TERROR

Those who have never believed the emancipatory promises of the revolution, and have seen only evil in that great social upheaval, point to the dark age of Stalin as the ultimate justification for their beliefs. By contrast, the partisans of the revolutionary ideology have had the painful task of coming to terms with the sad and inconvenient fact that it was Stalin who ultimately emerged victorious. It is hard for them to answer the question: has there always been a worm in the communist apple? Stalinism is at the heart of Soviet history. Rightly or wrongly, we are often tempted to regard the history of the 1920s as preparation for Stalin, and the post-1953 period as a long recuperation from the ravages of tyranny.

The preconditions for the rise of Stalin and the main outlines of the era of terror are not in doubt, but the reasons for the mass murder remain elusive. As long as the Soviet Union existed, historians had no access to party and secret police archives. In any case, the answers to the most significant questions cannot be found in documents. The important decisions were never put on paper; Stalin, it seems, ordered the destruction of his closest comrades by a nod of the head. It is unlikely we will ever know all that we would like to know.