The Great Terror

15

HERITAGE OF TERROR

None of the evils which totalitarianism … claims to remedy is worse than totalitarianism itself.

Albert Camus

“Zachto—why?” The last words of Yakov Livshits, Old Bolshevik and Deputy People’s Commissar, as he awaited execution on 30 January 1937, got no answer. During the few remaining months that old Party members were still at liberty and able, occasionally at least, to talk of such things, his question was much repeated. If experienced politicians felt baffled, the man in the street was even more uncomprehending. “I asked myself and others, why, what for? No one could give me an answer.”¹ As for victims, the first words on entering a cell were almost always, we are told, a shaken “But why, why?”² The prison and camp literature tells of the same phrase, “Why?” often found written on cell walls, and carved into the sides of prison wagons and on the planks of the transit camps.³ The old partisan Dubovoyfn1 (whose long white beard, of which he was very proud, the examining magistrate had torn out) even developed in jail the theory that the Purge was the result of an increase in the number of sunspots.⁴

The simplest form of true answer would, of course, be “to destroy or disorganize all possible sources of opposition to Stalin’s progress to absolute rule.” But we can also see, in the system he created after his victory, the specific form of despotism for which he had sacrificed the nation and Party.

The victory was inevitably marked by a good deal of dislocation, and stability had not been achieved when the Soviet Union was faced with international emergencies, starting with the Finnish War of 1939 to 1940, which became a desperate struggle for mere existence in the four-year war with the Nazis from 1941 to 1945, and its of reconstruction. It was not until 1947–1948 that the Stalinist State became politically and institutionally stabilized.

But meanwhile, two main objects had already been accomplished. A vast number of past or potential “hostile” elements had been destroyed or sent to labor camps, and the rest of the population reduced to the most complete silence and obedience. And, on the other hand, the Communist Party itself had been turned into something entirely new.

This political transformation is to some extent masked by the fact that the organizational forms remained the same. But, in fact, the discontinuity between the Party of 1934 and the Party of 1939 was radical. The people opposed to Stalin had already been almost entirely eliminated from the leading organs of the party. Over the Purge period, the Stalinists themselves, except for a small and peculiar personal following, were destroyed. The extent of the discontinuity is plain if we consider the delegates to the XVIIth and XVIIIth Congresses. As we have seen, and it is worth repeating, less than 2 percent of the rank-and-file delegates of 1934 held their positions in 1939. The Communist Party of 1939 was more different from that of 1934 than Buchanan’s Democratic Party was from Andrew Jackson’s. If the latter case is more evident to historians, it is partly because, in the Communist case, emphasis on the continuous tradition, and thus concealment of the change, were of much greater political importance to the rulers.

The earlier leaders had wished to reserve all political rights for the limited leading membership of the old Party. Stalin, in destroying that Party, in a sense threw the positions of power open. He instituted the carrière ouverte aux talents in place of the old system. It is true that the “talents” required were of a special type. But at least any man, whatever his origins and however recently he had joined the Party, could be sure of a good post if he exhibited adequate servility and ruthlessness. But at the same time, among the new cadres of Stalinism, Party theory in its old justificatory form was still to be a basis. As Hitler had remarked, “Any violence which does not spring from a firm spiritual base, will be wavering and uncertain. It lacks the stability which can only rest in a fanatical outlook.”⁵

A close student of, and victim of, the Purge acutely analyzes the thoughts of the truly orthodox among Stalin’s operatives. Taking the case of a former NKVD officer known for his brutality, but gentle and even sentimental when himself a prisoner, he concludes:

What would a Prygov say if he were required to defend himself in a court of law? He would not, we believe, refer to superior orders, but to the teachings of Marxism and Leninism as he understood them. Prygov was as loyal and obedient as an S.S. man. But his faith was founded on a conviction that it fully accorded with the demands of reason and conscience. He was fully convinced that his was no blind faith, but was founded on science and logic. He was brutal because the general line required him to be brutal. The general line, so long as it accorded with the fundamental tenets of Marxism, was everything to him. Without the allegedly scientific foundation of the general line, which was the backbone of his faith, all the instructions of the Patty authorities would have lost their significance for him. He was convinced of the logical and ethical correctness of his Marxist principles, and on this conviction his faith depended.⁶

For the Stalinist Party maintained, in theory, the old doctrine and the old loyalty. But the discipline which had hitherto been due, in theory at least, to a corporate collective leadership now became the service of one man and his personal decisions. The loyalties and solidarities which had bound the membership now worked in one direction only—upward; sideways, as regards the Party comrades among whom there had subsisted some degree of common trust, only mutual suspicion and “vigilance” remained.

A new political system had been established. Not merely had the new men everywhere taken the place of the veteran cadres, but they had been given a long, severe, and testing exercise in the methods and attitudes of the new style of rule. The experience of the Purge had hardened and tempered them, as the collectivization struggle and, before that, the Civil War had tempered their predecessors. The alloy, however, was a new one. Dostoyevsky remarks, in The House of the Dead, “Tyranny is a habit; it grows upon us, and in the long run, turns into a disease…. The human being, member of society, is drowned for ever in the tyrant, and it is practically impossible for him to regain human dignity, repentance and regeneration.”

A Communist philosopher saw Stalin

as the apex of a pyramid which widened gradually toward the base and was composed of many “little Stalins”: they, seen from above, were the objects and, seen from below, the creators and guardians of the “cult of the personality.” Without the regular and unchallenged functioning of this mechanism the “cult of the personality” would have remained a subjective dream, a pathological fact, and would not have attained the social effectiveness which it exercised for decades….⁷

At the apex, this led to an extravagant adulation of Stalin. A Congress delegate of 1939 remarked: “… At that moment I saw our beloved father, Stalin, and I lost consciousness. The ‘hurrahs’ resounded for a long time, and it was probably this noise which brought me to myself….”⁸ And this was reasonably typical. A whole literature was devoted to the Vozhd.

In the country as a whole, a new public mood had been created. The experience had given the ruled as well as the rulers a new impress. The population had become habituated to silence and obedience, to fear and submission. In the years which remained of Stalin’s rule after the Purges, the all-out mass terror was no longer necessary. The machine had been started up, and could now be kept rolling without extraordinary efforts. It is true, in a sense, that the comparative calm which may reign in an autocracy following the elimination of all opponents or potential opponents is no less a manifestation of terror than the original killings—is, in fact, merely a product and consolidation of them: “Ubi solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant.”

In any case, the security organs never ceased to strike and strike brutally at all suspects. As late as 1940, Saratov jail was still holding ten men in cells for one or two.⁹ Right through the period, millions of prisoners, replacing the losses by death, were dispatched to the camps, and the threat remained ever present in all minds; yet the intensity of 1936 to 1938 was never reached again. In one vast operation, the country had been silenced and broken, and from then on more selective terror sufficed. This was partly because a good proportion of the new recruitment of forced laborers came from local and partial actions, starting with the Baltic and eastern Poland, where the work of 1917 to 1939 in the rest of the USSR was compressed into a couple of years, in 1939 to 1941.

Apart from the approximately 440,000 Polish civilians sent to camp, in September 1939 the Russians took about 200,000 Polish prisoners of war. Most of the officers and several thousand soldiers were sent to camps at Starobelsk, Kozielsk, and Ostachkov. In April 1940, there were about 15,000 of them there, including 8,700 officers. Only 48 were ever seen again; they had been removed from the camps and sent to Soviet prisons. The missing group included 800 doctors and a dozen university professors.

When, under the agreement between the Poles and the Russians following the Soviet entry into the war, the former Polish prisoners were allowed to leave Russia and form their own army in the Middle East, the Polish representatives gave the Russians lists of names of soldiers who were known to have fallen into Russian hands and had not been released.

The Polish Ambassador, Professor Kot, raised the subject ten times with Molotov and Vyshinsky between October 1941 and July 1942, and always received the reply that all the prisoners had been released. When Kot met Stalin in November 1941, Stalin made a call to the NKVD on the subject. Whatever the answer was, Stalin then went on to the next point and would not discuss the matter further.

When General Sikorski saw Stalin on 3 December 1941, he was told that perhaps the missing men had got over the border into Manchuria. But Stalin promised to look into the question, saying that if any Poles had not been released, through local obstruction by NKVD officers, the latter would be disciplined.

In April 1943, the Germans announced the discovery of mass graves containing executed Poles in the Katyn Forest, near Smolensk. Within two days, the Russians produced a clear-cut official story of Polish officers in camps in the Smolensk area who had been left behind and had fallen into German hands—a totally different account from those which had previously been given by Stalin and his subordinates.

