Stalin and Yezhov: An Extra-Paradigmatic View - by Philip E. Panaggio
Chapter 9: The Totalitarian Paradigm and NKVD Terror
Second in importance to Stalin’s personality in the basic totalitarian paradigm is the role of terror. NKVD-inflicted terror is literally the glue that the paradigm avers that Stalin used to hold his vast Communist State together. Hence the paramount importance to this paradigm of NKVD chiefs Dzerzhinsky, Yagoda, Beria, and especially Yezhov, who headed the NKVD at the peak of these purges in 1937, the climax of the 1936-1938 Yezhovshchina period. The actual quantity of "excess mortality" due to the NKVD has a special importance when one is clear and consistent as to what the totalitarian paradigm requires to be the case in Stalinist society apart from any moral considerations. If one adopts a moral point of view, it does not matter whether 40 million people "prematurely" died due to these purges (the astronomical figure given by Roy Medvedev) or whether the victims numbered "only" in the hundreds of thousands, as some of the smallest estimates have claimed. Either number would clearly be "equally immoral." But such a difference in numbers does matter to the paradigm’s plausibility, because a society as vast as the Soviet Union, comprising over 160 million people (according to a suppressed but now available 1937 census), spanning eleven time zones, would require a number of victims falling in the order of magnitude given by Medvedev to hold it together if terror is indeed the "glue," as the paradigm asserts. In other words, "only a few hundred thousand" murdered by the NKVD is just as "immoral" as 40 million, but a society in which 40 million are victims is one in which the role of police terror must be quite different from what it would be in a society in which "only" a few hundred thousand die as a result of police arrests and executions. This crucial point is invariably missed because the moral shock and outrage felt by modern Americans and Europeans when such staggering numbers of victims are announced - or their inability to conceive of such enormous numbers of the dead being bandied about - grinds critical thinking to a halt just when it is most needed. Here the previously mentioned unconscious and unuttered moral input to the paradigm rises up to submerge the rest of it. The sheer numbers of the dead become a towering, stout flagpole on which the rest of the paradigm flutters like a small, bloodstained banner. The fact that at least an order of magnitude greater than 40 million (at least ten times that number, or 400 million) perished due to capitalist exploitation and expansion in only a few generations is easily forgotten. When thinkers live and breathe a paradigm, they seldom make insightful and compelling comparisons between the "evils" of other social systems and their own "good" society. They do not even realize there are enlightening comparisons to be made.
Based on recently declassified Soviet archival data, the estimate of the number of "excess deaths" due to terror for the entire period from 1927-1937 (10 years) ranges anywhere from 4 to 11 million, most likely in the range of 4 to 5 million, figures Getty and Manning state are "much lower than those of Robert Conquest, who maintains that abnormal deaths ran as high as 20 million, not to mention those of Roy Medvedev and the new Soviet high school textbooks that claim that over 40 million victims perished under Stalin" (op. cit., p. 13). Even historians who are not conscious in their choice and use of paradigms, like Conquest, implicitly understand that the standard totalitarian paradigm requires very large numbers of deaths at the NKVD’s hands to really make sense, and that there is a "moral requirement" (imported into the paradigm) of assuring that the NKVD surpass the Gestapo by being responsible for deaths exceeding the 6 million of the Holocaust. S. Maksudov is reported to have pointed out that if Conquest were right in his estimate of 12 million political and 3 million non-political criminals in detention in 1937-1938, then from what is now known from the new census and other newly available demographic figures, "this would mean that half or more of the men of the age group (30 to 60) were behind bars... ." If Conquest’s estimates for the number of deaths and incarcerated during the Great Terror had been correct, Stalinist society would truly have been a society held together, run, and ruled by NKVD terror. But the figures now known empirically do not bear this out. The glue that held the society together must have been something else: it was not the "Terror."
Some of the figuring methods formerly used to arrive at mortality, detention, and famine estimates for the Stalin years can only be described as so "barnyard" that reputable authors who desired to maintain at least a patina of scholarly respectability and credibility did not even discuss them, yet consistently used their "results" as facts and points of reference. One such method was used by the historian Dana Dalrymple in an article "The Soviet Famine 1932-1932," which appeared in Soviet Studies, Jan. 1964, Oxford. pp. 259-260. Hari Kumar and Douglas Tottle report that Dalrymple estimated mortality figures for this famine simply by averaging "figures of ‘reliable sources’...such as Thomas Walker [a convicted pornographer and White slaver employed by the very strongly anti-Soviet Hearst Press as a "correspondent"], open fascists, the pro-fascist Archbishop of Canterbury (who had publicly proclaimed his ‘greatest sympathy’ with Herr Hitler’s remarkable revolution in every facet of German life), the Austrian Cardinal Innitzer (who struck a deal with Hitler, and instructed Catholics to vote for the ‘man whose struggle against Bolshevism corresponds to the voice of Divine Providence’) and so on." In Dalrymple’s "method," objectivity was completely consumed by passion and hatred, but this failure is readily ignored - and Dalrymple gets away with it - because the result of the calculation fits the reigning paradigm.
© Copyright by Philip E. Panaggio P. O. Box 85, Lehigh Acres, FL 33970-0085, USA
