Genocide: - DIIS

Motives, Mechanisms and Memories of Soviet Communist Terror
very divergent information about even the mere facts of the terror, such
as the number of the victims. The other reason is ideological; the fact that
some scholars accuse Stalin of having murdered 50 million people in cold
blood while others count the victims of terror in thousands indicates that
we will never reach complete agreement. Nevertheless, it is urgent to get
as close to the factual and “true” numbers as possible, not least because of
those who, as in the debate on the Holocaust, deny its historical existence
or trivialise the whole terror process. Thus the problem of the number of
victims is a problem of the memory of the terror.
The long-term consequences of the terror are often more diffi cult to estimate.
This does not mean that they are any less serious or diffi cult to
handle for a society affected by terrorist mass violence. The Soviet example
bears witness to the fact that terror can infl uence society long after mass
violence itself has ended.
These consequences have been of two closely related kinds: physical and
psychological. The legacy of a long-term reliance upon a camp-based
economy have already been mentioned. The physical consequences also
include political and military problems such as the violent post-Soviet confl
icts in north Caucasia, which were partly triggered by antagonisms about
border adjustments undertaken by Stalin during the war years. In its turn,
these antagonisms fostered recollections of the tragedy infl icted on these
“punished peoples”. Consequently memories of the forcible deportations
of Chechens, Ingushs and other Caucasian peoples, of the obliteration of
their autonomous republics and of the disappearance of their ethnic names
from the current Soviet vocabularies have haunted the Russian Federation
in a very tangible way for more than half a century after Stalin’s terror
against the Caucasian peoples. 36
The psychological consequences are less manifest. To a large extent they
are related to the long-term diffi culties that individuals and groups have
36 Cf Abdurahman Avtorkhanov (1992), “The Chechens and the Ingush during the Soviet
period and its antecedents“, in Marie Bennigsen Broxup (ed.), The North Caucasian Barrier.
The Russian Advance towards the Muslim World. New York, p. 146-94.
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