Allied leaders, while not all actively accepting the Russian story, took the line that no trouble should now be caused in view of the overriding importance of unity against Hitler. The Western press, however, accepted the Russian version almost unanimously. The American military paper Stars and Stripes even published a caricature of a Polish officer, represented as pretending to have been killed by the Russians.¹⁰

The Germans allowed access to the Katyn Forest to a large number of expert or interested parties—a European medical commission, containing experts from universities all over Europe, including neutrals such as Dr. Naville, Professor of Forensic Medicine at Geneva;fn2 representatives of the Polish underground; senior Allied prisoners of war, who correctly refused to pronounce any opinion, but who reported confidentially to their Governments that the German story was quite clearly true.

Basically, the proof consisted of digging up previously untouched mass graves; examining the corpses, compacted under earth; finding on them Soviet newspapers and similar material going up to April 1940, and nothing later; and noting that they were mostly in thick clothing, as against the Russian story that the executions had taken place in the warmth of September 1941.

The bodies found at Katyn, 4,143 in number, represented only those who had been in the Kozielsk camp; 2,914 were identified, and 80 percent of them were among the lists of missing the Polish authorities had assembled.

What happened to the Poles from the other two camps, numbering about 10,400 men, remains unknown. There are stories that a number of Polish prisoners were packed into old barges and scuttled in the White Sea. And there are also tales of a mass execution and burial resembling Katyn in the neighborhood of Kharkov.¹¹

The Nuremberg judges examined the Katyn Affair from 1 to 3 July 1946 in a derisory fashion, and did not mention Nazi responsibility for it in their verdict. No evidence of any sort has ever been forthcoming from German prisoners or captured material of Nazi responsibility for this particular crime.

But it is now hardly necessary here to say more. It is nowhere believed any longer that the Germans were responsible.

The significance, from the point of view of our theme, the Purges, is that we have here a clear-cut example of a mass execution carried out, without trial and in complete secrecy, as a routine administrative measure—and in peacetime.

One further case, this time of two individuals, is equally illustrative. Henrik Ehrlich and Viktor Alter, the leaders of the Jewish Bund Socialists in Poland, fell into Russian hands in September 1939 at the time of the Soviet–German invasion of Poland. They were both veterans of the Social Democratic movement in the old Russian Empire, and Ehrlich had been a member of the Executive of the Petrograd Soviet in 1917. They were taken to the Butyrka, charged with acting for the Polish Government in various infiltrations of saboteurs from 1919 to 1939. Ehrlich, who was on one occasion interrogated by Beria personally, insisted on writing all his answers. Alter replied simply to each question, “It is absolutely false, and you know it well.”

After eighteen months, in July 1941, they were transferred to Saratov and condemned to death. They both refused to appeal, but after ten days their sentences were commuted to ten years’ imprisonment. The amnesty granted to all Polish prisoners shortly afterwards resulted in their release in September and October, respectively. They were asked to organize a Jewish antifascist committee, and it was clear that their connections with old members of the Bund in the American trade unions—such as David Dubinsky—were much valued. Ehrlich became president and Alter secretary of this new organization, and the Soviet actor-producer Mikhoels was named a member of its Presidium. Beria personally sponsored the organization, while telling them that on all international questions Stalin took the final decision.

On 4 December, they went out of their hotel in Kuibyshev, and were never seen again. At first, the pretense was kept up that what had happened to them was unknown. But after protests from Clement Attlee and from the leading trade unionists in America and England, and also from important world figures like Albert Einstein and Reinholdt Niebuhr, Litvinov finally, in February 1943, sent a letter to the Head of the American Federation of Labor, William Green, explaining that Ehrlich and Alter had been arrested and executed for trying to persuade Soviet troops to cease contesting the advance of the German armies and to conclude an immediate peace with Nazi Germany. He added that they had been executed in December 1942—but their colleague, Lucjan Blit, who was with them in Kuibyshev until the moment of their arrest, believes that this is probably a mistake for December 1941.

Katyn and the Ehrlich–Alter Case are representative of a host of similar actions, both having exceptionally come to the notice of the world public through special circumstances. Apart from continuous attrition in the old lands of Russia, particular operations provided a flow of victims. After the Poles and Baits in 1939 to 1941, various other minorities were deported. In 1941, the Soviet Germans; in 1943 and 1944, seven entire nations, mainly from the Causasus, were arrested and deported en bloc.¹² German and Japanese prisoners of war filled the camps. In 1945 and 1946, the Western territories were again ravaged, and with the end of the war those Russian soldiers who had fought for, or merely been captured by, the Germans were mostly sent to camps on their return.

THE PURGE AND THE WAR

Meanwhile, in 1941 to 1945, the country had felt the effects of the measures taken by Stalin against his military leaders.

Figures given over the past years vary slightly, depending on (for example) whether they refer to those holding ranks at the time of the original appointments in 1935, or include promotions made later. As now given in the Soviet press, the Purge accounted for

3 of the 5 Marshals

13 of the 15 Army Commanders

8 of the 9 Fleet Admirals and Admirals Grade I

50 of the 57 Corps Commanders

154 of the 186 Divisional Commanders 16 of the 16 Army Commissars

25 of the 28 Corps Commissars

58 of the 64 Divisional Commissars¹³

All 11 of the Vice Commissars of Defense went, as did 98 out of 108 members of the Supreme Military Soviet. Nor was the effect confined to the upper echelons. Between May 1937 and September 1938, 36,761 Army officers and “over three thousand” Navy officers were dismissed (of whom 9,579 had been arrested even before dismissal). But from 1939 to 1941, we are told, some 13,000 of these dismissed were re-enrolled, so that the total permanently repressed may be as low as 27,000. (This omits, of course, those repressed after September 1938, for which Soviet figures almost as high as those for 1937 and 1938 have been given, for a total over the whole period of 43,000)¹⁴ As Khrushchev later said, the Purges started “at company and battalion commander level.”¹⁵ And the chances of the repressed seem to have been lower than those in any other field: of one group of 408 Army men tried by the Military Collegium, 401 were shot and 7 sent to labor camp.¹⁶

The Soviet novelist Konstantin Simonov gives an account of a conversation between two generals—Serpilin and Ivan Alexeyevich—in his Soldiers Are Made, Not Born.¹⁷ Ivan Alexeyevich comments that the Purge was not merely a matter of individual generals:

“The whole thing goes deeper. In the autumn of 1940 when the Finnish war had already ended, the Inspector-General of the Infantry carried out an inspection of regimental commanders and in the course of my duties I saw the resulting data. The review was attended by 225 commanders of infantry regiments. How many of them do you think had at that time graduated from the Frunze Academy?”

“I cannot really guess,” said Serpilin, “judging from the preceding events, presumably not very many.”

“What if I tell you that there was not a single one to have done so?”

“It just cannot be …”

“Don’t believe it then, if you find that easier. Well, how many of the 225 do you think had gone through ordinary military college? 25 of them! and 200 of them had come from junior lieutenants’ courses and regimental schools!”

As Ivan Alexeyevich himself points out, 225 regiments constitute 75 divisions, or half the strength of the peacetime Army, a reasonable sample. What Simonov is saying, in effect, is that the Army purge (plus the comparatively minor Finnish War of 1939 to 1940) accounted for virtually every single regimental commander throughout the entire Soviet Army apart from those promoted to fill gaps higher up. Although fictional in form, the figures Simonov gives also appear in factual Soviet literature.¹⁸

Similarly, in his labor camp, Gorbatov

wondered how the officers newly appointed to high rank, with no battle experience, would deal with operations in a real war. Honest, brave men, devoted to their country they might be, but yesterday’s battalion commander would be head of a division, yesterday’s regimental commander of a corps; in charge of an army, or a whole front, there would be at best a former divisional commander or his deputy. How many futile losses and failures would there be? What would our country suffer just because of this?¹⁹

As is confirmed by Russian military writers, the Purge had indeed led to “inexperienced commanders” being promoted. As early as 1937, 60 percent of the commanding cadres in rifle units, 45 percent in tank units, and 25 percent in air units were given as in this category.²⁰ Moreover, “the cadre of leaders who had gained military experience in Spain and in the Far East was almost completely liquidated.”²¹

Nor could the atmosphere fail to affect the discipline of the Army:

The policy of large-scale repression against the military cadres led also to undermine military discipline, because for several years officers of all ranks and even soldiers in the Party and Komsomol cells were taught to “unmask” their superiors as hidden enemies. It is natural that this caused a negative influence on the state of military discipline in the first war period.²²

Mekhlis, in his report to the 1939 XVIIIth Congress, expressed horror and sorrow at “incorrect expulsions” from the Party which had taken place in the Army in 1935, 1936, and 1937, on the basis of “slander,” instead of the correct method of “documents and facts.”²³

And over the next few years, a handful of generals were released—Rokossovsky and Gorbatov, for example. But still, as with the civilian purge (and the similar crocodile tears of Zhdanov), the arrests did not actually cease and cases continued to be processed. Herling mentions a number of Soviet generals with whom he shared a cell in 1940. Most of them had been badly beaten, and showed the marks of ill-mended broken bones.

