5.1 Terror

Those who have never believed the emancipatory promises of the revolution, and have seen only evil in that great social upheaval, point to the dark age of Stalin as the ultimate justification for their beliefs. By contrast, the partisans of the revolutionary ideology have had the painful task of coming to terms with the sad and inconvenient fact that it was Stalin who ultimately emerged victorious. It is hard for them to answer the question: has there always been a worm in the communist apple? Stalinism is at the heart of Soviet history. Rightly or wrongly, we are often tempted to regard the history of the 1920s as preparation for Stalin, and the post-1953 period as a long recuperation from the ravages of tyranny.

The preconditions for the rise of Stalin and the main outlines of the era of terror are not in doubt, but the reasons for the mass murder remain elusive. As long as the Soviet Union existed, historians had no access to party and secret police archives. In any case, the answers to the most significant questions cannot be found in documents. The important decisions were never put on paper; Stalin, it seems, ordered the destruction of his closest comrades by a nod of the head. It is unlikely we will ever know all that we would like to know.

The historian is compelled to describe and analyze mass murder on an extraordinary scale, a self-immolation of society. One cannot avoid psychological explanations, and the historian is always on thin ice in such matters, for it is difficult to find rational explanations for irrational phenomena. As a consequence, at the very heart of Soviet history there is a blank spot, a large area open to widely different interpretations, none of them is fully satisfactory.1 Our knowledge of the era cannot be complete without understanding the person who controlled events, but Stalin was an extremely secretive person. While we have a good idea of Hitler’s mind and motives, we know almost nothing about Stalin’s mind. He did not have Hitler’s desire to appear on the stage, holding forth and giving his views on every conceivable topic. Hitler was an actor; Stalin was a puppeteer, who liked to move figures from behind the scene. In trying to envisage that elusive figure, we must recognize that he changed greatly as time went on. The man who came to power in the late 1920s was not the same Stalin as the tyrant of the 1930s, the warlord of the Second World War, or the old Stalin, who increasingly lost touch with reality and lived in a world of his own.

Lightning never strikes from a clear blue sky. Stalin’s terror could not have existed without certain preconditions. First of all, terror had been part of the Leninist system from its inception. The Bolsheviks called their regime the “dictatorship of the proletariat” and believed that as revolutionaries they had to be hard and pitiless. The first instrument of terror, the Cheka, was created already in 1917; it became the OGPU in 1922, which in turn in 1934 became a part of the commissariat of internal affairs, NKVD; under that name it functioned during the darkest years. The machinery vastly expanded during the struggle against the Russian peasantry at the time of collectivization – as a result, Stalin had extermination machinery, camps, interrogation facilities already in place.

Second, a characteristic feature of the 1930s, the show trials, also had precedents. The Soviet regime had already held trials in which innocent people were made to confess to fantastic crimes at the time of the first five-year plan. Although compared to what was to follow, there were relatively few victims, and the purpose of the trials was limited – namely to find scapegoats for genuine problems – in retrospect they appear as sinister forewarnings. Third, for the terror to reach its bloodiest extreme, Stalin had to become a dictator. As long as he did not rule the party absolutely it was impossible to order the extermination of venerable ex-leaders. But the most significant precondition was a general cheapening of the value of human life. Twentieth century Russian history is a series of demographic catastrophes and the purges. Mass deaths began with World War I, continued in the civil war and during the famine, and millions more died at the time of collectivization and in the famine that followed.

The seventeenth party congress in 1934 was a turning point: Stalin had already defeated his rivals; violence and terror had already become part of Soviet life; the country was set on the road to industrialization; the peasants had been forced to give up their land and the organization of the Soviet collective farm was taking shape; the worst of the famine was over; and by the elevation of “socialist realism” as the only tolerated artistic style, the cultural heterogeneity of the NEP had come to an end. The Bolsheviks had fought many battles and had faced genuine problems, and now the issues had all been resolved to their satisfaction. It was for these reasons that the seventeenth congress designated itself “the congress of Victors.” At the congress Stalin himself said: “There is nothing more to prove and, it seems, no one to fight.”

