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LETTERS to the Editor, WSJ, 5/24/05

The How and Why of Russia's Stalinist Terror

I was pleased to see David Satter's piece ("What Gulag?" editorial page, May 6) draw attention to the often obscured and terrible reality of Soviet Russia's World War II experience. But I regret that Mr. Satter did not go into the matter of the Gulag more deeply.

Historians dispute the number of dead in this vast system of concentration camps, but estimates run into many millions of Russians killed through starvation, forced labor and the brutal conditions of Siberia. The camps were not only for those suspected of "anti-revolutionary activity"; returning POWs were sent to the Gulag for fear they may have been "contaminated" by their contact with their captors. The brutal ethnic repressions, indeed total transfers of populations (the Chechen people, for example, were trucked to Kazakhstan), is yet another matter.

Even if we limit our examination to those brutalities carried out in the name of the war effort, it is entirely possible that Stalin's policies caused more deaths than Hitler's invasion. The fact, to cite just one example, that under-equipped front-line troops were followed by squads of NKVD (equivalent to Hitler's SS) to mow down stragglers or anyone in retreat, should be enough to deflate the obscene rhetoric praising Stalin's leadership during this tragic period in Russian history.

Eugene A. Sokoloff
Yonkers, N.Y.

As a socialist, I would be the last to object to Mr. Satter's demand for the opening of the archives of the former Soviet Union and the exposure of all aspects of the crimes perpetrated by Stalin's regime during the Terror of 1936-39. However, the results of such an inquiry would have political consequences not necessarily to Mr. Satter's liking. While Mr. Satter insists that the entire Soviet era and the revolution from which it emerged be defined as criminal and illegitimate, it is a historical fact that the vast majority of the victims of Stalin's terror were leaders and political partisans of the 1917 October Revolution.

The terror unfolded under the banner of the struggle against the political influence of Leon Trotsky, the most prominent and unrelenting opponent of Stalin's right-wing bureaucratic regime. Virtually all the defendants in the three show trials held in Moscow between 1936 and 1938 -- people such as Kamenev, Zinoviev, Bukharin, and Rakovsky -- had played major roles in the creation of the Soviet state and during its early years. All the Soviet generals murdered by Stalin in 1937 had achieved prominence during the Civil War, when Trotsky commanded the Red Army.

The purges were by no means arbitrary. The terror was directed not against right-wing enemies of the Soviet Union, but against left-wing opponents of Stalin's betrayal of the October Revolution. The blood purges resulted in the physical annihilation of an entire generation of Marxist intellectuals and workers whose lives had been dedicated to the goal of socialist internationalism and egalitarianism. It set into motion a process that culminated in the dissolution of the Soviet Union, the final political repudiation of the socialist principles of the October Revolution, and the restoration of capitalism.

If the Russian people knew the political identities of the victims of the terror buried in mass graves on the outskirts of St. Petersburg and Moscow, they would better understand the enduring significance of their own socialist heritage.

David North
Socialist Equality Party
National Secretary
Detroit