the Polish government, but it was soon extended to other minorities, most of whom were not even mentioned in the central directives. No limits were set on the number of victims of this cleansing. Both operations were expected to end in December 1937, on the eve of the elections.
At first glance, it was easy to identify people on the basis of their past activities or political affiliations, especially former oppositionists. Nonetheless, it was impossible to know what constituted deviation because the term applied to attitudes as well as behaviors. In the same way, there was no guarantee that only declassed people and believers were dissatisfied with the regime. Moreover, there was no guarantee that potential subversion by foreign governments could be countered by massacring their ethnic kin.
OUTCOME
The Great Purges resulted in chaos. About 100,000 Party members were arrested, often tortured to confess to concocted charges, and sent before the firing squad or to camps. But it soon became evident that many of them were victims of overzealous officials, some of whom were themselves later purged. The mass terror took almost a year more than projected. This was partly because zealous cadres sought to demonstrate their vigilance by requesting new quotas from Moscow for additional arrests and shootings. The names of purported accomplices were frequently obtained by cruelly mistreating the detainees. People were sometimes punished because of a foreign-sounding name or simply because anyone could be accused of being a German, Japanese, Latvian, or Greek spy. The campaign took on a life of its own. Even when it was halted in November 1938, scheduled executions continued in some regions.
More than 680,000 people were killed in 1937 and 1938, and about 630,000 were deported to Siberia. Nevertheless, two years after the purge the number of persons listed as politically suspect by the secret police exceeded 1,200,000. But official misconduct, incompetence, and networks of solidarity did not change, despite the massive change in the leading personnel. The national economy and the administration suffered from the loss of valuable specialists, and the hunt for enemies in the army decapitated the high command and decimated the officer corps. Many of the victims were sincerely devoted to the principles of Bolshevism.
The Great Purges are usually associated with Joseph V. Stalin and his police chiefs, Nikolai I. Yezhov and Lavrenty P. Beria. But their true origin lay in the Soviet regime’s inability to utilize modern techniques for managing institutions, political processes, and social relations. The purges showed that indiscriminate campaigns, police operations, and violence would play an important role as policy instruments and take priority over economic and administrative incentives to enlist popular support. They also showed the disastrous consequences of the system’s lack of independent watchdog agencies that could, if necessary, restrain the Party-state’s actions. The intent behind the purges bore some resemblance to social engineering, but the sociopolitical framework led to an outcome that had little in common with the original aims. See also: BERIA, LAVRENTI PAVLOVICH; GULAG; KOMANEV, LEV BORISOVICH; SHOW TRIALS; STALIN, JOSEF VIS-SARIONOVICH; STATE SECURITY, ORGANS OF; YEZHOV, NIKOLAI IVANOVICH; ZINOVIEV, GRIGORY YEVSEYEVICH
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Chase, William J. (2001). Enemies Within the Gates? The Comintern and the Stalinist Repression, 1934-1939. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Conquest, Robert. (1990). The Great Terror: A Reassessment. New York: Oxford University Press. Getty, J. Arch. (1985). Origins of the Great Purges: The Soviet Communist Party Reconsidered, 1933-1938. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Getty, J. Arch. (1999). The Road to Terror: Stalin and the Self-Destruction of the Bolsheviks, 1932-1939. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Getty, J. Arch. (2002). “’Excesses Are Not Permitted’: Mass Terror and Stalinist Governance in the Late 1930s.” Russian Review 2:113-138. Getty, J. Arch, and Manning, Roberta T., eds. (1993). Stalinist Terror: New Perspectives. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
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Siegelbaum, Lewis, and Sokolov, Andrei. (2000). Stalinism as a Way of Life: A Narrative in Documents. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
(1799-1837), considered Russia’s greatest poet, author of lyrics, plays, prose, and the novel in verse Eugene Onegin.
