In her magnum opus, The Triumph of the Dark, pp. 439–40, Steiner attributes the terror to Stalin’s desire for absolute power and ‘his ideologically based belief in the coming war’, a point which historiography has yet to establish firmly. She relies heavily on J. Harris, ‘Encircled by enemies: Stalin’s perceptions of the capitalist world, 1918–1941’, Journal of Strategic Studies, 30/3 (2007), who claims that the way Stalin handled the intelligence reports submitted to him evinced his ideological predisposition. However, it reflects, at best, a cultural revolutionary bias, hardly different from the ideological bias discernible in the official British and French reports on Russia, the content of which were well known in the Kremlin but which Harris tends to overlook. The Western bias is convincingly presented in the prolific works of J. Carley (cited within this volume), as is the revolutionary culture, which by no means signifies a dogmatic modus operandi. T.J. Uldricks, ‘Soviet security policy in the 1930s’, in G. Gorodetsky, Soviet Foreign Policy, 1917–1991 (London, 1994), continues to serve as a sound and objective compass. Similar subtle, complex and convincing arguments were produced by Pons in The Inevitable War. Naturally the synoptic nature of Steiner’s masterpiece leads to inconsistent presentations of Stalin, who occasionally is also viewed as ‘the pragmatic Soviet leader’ (The Triumph of the Dark, p. 443). The inconsistency reflects the absence of consensus among experts in the field, even after the partial opening of the Soviet archives. The failure to reach a single common explanation for the purges leads Steiner to reach a final verdict that the terror was ‘rooted in Stalin’s fierce determination to establish his absolute control over all men and institutions that might threaten his monopoly of power’ (ibid., p. 461). She does, however, overlook a significant corroborative element – the struggle for power and ideas within the Soviet elite, which goes beyond the simple selfish interests characterizing the totalitarian model. See J.A. Getty and O.V. Naumov, The Road to Terror: Stalin and the self-destruction of the Bolsheviks, 1932–1939 (New Haven, 1999).

DVP, 1938, XXI, doc. 27; Webb, diary, 23 Jan. 1938, p. 6433. An isolation, contingent on military might and economic autarky, was ordained from the outset by the failure of collective security and was first enunciated by Molotov in January 1936. See Haslam, The Soviet Union and the Struggle for Collective Security, p. 93. The entire work of Pons, The Inevitable War, presents a fusion of the ideological and pragmatic approach, but Pons’s narrative, based on impressive archival findings, overwhelmingly underlines the reactive nature of the policy.

Suggested by Pons, The Inevitable War, pp. 106–10.