At the heart of Soviet history is the issue of Stalinist terror.
Those who had enthusiasm for
the emancipatory promises of the revolution have to deal with
the fact that actually what came into
being is a terrorist regime which murdered millions.
And those who had no attraction for whatever the revolution promised could think,
"Well, this is what Marxism and socialism means."
How are we to explain what happened?
What we can do is to describe how it came about,
could describe what are the preconditions which were needed.
But what we cannot do is to explain why it happened.
That remains elusive.
Stalin was different from Hitler.
We have perfectly clear understanding of why Hitler did what he did.
There is no mystery there.
It's a little reminder all the wickedness he articulated perfectly clearly.
Stalin is forever elusive.
Stalin was not an actor,
he was more of a puppeteer.
Why he did what he did,
we have no good understanding.
He did not give speeches,
he did not give many speeches,
he did not write an autobiography.
How did it come about?
We started the revolution.
The Bolsheviks did not regard themselves as terrorist but
they took it for granted that we show our revolutionary commitment
by taking harsh measures and there and the real revolutionary does not
askew cruelty, killing our enemies.
The Civil War of course.
The two sides, the Bolsheviks and anti-Bolsheviks each committed atrocities.
Whether the Bolsheviks were responsible for the larger number of deaths
than that the whites is not stuff that we've done but even if it was.
So, at the very outset,
really within the first few weeks of the establishment of the regime,
the regime created an instrument called Cheka Extraordinary Committee.
Which was used in the course of the Civil War and it was used in the course of the 1920s.
When I talk about what was necessity,
what was necessary for the establishment of this terrorist regime was an instrument,
which would carry out the terror and that was already in
existence from the very beginning.
In 1934 it was renamed and it became part of the Ministry of Interior.
It didn't matter that the instrument of terror has been there from the very beginning.
This was one needed.
Second remarkable feature of the terror were the show trials.
In the course of the show trials,
the Bolshevik leadership which created the revolution,
which administered the country in the 1920s were exterminated.
This is an unparalleled event.
The show trials also have a history, they also existed.
Already in 1922, show trials
were made against the Mensheviks and the socialist revolutionaries.
By show trial, I mean is that
people who are accused of crimes which they did not and could not have committed.
In the late 1920s,
with a series of show trials against intellectuals,
against the very people that the regime would need for the purpose of industrialization.
That too has a history.
Then, of course, a major prerequisite was the victory of Stalin.
That is it would be inconceivable of carrying
out the kind of acts which were carried out by a collective leadership.
That is they would not have allowed
their comrades to be destroyed the way they were destroying.
And then it seems to me
a more vague but necessary precondition
was the bloodiness of the first decades of the 20th century.
That is life was cheap.
Millions died in the course of the war and revolution,
then millions died during the famine of the 1920s,
and even more millions died as a result of Soviet collectivization and industrialization.
Now, how to describe the terror of what exactly happened?
The estimate among historians that something like
700,000 to one million people were actually sentenced to death by various tribunals,
and another 10 million were sent to camps where survival rates were very poor.
