Sending Stalin to Siberia

For months a special Soviet commission has been poring over records from the 1930s, reviewing the charges of treason and other high crimes brought against hundreds of old Bolsheviks who were executed at Josef Stalin’s command. Many of the most prominent officials convicted during the infamous purge trials have now been exonerated, with the accusations that cost them their lives dismissed as fabrications. But for every major figure who was forced to confess to imaginary crimes by Stalin’s torturers, tens of thousands of ordinary Soviet citizens also suffered. Now, as part of the reform effort to shed greater light on the Soviet Union’s dark and bloody past, the Communist Party’s Central Committee has proposed the mass rehabilitation of these victims.

The idea of a blanket reversal of convictions was probably prompted as much by administrative need as by the pleas of the surviving purge victims and their families. So enormous was the number of those arrested and condemned to quick execution or deadly servitude in the vast Siberian penal empire that reviewing their cases on an individual basis would likely take centuries. Those who felt the worst of the terror have been clamoring for recognition and fitting memorials. It appears that they may soon get both.

Soviet historians, meanwhile, are starting to ask that the archives of the period be opened. Even now there are only informed estimates about the number of people killed or condemned to slave labor during decades of terror. Western experts, using census figures and what is known of the size of various penal camps, put the number of those affected at anywhere between 7 and 23 million.

It was the practice of the secret police to arrest someone, force him to name eight or ten other supposed anti-state conspirators, and then force the new arrestees to implicate still others. The number of victims thus came to expand geometrically. In time, suggests Robert Conquest, the foremost Western historian of the great terror, the frightful logic of the purges would have led to the arrest of every Soviet citizen. And so the terror came to be restricted--though it never disappeared, continuing until Stalin’s death in 1953. The pain that it still evokes among ordinary Russians is evident. That a system not noted for its sensitivity to popular suffering feels compelled now to try to address that pain is significant.