The Great Terror

The Great Terror: Stalin's Purge of the Thirties is a book by British historian Robert Conquest, published in 1968. It gave rise to an alternate title of the period in Soviet history known as the Great Purge. Conquest's title was in turn an allusion to the period that was called Reign of Terror (French: la Terreur, and, from June to July 1794, la Grande Terreur -the Great Terror-) during the French Revolution.

A revised version of the book, called The Great Terror: A Reassessment, was printed in 1990 after Conquest was able to amend the text, having consulted recently opened Soviet archives.

One of the first books by a Western writer to discuss the Great Purge in the Soviet Union, it was based mainly on information which had been made public, either officially or by individuals, during the Khrushchev Thaw in the period 1956–1964. It also drew on accounts by Russian and Ukrainian émigrés and exiles dating back to the 1930s. Lastly it was based on an analysis of official Soviet documents such as the census.

The first critical inquiry into the Great Purge outside USSR had been made as early as 1937, by the Dewey Commission, which published its findings in the form of a 422-page book entitled Not Guilty (this title referred to the people who had been charged with various crimes by Stalin's government and therefore purged; the Dewey Commission found them not guilty). The most important aim of Robert Conquest's The Great Terror was to widen the understanding of the purges beyond the previous narrow focus on the "Moscow Trials" of disgraced Communist Party leaders such as Nikolai Bukharin and Grigory Zinoviev. The question of why these leaders had pleaded guilty and confessed to various crimes at the trials had become a topic of discussion for a number of western writers, and had underlain books such as George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four and Arthur Koestler's Darkness at Noon. According to the book, the trials and executions of these former Communist leaders were a minor detail of the purges, which, together with man-made famines, had led to 20 million deaths according to his estimates. In the appendix of the original 1968 edition of The Great Terror, Conquest estimated 700,000 "legal" executions took place during 1937 and 1938, which was roughly confirmed by the 681,692 executions found in the Soviet archives for these two years. In the preface to the 40th anniversary edition of The Great Terror, Conquest wrote that he had been "correct on the vital matter—the numbers put to death: about one million", but lowered other figures saying the total number of deaths brought about by the various Soviet terror campaigns "can hardly be lower than some fifteen million."

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