. 241 Google Scholar. Orlova came from an educated family and Panin's father was a tsarist officer.

46. Conquest, Great Terror, p. 402.

47. Mikhail Ivanovich Nil'skii, “Manuscripts” [“Pobeg” and other stories], BA, p. 76.

48. Kravchenko, Chose Justice, p. 158.

49. Evgeniia Ginzburg did believe that innocent people were being arrested in 1937, but sheapplied that idea only to Communists (Into the Whirlwind, pp. 36–37). Kravchenko, Chose Freedom, p. 212, refers to alarm among workers in 1937 in regard to arrests but points out that partymen slept in their clothes in expectation of arrest on p. 215; he does not say that workers took suchprecautions. Bogdan, Mimikriia, p. 130, said that she and her husband feared arrest; however, theywere left at liberty.

50. Akhmedov, In and Out, p. 104; Bogdan, Mimikriia, p. 130, reports that she and her husbandknew innocent people were being arrested.

51. Solzhenitsyn, Gulag, I-II: 160–161.

52. Pavel Kuznetsov, “Why I did not return to the USSR,” David Dalin file, BA, p. 3.

53. Beck and Godin, Russian Purge, p. 21; Inkeles and Bauer, Soviet Citizen, p. 161, reportedthat 50 percent of Soviet nonreturnees after World War II said that word of mouth was an importantsource of information; 35 percent considered it the most important.

54. Nikita Malysh, “Why I did not return to my country: the story of a Red Army Officer,” David Dalin file, BA, p. 3.

55. Andrei Manchur, “Pochemu ia ne vozvrashchaius’ v SSSR,” David Dalin file, BA, pp. 2–3.

56. Lena Moroz, “The Road of the Young,” David Dalin file, BA, p. 7. Bauer, Inkeles, andKluckhohn, How the Soviet System Works, p. 115, noted a high degree of gratification and loyaltyamong Soviet youth in the Harvard survey.

57. Orlova, Memoirs, p. 61, writes that only one person “from those close to us was arrested.” On the same page and elsewhere she notes other arrestees she knew; yet the scale of arrests in herpersonal experience was not enough to shake her faith.

58. Kravchenko, Chose Justice, pp. 165–166, for example.

59. Ibid., p. 204.

60. Gorbatov, Years, p. 103.

61. Chukovskaia, Lidiia, Opustelyi dom (Paris: Librairie des Cinq Continents, 1965), pp. 52 and 59Google Scholar; see also p. 50. The novel is also called Sofia Petrovna. Chukovskaia's father was the translatorand writer Kornei Chukovskii.

62. Prychodko, Nicholas, One of the Fifteen Million (Boston: Little, Brown, 1952), p. 21Google Scholar. Prychodkoworked in education; his father had been a well-off peasant.

63. Grigorenko, Memoirs, p. 36.

64. Kuznetsov, “Why,” p. 3.

65. Bogdan, Mimikriia, pp. 108–111.

66. A. Lunin, “Kak sozdaiutsia‘Sputniki',” BA, p. 14.

67. K., Petrus, Vzniki kommunizma (New York: Chekhov, 1953, p. 169 Google Scholar.

68. [Mikhail Gorokhov], “From the NKVD to the Polish Army,” David Dalin File, BA, p. 23.

69. Orlova, Memoirs, pp. ix and 63.

70. Panin, Notebooks, p. 15. Panin had been deeply anti-Soviet from childhood.

71. Kopelev, Lev, The Education of a True Believer, trans. Gary Kern (New York: Harper & Row, 1980), p. 122 Google Scholar. Kopelev was from a well-educated and relatively well-off Kievan family. Manyothers apparently sincerely believed that there were many authentic enemies of the people about;see also A. T., “Tipy,” p. 2; and Vasil'ev, “Voprosov,” p. 87.

72. Kravchenko, Chose Justice, p. 251.

73. Chukovskaia, Opustelyi dom, p. 70.

74. Chukovskaia, Lidiia, Protsess iskliucheniia: Ocherk literaturnykh nravov (Paris: YMCA Press, 1979, p. 10 Google Scholar; the second quotation is from POlilicheskii dnevnik, I (1964–1970) (Amsterdam, 1972), p. 57.

