Editing Marxists Behaving Badly (section)

==== 4. “The Great Terror” ====
A  more  accurate  term,  one  used  mainly  in  Russia,  is [[Yezhovshchina]] – “bad  time  of Yezhov.” The term “Great Terror” was invented by anticommunist British intelligence agent and propagandist<ref>For the evidence that Conquest was a British agent see [[Grover Furr]], “[https://msuweb.montclair.edu/~furrg/research/furr_conquest_obit.html Response to the Death of Robert Conquest].” At <https://msuweb.montclair.edu/~furrg/research/furr_conquest_obit.html>.</ref> Robert Conquest, who applied it to virtually all of Soviet history during the 1930s.<ref>Robert Conquest. The Great Terror. Stalin’s Purge of the Thirties. London: Macmillan, 1968. A new but equally dishonest edition was published in 2008 as The Great Terror. A Reassessment. 40th Anniversary Edition. New York: Oxford University Press, 2008.</ref> Few mainstream historians of the Stalin period have dared to reject it. It misleadingly implies, just as the Trotskyist Marxist.org site falsely asserts, that the USSR was ruled by “absolute terror.” Under this heading, Marxists.org cites a list of worthless anticommunist material from the 1930s plus Trotsky’s own lies.<ref>At <https://www.marxists.org/history/ussr/events/terror/index.htm>.</ref> They lead off with the following words in small print:<blockquote>Statistics based on archival sources, but nonetheless approximate numbers 

Executed (1930-53): 786,098

Imprisoned: 3.5 million

Death in prison and exile: 2 million</blockquote>3.5 million “imprisoned” for the period 1930-1953 –24 years –is a small figure. More than 2 million  persons  are  imprisoned  in  the  USA ''today''. But  Russia  and  the  USSR  went  through catastrophes during these years that have no parallel in American history: World War I; the Civil War,  1918-1921;  four  famines  during  the 1920s  alone;the  devastating  famine  of  1932-33;  the [[Nikolai Yezhov Interrogation Transcripts|conspiracies of the 1930s]]; World War II.

“Death in  prison  and  exile”  is  misleading.  Sixty  per  cent  of  prisoners  who  died  in  the GULAG lost their lives during the great famine of 1932-33 or during World War II, in 1942-44. During  these  periods  a  great  many  Soviet  citizens  were  also  dying  prematurely. For example: during World War II Soviet workers sickened and died of starvation ''at their work'', far from any fighting.<blockquote>The high intensity of work at the factory and the inadequacy of the food make it a matter of urgency that [workers receive their rightful days off], as witnessed by the frequency with which workers are dropping dead from emaciation right on the job. On  some  days  you  see  several  corpses  in  the  shops.  During  the  two  months December 1942 and January 1943, they observed 16 bodies just in the factory shops. Those dying from emaciation are mainly workers doing manual labor.(Shliaev, Chief Prosecutor of Cheliabinsk province, to Bochkov, Prosecutor General of the USSR, March 29, 1943)</blockquote>This is from an article by [[wikidata:Q3036013|Donald Filtzer]], “Starvation Mortality in Soviet Home Front Industrial Regions  During  World  War  II.”<ref>Wendy Goldman and Donald Filtzer, [https://libgen.is/book/index.php?md5=5091958ED31C81FF3E86BED26DC2954D ed. Hunger and War. Food Provisioning in the Soviet Union during World War II., Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2015.]</ref> Filtzer  is  a conventionally anticommunist  scholar  who specializes in studying the Soviet working class. He states:<blockquote>During 1943 and 1944, starvation and tuberculosis–a disease that was endemic to the USSR and is highly sensitive to acute malnutrition–were between them the largest single cause of death among the non child civilian population.</blockquote>Filtzer continues:<blockquote>The USSR did not have enough food to feed both its military and its civilians, even with the arrival of Lend-Lease food aid. The state therefore had to engage in a grim calculus and decide how it could most efficiently use its limited resources–that is, how many calories and grams of protein it could allocate to different groups. In these circumstances it was '''inevitable''' that some people would not obtain enough to eat  and  many  would  die. '''No  matter  what  regime  had  been  in  power  in  the USSR—Stalinist,  Trotskyist,  Menshevik,  or  capitalist—it  would  have  faced the same set of choices'''.</blockquote>A more recent book by Filtzer and Goldman is [https://libgen.is/book/index.php?md5=7E80B2B56A1F21E960E63156553FB30D Fortress Dark and Stern. The Soviet Home Front  during  World  War  II (Oxford  University  Press,  2021)].  Based  on  primary-source documentation from the Soviet organizations in charge of transportation, housing, labor, and food distribution during the war, it is a truly harrowing account of the massive suffering, hunger, disease, and starvation among the civilian working class who, in the face of all this deprivation and under the  leadership  of  the  Communist Party,  moved  and  reassembled  the  factories,  manned  the machines,  and  produced  the  vehicles,  weapons,  ammunition,  clothing,  and  foodstuffs  without which the Red Army could not have smashed the fascist invaders and mass murderers.

