스탈린 대테러의 배경과 원인에 관한 재고찰 = A Critical Review on Historical Background and Causes of Stalin’s Great Terror

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

This article aims to give a progress report of the academic studies about Stalin’s Great Terror in 1936-38, particularly its causes, by doing a critical review on The Anatomy of Terror: Political Violence under Stalin, edited by James Harris in 2013. Although many Western historians have written a lot of serious books and articles about Stalin’s Great Terror since 1960s, there is still no consensus among them on why Stalin killed almost seven hundred thousand Soviet elites and ordinary people in only two years. Fifteen authors in The Anatomy of Terror also present various explanations about this question. We can divide their sixteen contributions into three categories according to types of the terror’s causes which they emphasize. Firstly, some scholars stress ‘excisionary violence’, ‘Chekist mentalite’ and intelligence and threat ‘misperception’ as long-term preconditions of the Great Terror. The second group of authors proposes Kirov murder, historical origins of mass repressions and conflicts among political police, civil police and judiciary as mid-term causes. The last group considers fear and anxiety of the provincial party leaders about the impending Soviet elections, participation of the masses in the process of purges and Stalin’s personal mental illness as immediate short-term evens or situations which triggered off the terror. However, in my view, all contributors failed to offer a comprehensive explanation about reasons for Stalin’s Great Terror. In order to explain the terror’s causes more plausibly, we have to consider additionally Khlevniuk and Kuromiya’s consistent arguments that the international political and military crisis in mid-1930s in Europe and Asia brought about within Stalin’s leadership the need for prior elimination of ‘the fifth-column’ as a preventive war.
(Seoul National University of Science and Technology/[e-mail])