The peoples of the Soviet Union, and also many members of the political elite, desperately wanted a time of relaxation. While we have no firm evidence, there are hints that there was a faction in the Party leadership that wanted to get rid of Stalin, or at least to limit his dictatorial powers as a precondition of returning to normality.2 Stalin’s response was an attack on the party, unleashing mass terror that ultimately demanded millions of lives. Terror for the first time was turned against the party itself. Among the victims were the “victors”: by the time the next party congress met in 1939, more than half of the almost 2,000 delegates had been arrested – the higher in the hierarchy, the worse the chances for survival.

Sergei Kirov, the first secretary of the Leningrad party organization, a good orator, and unlike Stalin an ethnic Russian, was assassinated on December 1, 1934. The assassin, L. V. Nikolaev, had been associated in the past with the “left opposition,” but it is likely (though there is no firm evidence) that it was Stalin who plotted the murder. The historians who take for granted Stalin’s involvement in this matter make assumptions concerning Stalin’s character and the nature of the political system. These are good reasons, but by no means conclusive. Kirov’s public record was neither better nor worse than that of other leaders, and if he harbored liberal sentiments, he kept them to himself. What was Stalin’s motive? Did Stalin fear Kirov as a rival, or was the tyrant already planning the elimination of his past opponents and needed a good excuse? We can only speculate.

Kirov’s assassination was followed by thousands of arrests and hundreds of executions. In the following period of terror, mass murder was carried out on different levels. The most spectacular were the trials of ex-leaders of the Bolshevik Party, Lenin’s comrades. With a few exceptions, the entire leadership of the revolution was exterminated. The first to be tried were Zinoviev and Kamenev for “moral responsibility” – and, of course, they were found guilty. In a closed trial they were sentenced to five years in prison. The next act was a second Zinoviev-Kamenev trial in August 1936; with them were tried major figures of the “left opposition.” This was the first of the great show trials that the Stalinists were to stage repeatedly in the following years. The sixteen accused were charged with carrying out Trotsky’s orders to attempt to overthrow Stalin with the use of terrorist methods. Lenin’s old comrades were accused of organizing Kirov’s murder, and of failed attempts on other leaders, including Lenin and Stalin. They were also accused of being agents of foreign espionage services. These represented a curious assortment of countries, from England, France, Japan, and Germany to Poland. Only one major country was conspicuously missing: the United States. Presumably the United States was not considered important enough to be accused.

In January 1937 a second group of old Bolsheviks, including Iurii Piatakov, one of the architects of the industrialization drive, and Karl Radek, a brilliant publicist, were put on trial. The accusations were the same: these Bolsheviks wanted to overthrow the Soviet system by carrying out sabotage and were the agents of foreign powers and of Trotsky. A few months later, in June, the most self-destructive event occurred: the top leadership of the military were tried in a closed trial. The Stalinists eliminated the high command of the armed forces by carrying out a bloody purge. In March 1938 the trial that is sometimes referred to as the “great purge trial” took place, the trial of Bukharin and Aleksei Rykov and nineteen others. Here the stakes for Stalin were the highest. Bukharin still possessed vestiges of authority within the party, and a degree of popularity in the country. It was therefore especially necessary for the Stalinists not only to destroy him personally but also to discredit his past. He and his comrades were depicted by the prosecution as double agents from the beginning of their careers.

The destruction of the leadership was extraordinary because of the public nature of the trials, and because of the spectacle of previously powerful people standing in open court confessing to the most fanciful, and highly improbable, criminal activities. The confessions, carefully scripted, resembled contemporary novels and movies: the scripts were hallucinatory, and the authors paid very little attention to believability and psychological motivation. The accused were bad, just because they were bad. None of them had motives for opposing the Stalinist system, for there could not be any good motives. In the Soviet mind there was no such thing as a good comrade who had lost his way. The wicked had been wicked from the beginning, just as Lenin and Stalin had exhibited their extraordinary talents practically from the cradle. Stalinist ideology allowed no development of character. It could not, for if there was change, than there had to be intermediate stages, something between black and white. Such a proposition was subversive of Stalinist ideology.

