Great Purge

The Great Purge is the name given to campaigns of political repression and persecution in the Soviet Union during the late 1930s which included purges of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.

Western reactions

Although the trials of former Soviet leaders were widely publicized, the hundreds of thousands of other arrests and executions were not. These became known in the west only as a few former gulag inmates reached the West with their stories. Not only the foreign correspondents failed to report on the purges, but in many Western nations, especially in France, attempts were made to silence or discredit these witnesses; Jean-Paul Sartre took the position that evidence of the camps should be ignored, in order that the French proletariat not be discouraged. A series of legal actions ensued at which definitive evidence was presented which established the validity of the former concentration camp inmates' testimony.

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Robert Conquest, a former communist and a British intelligence official and writer for the Foreign Office's Information Research Department, a department whose function was anti-communist propaganda, wrote the book The Great Terror in 1968. According to Conquest, writing in The Great Terror, with respect to the trials of former leaders some Western observers were unable to see through the fraudulent nature of the charges and evidence, notably Walter Duranty of The New York Times, a Russian speaker; the American Ambassador, Joseph Davis, who reported, "proof...beyond reasonable doubt to justify the verdict of treason" and Beatrice and Sidney Webb, authors of Soviet Communism: A New Civilization. According to Conquest, writing in The Great Terror, while "Communist Parties everywhere simply transmitted the Soviet line", some of the most critical reporting also came from the left, notably the Manchester Guardian.

Related Topics:
Robert Conquest - Walter Duranty - The New York Times - Manchester Guardian

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Despite great skepticism regarding the show trials and occasional reports of Gulag survivors, many western intellectuals retained a favorable view of the Soviet Union. Some of them dissociated themselves from the Communist party, but not from Communist convictions, only in 1956, when the Stalinist crimes were made public within the inner communist circles in Russia. With the beginning of the Cold War and McCarthyism, supporters of the USSR were persecuted, so there were personal motives for many intellectuals to change their mind. Also, evidence and the results of research began to appear after Stalin's death which revealed the full enormity of the Purges. The first of these sources were the revelations of Khrushchev which particularly affected the American editors of the Communist Party USA newspaper, the Daily Worker, who, following the lead of the New York Times, published the Secret Speech in full http://www.trussel.com/hf/onleave.htm. In 1968, Robert Conquest published The Great Terror: Stalin's Purge of the Thirties. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's The Gulag Archipelago followed in 1973. By the glasnost era of the late 1980s Stalin was denounced openly by Gorbachev as a criminal and Soviet records were opened to Western and Soviet researchers after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Finally, in France, where the intellectual climate was most sympathetic to Soviet communism, The Black Book of Communism (1997), relying in part on revelations of the Great Purge, compared communism unfavorably to Nazism. Nevertheless minimization of the extent of the Great Purge continues among revisionist scholars in the

Related Topics:
Cold War - McCarthyism - Khrushchev - Communist Party USA - Daily Worker - Secret Speech - Robert Conquest - Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's - The Gulag Archipelago - Glasnost - Gorbachev - The Black Book of Communism - Nazism - Revisionist scholars

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United States (see, e.g., pp. 15-17, In Denial, ISBN 1893554724) and small but passionate groups of modern day Stalinists http://www.plp.org/books/Stalin/book.html.

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