Even now, the Red Army had considerable striking power in the right hands. This was shown over the summer of 1939. After a very shaky start, a build-up of superior forces (itself a feat), luckily entrusted to the one superlative soldier of the old First Cavalry Army, Zhukov, threw back the Japanese invaders of Mongolia in model fashion at Khalkhin-Gol. But even as this was being done, the armored tactics he had used, sponsored under Tukhachevsky (who with his group had by 1937 been beginning to create an “elite army emerging from the mass”),²⁴ were being condemned and abandoned, and within two months the tactical doctrine of the Red Army was back to old-fashioned “mass,” and the tanks were distributed in packets to lesser unit commands.

The post-Purge promotions placed men totally unsuited or untrained for high command in key positions. None of them showed any capacity for strategic thinking, and even the tactical dispositions on the frontier were proof of “a dull or listless mind.”²⁵ The rigidity of the military–political machine meant that failure at the top produced certain dislocation. The “mass” on which post-Tukhachevsky doctrine relied became too large and sluggish to be manipulated in such circumstances.

In the Finnish War of 1939 to 1940, the “initial incompetence of the Voroshilov–Mekhlis clique literally plunged the Red Army into disaster,” says John Erickson.²⁶ He adds that apart from this high-level failure there was a fatal lack of the “nerve” that Tukhachevsky had insisted on in junior commanders: independence of spirit had been destroyed by the Purges.

The German General Staff’s secret rating of the Red Army at the end of 1939 spoke of it as a “gigantic military instrument.” Although finding the “principles of leadership good,” it added “the leadership itself is, however, too young and inexperienced.”²⁷ In 1940, German intelligence, warning against an underestimation of the Red Army, felt that nevertheless it would take four years before that Army was back to its 1937 level of efficiency.²⁸

There were two positive ingredients in the gloomy post-Purge scene. First, Army Commander Shaposhnikov, the Tsarist colonel, had never lost Stalin’s trust. Through the debacle, he contrived to seek out and promote talent. As Chief of Staff his powers were limited, but he brought into the senior command posts a number of efficient officers, even though not enough to make up for those rising through the whims of Stalin, Mekhlis, and Voroshilov.

Second, by great good luck, two of the old First Cavalry Army officers were fair, or good, soldiers. After Voroshilov’s Finnish effort, Timoshenko, who had picked up the pieces and was now (7 May 1940) a Marshal, was made Defense Commissar. At the same time, Zhukov took the newly revived rank of full General, and then various key commands, culminating in his appointment as Chief of Staff in January 1941.

The reforms which took place between 1940 and the German attack on Russia in 1941 were inadequate, but without them the Red Army would probably have been completely ruined in the first weeks of Hitler’s assault. Timoshenko, in effect, attempted to restore the position as it had existed under Tukhachevsky. But three years of degeneration could not be recouped in a few months.

Moreover, with Timoshenko, the grotesque Kulik, also from Stalin’s Tsaritsyn entourage of the Civil War, and commonly described in the Soviet literature as a bullying incompetent,²⁹ was made Marshal and put in charge of the artillery arm; and another ineffective First Cavalry veteran, Tyulenev, became full General, together with Zhukov and Meretskov (the latter arrested early in the war and confessing under torture to being a terrorist plotter, but released in September 1941).

In fact, as a result of the 1940 promotions, four out of the five Marshals, two out of the three full Generals, and two of the new Colonel-Generals were from Stalin’s Civil War group. Of the eight, two were to prove useful appointments. The others ranged from mediocre to disastrous. Stalin’s concessions to military reality were not yet whole-hearted. We can be reasonably certain that but for the sharp jolt of the Finnish War, Timoshenko would not have been allowed to carry out his partial program of revitalization.

The task was tremendous—indeed, given the circumstances, impossible. But some improvement could be effected. The dual-command system was, after all, abandoned on 12 August 1940. In September, Mekhlis was removed from the Political Administration of the Army. A partial reversion to Tukhachevsky’s training methods set in. To create a new leadership and a new spirit could nevertheless not be done in the time remaining. Timoshenko was a vast improvement on Voroshilov, but the latter, and a large number of Stalinist arrivistes, remained in positions of power. And Stalin himself, with his long refusal to face the possibility of a German attack, was in final control.

When the German invasion was on the point of being launched, a leading commentator was doubtful “whether any consistent plan for the defense of the Soviet Union existed, even at this late hour….”³⁰

Stalin’s attitude towards the Nazi-Soviet Pact of 1939 is one of the most peculiar things about his entire career. The man who had never attached the slightest value to verbal assurances or paper promises does really seem to have thought, or hoped, that Hitler would not attack Russia. Even when overwhelming evidence was sent to him, by Soviet intelligence, by the British, by German deserters, that the Nazis were massing for attack, he gave strict orders that such reports should be treated as provocations. As far as can be seen, it was in the genuine hope of persuasion that he remarked to Schulenberg, “We must remain friends,” and told Colonel Krebs, “We will remain friends with you in any event.”³¹

During the 1939 to 1941 period, attacks on the British were encouraged, but no mention even of the word fascism was allowed. The Counselor of the Soviet Embassy in Paris, Nikolai Ivanov, was actually sentenced to five years for “anti-German views,” and the sentence was confirmed—doubtless through bureaucratic inefficiency—in September 1941!³²

As an old Soviet diplomat remarked, the two years gained by the Nazi-Soviet Pact were almost completely wasted. He commented sourly, “He suspected his own closest comrades, but he trusted Hitler.”³³

It has been said that so much genuine enmity had been focused on Trotsky that Hitler, in comparison, seemed a shadowy figure, a bogeyman for use in frightening the Party rather than a real threat. There may be an element of truth in this, psychologically speaking. But Stalin’s lack of contact with reality on the one point of the Nazi invasion had not been reflected in his attitude to Soviet–German relations during the earlier part of the Pact’s duration. In 1939 and 1940, the Soviet Union had bargained hard, had refused to make definite commitments, and, though providing the Germans with various services appropriate to an ally such as the U-boat “Base North” near Murmansk, had conducted even the lowest-level negotiations with all the self-centered closeness and suspiciousness later shown in relations with the Anglo-American allies of a subsequent phase of the war period. The complete withdrawal from reality in the face of unpleasant facts is very much the aberration of 1941.

It seems likely that Stalin, realizing the incapacity of his Army and his regime in the face of the Germans, hoped against hope at least for a further year or two’s grace. Everything had gone his way for years. He could scarcely, it seems, conceive of his luck failing. Be that as it may, the result of his attitude was the despairing and absurd messages which poured in from the frontier on 22 June—“We are being fired on. What shall we do?”

And yet the Soviet Army was larger in numbers, stronger in materiel, and at least as well equipped technically as the Germany invaders. There was only one element in which the armies were not comparable: the German Command, staff, and officer corps in general were of immensely superior quality. Although Hitler had removed a number of the higher officers, he had at least the sense to see that he could not fight a major war without a trained military cadre.

As the armies facing the Germans broke up under a task for which they had not been properly prepared or supported, Stalin reacted promptly. The Commander of the Western Front, Pavlov; his Chief of Staff, Klimovskikh; and his Signals and Artillery Commanders were shot. General Korobkov, commanding the battered Fourth Army, followed them. This did not save the three armies and four mechanized corps trapped between Minsk and Bialystok.

The Air Force, with 10,000 to 11,000 machines to the Luftwaffe’s 5,000,³⁴ was almost annihilated in the first days of the war. A large proportion of Soviet aircraft were not of modern type. And the other faults of Stalin’s rule in the Air Force reinforced the errors of industrial and design policy. First, training had been inadequate, and tactical methods were poor. Kesselring applied the term infanticide to the Luftwaffe’s destruction of Soviet bomber formations.

And all these long-established errors were compounded by Stalin’s last and most fateful blunder, the failure to believe in the imminence of attack. Large parts of the Air Force were caught on the ground and destroyed in the first hours. General Kopets, of the air arm, committed suicide, having lost 600 aircraft while imposing negligible damage on the Luftwaffe, and others were arrested and shot—for example, General Chernykh, commander of an aviation division in the Western Front, who had lost seven-eighths of his command, and General Ptukhin, commander of the Kiev District Air Force.³⁵ In all, between June and August 1941, about 8,500 Soviet planes were lost.³⁶

The Russians also had a great superiority in the number of tanks, 11,000 or 12,000 to 4,300,³⁷ and here design had not fallen behind. The original Soviet tank defeats can be attributed almost entirely to bad tactical methods and worse staff work.³⁸

In his biography of Stalin, Isaac Deutscher mentions that imprisoned officers (like survivors of the purged opposition) were “brought out of concentration camps and assigned to important work.”³⁹ This needs to be qualified.

