Genocide: - DIIS

Klas-Göran Karlsson
hampered by different kinds of restrictions in the accounts of the terror. In
the Soviet Union terror was for a long period of time excluded from the
offi cial Soviet discourse. This had however not always been the case. Until
the late 1930s internal mass violence was ethically and ideologically justifi
ed as a necessary and positive means of controlling human behaviour in
Soviet society. In Soviet literary representations of the terror Dariusz Tolczyk
has found “a convention that presented the chief institution of Soviet
state terrorism, the concentration camp, as the locus of the re-education
and redemption of reactionary social elements in a process leading to a
more just and humane future society”. 3 Offi cial silence was implemented
in connection with the culmination of Stalin’s great terror in 1937.
The topic was reopened in 1956, when Nikita Khrushchev in his secret
speech to the 20th party congress related terror to what was described as
Joseph Stalin’s unpleasant personality and political errors. Also in Soviet
historian Roy Medvedev’s Let History Judge from 1967, Stalin was made the
culprit for bringing about mass psychosis among the broad Soviet masses.
Somewhat broadening the analytical perspective, Medvedev admitted
that Stalin’s politics allowed “cliques of unprincipled careerists” 4 to commit
large-scale cruelties in order to further their own careers and to destroy
political opponents.
Until the glasnost years the Russian writer Aleksander Solzhenitsyn was
the only Soviet analyst who dared to penetrate deeper into the mechanisms
of Soviet terror. In his Gulag Archipelago from 1973-75 Solzhenitsyn looked
into the very heart of the Soviet Communist system, tracking down the
institutional and mental prerequisites of terror, in particular an ideology
well adjusted to legitimizing large-scale evil deeds. In contrast to the Leninists,
Khrushchev and Medvedev, who depicted Stalin’s era as a negative
deviation from a positive party line introduced by Lenin and continued by
Khrushchev, Solzhenitsyn did not spare Lenin from criticism. He held him
responsible for not only being the founder of the Soviet state, but also of
3 Cf Dariusz Tolczyk (1999), See No Evil. Literary Cover-Ups and Discoveries of the Soviet Camp
Experience. New Haven, p. XVIII.
4 Roy Medvedev (1973), Let History Judge. The Origins and Consequences of Stalinism. New
York, p. 344.
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