75. Shatunovskaia, Zhizri, p. 268.

76. Weissberg, Accused, p. 309, for the claim that everyone realized innocents were being arrested. On his own sense that justice would still be done and the reaction of others arrested that their own cases were mistakes and that they would be released, see pp. 205, 269, 284, and 295. For similar reactions, see also Buber, Under Two Dictators, pp. 28, 35, 40, and, especially, 84; Gorbatov, Years, pp. 117–118 and 134; A. T., “Tipy,” p. 1; Kravchenko, Justice, pp. 178–180; Grossman, Vasilii, Forever Flowing, trans. Whitney, Thomas P. (New York: Harper & Row, 1972), pp. 104–105 Google Scholar, a novel about the 1930s by an orthodox Soviet writer who later turned dissident; Shul'man, Butyrskii, 1: 18; and Ginzburg, Into the Whirlwind, pp. 96, 102–103, 107, 111, 120, 122–124, 144, and 154–155.

77. Ivanov-Razumnik, R. V., The Memoirs of Ivanov-Razumnik, ed. Squire, P. S. (London: Oxford University Press, 1965), pp. 311 and 316Google Scholar.

78. Antonov-Ovseenko, Time of Stalin, p. 231.

79. Beck and Godin, Russian Purge, pp. 168–169 and 228–229; A. T., “Tipy,” pp. 3–4; whenAvtorkhanov insulted the party in front of an NKVD investigator, the man became enraged and beathim up, Memuary, p. 519. On NKVD men who seemed to believe in enemies, see, among theexamples, Weissberg, Accused, pp. 406–407; Boikov, Liudi, v. 1, p. 34; Solzhenitsyn, Gulag, I-II, p. 146; and Fedor Ivanovich Gorb, “Chernyi uragan,” BA, p. 46. Gorb was a young meteorologicalemployee at the time of his arrest in 1939. Bogdan, Mimikriia, pp. 29 and 143, tells two stories ofthe NKVD interrogating engineers about accidents as they lay in hospitals dying from other causes.These cases would suggest that the NKVD believed there was some real guilt involved.

80. Kravchenko, Chose Justice, p. 232.

81. Gorokhov, “From the NKVD,” p. 23.

82. Ibid.

83. See also the justification of his work by a former NKVD man in An End to Silence, pp. 137–139.

84. That is, the same sorts of conversations, criticism, and self-criticism occurred in this cell asin non-NKVD cells at the same time. The curve of concern about enemies in Tumanovo followedarticles in the press. At a meeting on 19 January 1937, the members discussed hooliganism andcrimes in rural areas; there was not a word about enemies (SA box 14, WKP 106, 1. 47). A sessionon 1 February considered the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Prague Party Conference and resolvedto raise “vigilance in the struggle with the remains [my emphasis] of unbeaten enemies of the partyand the people in everyday practical work” (ibid., 1. 66). In other words, it was a humdrum meetingand a stereotypical resolution. But by 30 March, after considering Stalin's report to the FebruaryCentral Committee Plenum, which was not published until the day before, the hunt for enemies wasin full cry (ibid., 1. 52). This NKVD cell also discussed lead editorials in Pravda as the basis for itsmeeting of 19 August 1936 (SA box 38, reel 37, WKP 322, 1. 140). After the Central Committeeresolution denouncing careerists and unfounded accusations appeared in Pravda on 19 January 1938, p. 1, this group began to fall all over itself in exposing its own mistakes along this line in the recentpast (SA box 38, reel 37, WKP 322, 11. 11–14, session of 22 January 1938; and the meeting of11 April 1938, ibid., 11. 1–5). It is also noteworthy that the cell held secret ballots for its ownleadership (3 April 1937 meeting in SA box 14, WKP 106, 11. 58–60, and 1. 65, meeting of 15 October1937). There is no indication that those demoted in the voting were arrested; they were not chargedat the time.

