Frightful Portent

...With the war of attrition inaugurated in 1916 at Verdun, the individual for the first time ceased to count on his own human level, becoming instead a mere undifferentiated unit of a sum-total, a commodity with a precisely definable flesh-and-blood value...

...Persecution, even on this scale, is of course nothing new in history, which abounds in incidents of religious mania and mass extermination...

...Guilt and innocence became quite irrelevant, though the victims of the terror never seemed to grasp this...

...why it occurred and what it meant, he hardly bothers to explain...

...How the terror began and how it unfolded, he tells with admirable clarity...

...and that it is possible to amputate whole social groups from society...

...Here is Bertolt Brecht, saying of the defendants in the show trials, "the more innocent they are, the more they deserve to die...

...These served as an excuse for the arrest of any person or group Stalin for one reason or another wanted eliminated...

...Or Jean Paul Sartre, urging that evidence indicating the existence of forced labor camps in the Soviet Union be ignored lest the French proletariat fall into despair...

...The author is a poet who seems to have turned to the study of Soviet history from a sense of moral outrage at the indifference with which the world at large responded to the crimes perpetrated by the Soviet government on its own citizenry...

...Second, it gave its victims no opportunity to exonerate themselves...

...Conquest's concern with the individual and the narrative, however, is a tendency to neglect the analytic...

...As such, it belongs alongside World War I and Hitler's "Final Solution" in the very center of modem history...

...But he did apply it freely against all who refused to acknowledge him as the embodiment of the will of the working class...

...Reviewed by RICHARD PIPES Professor of History Director, Russian Research Center, Harvard University The subject matter of this book extends beyond the series of well-publicized "trials" and executions of Lenin's associates, arranged by Stalin some 30 years ago to rid himself of potential rivals and to consolidate his authority...

...Conquest underestimates the potential for terror built into the political system Lenin created between 1917-20...

...By the time the terror came to a halt, virtually all those who made the Revolution with Lenin, or who had any significant connections with pre-Revolutionary culture, had either been committed to forced labor camps or shot...

...it, too, is the only comprehensive work on the subject...

...Is this attitude justified...

...I confess that I felt even more incensed at those who encouraged Soviet terror from the safety of the West, than at those inside the Soviet Union who helped carry it out...

...Precisely what links these three terrible events I shall suggest at the conclusion of this review...

...There can be hardly any doubt that the murder was arranged by Stalin himself...

...The silence with which Trotsky and the other opponents greeted Stalin's persecutions, as long as they were directed against third parties, suggests that the institution of terror is more deeply imbedded in Communist theory and practice than Mr...

...Conquest allows...

...And since the system he bequeathed to his heirs provided neither for a genuine popular mandate nor for a legitimate order of transferring authority, it was inevit-' able that struggles should break out among contenders for leadership, and that in these struggles each side would claim to embody the will of the working class, with all that this entailed for the opposition...

...Although Stalin's paranoiac personality exacerbated the tendencies toward mass violence inherent in the Soviet system, and tended to make them less discriminating, it did not cause them in the first place...

...It is for this reason that events like World War I, the Stalinist terror, and Hitler's extermination of Jews are instinctively regarded by us as aberrations —warnings rather than portents...

...In the course of unraveling the alleged conspiracy that cost Kirov his life, Stalin's police apparatus proceeded from one imaginary plot to another, each supposedly aimed at the overthrow of the Soviet system...

...For Stalin's terror is much more than a chapter in the development of post-1917 Russian politics...

...Or Harold Laski, finding Andrei Vishinsky a "man whose passion is law reform...

...The methods used in implementing the terror, such as physical tortures, extortion of confessions, and mock trials, had been rehearsed for some time before 1934, so that once it was set in motion the machinery of destruction worked with considerable efficiency...

...Stalin's terror pushed the process of dehumaniza-tion a great deal further along...

...What could have induced intelligent men to make such callous statements, contrary both to the dictates of common sense and the massive evidence furnished by survivors, poses interesting questions about the mentality of the radical intelligentsia...

...The terror comes alive under his pen in a way that it does not in academic studies of totalitarianism...

...The terror in his presentation emerges as a tragedy, ultimately causeless and meaningless...

...it represents a crucial phase in the evolution of modern man...

...Even Stalin, the pivotal figure, of whose personal life so little is known to this day, emerges here as a plausible person, very similar to the man depicted by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn in his recent novel, The First Circle...

...And Owen Lattimore, who after visiting the notorious Magadan camp complex as a guest of the Soviet government, on his return depicts it as something between a trade school and a vacation resort...

...Conquest's book is the first coherent account of the Russian installment in that trilogy...

...The wars and genocide of the 20th century have tempered the optimistic conception of man, once prevalent in the West, without really destroying its optimistic estimate of man's potential...

...This very capriciousness was intended to destroy any sense of identity or will...

...An individual was killed not for what he thought, said, or did, but for being what he was: a member of a particular segment of the population condemned to liquidation or decimation...

...It also includes—and herein lies the book's importance—the story of the detention, torture, exile, and slaughter of hundreds of thousands of anonymous functionaries and intellectuals, little men whose fate did not then attract public attention and even today can be reconstructed only in the most general terms...

...There is a frightful logic in all this, which suggests that we are dealing not with aberrations but possibly some entirely new principles of human management whose implications for the future can be only vaguely suspected...

...Finally, in the Nazi concentration and extermination camps human beings were reduced to the status of automata, exploited up to a point and then efficiently eliminated, leaving no trace of their previous existence...

...The obverse side of Mr...

...Here it is sufficient to say that Mr...

...This is as it should be...

...It demonstrated that, properly treated, the individual can be divested of his memory, judgment and will, and put to any use one finds convenient...

...His feeling for individual personalities and his ability to reconstruct situations imaginatively are considerable...

...What the Nazis practiced in their concentration camps against selected groups, Stalin applied on a national scale...

...Conquest's literary background is a source of both his strength and his weakness as a historian...

...Stalin's terror was a means not so much of securing absolute obedience as of uprooting the very idea of a choice between obedience and self-assertion...

...The past half century has seen a steady perfecting of the means and techniques used to transform the human individual into a passive manipulative object by those in control of political, military and economic power...

...Conquest cites instances of individuals who groveled before Stalin, only to suffer execution, while others who maintained their independence (like the proud Boris Pasternak) were spared...

...The event which started it all was the assassination in December 1934 of Sergei Kirov, head of the I^nin-grad Party organization...

...One of the most interesting and nauseating chapters in this fascinating book deals with the responses of some leading Western public figures to the bloodbath...

...His previous Soviet Deportation of Nationalities, an account of the exile by Stalin of several entire ethnic minorities, constitutes, as it were, a postscript to the present volume...

...First, it was directed not against an outside group but against its own people...

...In his eagerness to present Stalin as the source of all that transpired during the terror, Mr...

...But Stalin's terror is distinguished by two special features...

...Lenin, it is true, did not practice terror against his own followers...

...Conquest plausibly suggests that in committing this act Stalin was inspired by Hitler's killing of RShm and the other sa leaders that June...

...While most of us have lost faith in unilinear historic progress, we do tend to accept its basic premise as valid: the possibility (if no longer the necessity) of creating conditions on earth under which men can live securely and fulfill themselves as individuals...