Abstract
1937 was not a good year for census-takers in Russia. On 5 January 1937, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics carried out the first national census since 1926. Nine months later, after scanning the preliminary results, Josef Stalin was not a happy man. Officially the General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU), but more familiarly known as Vozhd (Boss), Stalin did not like the results. The Soviet government voided the census on 27 September 1937 on the grounds that it had been undertaken ‘in profound violation of elementary statistical rules and of governmental instructions’ (cited in Garros et al. 1995: 164). The data were never published. The chief of the census bureau and several of his colleagues were arrested and executed. A new census carried out in 1939 produced a more ‘satisfactory’ result.
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Notes
- 1.
Russians called these years the Yezhovshchina to ‘remember’ the boss of the People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs (NKVD), Nikolai Yezhov (1937–8).
- 2.
The violence that began in late 1929 was different from but reminiscent of the violence of the Civil War (1918–21) (Yakovlev 2004). That Civil War, a consequence of the Bolshevik Party’s seizure of power in a military coup in October 1917, unleashed a far-ranging campaign of military violence and savage reprisals on both sides. Allied armies invaded Russia in 1919 alongside local ‘Whites’ seeking to reinstate the Czarist regime which fought pitched battles with the Red Army led by Trotsky. Ultimately, the Bolshevik combination of unified military strategy and the overwhelming use of terror involving summary arrest and executions triumphed. The citizens of the Soviet Union enjoyed nearly a decade of post-war reconstruction and peace before the Soviet state announced it was embarking on a project linking its socialism to a programme of modernization in late 1929.
- 3.
This nonsense elicited a riposte by Berlin: ‘The one thing we can be sure of is the reality of the sacrifice, the dying and the dead. But the ideal for which they die remains unrealized. The eggs are broken, and the habit of breaking them grows, but the omelette remains invisible’ (1990: 16).
- 4.
It is extremely tempting to see in this identification, especially given the formal religious educational experiences of many Old Bolsheviks (e.g. Stalin), something remarkably like the identification of the priesthood with the historic identity and purpose of the Russian Orthodox Churches.
- 5.
The only precedent for what happened in 1936–7 had been the case of Leon Trotsky who between 1917 and 1921 had stood second only to Lenin. After the death of Lenin in 1923, Trotsky was subjected to special treatment leading to his expulsion from the Party in 1927, then exile in 1929. He was subsequently pursued around the world until in 1941 he was murdered in Mexico by a Soviet agent (Kotkin 2014: 640–52).
- 6.
As Leftwich (2004: 1–22) notes, contemporary political science has not directly engaged the question of thinking about ‘the political’. His edited collection does not do much to advance the project.
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Watts, R. (2016). Stalin and Crimes of the State: The Soviet Terror, 1936–7. In: States of Violence and the Civilising Process. Critical Criminological Perspectives. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-49941-7_5
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