85. Solzhenitsyn, Gulag, I—II: 68; Weissberg, Accused, p. 89, wrote that the mass arrests beganin the fall of 1937.

86. Allilueva, Svetlana, Twenty Letters to a Friend, trans. Johnson, Priscilla (New York: Harper & Row, 1967), pp. 7–8 Google Scholar; Khrushchev, “Secret Speech,” pp. S34, S46, and S50; and Medvedev, On Stalin, p. 100.

87. Dneprovets, untitled ms., BA, pp. 29–30; Weissberg, Accused, p. 375; Beck and Godin, Russian Purge, p. 64; Gorbatov, Years, p. 152; and Kravchenko, Chose Freedom, pp. 289–290. TheNKVD investigator in this case seems to have been quite sincere about his work and in the beliefthat many genuine enemies of the people had been arrested. Although Kravchenko was convictedof minor embezzlement in early 1940, his case went up through the court system in an orderlymanner and was tossed out by the Supreme Court in early 1942 (Chose Freedom, pp. 350–351).By mid-1938 the Supreme Court was reviewing many cases, including political ones, and it “stoodready to throw out or send for a new trial any case heard in a lower court.” Peter H. Solomon, Jr., “Soviet Criminal Justice and the Great Terror,” paper delivered to the Third World Congress ofSoviet and East European Studies, Washington, D.C., November 1985, p. 31.

88. Beck and Godin, Russian Purge, p. 82. For lack of a better estimate, one might cite Weissberg's guess that somewhat over 100, 000 were released at this point (Accused, p. 324).

89. Avtorkhanov, Memuary, p. 564, reported that there was not one case of beating in the prisonwhere he was held after Beria took over. For the same or a similar observation see Prychodko, One of the Fifteen Million, p. 92; Ioffe, Mariia, Odna noch': Pbvesi o pravde (New York: Khronika, 1978, p. 127 Google Scholar; Ivanov-Razumnik, Memoirs, p. 323; and Beck and Godin, Russian Purge, p. 48. Ioffe, a committed Trotskyite, was the wife of the prominent Bolshevik and Trotskyite A. A. Ioffe.

90. For such trials, see Avtorkhanov, Memuary, p. 615; Beck and Godin, Russian Purge, p. 169;and Weissberg, Accused, p. 12. Pravda for 22 October 1938, p. 6, mentions another trial of a regionalprocurator and his assistant.

91. Dneprovets, untitled ms., BA, p. 32, his emphasis. See the strange stories of soldiersresisting the NKVD in Nil'skii, “Manuscripts,” pp. 34–35 and 103, which he says date from 1940.

92. Pravda, 5 July 1939, p. 6, and 11 July 1939, p. 6.

93. Weissberg, Accused, p. 324. Many survivors speak of 1937–1938 as the terrible time, not1939. For example, Orlova, Memoirs, p. 269, and Ioffe, Odna, p. 112, who mentions only 1937.

94. The purges of the late 1940s and early 1950s appear to have involved above all Jews andofficials from Leningrad. These arrests took place in an atmosphere supercharged with nationalismand fear of the west's strength.

95. See Poliakov, Leon, Harvest of Hate: The Nazi Program for the Destruction of the Jews of Europe (Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 1954), p. 18 Google Scholar; Broszat, Martin, The Hitler State: The Foundation and Development of the Internal Structure of the Third Reich, trans. Hiden, John W., (London: Longman, 1981), pp. 349–351 and 357Google Scholar; Peterson, Edward N., The Limits of Hitler's Power (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1969), esp. p. 443 Google Scholar; and Mayer, Milton, They Thought They Were Free: The Germans 1933–1945 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1955 Google Scholar.