Three hundred experienced officers were being held in the Lubyanka in October 1941 while at the front battalions were being commanded by lieutenants.⁴⁰ A Soviet account refers to two lists of “men inside” who were liquidated in October 1941 and July 1942, respectively, at times when Stalin “considered the situation to be desperate.” The October executions included, on the twenty-eighth of that month, and after severe torture, Colonel-General Shtern; three successive Heads of the Soviet Air Force—Loktionov, Smushkevich, and Rychagov—and a number of other senior officers, mainly artillery or Air Force (with three of their wives). They were shot without trial, on an administrative order from Beria.⁴¹

Moreover, a Soviet Marshal makes it clear that while some of the officers brought out of camps and rehabilitated gave good service, in many cases the men concerned had been ruined: “the moral, and often also the physical sufferings undergone in the prisons and camps had killed in them all the will, initiative and decisiveness necessary for a military man.” He gives the example of a general (a Civil War hero who had been wounded eleven times) who was arrested and sentenced in 1939 to twenty years’ imprisonment without any charges being presented apart from the simple formula “enemy of the people.” In a camp of “severe regime,” he became a bath attendant and was given five years more for stealing a few underclothes. He was released in 1943 and made Chief of Staff of an Army, but his sufferings had broken his character.⁴²

The “Horse Marshals” commanded in 1941—all three from the old First Cavalry Army. Timoshenko, in the center, proved reasonably competent, though he, too, suffered heavy losses. On the southern and northern flanks, Budenny and Voroshilov were merely catastrophic, especially the former. Stalin’s other protégé, Marshal Kulik, came to grief in a clumsy operation before Leningrad. General Tyulenev became involved in the disasters in the Ukraine. All four were removed, but none was shot (except, apparently, Kulik, but only after the war). As late as 1957, Tyulenev was defending Stalin’s Lwów operations of 1920, the old wound in the side of the Soviet Army which had festered so long and so desperately.

With superior Soviet resources and vastly lengthened German communications, it was still only possible to avoid total defeat for three reasons. First was the continued existence of further reserves. Second was Allied aid. Third, and most important, was the selection of better commanders. This could only be done in the course of the endless battles of the great retreat. The incompetents who had been put in to replace an adequate command in 1937 and 1938 were weeded out by disaster. A new and efficient command was created by natural selection in the struggle itself. It was purchased, in fact, with the lives of hundreds of thousands of Russian soldiers, with hundreds of miles of Russian territory, and with a great prolongation of the war.

Tukhachevsky’s military doctrines were reinstated in the directives of the Stavka for the counter-offensive at Moscow in 1941. The turn had come. But, as a Soviet Army officer once remarked to the author, it was owing to the purges that the road to Berlin involved the long and painful detour via Stalingrad.

Far from the Great Purge eliminating a Soviet fifth column, it laid the foundation for one throughout the country in 1941 to 1945. This was the first war fought by Russia in which a large force of its citizens joined the other side.

Among the more brilliant younger officers who had survived the Purge was General Vlasov. In the maneuvers of 1940, his Ninety-ninth Division had proved the best. A tall, powerful man with a stentorian voice and a fine flow of invective, he was, Ilya Ehrenburg tells us, popular with the troops and in favor with Stalin, who could not recognize a genuine potential “traitor.”⁴³

Vlasov, when captured, organized the Russian troops on the German side, in spite of great difficulties with the Nazi authorities. His program shows that he was entirely out of sympathy with Nazism, and only concerned with a democratic Russia—he was comparable, in fact, to the Irish revolutionaries of 1916 who sought German support against Britain, or the Burmese and Indonesians of the Second World War who came to agreements (or tried to) with the Japanese against the West. As a Polish prisoner in Russia remarks more generally, of the expectations in the labor camps:

I think with horror and shame of a Europe divided into two parts by the line of the Bug, on one side of which millions of Soviet slaves prayed for liberation by the armies of Hitler, and on the other millions of victims of German concentration camps awaited deliverance by the Red Army as their last hope.⁴⁴

Ehrenburg’s implication that Stalin was effective at dealing with imaginary traitors is sound. In 1941, he destroyed the last remnants of alternative political leadership. Antipov was apparently shot on 24 August. In September, the survivors of the 1938 Trial still in prison—Rakovsky, Pletnev, Bessonov—were retried and shot, as was Maria Spiridonova, the Social Revolutionary leader. In October, two more political figures, former members of the Central Committee Goloshchekin and Bulatov, were shot with the Shtern–Loktionov group of officers.

It seems that such acts were widespread. A Pole mentions, in the Yertsevo camp, two generals, four lawyers, two journalists, four students, a high-ranking NKVD officer, two former camp administrators, and five other assorted nobodies being selected and shot in June 1941.⁴⁵

In fact, the outbreak of war was made the occasion for a general increase in police activity and power. Individual grudges were paid off, and potential malcontents dealt with—as with the case of the widow of the Deputy People’s Commissar of the NKVD in the Ukraine, Brunivoy, who had died under interrogation. She was arrested in 1937 and severely interrogated, with permanent injury to the kidneys and several broken ribs. She was released in 1939 and rehabilitated. She believed throughout that everything that had happened was the result of hostile elements in the NKVD, and wrote to Stalin and Vyshinsky to this effect. At the beginning of 1941, the NKVD officials in her case were tried and sentenced to short terms of imprisonment for the use of torture. She felt herself completely justified. Two days after the German invasion, on 24 June 1941, she disappeared once more.⁴⁶

When the Russians withdrew before the German advance, attempts were made to evacuate NKVD prisoners. Not only was their labor needed, but they were, of course, expected to sympathize with liberators, even German ones. The retreat was so disorganized, especially in the Ukraine, that evacuation was often impossible. Killings on a mass scale took place. These are reported from Minsk, Smolensk, Kiev, Kharkov, Dniepropetrovsk, Zaporozhe, and throughout the Baltic States. Near Nalchik, in the Caucasus, there was a molybdenum kombinat operated by the NKVD with convict labor. The prisoners were machine-gunned on the orders of the Kabardino-Balkar Republic’s NKVD Commissar.⁴⁷ There is another report of a group of 29,000 prisoners accumulated in the Soviet retreat. When threatened with a further German advance and the abandonment of the camp at Olginskaya, the NKVD released all those serving less than five years and on 31 October 1941 shot the remainder.⁴⁸

More generally, we are told that mass shootings took place in the camps in November 1941, when the Germans were at the gates of Moscow; in early June 1942; and in September 1942, when Stalingrad seemed about to fal1.⁴⁹

And yet the war was also an occasion for the relaxation of certain pressures. Religion, for example, was no longer persecuted. The public reversion to the old patriotism heartened at least the Russians. Above all, there was everywhere hope that once the war finished, things would become easier: the collective-farm system would be abolished; the Terror would end.

Even apart from the sanguine mood of the people, the war brought a feeling of release, as Pasternak’s characters remark:

You could volunteer for front-line service in a punitive battalion, and if you came out alive you were free. After that, attack after attack, mile after mile of electrified barbed wire, mines, mortars, month after month of artillery barrage. They called our company the death squad. It was practically wiped out. How and why I survived, I don’t know. And yet—imagine—all that utter hell was nothing, it was bliss compared to the horrors of the concentration camp, and not because of the material conditions but for some other reason….

… It was not only felt by men in your position, in concentration camps, but by everyone without exception, at home and at the front, and they all took a deep breath and flung themselves into the furnace of this deadly, liberating struggle with real joy, with rapture.⁵⁰

THE CONSOLIDATION OF STALINISM

But in proposing the toast at the victory banquet in the Kremlin in June 1945, Stalin spoke significantly of the “ordinary” people as “cogs in the wheels of the great State apparatus.”⁵¹ His intention, completely fulfilled, was the restoration of the old machine.

In the same month, it was made clear that the confession–trial system had been abandoned after 1938 because it was, in the then circumstances, no longer necessary, rather than because Stalin thought it unconvincing or useless. Sixteen leaders of the Polish underground Government and Army were placed on trial. The accused were headed by General Okulicki (who had taken over command of the Home Army following the surrender of General Bor Komorowski after the heroic Warsaw Rising) and Jankowski, the chief delegate in Poland of the Polish Government. (Okulicki, then underground, had been asked to contact the Soviet Command, with a guarantee of safe conduct, but was arrested when he presented himself.) They and thirteen of their fourteen co-defendants pleaded guilty to charges of anti-Soviet activity. This was the last of the great public trials to be held in Moscow. Its aim was to discredit the Polish Resistance and to bring pressure on the Polish Government-in-exile to enter into a coalition with the Communist-sponsored Lublin Committee, then ruling Soviet-occupied Poland, on terms adequate to secure Communist predominance.

