Debate

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Notes

I am grateful for advice and comments from my colleagues R. W. Davies, D. Christian, M. Harrison and C. Sowerwine.

¹R. W. Davies explains below that this is an incorrect attribution and that Davies was actually referring to E. H. Carr and not Stalin at this point.

²He uses the term ‘pseudo-rational choice rationality’ to describe the model for Stalin's government (Barnett 2006, p. 464).

³My article begins by asking whether it is possible to understand repression and mass killing or whether we should abandon any attempt to look at such heavily morally charged topics. I stated my belief that historians have an obligation to try to understand how such events could occur. I noted that there were two aspects to these problems. One was the personal aspect, which could be analysed in terms of morality and personal motivation: ‘Hitler was clearly anti-Semitic and we could attempt to ask why; Stalin was clearly impatient of groups that got in the way of his ideas of what needed to be done, and we could look at what motivated him and fed his paranoia’. But I went on to say that I was interested in this problem from another point of view: ‘What was it that empowered this anti-Semitism and impatient revolutionary paranoia to an extent that they resulted in mass repression and mass killings on the scale that they did?’ In my article I wanted to make it clear that I was interested in social and social scientific comparisons and not in individual and moralistic comparisons: ‘Where this article approaches the question of comparisons of causation, it is in this second sense’. I went on to explain the main purpose of the article: ‘But of fundamental importance for this is an improved understanding of the scale and the nature of the repression and mass killings that were a part of Stalin's Russia and of Nazi Germany in the 1930s and 1940s. This article is primarily concerned with providing a better basis for such an understanding. Historians have already written too much on this topic without such a basis of understanding’ (Wheatcroft 1996, p. 1319).

⁴Of course we also now know that Auschwitz was not exclusively an extermination camp, and that for a while part of it (Birkenau) was also a severe regime labour camp, with the results of labour rather than extermination being the main objective.

⁵The reason why we have these figures at all is because these were the cases recorded by the statistical department of the investigative organs. The cases that were mass operations and did not pass through the investigative organs were not recorded in these data. It should be pointed out that at the height of the Yezhovshchina the level of individual investigation actually carried out by these organs was often minimal, especially when they began using the album method.

⁶I should point out that ‘mass operations’ is a term that is often used in different ways. Large scale operations are often described as ‘mass’ just because they are large scale. But there is another, more specific, operational meaning: a mass operation is one in which the subjects are determined fairly arbitrarily as a group, without attempts at individual investigation. This is the sense in which Soviet legal experts tended to use the term.

⁷In fact, as will be explained elsewhere, we know about this figure, because the data that we have are specifically from the investigative agencies. It was only those cases that were subject to individual investigation through the investigative organs that are included in the famous Pavlov series of figures (see Wheatcroft 2002, pp. 112 – 146).

⁸R. W. Davies has pointed out that Stalin's attitude for most of the 1930s indicated that he would have preferred a closer relationship with the West. It could be argued that his decision to sign the pact with Hitler was for purely practical and survival reasons, in the way that he envisaged the situation in 1939, and that the reversal of that decision in 1941 was clearly practical, but brought the USSR back onto a track that was more consistent with their overall outlook.

⁹The term does appear to have been fairly infectious. After using the term in an earlier version of my article which was presented at a conference of the European University Institute in Florence in 2002, the term was quickly picked up by other conference members, who have not necessarily acknowledged where they got it from.

¹⁰In fact when I wrote it I was undoubtedly thinking of Urban's description of Stalin as ‘the single-minded usurper of all decision-making’ in his conversation with Bazhanov (Urban 1982, p. 8) which I cited at the time. I simply toned it down a bit.

I thank Chuck Blackorby, R. W. Davies, Sayantan Ghosal, and Peter Law for advice.

¹Thanks to Peter Law for this point.

²See Gregory (2004, pp. 76 – 109). Gregory and Harrison (2005, pp. 731 – 734), discuss the Politburo's ‘accumulation model’ as a rule of thumb.

³For example Carmichael and MacLeod (2006, pp. 193 – 218). Thanks to Chuck Blackorby for this reference.

⁴Thanks to Sayantan Ghosal for this point.

⁵For example Barnett (2006, p. 464) contrasts ‘a system of rational planning based on real human needs’ with the actually existing ‘system of (partial) irrationality, or lagged institutional overhang from the Tsarist and World War I periods’.