Roger Boyd
About Stalin
In the light of what I now know about the political-intelligence-media communities of the U.K. and USA, revealed by the Ukraine and Gaza wars, I am beginning to question history of, for instance, the Soviet Union, that we have accepted as canonical. Should anything arising from angloworld state media be taken at face value, even retrospectively?
Take the great Soviet “purges” for example. It is part of our western Nicean creed that tens of millions of people were disappeared and died horrible deaths in a Siberian gulag, in the late thirties just before WW2, based on waves of Stalin’s paranoia. This belief architecture can be seen in the (very entertaining) recent movie “The Death of Stalin”.
Belief in the horror-movie enormity of the Soviet purges can be traced to a single book – “The Great Terror” by English historian Robert Conquest (subtle clue in his name??) published in 1968. This book caused what academics like to call a “sea change” in opinion about the USSR. Before it, belief in Soviet communism was fashionable among western academics. But “The Great Terror” changed all that. Suddenly we were exposed to a dark story of millions being arbitrarily abducted and spirited away to Siberia. The belief system about the essential evil of Soviet communism was largely formed by Conquest’s book. Fast forward to today, the maniacal neurosis about communism or even socialism in the USA, and much of the Fourth Reich, can largely be traced to this single historian.
Was Conquest’s literary conquest true – about the horrors of the purges? Well they certainly happened. We know anecdotal accounts such as the interrogation endured by Soviet general (of Polish descent) Rokossovsky who lost his front teeth in the process but went on to be one of the most important generals in WW2, a rival to Zhukov.
But what of the tens of millions unjustly disappeared? Condemned to a horrid fate?Well for some western and especially British readers tales of a holocaust of Russians would be a form of intellectual self-pleasuring, an end in itself. And up to recently I have believed this to be true.
However about 30 years ago I had a discussion with someone in Minsk, Belarus who had written a book about the purges of the 1930’s. I didn’t fully understand all that he said due to limitations in my Russian. But the gist of it was that the Soviet purges were largely an operation of “maskirovka”. Essentially in the 1930’s as Germany and – eventually – the allies also rearmed massively, the USSR did the same. But it was desirable to conceal the extent of their armament program. So indeed millions of critical workers were forcibly moved to the Urals to create the massive Soviet armament industry. But that big movement of people was, at least partly, disguised as a political/criminal purge.
Such a duality would persist in the USSR after the war. As late as the 1980s people would joke that if there was a big construction project in the far east, then it would coincide with a crackdown on crime or corruption, or just alcoholism.
I would be interested in your thoughts on this.

Posted by: Andrew Sarchus | May 4 2025 21:19 utc | 301