Although no more such trials were seen in Moscow, all over Eastern Europe the old method was employed, under direct Russian control, first (as in Russia) against non-Party elements, such as the Agrarian leader Nikola Petkov in Bulgaria and Cardinal Mindszenty in Hungary, and later with Communist leaders like Laszlo Rajk in Hungary and Traicho Kostov in Bulgaria.

The system of public confession to entirely false charges came to an abrupt halt in December 1949fn3 when Kostov, Secretary of the Central Committee of the Bulgarian Communist Party, retracted his confession in open court and maintained this stand throughout the trial.

Kostov refused to change his mind in spite of the moral indignation of the court and the tearful appeals of his co-accused. Kostov was perhaps in a stronger position than most accused in earlier trials; he must long ago have become accustomed to the idea of death and torture in pursuit of his political aims. His conduct under “fascist” interrogation had been held up as an example to the Bulgarian Communist Party. He was still close to the period of his illegal life and had not—as perhaps Bukharin and others had—gone to seed after years of comfort. Moreover, he knew that the bulk of his party was silently behind him, and thus, perhaps, did not feel quite the isolation of the Russian oppositionists. In addition, he seems to have been particularly tough; in him, typical Bulgarian mulishness and resilience were developed to a high degree.

In Russia itself, there were almost no death sentences for three or four years after the war, apart from those on a few leading Vlasovites. Genuine collaborators with the Germans had been rounded up by the tens of thousands, and merely sentenced to labor camps, where they were joined by the Soviet soldiers returned from internment in Germany. In 1946 and 1947, a great wave of arrests struck at Jews, Army officers, and others, and soon afterwards all those who had been released in the meanwhile were again arrested. This reversal of an act of “rotten liberalism” was given official authorization by a decree of 1950, said to have been adopted “on the initiative of Beria and Abakumov.”⁵²

The camps were at first more deadly than ever. Of those sentenced in 1945 and 1946, few survived by 1953. The famine of 1947⁵³ was, of course, reflected in the camp rations, with the usual results. By the beginning of the 1950s, however, a reform and rationalization of the forced-labor system led to a drop in the death rate. Since almost no releases took place (one Kotlas commandant is quoted as saying that he had been in his post for eight years and had released one prisoner),⁵⁴ the camp population mounted, by Stalin’s death, to its probable maximum of approximately 12 million.

This general consolidation of the labor-camp system reflected a consolidation of the whole State and economy into the form Stalin had evidently been aiming at since his achievement of full power. In the new society, forced labor was evidently intended as permanent economic form.

What Stalin had established was essentially a command economy and a command society. This applied at every level. The collective farms, with their tractors, were producing less food than the ill-equipped muzhik of 1914. But they were now economically and politically under control. They could no longer hold the market to ransom.

And so it was the whole way up the scale. Everywhere, orders from the center were not merely binding in principle, but enforceable in practice. There was no significant area in which the important decisions could not be taken in the Kremlin.

The resemblances between this and “Socialism,” as Marx and others had envisaged it, were, formally speaking, not negligible. The capitalist no longer existed. The “petit-bourgeois” individual peasant had gone. The State controlled the economy. For those who held that in a modern industrial society the absence of capitalists could only mean Socialism, this was enough. Defined more positively, Socialism had indeed always had one further characteristic—in effect, its very keystone. The control of the State by the proletariat had been regarded as the essential. In Stalin’s Russia, there was no sign at all of any such thing. This point was got over by verbal means. All the phraseology of the Workers’ State was employed, in every conceivable context.

One may wonder how far Stalin thought that he had produced the Socialism the securing of which he had, as a young man, been converted to. There was indeed no longer any “ruling class.” Although Stalin created (and admitted he was creating) a large privileged stratum, it had no rights of ownership over the means of production. Every privilege was held, in the last analysis, at the whim of the ruler.

In this unitary system, politics as such had disappeared, except in the form of intrigue at the highest level for Stalin’s favor. In a sense, this may sound paradoxical; there was more “political” agitation and propaganda in the press and on the radio, in factory speeches and official literature, than anywhere in the world. But it was totally passive. It consisted solely of the handing down of, and working up of enthusiasms for, the decisions of the General Secretary. A new generation of industrial managers had risen, competent in the techniques of administration, in which the threat of the forced-labor camp spurred on the directors, just as a piecework system drove the worker to his limits by the threat of hunger. The new industrialists—even those at the highest level, like Tevosyan, Malyshev, and Saburov—were little more than the unquestioning technicians of the new scheme of things.

The planning system, which had been quite chaotic in the 1930s, now settled into a new rationality; increases in productivity—at least in the heavy industrial production which was Stalin’s main interest—at last became regular. The system had huge wastages and inefficiencies. Its planning was, in many fields, largely mythical. And the general unworkability of its distribution network was made up for by a large extralegal market. But, all in all, the economy Stalin had created was at least an operating reality. Its built-in wastages were not great enough to prevent achievement of its main aim—the continuing investment in industry of a high proportion of the national income. They were, however, great enough to hold the expansion bought at such sacrifice down to a level lower than that of various capitalist countries.

Detailed comparisons were in any case impossible to make, owing to the secrecy and distortion of the Soviet statistical system of the time. But what provided confidence to the Party elite, and gained the admiration of certain intellectuals abroad, was the more general fact that industry had been “created” in a fairly backward country. It was hoped that the method might be applicable in the really backward lands of the East.

But the old Russia had not been all that backward. It had already been the fourth industrial power before the Revolution. In the reign of Nicholas II, the railway network had doubled in length in ten years, and there had been a great upsurge in the mining and metal industries. As Lenin said:

… The progress in the mining industry is more rapid in Russia than in Western Europe and even in North America…. In the last few years (1886–1896) the production of cast metal has tripled…. The development of capitalism in the younger countries is accelerated by the example and aid of the older.⁵⁵

And the trend continued right up to 1914.

Since 1930, Stalin had enlarged the industrial base. But he had done so by very wasteful methods—far more wasteful economically, and in human suffering, than those of the original Industrial Revolution. He had not made the best use of his resources, solving the problem of rural overpopulation by removing precisely the most productive section of the peasantry, and wasting much of the original skilled engineering force by decimating it on false charges of sabotage. (It is true, indeed, that a high proportion of Russia’s skill had been killed or had emigrated during the Revolution itself.) Even in 1929 it was reasonably clear, economically speaking, that milder measures could have produced equally good results, as they had in Meiji Japan, for example.

As long ago as Khrushchev’s time, Kommunist, the main theoretical and political organ of the Central Committee, summed up the charges against Stalin’s planning system. He personally interfered with the work of planning organizations, enforced arbitrary goals, and radically changed plans in a way that made whole sections of them meaningless. He thus inflicted lasting harm on the Soviet planning work and on the Soviet economy. Indeed (Kommunist went on), it was Stalin who was responsible for lasting troubles in the Soviet economy which, to cover up his personal guilt, he used to ascribe to difficulties allegedly inherent in the rapid growth of the economy. In particular, “arbitrary planning caused immense damage to agriculture which still suffers from the results of the cult of Stalin’s personality.”⁵⁶

Few would now maintain that Stalin’s method was the only, or the best, way available—even to a one-party regime—to attain the degree of increased industrialization actually realized. But in any case, the basic economic benefits obtained, or supposedly obtained, by the Stalin regime were already in hand before the Purge proper started. Economically, in fact, there is no doubt that the Purge was disadvantageous: it removed a high proportion of the most skilled industrial leaders, from Pyatakov down; and at the same time, the camps were filled from an already overstretched labor pool. The rationale was that not of economics, but of despotism. With all the incentives to attain, or at least claim, the opposite, economic advance admittedly slowed down in 1938 to 1940.⁵⁷

The lesson might seem to be that the use of terror in conditions when it may seem to some degree economically effective is nevertheless not a good idea even economically. For it cannot simply be switched off. It builds up its own interests and institutions, its own cadres and habits of mind. Any good it may be (in this sense) at a particular moment is likely to be offset at a later stage when it is no longer applicable, but still applied.

But even if one were to accept the Stalin method as a whole, writing off later losses as the inevitable payment for earlier successes, other issues arise. Stalinism might be one way of attaining industrialization, just as cannibalism is one way of attaining a high-protein diet. The desirability of the result hardly seems to balance the objections.

Meanwhile, Stalin pervaded every sphere. In philosophy, for example, he was celebrated as a profound critic of Hegel, as the first to elucidate certain pronouncements of Aristotle, as the only man to bring out the full significance of Kant’s theories. On the tercentenary of Spinoza’s birth, Pravda had put in several quotations from Stalin, having nothing to do with Spinoza or even philosophy.⁵⁸

At a Moscow conference of experts held in 1963, a historian complained that in the postwar period “it was impossible frankly to share one’s thoughts and doubts even with one’s comrades, for fear of placing them in a difficult position.”⁵⁹ Academician Evgeni M. Zhukov spoke of the “psychological trauma” suffered by historians who were “systematically imbued with the idea that theoretically sound works could only be written by a select vozhd and that profound thoughts and fresh deeds could proceed only from him.” Thus “for almost twenty years—the period of the formation of the consciousness of a whole generation—independent creative thought by ‘ordinary mortals’ in the sphere of theory was placed in doubt.”

