Great Purge - Western Reactions

Western Reactions

Although the trials of former Soviet leaders were widely publicized, the hundreds of thousands of other arrests and executions were not. These became known in the west only as a few former gulag inmates reached the West with their stories. Not only did foreign correspondents from the West fail to report on the purges, but in many Western nations, especially France, attempts were made to silence or discredit these witnesses; Jean-Paul Sartre took the position that evidence of the camps should be ignored, in order that the French proletariat not be discouraged. A series of legal actions ensued at which definitive evidence was presented which established the validity of the former labor camp inmates' testimony.

According to Robert Conquest in his 1968 book The Great Terror: Stalin's Purge of the Thirties, with respect to the trials of former leaders, some Western observers were unable to see through the fraudulent nature of the charges and evidence, notably Walter Duranty of The New York Times, a Russian speaker; the American Ambassador, Joseph E. Davies, who reported, "proof...beyond reasonable doubt to justify the verdict of treason" and Beatrice and Sidney Webb, authors of Soviet Communism: A New Civilization. While "Communist Parties everywhere simply transmitted the Soviet line", some of the most critical reporting also came from the left, notably The Manchester Guardian.

Evidence and the results of research began to appear after Stalin's death which revealed the full enormity of the Purges. The first of these sources were the revelations of Nikita Khrushchev, which particularly affected the American editors of the Communist Party USA newspaper, the Daily Worker, who, following the lead of The New York Times, published the Secret Speech in full.

Efforts to minimize the extent of the Great Purge continue among revisionist scholars in the West. Jerry F. Hough claims, regarding the numbers executed in the Great Purge, "a figure in the low hundreds of thousands seems much more probable than one in the high hundreds" and that a lower figure of only "tens of thousands" was "even probable". Sheila Fitzpatrick also placed the numbers executed in the "low hundreds of thousands." Robert W. Thurston allows for 681,692 executions, but claims that Stalin "was not guilty of mass first degree murder from 1934 to 1941" and that he was a "fear ridden man" who just "overreacted to events."