96. Antonov-Ovseenko, Time of Stalin, p. 212; Kennan, George F., Soviet Foreign Policy 1917–1941 (Princeton, N.J.: Van Nostrand, 1960), p. 89 Google Scholar. Kennan was a diplomat in Moscow at the time.Getty, “ ‘Great Purges’ Reconsidered,” p. 560, provides a handy table of estimates by various authors.Conquest, Great Terror, pp. 700–702, estimates six million to nine million arrests. David J. Dallinand Nicolaevsky, Boris I., Forced Labour in the Soviet Union (London: Hollis & Carter, 1948), p. 62 Google Scholar, estimate six million arrested in the Great Terror and fifteen million in the camps by 1940–1942 as aconservative figure. For recent examinations of the numbers in the labor camps by 1940–1941, somesubset of which was arrested in 1937–1939, and for the historiography of estimates, see Steven, Rosefielde, “An Assessment of the Sources and Uses of Gulag Forced Labour 1929–1956,” Soviet Studies 33, no. 1 (1981): 51–87 Google Scholar; S. G., Wheatcroft, “On Assessing the Size of Forced ConcentrationCamp Labour in the Soviet Union, 1929–1956,” Soviet Studies 33, no. 2 (1981): 265–295 Google Scholar; and idem, “Towards a Thorough Analysis of Soviet Forced Labour Statistics,” Soviet Studies 35, no. 2 (1983): 223–237.

97. Antonov-Ovseenko claims in Time of Stalin, p. 212, that his figures are from a secret studyauthorized by the Politburo after 1956. He did not see the document. Too often, his book is unreliableon things he did not experience personally. See van Rossum, Leo, “A. Antonov-Ovseenko's Bookon Stalin: Is It Reliable?” Soviet Studies 36, no. 3 (1984): 445–447.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

98. Conquest, Great Terror, p. 702. Panin, Notebooks, pp. 15–16, does give a ratio of seven oreight non-Communists shot for every party member executed, but this appeared in a book writtenin the west after he had done a great deal of reading about the Terror; see p. 5. Surely he saw Conquest's work.

99. The estimate is that the average prisoner spent about three or four months in jail during 1937–1938; Conquest, Great Terror, p. 700. This figure is taken from Weissberg, Accused, p. 89. Itis a curious one, since Weissberg was in prison from March 1937 until February 1939. Among those who were in jail much longer than three to four months were K. Ivanenko, “Shlema,” BA, pp. 3–4 (eight months); Kosterina, Dnevnik, p. 102 (her father spent twenty-six months); Boikov, Liudi, 1: 247 (noting an engineer who spent at least a year; Boikov himself spent eighteen months); Ivanov-Razumnik, Memoirs, p. 209 (twenty-one months); and Herman, Victor, Coming Out of the Ice: An Unexpected Life (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1979), pp. 108 and 205Google Scholar (fourteen months).

100. A. Repin, manuscript, BA, p. 254.

101. Manning, “Government,” p. 9

102. We might also note that the level of technology so necessary for the conditions of 1984 most certainly did not exist in the Soviet Union in the 1930s: see Getty, Origins, esp. pp. 25–37 butalso passim; and Manning, “Government,” pp. 8–10, 14–16, and 31. In Belyi raion Communistcadres, who were often swamped with work of various kinds, regularly traveled through their largejurisdictions by horse in this period.

103. See, for example, Boikov, Liudi, vol. 1, p. 88; Beck and Godin, Russian Purge, pp. 93and 221–222; Minishki, “Illiuzii,” p. 141; and Vladimir Petrov [not the man of the same name citedearlier], It Happens in Russia: Seven Years Forced Labour in the Siberian Goldflelds (London: Eyre & Spottiswoode, 1951), pp. 65–66.

104. Stalin, , Sochineniia, torn 1 [14], 1934–1940, ed. McNeal, Robert H. (Stanford, Calif.: Hoover Institution, 1967), p. 395 Google Scholar.

105. On engineers see, for example, Andreev, G. [Khomianov, Gennadii A.], Trudnye dorogi; vospominaniia (Munich: T-vo zarubezhnykh pisatelei, 1959), p. 19 Google Scholar; Gorbatov, Years, p. 132; Berger, Nothing but the Truth, pp. 200–201 and 204; Gorb, “Chernyi,” pp. 16 and 48. One file in the SmolenskArchive, which covers the Stalin raion of the city of Smolensk, contains records of people promotedduring 1937 and early 1938. In this group forty-one were advanced who had been born in thenineteenth century and who'presumably had developed some political and cultural consciousness bythe time of Lenin's death or even “b4947 (SA box 38, reel 37, WKP 323, 11. 7–188). Many of thosepromoted in this district were nonparty.

