The Great Fear

With the wealth of scholarly literature on the Great Terror, it is difficult to expect a fresh approach or new conceptual framework from yet another survey volume on this topic. But James Harris delivers just that, an innovative explanation of the Stalinist repressions through the prism of information gathering and processing. His main argument in this book is refreshingly simple: the Soviet system of collecting information about external and internal threats was programmed to exaggerate them. Stalin did much to shape the system this way, but in the end he was also its hostage. The ‘Great Fear’ of the book’s title does not refer to the people’s fear of the NKVD, as one would assume; it is Stalin’s fear of foreign enemies and internal fifth columnists. Harris’s book stands out among other treatments of the Great Terror in paying equal attention to the earlier decades of Soviet rule. Instead of focusing on the crucial years 1936 to 1938, he builds his argument slowly by showing how a dysfunctional relationship between the secret police and the party leadership developed from the Civil War onwards. This reviewer remains unconvinced by sweeping statements, such as ‘fear and suspicion were built into the structure of Russian history’ (p. 185; similar statements on pp. 6 and 14), but the case for the Bolsheviks’ particular insecurity is well constructed. An official party line based on a peculiar reading of Marxist ideology conditioned them to expect foreign invasions and class struggle at home. As Harris shows, already in Dzerzhinsky’s time the secret police fought against budget cuts and judicial overview by emphasising the allegedly growing threats to the regime. These institutional interests often coincided with Stalin’s tactical aims in the political struggles at the top and his belief that the failure to fulfil the targets must have been the result of enemy sabotage. Readers accustomed to thinking of the Great Terror as a phenomenon of the late 1930s should consider the following numbers from 1931, when 343,734 people were arrested for counter-revolutionary activities and 15,670 for ‘terrorism’ (p. 103)

Argument (complex analysis · Dysfunctional family · Ideology · Marxist philosophy · Political science · Politics · Reading (process · Sociology · History · Intelligence, Security, War Strategy · Italian Fascism and Post-war Society · Law · Psychology