Much of the pieces cited in that article here had political motives for hiding what they were doing. These were show trials driven by an extreme political agenda.
First the issue of the show trials has absolutely NOTHING to do with the bulk of the mass deaths caused by Stalin. Unlike the Gulags, the Famine of 1932/33, and the terror of the KGB/NKVD, these trials were conducted well above board and to conflate them is to do a grave disservice to those who died at the hands of Stalin genocidal indifference (the Famines of 32/33 and the de-Kulakization effort) and the directed efforts of his secret police. People forget that Stalin's rise post Lenin was thru the raw use of power including murder and execution of his rivals. This was not a "natural" transition of power from Lenin. I'm often confused as to why Marxists defend Stalin as he represents to me the opposite - a personality driven leadership (top down) as opposed to the bottom up leadership espoused by Marx. I do understand the misplaced nostalgia of the Russian people for a time when they had world respect and some stability (pensions, food, etc.), but they also make little differentiation between Kruschev and his successors than any real legacy left by Stalin who represents more of a blip than continuum.
Back to the main point; the audience of the show trials was not the Soviet Union, but were played out purely for those in the West. The tools he used were those most sympathetic to the Soviet Union including people like Duranty and Ambassador Davies. The show trials accomplished two things:
1) The renouncement and repudiation of the remaining elements of the 1917 revolution to curry favor with the Western Powers for the upcoming fight against Hitler. Why? There were many in the West who were fearful of the "Communist" menace. By eliminating these remaining "Reds" including Trotsky in Mexico (1940), Stalin showed that the Soviet Union had destroyed it's ideologues who had caused the most fear for those in the West. Stalin's control was not an extension of Bolshivism which saw in it concern for the commoner, but rather a bureaucratic machine (a bureaucracy represented by Stalin) that attempted to separate itself over the common person and do whatever it took to self-perputate itself.
2) It served as a way for Stalin to demonstrate his firm control as dictator of the political machine. (He was in charge). Plus it removed once and for all the influence of his last possible rival, Trotsky.
http://www.wsws.org/articles/2003/nov2003/nyt-n01.shtml Duranty's reaction to these events, as the Times has noted, was the infamous phrase, "you can't make an omelet without breaking eggs." At the same time he mocked the right-wing critics of the Soviet Union, asserting that their concern for the loss of life in the collectivization drive stood in sharp contrast to their indifference to the slaughter of the World War of 1914-1918.
The disaster unleashed by forced collectivization, combined with the historic defeat of the working class that resulted from Stalinism's policies in Germany, set the stage for a lurch to the right and the advent of "popular frontism." Faced with a Hitlerite regime committed to the Soviet Union's destruction, the Kremlin pursued diplomatic alliances with "democratic" imperialism in exchange for an explicit renunciation of revolutionary goals and a commitment to defend the international status quo.
Within the USSR, it turned to the physical liquidation of all those who had been associated with the October 1917 revolution.
It was in this period that Duranty's writings took on a qualitatively different character. In the face of monstrous acts of wholesale judicial murder, the Times did more than remain silent. It published Duranty's apologetics and support for the frame-ups.
The Moscow Trials indicted the principal leaders of the October 1917 revolution-the exiled Trotsky being the foremost defendant-as fascist collaborators supposedly guilty of crimes ranging from industrial sabotage to plots to poison the population's water supply and assassinate Stalin.
The only evidence presented to substantiate these fantastic charges were the confessions of the accused, extracted through the method personally recommended by Stalin of "beat, beat and beat again." The Soviet prosecutors ' tales of secret meetings and conspiratorial intrigue, supposedly confirmed by confessions extracted from the defendants, were subsequently exposed as crude fabrications.
For example: at the first trial, held in August of 1936, a supposed 1932 meeting in Copenhagen of an alleged conspirator with Trotsky's son, Leon Sedov, was said to have taken place at the Hotel Bristol. The Hotel Bristol, it was pointed out soon after the frame-up, had been torn down in 1917.
At the second trial, held in January of 1937, one of the accused, former head of Soviet industry Yuri Piatakov, was said to have flown to Oslo in December 1935. It was soon revealed, however, that no planes had been able to land in Norway for the entire month of December 1935 because of foul weather.
None of this gave pause to the Times and its Moscow correspondent in their favorable coverage of the frame-ups. Reporting on the first of the Moscow Trials in 1936, Duranty wrote: "It is inconceivable that a public trial of such men would be held unless the authorities had full proofs of their guilt."