For those arrested and imprisoned we can turn to Arkadii Roginskii. He was the founder of  the  “[https://www.memo.ru/en-us/ Memorial  Society],”  a strongly anticommunist  group  that  calls  itself  a  “human  rights” organization. It gets funding from Western NGOs It also has a contradictory relationship with the Russian government, which has given it privileged access to a lot of materials while also trying to restrict it (as of April, 2022, Memorial has been closed in Russia<ref>[https://www.memo.ru/en-us/memorial/departments/intermemorial/news/690 Russia’s Supreme Court approves liquidation of International Memorial]</ref>).

Here is what Roginskii, who died in 2014, stated in an interview about the so-called “terror”:<blockquote>In the early 90’s I did a lot of statistics on Soviet terror. I studied a huge number of reporting “sheets”about terror for all years, from different regions of the Soviet Union.  The  statistics  we  have  seriously  begins  from  1921,  until  1921  only fragments remained. And, since 1921 –huge folders. In 1994 I studied everything, transcribed everything and put it away. Later, it should be published. I looked at the numbers I had obtained. . .

There are people around me in the outside world, whose opinion is important for me: there is the traditional intellectual public opinion, and, most importantly, the opinion  of  former  prisoners  who  were  still  very  much  alive  in  1994.  And  they measured  our  victims  in  the  whole  history  of  terror  by  some  absolutely inconceivable figures, tens of millions.

And yet, according to my calculations, '''in the entire history of Soviet power, from 1918 to 1987 (the last arrests were in early 1987), according to the surviving documents, it turned out that 7 million 100 thousand people were arrested by security  agencies  across  the  country. At  the  same  time,  among  them  were arrested –and quite a lot –not only for political crimes'''. Yes, they were arrested by security agencies, but security agencies arrested people for banditry, smuggling, counterfeiting. And for many other “general-purpose” crimes . . .

And here is the final figure –7 million. This is for the whole history of Soviet power.

What to do about it? Public opinion says that we have almost 12 million arrested only for 1937-1939. And I belong to this society, I live among these people, I am a part of them. Not the Soviet government part, not the Russian democracy, but these people. '''I just knew for sure that, first, they would not believe me. And, secondly, for  the  circle  to  which  I  consider  myself  to  belong,  it  would  mean  that everything that we were told about the figures until now quite respected by us people is not true.'''

'''So  I  put  all  my  calculations  aside.  For  a  long  time.  After  years,  it  may  be possible to publish them. But not now. Later!'''<ref>“Arsenii Roginskii o molchanii istorika” (Arseny Roginsky about the silence of a historian). At <http://old.memo.ru/d/124360.html>.</ref></blockquote>This prominent anti-Stalinist agreed that anticommunists like himself –“his people” –have vastly overstated arrests by the OGPU-NKVD. But his calculation is still incomplete.

* Roginskii failed to add that 7.1 million arrest folders do not mean 7.1 million different people.Many people were arrested more than once, or under two or more identities. The real number of persons arrested –not convicted, not imprisoned, executed, etc. but arrested –has to be much lower than 7.1 million. And this was over a period of 67 years –1921 to 1987.
* Roginskii  failed  to  separate  out  the  1  million  plus  arrests  by  Nikolai  Yezhov  and  his henchmen, in the course of their anti-Soviet conspiracy. The year 1939, Lavrentii Beria’s first year as head of the NKVD after Yezhov, saw the release of at least 110,000 persons who had been wrongfully arrested by Yezhov and his henchmen.<ref>Lubianka. Stalin i NKVD-NKGB-GUKR “Smersh”. 1939 –mart 1946. Moscow: MDF, 2006, 564 n.11; Okhotin and Roginskii in Danilov,V., et al., ed., Tragediia Sovetskoi Derevni vol. 5 No. 2. Moscow: ROSSPEN, 2006, 517. These two passaged are translated into English in Yezhov vs Stalin113-4.</ref>

Marxists.org’s “exile” figure implies that these persons died ''because'' they were in exile. In reality,  it  simply  means  that people –mainly  former  kulaks  and  their  families,  but  also anticommunists –eventually died at the places to which they had been exiled, normally to work on collective farms (“exile” did not mean confinement in a labor camp). These deaths must have been natural, due to old age, the normal run of diseases, famine and the war, causes that killed a very large number of Soviet citizens. 

