JUST BEFORE MY PARENTS MET

In the late 1930s, as far as I know, my mother and father met in Hamilton Ontario. They both worked at the Otis Elevator Company. My father was a Welshman who had come out to the USA just before the Great War. My mother was in her mid-30s when she met my dad. They knew nothing about the Great Terror/Purge (1936-3 in the Soviet Union. Indeed few did. Judging from the Soviet records we now have, the number of people who died in both the Great Terror and in the Gulag(1930-1960) between 1933 and 1945 is fewer than historians once thought. This short piece of writing attempts to place May 1937, at the heart of the Great Terror of 1936 to 1938, in a personal perspective.

In 1937, as his vision of modernization faltered, Stalin ordered the Great Terror. Because we now have the killing orders and the death quotas, inaccessible so long as the Soviet Union existed, we now know that the number of victims was not in the millions. We also know that, as in the early 1930s, the main victims were the peasants, many of them survivors of hunger and of concentration camps. The highest Soviet authorities ordered 386,798 people shot in the “Kulak Operation” of 1937–1938. The other major “enemies” during these years were people belonging to national minorities who could be associated with states bordering the Soviet Union: some 247,157 Soviet citizens were killed by the NKVD in ethnic shooting actions.

In the largest of these, the “Polish Operation” that began in August 1937, 111,091 people accused of espionage for Poland were shot. In all, 682,691 people were killed during the Great Terror to which might be added a few hundred thousand more Soviet citizens shot in smaller actions. The total figure of civilians deliberately killed under Stalinism, around six million, is of course horribly high. But it is far lower than the estimates of twenty million or more made before historians and analysts had access to Soviet sources. At the same time, we see that the motives of these killing actions were sometimes far more often national, or even ethnic, than we had assumed. Indeed it was Stalin, not Hitler, who initiated the first ethnic killing campaigns in interwar Europe.-Ron Price with thanks to Timothy Snyder, “Who Was Worse, Hitler or Stalin?,” The New York Review of Books, 10 March 2011.

In May 1937 as the first
Seven Year Plan opened1
and the delegates returned
home form Chicago that
Commission of Inquiry into
the charges made against Leon
Trotsky in the Moscow Trials,
commonly known as the Dewey
Commission had begun in New
York by supporters of Trotsky
to establish the truth about the trials.
The commission was headed by the
famous American philosopher and
educator John Dewey. The hearings
were conducted to prove that Leon
Trotsky was innocent; they brought
evidence and established that specific
charges made at the trials could not be
true……The Dewey Commission later
published its findings in a book of 422
pages titled Not Guilty. Its conclusions
asserted the innocence of all those who
were condemned in the Moscow Trials.
For a summary go to good old, but often
that unreliable, encyclopaedia Wikipedia.2

1 The first Seven Year Plan of the North American Baha’i community: 1937-1944 to implement ‘Abdul-Baha’s Divine Plan written during the Great War.

2 In its summary, the commission wrote: "Independent of extrinsic evidence, the Commission finds:
• That the conduct of the Moscow Trials was such as to convince any unprejudiced person that no attempt was made to ascertain the truth.
• That while confessions are necessarily entitled to the most serious consideration, the confessions themselves contain such inherent improbabilities as to convince the Commission that they do not represent the truth, irrespective of any means used to obtain them.
• That Trotsky never instructed any of the accused or witnesses in the Moscow trials to enter into agreements with foreign powers against the Soviet Union [and] that Trotsky never recommended, plotted, or attempted the restoration of capitalism in the USSR.
The commission concluded: "We therefore find the Moscow Trials to be frame-ups."

Ron Price
4 August 2011