In January 1937, after the second trial, Duranty wrote: "It is a pity from the Soviet viewpoint that no documentary evidence was produced in open court." Nevertheless, he concluded, "taken all in all, the trial did stand up."
Behind this coverage lay definite political motives, and not merely the personal predilections of Duranty. Joining the Times in defending the trials was the US Ambassador to Moscow, Joseph Davies. What were then the leading journals of American liberalism, the Nation and the New Republic, lauded these frame-ups as models of fairness. Within ruling circles in both Europe and America, the three-year blood purge was recognized-and welcomed-as an irrevocable break with the revolutionary perspective of 1917.
Trotsky pointed to the political source of this liberal defense of the Moscow Trials. In his Their Morals and Ours, written in 1939, he commented that "the big bourgeoisie of the democratic countries, not without pleasure, though blanketed with fastidiousness, watched the execution of the revolutionists in the USSR. In this sense, the Nation and the New Republic, not to speak of Duranty, Louis Fischer, and their kindred prostitutes of the pen, fully responded to the interests of 'democratic' imperialism."
Trotsky described Duranty as the "correspondent of the New York Times, whom the Kremlin has always entrusted with the dirtiest journalistic tasks." ("Toward a Balance Sheet of the Purges," published in Socialist Appeal June 30, 1939 and included in Writings of Leon Trotsky, 1938-39, Pathfinder Press). Duranty's record on the Moscow Trials remained an issue of active controversy for decades to come.
The publishers and editors of the Times have never expressed any remorse about this aspect of Duranty's reporting. On the contrary, they have proven impervious to any protest from the left over their falsification of history in relation to the Soviet Union.
While the newspaper distanced itself from the Stalinist bureaucracy-first in response to the 1939 Stalin-Hitler pact and then by joining the anti-communist witch-hunt of the post-World War II years-it has never bothered to reexamine its role as an apologist for the Stalinist terror. On the contrary, the former "friends of the Soviet Union" at the Times passed over easily to vulgar anti-communism. Where they once put a plus, they merely substituted a minus.
Among those interviewed in last week's Times story on Duranty was the newspaper's editor, Bill Keller. "It's absolutely true that the work Duranty did...was credulous, uncritical parroting of propaganda," Keller declared. He added, however, "As someone who spent time in the Soviet Union while it existed, the notion of airbrushing history kind of gives me the creeps."
Keller was the Times correspondent in Moscow from 1986 to 1991. While the Times' distortion of the situation in the Soviet Union during this period may not have reached the grotesque levels set by Duranty, its version of events was hardly free of the influence of the US government. Keller's lionizing of Mikhail Gorbachev dovetailed neatly with the official policy of Washington, which then backed the Soviet leader as the most consistent proponent of capitalist restoration within the bureaucracy.
Since then, the Times editor has actively contributed to the new and officially sanctioned falsification of history-the slandering of the October 1917 revolution and the facile equation of Stalinism and fascism.
Keller's remark last week about his supposed distaste for "airbrushing history" is cynical, given that this was precisely the method used by the Stalinist bureaucracy against its Marxist opponents, led by Trotsky-a method supported by Duranty and continued in its own fashion by the Times to this day.
So what were the deaths attributed to Stalin? I will of course not only attribute those who were killed directly under his orders, but those who were placed in institutions designed to cause deaths as well as deaths which occured by Stalin's ill-conceived efforts to remodel the country under his form of bureaucracy.
You've got the handful (apx. 50) who were tried in the show trials, all of whom were executed. You also have their immediate families who were also arrested and killed (save one who survived the labor camp).
You've also got the apx. 1.5mm people who were arrested in the Great Purge of which 700,000 were executed.
And then of course you have the de-Kulakization and collectivation efforts. Defenders or Stalin such as Ludo Martens feel that these people were problems. However, it is overlooked, but these Kulaks (ie the peasants) were often the very workers who the state was supposed to be defending not attacking. Best estimates range at around 7mm Kulak deaths as well as 12mm deaths in the Gulags. Yes there may be more, but these numbers are the most "conservative" estimates available. There are those who cite upwards of 50-60mm deaths due to Stalin.
One of Stalin's favorite historical figures was aptly Ivan the Terrible. Like Ivan IV, Stalin did quite a bit for the Soviet Union during a critical time - his strong personality was necessary to defeat Hitler, but that does not excuse the massive amount of destruction and deaths he caused in his quest for personal power just as it did not excuse the founding of the Oprichnina by Ivan IV and the resulting reign of terror and deaths caused by this organization.