A doctor, denouncing the effect on Soviet medicine, summed up:

The main harm caused to science by the cult of the personality lay in the proclamation of a single opinion … “an inexhaustible fount of wisdom” as the supreme truth.…It is not accidental that in the course of discussions of concrete scientific problems, one concept or another was not verified by the experiments of its proposers but by references to scientific heritage, by mere quotation from the works of others.⁶⁰

In the even more sensitive field of economics, independent thought was naturally treated with greater rigor. The Director of the Institute of Economics of the USSR Academy of Sciences remarked in 1962:

Many Communists can still remember the havoc wreaked in the forties on the journal Problems of Economics for publishing an article by Professor Kubanin. In this article he expressed the completely correct thought that we were lagging behind America in labor productivity in agriculture. The great scholar and major expert on the economics of agriculture paid for this correct thought with his life, while the journal was closed for its “heresy.”⁶¹

The effect of the Stalinist attitude at the lower level is adumbrated by the First Secretary of the Georgian Communist Party, Mgeladze, who summoned workers from the Institute of Marxism-Leninism and the Institute of History of the Georgian Academy of Science and had them write a book on the history of the Party in Transcaucasia. When he was given the result, he announced, “I, as the author, like it. But be sure if there are any mistakes in it, you, dear friends, will all go to prison.”⁶²

Again, Stalin happened to say in an aside that the Azerbaijanis were obviously descended from the Medes. Although there is no basis for such a notion, it became established doctrine among the historians. Linguists spent fifteen years trying to find Median words in Azeri. “Eventually thirty-five dubious Median words were found, although the Median language itself is mythical.”⁶³

These few examples—which omit, for instance, the major scandal of Lysenkoism in Soviet biology—must serve as a general impression of the effect of Stalin’s new regime on the intellect.

In the less stormy atmosphere of the post-Yezhov years, moreover, more careful attention could be paid to thought-crime and face-crime. An authoritative instruction, typical of many, ran:

One must not content oneself with merely paying attention to what is being said, for that may well be in complete harmony with the Party program. One must pay attention also to the manner—to the sincerity, for example, with which a schoolmistress recites a poem the authorities regard as doubtful, or the pleasure revealed by a critic who goes into detail about a play he professes to condemn.⁶⁴

The last years of Stalin’s life saw a major, though unpublicized, series of purges. In 1949–1950 came a new “Leningrad Case.” Voznesensky, member of the Politburo; A. A. Kuznetsov, Secretary of the Central Committee; and other leaders were shot. About 3,000 senior Party members in Leningrad were arrested, and treated with particular brutality, many of them being shot; and there were similar purges elsewhere. In 1952 and 1953, leading Jewish intellectuals perished by the hundred, and a wave of arrests culminated in the Doctors’ Plot, with Stalin ordering the investigators, “Beat, beat and beat again,” as Khrushchev tells us.

Stalin’s execution of the main Yiddish writers in the “Crimean Affair” of 1952 is among the most extraordinary of all State acts. As Manès Sperber has said, these were Communists who had submitted to all the imperatives of the regime and of Stalin. “Like the others, they had betrayed their friends and their brothers every time that fidelity to the Party demanded it; but they were to die because they remained incapable of betraying their language and their literature.”

Not long before Stalin died, Pravda, by an extraordinary exception, published an article by Herbert Morrison, the British Foreign Secretary.⁶⁵ It calmly but cogently set forth democratic objections to the Soviet system. An answer appeared at once, saying that Morrison was asking for freedom of speech for those it would be wrong to give it to—“the criminals who … killed… Kirov.” It now turns out that it was precisely those people, and no others, who had freedom of speech.

The Stalinist version of the events of the Purge was, of course, the only one permitted in Russia itself. Many people there knew at first hand that this version was false, but anyone susceptible of indoctrination by terror or by sheer pressure of propaganda fell in with the official line.

Abroad, things were different. The West was not forced to accept the Stalinist version. Freedom of judgment and freedom of information prevailed, then as now. This did not prevent an extraordinary degree of success for the official Communist view.

FOREIGN MISAPPREHENSIONS

If thou canst not realize the Ideal thou shalt at least idealize the Real.

Calverley

During the Purges, a young English Communist, John Cornford, published a poem:

SERGEI MIRONOVICH, KIROV

(Assassinated in Leningrad, December 1934)

Nothing is ever certain, nothing is ever safe,

To-day is overturning yesterday’s settled good.

Everything dying keeps a hungry grip on life.

Nothing is ever born without screaming and blood.

Understand the weapon, understand the wound:

What shapeless past was hammered to action by his deeds,

Only in constant action was his constant certainty found.

He will throw a longer shadow as time recedes.⁶⁶

Cornford, with a first-class record at Cambridge University, went to Spain in 1936 and was killed near Córdoba, with the International Brigade, at the end of that year. There can hardly be a better illustration of the way in which the generous impulse in Western Communism could be befouled by Stalinism. The young man who gave his life in the cause of a supposed revolutionary humanism had been led by his allegiances to produce what is little more than a versification of Stalin’s theory that the class struggle grows more bitter as the opponents of Communism become weaker, using as its text a crime allegedly committed by counterrevolutionaries, but actually by Stalin himself.

Time having, as Cornford suggests, receded, what has become plain is that not even high intelligence and a sensitive spirit are of any help once the facts of a situation are deduced from a political theory, rather than vice versa.

Although Cornford’s case is instructive, and not only as regards his own time, he was not among those actively responsible for propagating and compounding the falsehood; he was, rather, at the receiving end. Between those in the West who accepted the Stalinist version of events and those who originally issued that version, there stood a number of journalists, ambassadors, lawyers, and students of Russia, whose direct and admitted duty it was to study the facts in detail and pronounce on them. Not every Western Communist, or every left-wing intellectual, could be expected to read with a critical eye the official reports of the Great Trials. Those who did, or who had actually attended them, and who from incompetence and blind (or cynical) partisanship transmitted a false analysis to the larger audience, may reasonably be thought somewhat blameworthy. A few examples of inadequate skepticism have already been noted.

Any recorder of these events must be tempted to compile a vast sottisier of misjudgments made by his compatriots and others in the West. It is scarcely a point that should be ignored, but it has been thought best to give no more than a few examples of the type of error which was made by many with high claims to clear judgment, moral enlightenment, and political knowledge. The contemporary effect on world opinion was an important aspect of the whole Purge operation. Stalin had himself considered it when he ordered the Zinoviev Trial: “He is not impressed by the argument that public opinion in Western Europe must be taken into consideration. To all such arguments he replies contemptuously: ‘Never mind, they’ll swallow it.’”⁶⁷

The fact that so many did “swallow” it was thus certainly a factor in making the whole Purge possible. The trials, in particular, would have carried little weight unless validated by some foreign, and so “independent,” commentators.

Foreign intervention had, as late as the mid-1930s, been able to secure certain results, particularly in view of Stalin’s post-1935 policy of alliances. For example, in June 1935, the International Congress of Writers for the Defense of Culture was held in Paris. It was intended as a large-scale Popular Front occasion. Magdalene Paz insisted on raising the case of Victor Serge, arrested in 1932. After an uproar, in which she was supported by Salvemini and Gide, she was allowed to speak. The Soviet delegation consisted of Pasternak, Nikolai Tikhonov, Ilya Ehrenburg, Mikhail Koltsov, and the playwright Kirshon—the two last to perish shortly. Apart from Pasternak, these Soviet delegates resisted the debate strenuously and accused Serge of complicity in the Kirov murder, which had taken place two years after his arrest.⁶⁸ Afterward, Gide went and conveyed the writers’ displeasure to the Soviet Ambassador.

Serge was released at the end of the year. This is an almost unique occasion on which foreign opinion was able to influence Stalin. It seems to show, however, that if articulate Western opinion had condemned the Zinoviev Trial with sufficient unanimity and force, it is conceivable that Stalin might, in this Popular Front period, have acted at least slightly less ruthlessly. In fact, those who “swallowed” the trials can hardly be acquitted of a certain degree of complicity in the continuation and exacerbation of the torture and execution of innocent men.

The facts that were concealed from (or by) progressive opinion in the West were twofold: the existence and extent of the mass slaughter and imprisonment; and the inconsistency and falsehood of the public trials.