The audience was asked to believe that people who had suffered for their revolutionary activities, who had devoted their entire lives to the struggle for a socialist future, had never in fact had been genuine revolutionaries. Many contemporaries in the Soviet Union and elsewhere were willing to accept such confessions on face value. The inherent implausibilities, the factual errors that would have discredited the confessions in normal circumstances, did not seem to matter; there was no one to point out the contradictions or even voice aloud doubts. Although the prosecution never presented material evidence against anyone, everyone who appeared in court confessed. At the time some wondered why old communists, courageous revolutionaries, confessed to crimes that they had not – and could not possibly have – committed, which besmirched their careers and everything to which they had devoted their lives. Some contemporary foreign observers speculated that the accused confessed because they had morally collapsed: they knew no secure moral foundation outside the communist party, and they wanted to serve the party even in their dying moments. However, no complex psychological explanations are necessary. In the NKVD prisons the victims were treated with such extraordinary brutality that few human beings were able to resist. The representatives of the regime at times bargained with the accused: for a confession, the victims were promised either their own lives or the lives of members of their families. The Stalinists almost never kept their word, for no one remained to enforce a promise. There were some differences among the victims. Some were never put on open trials, presumably because the torturers could not trust their victims to “behave.” Others, such as Bukharin, steadfastly denied some of the accusations to the end and sparred with the beastly prosecutor, Andrei Vyshinskii. Bukharin obviously attempted to make points that seemed important to him before his last audience. Whether people in the audience appreciated and understood Bukharin’s strategy, however, must remain an open question. N. Krestinskii behaved heroically: at one point in open court he withdrew his confession, even though he must have known that the consequences of his act would be swift in coming. Indeed, the next day – presumably after a difficult night – he reaffirmed his original confession. But, if anyone cared to observe, he had already made his point. Most of the accused were sentenced to death, but the formal sentences did not matter much – almost everyone, whatever the sentence, was killed.3

Many of the leaders of the French revolution paid with their lives. Hitler, in 1934, just before the great trials, exterminated in a brutal fashion a segment of the Nazi leadership. Stalin’s terror was far more thorough than the French or German, and he made it particularly gruesome by the show trials and torture; but the purge trials were only a small part of the terror. The arrests spread, ultimately involving millions of people. From a moral point of view, the elimination of the top leadership of the Party – i.e., people who themselves in the past had not shied away from the use of terror – was less reprehensible than the incarceration and killing of millions of people who were guilty of nothing, neither according to the existing criminal code nor according to any moral reckoning.

The exact number of victims cannot be precisely established; the numbers are passionately debated among scholars. (Approximately a million people were executed, and maybe as many as ten million were sent to camps.) Of course, it does matter whether the number of victims was three million or thirty million; and yet, for our understanding of the working of that particular political order, it cannot make much difference. Even if we accept the lowest reasonable number suggested by scholars who have studied the evidence, we cannot but form the picture of one of the most criminal regimes that ever existed on the face of the earth.