Concerning  executions,  according  to  the  “Pavlov  Report”<ref>One Russian-language publication of these figures is <https://www.alexanderyakovlev.org/fond/issues-doc/1009312>.</ref> made  to  Khrushchev  in December, 1953, and the recent research<ref>For Mozokhin the most accessible are on the Internet. 1939, at <http://istmat.info/node/290>; 1940, at <http://istmat.info/node/291>.</ref> of Oleg V. Mozokhin, an expert in the NKVD archives, the figures of persons executed from 1936 through 1939 are as follows:

* 1936 –1118
* 1937 –353,074
* 1938 –328,618
* 1939 –2552 / 2601 (Pavlov/Mozokhin)
* 1940 –1649 / 1863 (Pavlov/ Mozokhin)

The total for 1937-1938 is 681,692 or 86.7% of the total of 786,098 executed between 1930 and 1953. Note that in 1939 and 1940, Beria’s first and second years as head of the NKVD, executions ''were less than'' 1% of  the  number  killed  by  Yezhov in  1937-8.  Many  of  these  were Yezhov’s henchmen, who had committed the mass murders –and, of course, Yezhov himself, who was tried and executed for his monstrous crimes on February 4, 1940.

As most of the executions took place during the [[Yezhovshchina]] which Stalin opposed when he  learned  of  it<ref>"This issue is fully discussed, with primary-source evidence, in ''[https://libgen.is/book/index.php?md5=10D697104A7831F0301673DA86AB2536 Yezhov vs. Stalin]''." - [[Grover Furr|GF]]</ref>, we  should  briefly  note  what  did  happen in  1937-1938. Nikolai  Yezhov, Commissar (head) of the Commissariat of Internal Affairs or NKVD<ref>"NKVD is the abbreviation for ''Narodniy Kommisariat Vnutrennikh Del'', People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs." - [[Grover Furr|GF]]</ref>, was killing as many people as he could in order to stir up anger and resentment among the Soviet population. His plan was to seize  power  in  the  USSR  for  himself  by  recruiting  an  army,  or  at  least  rebel  bands,  from  the discontentment so created, when the Japanese and/or German rulers attacked the USSR. I briefly discuss Yezhov’s deliberate mismanagement of the GULAG, or labor camps, below.

The primary-source documents that demonstrate these facts have been available for more than a decade. In 2010 I published an online article summing this up in much more detail. To it I attached [[Nikolai Yezhov Interrogation Transcripts|''all'' the  confessions  of  Yezhov]]  in  1939  and  1940,  in  both  the  original  Russian  and  in English translation.<ref>Grover Furr, “The Moscow Trials and the ‘Great Terror’of 1937-1938: What the Evidence Shows.” At <https://msuweb.montclair.edu/~furrg/research/trials_ezhovshchina_update0710.html>.</ref> In January 2017 I published a full-length book on this same subject<ref>[[Grover Furr]]. [https://libgen.is/book/index.php?md5=10D697104A7831F0301673DA86AB2536 Yezhov vs. Stalin: The Truth about Mass Repressions and the So-Called ‘Great Terror’ in the USSR].Kettering, OH: [https://www.erythrospress.com/ Erythrós Press & Media], LLC, 2017.</ref>. I have also published an article in which I summarize the main points of my book<ref>“Yezhov vs. Stalin: The Causes of the Mass Repressions of 1937–1938 in the USSR.”Journal of Labor and Society20 (September, 2017) 325-347. It is also now linked on my Home Page at <https://msuweb.montclair.edu/~furrg/research/yvs_jls2017.pdf>.</ref>. The book includes evidence that corroborates the [[Nikolai Yezhov Interrogation Transcripts|confession statements by Yezhov]] and some of his accomplices.

The Trotskyist site Marxists.org, and most anticommunists, start the “Great Terror” at the 1936 Moscow Trial, and carry it through either the March, 1938, Moscow Trial (Marxists.org) or to the end of the [[Yezhovshchina]] in November, 1938. In reality, the defendants at the Moscow Trials, plus the “Tukhachevsky Affair” military commanders, were all guilty. In my books [https://libgen.is/book/index.php?md5=F0A2DC6F3041F83D7A800AF4C4082A11 The Moscow Trials as Evidence], [https://libgen.is/book/index.php?md5=0FA2BE18E21402199E0A70CA6ADB223E Stalin Waiting for ... the Truth] and, most recently, [https://libgen.is/book/index.php?md5=8A4954B60920502F92A958115D746CDD Trotsky and the Military Conspiracy], I have identified, located, and studied the primary source evidence, of which we now have a great deal<ref>"A list of my published books is at <https://msuweb.montclair.edu/~furrg/research/thirteen_book_flyer.pdf>." - [[Grover Furr|GF]]</ref>.