MAY 31, 2025 – As I first reported several weeks ago, part of my follow-through from the spring semester course in Russian history I took at the University of Minnesota, has been my study of the Stalinist Purges of the 1930s. The textbook for this study has been The Great Terror, Robert Conquest’s aptly entitled definitive history of one of the most baffling examples of tyrannical excess in all of civilization. At a minimum the Purges gave Soviet-style Communism a double “forever” black-eye. At the maximum Stalin’s murderous reign gives our entire species a really bad reputation.
What doesn’t compute for a rational mind is the process by which the Purges were carried out—compilation of lists of people to be accused, arrested, tried and . . . shot in the back of the head. At first hundreds, then thousands, then tens of thousands, and eventually hundreds of thousands; in the end, as many as 1.2 million.
Most shocking about the whole episode is that the vast majority of the victims were true and tried Bolsheviks, loyal communists, even ardent Stalinists. Many had earned their bona fides many times over in the years that preceded and followed the October Revolution of 1917; many had fought heroically during the Civil War following the Revolution. Nevertheless, a collection of charges developed, many falling under the rubric of “Trotskyites,” Stalin’s rival before Trotsky was banished from the country, vilified mercilessly, and eventually assassinated by Stalin’s command. Being labeled a “Trotskyite” was synonymous with “traitor,” even in the total absence of evidence. Others were charged with being “wreckers and saboteurs” in the wake of an industrial accident or . . . maybe for absolutely no reason at all. Another category was “espionage” or serving as a “foreign agent.” Others would wind up as an “Enemy of the People” for not having displayed adequate condemnation of a fallen colleague (as in not having been more outspoken about the colleague deserving punishment “in the first degree” (execution)). Top leaders would be arrested during transit back to Moscow (ordered by the Kremlin) or after a concert or social dinner or during an official meeting. While the poor bloke was being tortured in prison, his successor would be enjoying the fruits of promotion—for about two months, when he, in turn, would be arrested, tortured and shot.
The arrest of a “Trotskyite, wrecker and saboteur or foreign agent” would immediately put his family in peril. Wives and children 16 and over were liable to wind up shot. Children under 16 were consigned to orphanages.
The craziest aspect of the whole insane project was the forced “confession,” extracted by torture or the promise of leniency, which promise, of course, was always broken eventually. In most cases the “confession” entailed required accusations against friends, colleagues and associates—again, despite the complete absence of evidence.
Perhaps most shocking strategically, especially when the reader knows full well the catastrophe that would be triggered by Germany’s invasion in WW II, was Stalin’s evisceration of the officer corps of the Red Army. Charges fabricated from whole cloth were leveled at the best minds and most loyal records within the military. Many of the victims had proven themselves in myriad ways. Had they been in command in June 1941—or more saliently, in the years leading up to the German invasion—the Nazis would have been stopped in their tracks far earlier; or under a perfectly plausible alternative, would never have attempted to imitate Napoleon in the first place.
Stalin’s purge of his own military was as big a “war crime” as the Germans assault on the USSR. And yet, even after going AWOL for the month that followed the launch of Operation Barbarossa, Stalin was able to project and maintain a heroic image among his people.[1] If ever in modern history there was a moment—a month—for a coup d’etat, June to July 1941 was that time. The fact that none occurred proved the efficacy of Stalin’s Purges, which had eliminated all internal threats, even the most theoretical, to his absolute power.
A giant footnote to the foregoing executions is the figure of 18 million—the number of Soviet citizens who were banished to the Gulag labor camps during Stalin’s reign ending in 1953. Another footnote to the terror of the Purges is the Holodomor—Stalin’s intentional starvation of as many as four million Ukrainians in 1932-33.
By most empirical standards, Stalin’s reign of terror would seem to win first prize. Yet, concurrently—at least into May 1945—Hitler and his henchmen were sending six million Jews to their deaths by means unimaginable by a rational mind of any epoch in recorded history. And later, of course, Mao Tse-Tung launched his own unholy terror on his own people—as did Pol Pot of the Khmer Rouge.
Each of these “great terrors” prompts a similar slate of questions: 1. None of the individuals at the top of the pyramid—Stalin, Hitler, Mao, Pol Pot—could have aggrandized the power he did without lots of accomplices, supporters, apologists, enablers. By what mix of events, influences, catalysts, “grand plan” maneuvers, manipulation of fear, greed, hate, and prejudices did each of the tyrants consolidate, then exert his power? 2. In each case, where was the point of no return? and 3. How is it that during the terror and in its aftermath—terror on a grand scale of inhumanity toward humanity—people in the Soviet Union could say, “If only Stalin knew . . .”? How can people in living memory of the Holocaust deny that it even occurred? How could students in China in 1968 fall join Mao’s “Cultural Revolution” with such enthusiasm after their elders had suffered untold injustices under Mao? How is that in much of the world today Pol Pot’s murderous campaign against his own people has been largely forgotten?
Question #3, in turn, prompts a nagging question for our own times: Given the record of tyranny in the 20th century and during the lives of people who are still among us, how is it that in the largest democracy, which is also among the oldest continuous democracies of the world, we fell for a patent authoritarian with a tyrannical view of governance? Moreover, how in the world are the tyrant’s most ardent supporters people who were traditionally “conservative” and “libertarian,” that is, people who vehemently opposed centralized and powerful government—for fear it would lead to authoritarianism and ultimately, tyranny?
The answer was furnished by Sinclair Lewis in his 1935 novel, It Can’t Happen Here. The lesson for today’s citizen is that it’s insufficient to study the results of the Holodomor, the Purges, the Holocaust, the Cultural Revolution or the Cambodian Genocide. We need to study the circumstances leading up to those barbaric outcomes and examine most carefully and thoroughly, the pattern and playbook that every tyrant follows. If we don’t, “It will happen here.” In fact, because we didn’t do our homework, a tyrant now sits in the White House and his party holds a majority in the House and Senate. We must do all we can to ensure that the November 2024 election wasn’t the point of no return in “It will happen here,” because thus far in the Orange Reign, “It is happening here.”
Get out your protest signs (“Resist Autocracy and Tyranny!”) and know your protest site for June 14th and beyond. Help get out the Democratic vote in November 2026 and any special elections along the way. And make yourself heard: send regular “Resist!” email to your U.S. House Representative and Senators. We need to create a major setback to the sharp rise of authoritarianism in America . . . of all places.
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© 2025 by Eric Nilsson
[1]Initiated by Putin, a Stalinist revival is underway in Russia today. Soon after the demise of the Soviet Union at the end of 1991, I remember encountering a Russian visitor here in Minnesota. When the subject of Stalin and the Purges came up, she was surprisingly supportive of the tyrant. She repeated the common reaction among Soviets at the time of the Purges—“If only Stalin knew all the bad things that his enemies were doing, he’d have done more to stop them.”
