In Europe

lives – was depicted by Maxim Gorky and 120 other writers as heroism on an epic scale. Yet with the Great Terror of 1937, the system became even more grim. All talk of ‘rehabilitation’ disappeared, and anyone daring to address a guard with the term
tovarishte
, comrade, was struck down on the spot.
    We will never know exactly how many lives were ravaged and broken by the terror of the Gulag and the NKVD, to say nothing of the seven million who died of starvation in the 1930s. The Soviet regime ran onterror, on intense fear. Hitler's repression in Nazi Germany, however cruel, was clearly aimed at certain groups: Jews, socialists, communists and the ‘asocial’. The German who kept his head down and his mouth shut had little to fear. Stalin's terror, on the other hand, was characterised by total haphazardness. Anyone could be its target, for the silliest of reasons, next year or tonight.
    Almost 800,000 Soviet citizens were executed. During the 1930s an average of 1.5–2 million people were prisoners in the camps. By the early 1950s that number had risen to 2.5 million. Just as in Germany, however, large groups were regularly released. According to the most reliable estimates, approximately twenty-nine million Soviets spent part of their lives inside the Gulag system, or in ‘special exile’, between 1929–53. Four million citizens and their families had their civil rights rescinded during the 1930s, and at least a million farming families and a million others were deported. What is more, the fate of a single condemned man or deported husband had an impact on the life of the whole family; his wife was ostracised, his children expelled, after a ritual humiliation, from school or university. Women and babies were sometimes sent into exile as well. Trotsky's wife, Anna, died in exile in Siberia, as did his two sons-in-law. His own son was arrested in 1937 and died in the Gulag as well.
    Stalin's terror, wave after wave of it, lasted until the end of his life, into the 1950s. Around 1930 it was largely farmers and priests who were targeted, as well as the ‘bourgeois specialists’. In 1935, after the excessively popular Leningrad party chief Sergei Krov was murdered at Stalin's instigation, members of the former elite, as well as Stalin's former opponents, became the primary targets. Of the 1,225 representatives to the Seventeenth Party Congress of 1934, 1,108 were arrested within the year.
    The greatest purges, however, took place in the period 1937–8. Now it was no longer about ‘class enemies’, but about ‘enemies of the people’: a subtle distinction to indicate that the ‘enemies’ were now to be sought within the Communist Party as well.
    In St Petersburg, Anna Smirnova had told me about a girlfriend of hers at school. Her friend's father had graduated
cum laude
from the military academy, and was a leading communist. ‘One day she came to school, wild-eyed. Her father had been arrested. Everyone was in a tizzy. He hadstomach problems, and her mother was terribly afraid he wouldn't be fed well in prison. But of course, in prison he wasn't fed at all. They shot him right away.’ And what about her own parents? ‘They didn't belong to the party. For years, they could hardly find work. But that was their salvation as well. They couldn't be found on any list.’
    Karl Radek was now put on trial as well. According to an anecdote, at an international congress he once heard a comrade use the expression ‘Thank God’. He corrected the man: ‘These days we say: thank Stalin.’ ‘But what is one to say if Stalin dies?’ the comrade asked. ‘Oh, then we'll say: thank God.’ Jokes like that were not appreciated. In January 1937 he was put on trial for having established, on Trotsky's instructions, a ‘parallel anti-Soviet Trotskyite centre’ to serve as a base for espionage and terror.
    Like other suspects, Radek admitted to everything, in order to save his family. His irony, however, remained firmly in place. When asked whether he knew that terrorism was a capital offence, he replied that he was not familiar with that book of law. ‘Then you will know it after this trial,’ the people's prosecutor said. Radek: ‘But then I won't know it for long.’ He was sentenced to ten years in the Gulag; two years later he was dead.
    Of the 394 members of the Comintern's executive committee in January 1936, only 171 were still alive in April 1938. More members of the former Politburo of the German