Of the Russian poets, none is mentioned by Russians with more reverence than Alexander Sergeyevich Pushkin. His work has been set to opera by Mikhail Glinka, Modest Mussorgsky, Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, and Peter Tchaikovsky; his lyrics have been memorized by young schoolchildren throughout the former Soviet Union; and leading poets of the twentieth century, such as Anna Akhmatova, Marina Tsvetaeva, and Alexander Blok, emphasized his impact on their work and lives. Pushkin may indeed have opened the door for the later part of the so-called Golden Age of Russian literature. At the 1880 ceremony following the unveiling of the Pushkin statue in Moscow, Ivan Turgenev credited Pushkin with giving birth to the Russian literary language; Fyodor Dostoyevsky, in an impassioned, near-hysterical speech, declared Pushkin superior to Shakespeare.
Such reverence is certainly merited, but reverence has its dangers. The author of the novel in verse Eugene Onegin, the historical play in verse Boris Godunov, the cryptic yet fluid “Belkin Tales,” the brilliant “Little Tragedies” (four plays in blank verse, three of which deal with crimes of passion) the stylized folktale “Ruslan and Lyudmila,” the tense, fatalistic story “Queen of Spades,” and hundreds of lyrics, a master of style who absorbed and transformed European literary traditions and gave Russian folklore an unprecedented poetic expression, Pushkin attained quasi-mythological status in the twentieth century, becoming a hero figure for the Soviet establishment and dissidents alike. Yet Pushkin was a complex figure: profoundly solitary yet immersed in the social life of the aristocracy; devoted to his friends but easily incited to violence. His female characters, such as Tatiana in Eugene Onegin, have remarkable depth and soul, but he himself was primarily attracted to physical beauty in women, and brought about his own early death partly on account of this. These contradictions in his character, while perhaps limiting his literary offering, account in part for its richness; his work is both immediate and layered, both sincere and wry.
Pushkin was born in Moscow in 1799. His father Sergei descended from boyars, one of whom, mentioned in Pushkin’s Boris Godunov, had been a supporter of the False Dmitry during the Time of Troubles. Pushkin’s mother Nadezhda was the granddaughter of Abram Gannibal, an African slave. Abram had been brought from Africa as a gift for Peter I, who favored him and sent him to Paris for military education. With the accession of Elizabeth to the throne, Abram rose through the ranks to the status of general, but was retired following Elizabeth’s death. Pushkin took pride in his African heritage, referring to it often in his lyrics. Abram’s daughter Mariya, Pushkin’s grandmother, not only played the role of surrogate parent to Pushkin, whose own parents gave him little attention or affection, but also recounted family history, to be reflected later in Pushkin’s unfinished novel The Blackamoor of Peter the Great.
Pushkin’s parents embraced the lifestyle of the aristocracy, though they could not afford it. Sergei, an adept conversationalist with a vast knowledge of French literature, invited some of Russia’s leading literary figures to the household, including the historian Nikolai Karamzin and poets Konstantin Batyushkov and Vasily Zhukovsky. Pushkin and his sister and brother grew up surrounded by literati. However, Pushkin’s childhood was unhappy. Pushkin was the least favored child, perhaps in part because of his African features and awkward manner. Only his grandmother and his nanny Arina Rodionova nurtured him emotionally; the latter told him folk tales and entertained him with gossip, and served later as the model for Tatiana’s nanny in Eugene Onegin.
In 1811 Pushkin’s parents sent him to boarding school, the Lyceum, newly established by Alexander I in a wing of his palace in Tsarskoye Selo. There Pushkin received a first-rate education (though he was not a stellar student) in a relaxed and nurturing environment, and formed friendships that would prove lifelong, with classmates Ivan Pushchin, Anton Delvig, Wilhelm Kyukhel-becker, and others. While at the Lyceum, Pushkin enjoyed a social life filled with pranks and light romantic encounters, and he amazed his teachers and classmates with his verse. The aged poet Gavryl Derzhavin, upon hearing Pushkin recite his “Recollections in Tsarskoye Selo” during an examina1251
PUSHKIN, ALEXANDER SERGEYEVICH