From the start, there were three basic objections to the evidence in the trials. First, the alleged plots were totally out of character with the accused leaders, who had always opposed individual assassination, and were now, moreover, charged also with having been enemy agents throughout their careers. Second, the allegations were often inherently absurd—like the charge against Zelensky that he had put nails into the masses’ butter with a view to undermining Soviet health. Third, some of the stories told in court were of events abroad, which could be checked; these contained demonstrable falsehoods—a meeting at a nonexistent hotel in Copenhagen, a landing at a Norwegian airfield during a month when no landings had taken place.

In the West, the facts were readily available. Hundreds of articles and books were published in which all these points were clearly and flatly demonstrated. Trotsky, the one accused at liberty, exposed the frame-up with incisive skill. The distinguished Commission headed by Professor Dewey examined the whole evidence in the most judicious and meticulous fashion, and published its findings. It was not a question of political argument, properly speaking, but of facts. Yet in spite of everything, these went unheard among large sections of well-informed people. There was no reasonable excuse for believing the Stalinist story. The excuses which can be advanced are irrational, though often couched in the formulas of intensive rationalization.

The Communist Parties everywhere simply transmitted the Soviet line. Communist intellectuals, some of them better informed about Soviet conditions and more inclined to frame their own answers, reacted variously. There were those who simply repressed the difficult material. Stephen Spender quotes an English Communist friend, when asked what he thought of the trials, as replying, “What trials? I have given up thinking about such things long ago.”⁶⁹

More representative was the attitude of Bertolt Brecht, who remarked to Sidney Hook at the time of the first trials, “The more innocent they are, the more they deserve to die.”⁷⁰ Meanwhile, he had written a play about Nazi Germany: a father and mother are worried because friends of theirs are under investigation, and they fear the block warden. The husband, a teacher, does not know if they have anything against him at the school. “I am ready to teach whatever they want me to teach. But what do they want me to teach? If only I were sure of that.” They worry about whether to put Hitler’s picture in a more prominent position, or whether that will look like a confession of guilt.

Wife:

But there’s nothing against you, is there?

Husband:

There’s something against everybody. Everybody is suspected. It’s enough if someone expresses any suspicion of you, to make you a suspected person.

And later one remarks, “Since when have they needed witnesses?”⁷¹

But the main theme of the play—taken as completely destroying the moral basis of Nazism—is the father’s and mother’s fear that their schoolboy son may have denounced them. This was at a time when, as Brecht evidently knew, the same sort of thing was going on in the Soviet Union. In fact, there was a widely praised and celebrated Soviet example of sons denouncing their parents. During collectivization, Pavlik Morozov, leader of his village group of young Communist “Pioneers” who were acting as auxiliaries in the attack on the peasantry, “unmasked” his father—who had previously been president of the village soviet but had “fallen under the influence of kulak relations.” The father was shot, and on 3 September 1932 a group of peasants, including the boy’s uncle, in turn killed the son, at the age of fourteen—thus, as it were, anticipating Stalin’s age limit for executions. All the killers were themselves executed, and young Morozov became, until very recently, a great hero of the Komsomol. The Palace of Culture of the Red Pioneers in Moscow was named after him.⁷² Even in the Khrushchev period, the Soviet press celebrated the “sacred and dear” Pavlik Morozov Museum in his own village: “In this timbered house was held the court at which Pavlik unmasked his father who had sheltered the kulaks. Here are reliquaries dear to the heart of every inhabitant of Gerasimovka.”⁷³

In Brecht’s own case, it is noteworthy that a close connection, his former mistress the actress Carola Neher (who had played the lead in the Dreigroschenoper), was arrested in Russia and never seen again.

As Hubert Luthy has argued, Brecht himself was not attracted to Communism as part of the “Workers’ Movement, which he had never known, but by a deep urge for a total authority, a total submission to a total power, the new Byzantine State Church—immutable, hierarchical, founded on the infallibility of the leader.”⁷⁴ His political and semipolitical work invariably shows this pleasure at rolling in the muck for the sake of the idea. It seems to represent an extreme and degenerate version of Pyatakov’s view of the Party.

It is perhaps natural that committed Communists should in principle have accepted and propagated untruths, in the old tradition of “pious fraud.” But curiously enough, such a consideration seems partially to apply also to many elements of the non-Communist Left. Not in such a clear-cut manner, not so fraudulently or so piously, they yet tended to temper criticism, to put the best complexion on, or ignore, refractory events.

There was, indeed, much resistance among the tougher-minded Left. Edmund Wilson, reading the charges against Zinoviev and Kamenev while still in Russia, saw at once that they were faked. In the United States, the Dewey Commission had as its lawyer John F. Finerty, who had appeared for the defense in the Mooney and Sacco–Vanzetti trials. The Liberal Manchester Guardian was the strongest and most effective of British exposers of the trials. The orthodox Labour Party press did the same; that party also put out Frederick Adler’s forthright and accurate pamphlet on the subject. And on the extreme Left, some of the most effective exposure was done by Emrys Hughes in the Scottish Forward. In fact, some Leftists (and not only Trotkyists and so on, who had a direct partisan interest) were perfectly clear-headed about the matter, while some people opposed to the principles of Communism accepted the official versions.

But on the whole, in the atmosphere of the late 1930s, fascism was the enemy, and a partial logic repressed or rejected any criticism of its supposed main enemy, the USSR. The Western capitals thronged with “the thousands of painters and writers and doctors and lawyers and debutantes chanting a diluted version of the Stalinist line.”⁷⁵

Appeals in favor of the trials were made by various Western writers, Feuchtwanger, Barbusse—even the sensitive Gandhi fan, Romain Rolland. In the United States, a manifesto attacking the Dewey Commission was signed by a number of authors, poets, professors, and artists—Theodore Dreiser, Granville Hicks,fn4 Corliss Lamont, and others.

Speaking of the attitude of many British intellectuals to the trials, Julian Symons remarks on the “monstrous incongruities that they willingly swallowed.” He adds: “But they had not been deceived. In relation to the Soviet Union they had deceived themselves, and in the end one has to pay for such self-deceits.”⁷⁶

In the non-Communist, Popular Front–style Left, there were signs of unease. Britain’s leading journal of the intellectual Left, the New Statesman, found the first trial “unconvincing,” yet added, “We do not deny … that the confessions may have contained a substratum of truth.” On the 1937 Trial, it said, “Few would now maintain that all or any of them were completely innocent.” On the 1938 Trial, which it claimed was “undoubtedly very popular in the U.S.S.R.,” it said that the confessions remained baffling, “whether we regard them as true or false,” but that it could be concluded that “there had undoubtedly been much plotting in the U.S.S.R.”—curiously combining a sense of the incredibility of the charges with a willingness to believe them.

One of the achievements of Stalinism was, in effect, that in spite of the fact that plenty of information was available contradicting the official picture, it was possible to impose the latter upon journalists, sociologists, and other visitors by methods which, on the face of it, seem crude and obvious, but which worked splendidly. Tourists visited Russia on a bigger scale in the Yezhov period than ever before. They saw nothing. The nighttime arrests, the torture chambers of the Lefortovo and the crowded cells of the Butyrka, the millions of prisoners cold and hungry in the great camps of the north were all hidden from them. The only dramatic scenes were the three great public trials. And these, too, were strictly controlled and did not depart much from a prepared script.

For if access to Russia was extensive, it was also imperfect. The Soviet Government at this time maintained its model prison at Bolshevo, which many foreign visitors were shown. The Webbs give it a laudatory account,⁷⁷ and it had also attracted favorable comment from D. N. Pritt, Harold Laski, and many others. One friendly visitor had the opportunity of gaining a rather broader view: Jerzy Gliksman, who, as a progressive member of the Warsaw City Council before the war, visited and reported enthusiastically on Bolshevo and the new humanitarian methods of criminology. A few years later, he found himself in camps more representative of Soviet penal practice.⁷⁸

Other prisoners report occasionally passing through the model blocks—known to prisoners as “Intourist Prisons”—which were shown to foreign sociologists and journalists. Herling,⁷⁹ while in an ordinary cell in the Leningrad Transit Prison (which he describes as better than usual, with only seventy prisoners in a cell intended for twenty), was taken by chance through a model wing—evidently that described by Lenka von Koerber in her enthusiastic book about the Soviet prison system, Soviet Russia Fights Crime.

On the other end of the judicial process, the trials themselves, we have already quoted one or two Western reports. Of others, that of the eminent British pro-Communist lawyer Pritt, who attended the Zinoviev Trial, is especially interesting, since in his autobiography published in 1966, long after the Khrushchev revelations, he wrote that he still had “a Socialist belief that a Socialist state would not try people unless there was a strong case against them.” He added, “What the Soviet views are now … I don’t know.”⁸⁰

Every journalist Pritt spoke to thought the trial fair, and, he remarks, “certainly every foreign observer thought the same.” This is not so, of course, but the fact that even considerable partisanship could suggest it is presumably a sign that far too many did think so. One can certainly detect in some of the journalists, in particular, a certain professional vanity—that they could be duped was inconceivable. Then, once committed, a sort of blindness came over them.

