Wendy Z. Goldman

Wendy Goldman's "Terror and Democracy in the Age of Stalin" is intended as a corrective to many of the common accounts of the Great Terror, the period of Stalinist super-repression in 1937-1938. Many books, of varying quality, have already been written about this episode in history, and Goldman's is not yet another overview. Rather, she analyzes carefully to what extent the Terror can be said to have come from above and to what extent it came from below, and she also discusses the role that the simultaneously introduced campaign for democratic elections in the lower ranks and the workers' unions played in the Terror's unfolding.

Goldman shows quite well that the Terror was entirely within the control of Stalin and his assistants, but that its scope and functioning was not actually an entirely top-down affair. Because Stalin had closed off even the independence of the unions, the workers and lower rank bureaucrats had lost their last avenue for protesting against government decisions as well as local policies, and the terror campaign against oppositionists, real and imaginary, deprived the workers from the possibility of public criticism and debate within the Party as well. The result was that as Stalin increased his campaign against intra-Party opposition to his quite unpopular policies, people could, to have their grievances heard and attention paid to their problems, only resort to speaking in terms of denunciations and accusations of "wrecking", "sabotage", "oppositionism" etc. More and more, both within and without the Party, paranoia grew and accusations were flung back and forth as everyone tried to protect themselves and sometimes others from the possibility of being denounced as a "wrecker" over problems outside their control. This contributed to a sizable extent to the very rapid expansion of the scope of the Terror.

At the same time, Stalin's campaign for the democratization of unions and other lower rank positions destroyed the capacity of lower and middle level bureaucrats to use their power and collaboration with others to escape the impact of the Terror itself: the elections made it impossible for bureaucrats to use appointments to positions as a way to get a reliable group of supporters, and it also led to much infighting and power struggling within the bureaucracy, where everyone tried to accuse each other of structural problems in the heavily dislocated economy. In this way, the democratization campaign (quickly abandoned after 1939), either by accident or design, added to the Terror's impact by making every level of the bureaucracy directly vulnerable to political repression.

The problem with this book however is that it relies for a great deal on many different sources from different factories and workplaces, from which we have NKVD reports of comments overheard, letters sent to higher officials, etc. Goldman uses these consistently to prove her various points, but since we have no idea of how representative any given of these comments, letters, statements, speeches etc. were of public opinion at any given time, and Goldman doesn't tell us, it is all basically anecdotal evidence. It is therefore quite unclear what the value is of the long summaries of anecdotes about the variety of viewpoints expressed by workers and bureaucrats in different situations, and this makes the status of a large part of the book rather uncertain. Moreover, aside from Goldman's point about the Terror not being an entirely top-down undertaking, it is not very clear what she exactly wants to prove to us; instead, we get more of an impression of the atmosphere of those days than a real analysis (except for a small part on economic problems at the beginning, which was in my view far more interesting). And since we don't know what the relative 'weight' of her anecdotes are, we can't even say that it does that well or not.

It's not that Goldman hasn't done much work in this book or that it is not well-written, but it's rather the lack of clarity about both the value and the purpose of the elements in the book that make me give it such a (relatively) low rating. Still, it may be worth reading for people with a very specific interest in Soviet history.… (mehr)