Stalinist purges

The Stalinist purges are presented not only as a campaign of mass killing and deportation but as an assault on the possibility of remembering what had happened. Their victims were erased from public history, while families who knew the truth learned that speaking of it could endanger them. The later recovery of that history, during glasnost, becomes a measure of how far Soviet society had moved from enforced silence—and how quickly the old account of the past could begin to unravel.

Violence and its scale

The purges of the 1930s form part of a wider catalogue of state violence that the narrative says included the collectivization of land, the killing or deportation of millions of kulaks, and the famine organized by Joseph Stalin in Ukraine. The purges brought further millions of deaths and deportations, many imposed arbitrarily. The passage does not reduce these different crimes to one campaign; it shows how each was subsequently concealed within the same official denial that they had occurred.

The narrative makes the scale and logic of repression concrete through the party’s 5 percent theory: if only five percent of those arrested were actually guilty, the state could still treat the arrests as worthwhile. It also recalls the argument that executing the innocent could impress the public even more than executing the guilty. Together, these claims expose a system in which punishment did not depend on establishing individual guilt. The violence was not an accidental excess at the edge of administration; it was compatible with a political order that treated terror as useful.

Silence within families

Official denial did not mean that people had no knowledge of the purges. Children who were ten years old in 1937 knew when men came at night and took their fathers away, and knew that those fathers never returned. They also learned that being the child of a public enemy was dangerous and that the safest course was to behave as if the event had never happened. Private knowledge and public history thus diverged: families retained the facts, but silence became part of how they survived.

The account presents this enforced forgetting as a collective habit as well as a personal fear. A whole population learned history through the version compiled by Joseph Stalin, while experiences that contradicted that account remained unspoken. The injury of the purges therefore extended beyond those killed or deported. It shaped the lives of relatives and children, and helped make the disappearance of victims from public memory seem ordinary.

Glasnost and the return of history

The reversal began when people were allowed to write history as they saw it. Under glasnost, the attempt to fill the blank pages of the past opened a gulf between official acknowledgment and the facts being recovered: the public reference to hundreds of thousands of Stalinist victims gave way to figures in the tens of millions. The change was not simply a correction of numbers. It made possible the public recognition of crimes that the state had trained people not to name.

From 1988, books once available only to intellectuals, through samizdat or foreign editions brought into the country, reached a mass readership. Large print runs sold out, and people queued at kiosks and read on the subway, buses, and streets. Doctor Zhivago, Life and Fate, Nineteen Eighty-Four, and histories of collectivization and the purges became subjects of intense public attention. What had been restricted or inaccessible entered everyday conversation, changing the scale at which suppressed history could be shared.

The Memorial Society, founded by dissidents under the patronage of Andrei Sakharov, made remembrance a public undertaking. Its work sought to name victims who had not only been killed but erased from memory. At first the group hesitated to use the word millions; once it did, the number seemed to many to be something they had been waiting for permission to say aloud. Anna Akhmatova’s Requiem supplied an emblem for this effort: remembrance meant restoring individual victims to a history that had made their disappearance seem complete.

The purges in the book’s historical argument

The narrative treats control of memory as one of the defining operations of Soviet totalitarianism. It describes a demand not merely that people repeat falsehoods, but that they learn to believe them over time. In this account, suppressing the past and suppressing the real are connected: the state’s history required citizens to deny what they had seen and what had happened to their own families.

The return of testimony therefore carries political consequences. As the evidence of repression became speakable, comparisons between Joseph Stalin and Hitler entered ordinary debate, and senior figures could publicly describe rehabilitation not as an act of mercy but as an acknowledgment of complicity. The purges remain a historical subject in their own right, but their place in the book also clarifies the stakes of glasnost: once people could tell the truth about the dead, the authority of the system that had erased them was put in question.