Genocide: - DIIS

Motives, Mechanisms and Memories of Soviet Communist Terror
less peasants and priests, but simply as an analytical observation. Nor is
it meant to turn attention away from the structural continuities that obviously
exist between Leninist and Stalinist rule. Lenin created many of
those institutions of terror that Stalin later on exploited fully, and he laid
the foundations of a Soviet political culture in which terror was regarded
as an accepted and even normal feature.
However, in Stalin’s case, no valid extenuating circumstances can be proposed.
Terror in the course of Stalin’s long period of absolute power was
a matter of abnormal, far from necessary assaults, on millions of innocent
people, performed in the spirit of a totally perverted understanding of the
relation between on the one hand political power, on the other hand the
rights of the individual. Having no serious opponents either within or outside
the country, Stalin nevertheless wanted terror and succeeded in introducing
and maintaining a terroristic regime. Some structural determinants
might help to make this tragic process a bit more comprehensible.
One is economic. Economic motives can be detected behind the compulsory
transfers of kulaks and the development of a kolkhoz system in
the years around 1930. Through the collective farms, the state authorities
could control the production of and sale of grain, instead of relying
on insecure forced requisitions. Through the deportations of the richer,
enterprising peasantry, the same state authorities could control the allocation
of the work force, instead of relying on insecure free labour. With this
nationalisation of the whole agrarian sector resources could be set free for
a further concentration on the preferred policy of industrialisation, at the
same time as food supplies for the cities could be guaranteed. To succeed
the recalcitrant peasants had to be “liquidated as a class”, as the offi cial
parole ran.
Newly published documents provide evidence that the GULAG system
was consciously and systematically constructed as an integrated part of
the centralised command economy. There were ready-made plans for the
numbers of people to be deported from some regions to others. In the areas
of coal mining, forestry, metal industry and construction work, labour
camp inmates were instrumental in fulfi lling, sometimes in exceeding the
plan objectives. There is evidence to prove that the crisis experienced by
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