The top leadership of the nation – whether in politics, military, economics, or culture – was exterminated, but workers and peasants also became victims in the millions. The capital and the provincial cities suffered alike. It is possible to establish statistical probabilities for becoming a victim: although no group was altogether exempt, people in certain categories were in exceptional danger. Those who had contacts with foreigners rarely escaped. Foreign communists in the Soviet Union were treated with special venom: Stalin killed more German communists than Hitler. The Polish communists, who had the misfortune of residing in the “motherland of socialism,” were almost entirely eliminated. Members of past opposition groups did not survive. The higher the post of the party leader, the more he was in danger of being destroyed. But the newly created elite, those who had fought on Stalin’s side, those who were to be members of the new elite, also suffered. An unintended (or perhaps intended?) consequence was a constant renewal of elites. The intelligentsia of national minorities suffered especially, perhaps as a result of the Stalinists’ fear of the growth of non-Russian nationalisms. A peculiarity of the madness was that those who abused others were not likely to benefit. The NKVD was one of the organizations hardest hit: all of its leaders, Genrikh Iagoda, Nikolai Ezhov, and Lavrentii Beria, were ultimately killed, though Beria survived Stalin by a few months. Those who had carried out interrogations a short time before often shared cells with their victims. Unlike Nazi Germany, where the torturers were safe, in Stalinist Russia there was no clear division between “them” and “us.”

What kind of politics could exist in an age of terror and repression? It would be ludicrous to suggest, of course, that Stalin was involved in all the arrests. He must have signed hundreds of lists with thousands of names of victims, but there was no need for him to be involved in all the arrests. No doubt, matters got out of hand. As one might imagine, the atmosphere was used by thousands to take revenge on their enemies, or in some cases to destroy their superiors in order to get ahead. No doubt, there were also genuine issues at stake. It is likely, as suggested by some Western historians, that leaders disagreed concerning the best methods of carrying out policies and used the purges to advance their own programs. Local bosses in the provinces took advantage of opportunities to enhance their powers, and the center struggled desperately to maintain discipline. At the same time, there is nothing in the newly uncovered documents to suggest that Stalin was not fully in control.

Control, however, did not mean that the apparatus functioned well. Russia was an underdeveloped country with poorly functioning governmental machinery and an ill-educated, venal bureaucracy lacking in public spirit. The country had no well-developed communication system, which increased local power and confusion. It is a mistake to think that totalitarianism implies efficiency, that in such a system all orders are carried out as intended. In fact, the world has never known an efficient totalitarian regime.4 It would be a great jump in logic, however, to conclude that because Stalin did not control everything and not all orders were efficiently carried out in the provinces, he did not have an overall control or that events developed contrary to his desires.

The terror profoundly changed the character and even the role of the party. One could no longer talk about the dictatorship of the party. The Soviet political system in the 1930s was the dictatorship of Stalin, who stood above and aside from the party, using it when he needed it as he did other instruments of power, most notably the secret police. From 1933 to 1938 the composition of the party changed. As an institution the party was among the main victims of the attacks. Those who were purged were replaced by new elements, representing the new Soviet elite.

Party organizations lost their assigned functions. After the “Congress of Victors” in 1934, the Congress met only twice in Stalin’s lifetime, in 1939 and 1952, and never discussed significant issues. The Communist Party which contained within itself the nation’s elite, was designed to play the role of reconciling competing interests, but at a time of oppression and terror the party could not carry out its assigned task. The suspension of normal politics, however, did not mean that there were no longer interest groups. Even if the major issues facing the nation were not openly discussed, those issues did not disappear. While Stalin’s lieutenants agreed on a breakneck tempo of industrialization, for example, the question still remained exactly how much of the national income should be invested in the national economy.

Stalin and members of his ever-changing circle accumulated enormous power. They made their decisions not on the basis of law, not even on the basis of bureaucratic predictability, but according to whim. What mattered was not a party or government functionary’s official position, but whether he was able to gain Stalin’s attention and approval. In the absence of official forums, it was Stalin alone who was to reconcile competing interests and points of view. This was a haphazard political system, with an ill-functioning machinery, in which local leaders could sometimes sabotage directives from above.

Possibly a more important institution than the party was the political police, the NKVD (People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs). Although as one of the commissariats it came under the supervision of the council of commissars, in fact the heads of the agency reported directly to Stalin. In the 1930s the NKVD possessed an enormous network of paid and unpaid agents, which penetrated all levels of society and all institutions, including the party itself.

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