106. Fitzpatrick, “Stalin and the Making of a T'fewJslite,” pp. 396–398.

107. Timasheff, Nicholas, The Great Retreat: The-Growth and Decline of Communism in Russia (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1946, p. 195–203 Google Scholar.

108. For example, Kosterina, Dnevnik; Ivanov-Razumnik, Memoirs; Nadezhda and Ulanovskie, Maia, Istoriia odnoi sem'i (New York: Chalidze, 1982 Google Scholar; and A. Rakhalov, “Zhemchuzhina Zapoliar'ia,” BA.

109. Conquest makes this claim in Great Terror, p. 641.

110. Scott, Behind the Urals, p. 264. See also Joravsky, David, The Lysenko Affair (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1970, p. 124 Google Scholar, on “cases of audacious public disobedience” regarding opposition to the ideas of the quack pseudo-agronomist Trofim Lysenko, including one instance ofa scientist who told Stalin to his face that “organizational measures” were keeping the collective farms from applying sound principles; the man was not arrested. In 1940 biologists were able to start a new journal critical of Lysenko, though they did not refer to him by name (ibid., p. 108).

111. See, for example, SA box 14, WKP 106, U. 55 and 60; box 14, WKP 110, 1. 185; box 62, reel R67, WKP 107, 1. 94. These date from 1937.

112. Pravda, 4 December 1938, p. 2. The enemies meant here were probably the false denouncers stressed for many months.

113. Pravda, 2 December 1938, p. 4. For other articles that implied endorsement of criticismfrom below see Pravda, 4 July 1939, p. 2; 2 October 1939, p. 3; and 3 October 1939, p. 2. In March 1937 Stalin urged the party to “learn from the masses,” to “listen to the voice of the masses, to thevoice of rank and file party members, to the voice of the so-called‘little people, ’ to the voice of the people [narod].” Stalin, Sochineniia 14: 238.

114. Solzhenitsyn, Gulag I-II: 160–161.

115. Kravchenko, Chose Freedom, p. 345; for a similar case see Berger, Nothing But the Truth, pp. 180–181.

116. G. Arkitin, “Politicheskie nastroeniia naseleniia g. Leningrada v leto 1941 g.,” BA, pp. 4–7. Anna Ivanovna M., “Why I Did Not Return to the USSR,” BA, does not even mention arrests, purges, or the Terror in her account of her reasons for remaining in western Europe after the war;she speaks instead of poverty, hard work, and excessive time spent listening to propaganda. Asalready noted, the account of Andrei Manchur falls into this group of recollections that emphasizeeconomic factors, not Terror, as reasons for disillusionment with the system.

117. Kopelev, Education, p. 123.

118. Scott, Behind the Urals, p. 205.

119. Solzhenitsyn, Gulag I-II: 160.

120. For the most careful study of Soviet civilian response to the German invasion, a subjectthat deserves much more study, see Dallin, Alexander, German Rule in Russia 1941–1945: A Study of Occupation Policies (London: Macmillan, 1957, pp. 63–65 Google Scholar, who relates that Germans noticed amuch higher level of hostility when they crossed into the “old territories” of the USSR, that is, beyond the 1939 border. Even a high officer of the Russian Army of Liberation, which comprisedformer prisoners of war who joined the Germans against Soviet forces, maintained that its membershad fought honorably against the invaders as long as they were able to, up to the point of capture. Aldan, Andrei Georgevich, Armiia obrechennykh (New York: Russian Liberation Army Archives, 1969), p. 12 Google Scholar. See the same claim by nonreturnees in Inkeles and Bauer, Soviet Citizen, p. 32.

121. On a reaction of genuine grief at Stalin's death, see Mandel'shtam, Hope Against Hope, p. 313; and Allilueva, Twenty Letters, p. 12. On Stalin's continuing popularity with some segmentsof the population, Harrison Salisbury, “Stalin Makes a Comeback,” New York Times Magazine, 23 December 1979, pp. 19–30.