When did Western governments and the public learn of Stalin's atrocities?

by outnal

Stalin did some bad things. When did Western (read: basically US & UK) governments/intelligence learn of most of them? Most of the anticommunist rhetoric up until the secret speech and the Khrushchev thaw seems to be communism = bad rather than Soviets are mass-executing people. Was this because governments were unaware?

When did the Western public learn of them? My parents remember Solzhenitsyn but there must have been revelations before that. Just looking for a general outline; timeline of the key "revelations".

hamiltonkg

This is a complicated question to succinctly answer because knowledge of the atrocities of the Soviet government under the rule of Iosef Stalin did not suddenly appear one day in some kind of singular event. That understanding came about through a number of events which occurred at various points including during his rule:

  1. The Great Terror (1936 - 1938): the liquidation by execution or internment of at least half a million Russians (but probably closer to a million directly, and twice that indirectly) which was mostly focused on the military classes (5-10% of the officer corps) of the Soviet Union was committed at the direct order of Stalin. To give this macabre farce the appearance of legitimacy a series of trials (Trial of the Trotskyite-Kamenevite-Zinovievite-Leftist-Counter-Revolutionary Bloc 1936, The Trial of the Anti-Soviet Trotskyite-Centre 1937, Secret Military Tribunal 1937) were held. The first two of these were internationally publicized with journalists from across the world -- including the west -- invited to grant them legitimacy. This they did, a number of western journalists and even a British MP explicitly said the trials occurred under the auspices of the rule of law. Despite this, the Dewey Commission was formed in 1937 in the United States ostensibly to assess the charges against Leon Trotsky, but during the course of which, the more sordid details of these series of trials came forward and it became quite apparent that they were targeted, extrajudicial, political, and merciless.
  2. The Katyn Massacre (1940): the mass executions of the Polish military, political, and intelligentsia classes at the hands of the NKVD. These massacres were proposed by Lavrentiy Beria and approved by Stalin, no question-- the order with his signature is an archive. In a bit of morbid irony, the Nazi government discovered some of these victims improperly buried in mass graves and reported their findings, thus bringing the incident to light. Documentation has since emerged revealing that the United States and Britain both had reliable intelligence which implicated the USSR and specifically Stalin himself, but were unwilling to jeopardize the already shaky Comintern-Allies arrangement against Hitler in the forties when Stalin and Hitler were officially at peace with one another.
  3. Assassination of Lev Trotsky (1940): mortally wounded with an ice axe by NKVD agent Ramon Mercader in Mexico. Trotsky was quite a popular figure in the west and Stalin was implicated in his assassination immediately and didn't do much to try to conceal this fact, even going so far as awarding Mercader's mother the Order of Lenin within months.
  4. Massacres of Feodosia and Grishchino (1942, 1943): Russian armies have been known throughout history to be particularly unforgiving to invading armies upon their eventual retreat from the inner parts of the country and they made no exception for Hitler or his men. These two incidents were not the only cases of horrific war crimes committed against POWs, they just stand out among the carnage. Because they were reported upon by Nazis or former Nazis, not many western figures had much sympathy for the victims (a term I use not to sympathize with the Nazis, but rather simply to acknowledge the severity of their treatment), but horrific incidents such as mutilation, torture, rape, and myriad other allegations are quite plausible. While not directly responsible for the behavior of the Red Army on the march, Stalin made no attempts to prosecute generals who looked the other way during such chaos.

So there are four pretty disgusting examples of Stalin's blatant psychopathy and extreme sadism all of which occurred before or during the Second World War and were well known in the west. Stalin certainly didn't become some kind of enlightened ruler after the mid-forties, but he did tone down the absolutely blatant and arbitrary terror which he used against the peoples he ruled.

Even after the war, Sir Winston Churchill, and Harry Truman both made flattering remarks about Stalin -- which of course were eventually contradicted by speeches like Churchill's "Iron Curtain" and the advent of things like the Truman Doctrine.

TL;DR -- the west knew about the atrocities of the Soviet government under Stalin contemporaneously.

Further reading:

Stalin: Paradoxes of Power 1878-1928 (Kotkin)

Stalin: Waiting for Hitler 1929-1941 (Kotkin)

Both of these books are more than 700 page long, but no comparable study of Iosef Stalin exists, except for perhaps that done by Robert Service.