Alexei Levinson: The Great Terror’s Long Shadow

Alexei Levinson is a sociologist and senior researcher at the Levada Center, Moscow

One of the most traumatic episodes in the history of the Soviet Union and Russia goes under the name ‘1937’. Historians are still unclear whether the purges of that year were the most wide-ranging or horrific in the story of the USSR, but for various reasons ‘37’ has for many Russians become the symbol of all political repression. More than half of all Russians (52%) believe that, of all the countries where the 20th century was marked by mass repression, the Soviet Union under Stalin produced the largest number of victims in terms of percentage of population, and that of all the catastrophes of that era it was the wave of repression at the end of the 1930s that cost the most lives. These figures come out of a poll first carried out in 2007, eighty years after the events of 1937-38, and repeated this year.

This research, however, found that Russians were, and still are, far from unanimous about the events of those fateful years. In 2007, 9% of the population considered the purges of 1937 a ‘historically justified’ ’political necessity’, and in 2011 this number rose to 11%. Who are these Russians of today? Are they perhaps ignorant old people whose minds are befogged by Stalinist propaganda? Not in the least. Only 9% of pensioners took the line of historical justification, as opposed to 15% of people of working age. Most of these were not the barely literate poor, but members of the best-educated and affluent sectors of the population. And the highest proportion (23%) was recorded among students, the country’s future elite. We shall try to explain this phenomenon, although it is of course important to stress that we are talking about a minority in each population group. Another (17%) could not or would not either approve of or condemn the repressions, and were recorded as ‘don’t knows’. This category includes a quarter of young adults and almost a third of certain population groups, such as housewives and members of the armed forces....