Walter Duranty of the New York Times spoke Russian, had been in Russia for years, and knew some of the accused. For years, he had built a disgraceful career on consciously misleading an important section of American opinion. He now described Ulrikh as “a hard judge but a just one”; said, “No-one who heard Pyatakof or Muralof could doubt for a moment that what they said was true”; and concluded, “The future historian will probably accept the Stalinist version.”⁸¹ He argued that Muralov and Pyatakov were so “impervious to pressure” that their confessions could not have been false, and found one of the strongest proofs of Pyatakov’s guilt to be the fact that he was “the brains of heavy industry” and therefore Stalin would not have killed him unless his crimes were beyond pardon. As we have seen, this sort of common sense did not, in fact, apply.

Duranty’s argument about Gamarnik’s suicide is another example of the muddled advocacy thought acceptable in the period: “His suicide … proves that he had been engaged in some deal with the Germans.”⁸² Of the other military conspirators, Duranty argued that “they confessed” without long preparation, and this was an indication of the truth of the charges, while it also showed that confession was not necessarily the product of long interrogation. But of course the evidence that the Generals had “confessed” was simply that Stalin’s press said they had done so! The trial was not public.

Professor Owen Lattimore was another noted apologist for the Stalin and similar regimes. In his Pacific Affairs, he wrote of Yezhov: “As to the suggestion that the new head of the secret service is likely to abuse his power just as Yagoda did, it is obvious that the publicity given in the Soviet Union itself to Yagoda’s turpitude is a safeguard against any such thing”; and he described the trials themselves as a triumph for democracy on the grounds that they could only “give the ordinary citizen more courage to protest, loudly, whenever he finds himself being victimized by ‘someone in the Party’ or ‘someone in the Government.’ That sounds to me like democracy.”⁸³

Not only Leftists and journalists wrote this sort of thing. The American Ambassador Joseph Davies reported to the Secretary of State that there was “proof … beyond reasonable doubt to justify the verdict of guilty of treason.”⁸⁴

During wartime lectures, Davies used to get a laugh, which he greatly appreciated, to his answer to questions about fifth columnists in Russia: “There aren’t any, they shot them all.” Both parts of this piece of gallows wit are untrue. The men shot were not fifth columnists. And fifth columnists rose by the thousand, even in spite of the repulsive policies of the Germans. Most of them were, moreover, people who would never, under a moderately popular regime, have thought of going over to the enemy. Stalin’s policies created a vast pool of potential treason which, had the Nazis not been foolish as well as foul, might well have decided the war.

This sort of reporting is more or less ephemeral. We should perhaps take more serious and studious treatments as still more reprehensible. Scholars and Russian experts were duped to the same degree as journalists and lawyers. When Beatrice and Sidney Webb examined Soviet matters, and put their conclusions into their vast tome Soviet Communism: A New Civilization, the Constitution much impressed them. So did the constitutions and the statutes of the Party, the trade unions, the consumer cooperatives, the collective farms. And, indeed, if these documents had ever been put into operation, they might have produced the society the Webbs thought they saw. It doubtless never occurred to the Webbs, brought up in Britain, that official documents do not necessarily bear much relation to fact. As it is, their book is to be regarded less as an account of a real country than as a successor to the works of Sir Thomas More, Campanella, Plato, Harrington, and William Morris. It was unfortunate—and this, of course, applied not only to the Webbs—that the perfectly natural human activity of constructing Utopias should, through various misunderstandings, have been projected on to a real community with so little claim to it.

The Webbs assert flatly that Kirov’s assassin “was discovered to have secret connections with conspiratorial circles of ever-widening range.” On the executions immediately following the assassination, they say that those shot did not seem to have been proven accomplices in the assassination “or the conspiracies associated therewith,” but that they were “undoubtedly guilty of illegal entry and inexcusably bearing arms and bombs.”⁸⁵ “Undoubtedly” seems a strong word, when the sole evidence was a brief announcement to that effect in the Soviet press.

They describe the Moscow trials as “a tragic hangover from the violence of the revolution and the civil war.”⁸⁶ Of course, there is a sense in which all these events are connected, but the image does not seem appropriate as it stands. A hangover which suddenly reaches its climax sixteen years after the events supposed to have caused it requires some special explanation.

The Webbs comment, truly though not perhaps in the sense in which they meant it, that the trials produced some international revulsion against the Soviet Union and that therefore “the Soviet Government must have had strong grounds for the action which has involved such unwelcome consequences.” Claiming to attempt “a detached and philosophic interpretation” of the trials, they say that the whole manner of the confessions was convincing, and that “careful perusal of the full reports of the proceedings” left them with the same impression, though they express a reservation about Trotsky.⁸⁷

They explain the confessions as due to Russian prisoners

behaving naturally and sensibly, as Englishmen would were they not virtually compelled by their highly artificial legal system to go through a routine which is useful to the accused only when there is some doubt as to the facts or as to the guilt or innocence of the conduct in question.⁸⁸

This curious view of the comparability of the Soviet and British legal systems was shared by Professor Harold Laski, who noted that “basically I did not observe much difference between the general character of a trial in Russia and in this country.” In Vyshinsky, with whom he had a long discussion, he found “a man whose passion was law reform…. He was doing what an ideal Minister of Justice would do if we had such a person in Great Britain—forcing his colleagues to consider what is meant by actual experience of the law in action.”⁸⁹ This was indeed published before Vyshinsky’s great days. But trials had already taken place in Russia, and with Vyshinsky’s active participation, which might have produced qualms.

Another serious student of Russia (and of agriculture in particular) was Sir John Maynard, from whom it had been possible to hide the Ukrainian famine. On the trials, he remarked, “However much falsity of detail there may be, the Trials of the leading personages in 1936–38 were substantially justified by facts: and were probably the means of saving the U.S.S.R. from an attempted revolution which would have given to the Nazi Government an earlier opportunity.”⁹⁰

Sir Bernard Pares, a serious historian and long-established expert on all things Russian, was equally duped. The later editions of Pares’s History of Russia cover the period to the end of the Second World War. Dealing with the Purges, he permits himself to say, “Nearly all admitted having conspired against the life of Stalin and others, and on this point it is not necessary to doubt them…. Radek, who spoke with consummate lucidity, gave what is probably a true picture.”⁹¹ On the Tukhachevsky case—of which, it may be remembered, no evidence whatever was made public—he merely points out that the Russian and German General Staffs had earlier been in contact, and therefore “it is by no means unlikely that there was a plot.” A generation earlier, the conscience of the civilized world could be aroused by the false condemnation to imprisonment of a single French captain for a crime which had actually been committed, though not by him. The Soviet equivalent of the Dreyfus Case involved the execution of thousands of officers, from Marshals and Admirals down, on charges which were totally imaginary. It called forth instead, and not from Pares alone, comments like the above!

Of the trials in general, Pares concludes, “The plea that Stalin acted first to disrupt a potential fifth column … is by no means unwarranted.” Elsewhere he remarks that “the bulky verbatim reports were in any case impressive”⁹²—perhaps the most fatuous of all comments, and the fine fruit, as Walter Laqueur has said, “of fifty years of study of Russian history, the Russian people, its country, its language.”

As an old authority on Russia, Pares had been opposed to the Soviet Government and revised his attitude in view of the Nazi threat. “Towards the end of 1935,” his son comments, “my father set foot in Russia once more and any remaining doubts vanished at once. He had not left the Moscow railway station before his mind was flooded with the realization that the Bolsheviks were, after all, Russia.”⁹³ This reliance on personal revelation and intuition, inadequately related to the real situation, is surely inappropriate and egocentric—a point worth making when we read similar accounts from more recently totalitarianized lands.

What happened in Russia under Stalin could not be understood or estimated in any commonsensical fashion, if by common sense we mean notions that sound reasonable and natural to the democratic Westerner. Many of the misunderstandings which appeared in Britain and America during the Great Trials were due to prejudice—not necessarily to prejudice in favor of the Soviet regime or of Stalin, but at least prejudice in regard to certain events or interpretations of them as inherently unlikely. The Great Trials were, and it should have been plain at the time, nothing but large-scale frame-ups. But it was extraordinarily difficult for many in the West to credit this, to believe that a State could really perpetrate on a vast scale such a cheap and third-rate system of falsehood. Bernard Shaw typically remarked, “I find it just as hard to believe that [Stalin] is a vulgar gangster as that Trotsky is an assassin.”⁹⁴ Presumably, he would not have been surprised at some such events in quite highly organized societies like Imperial Rome or Renaissance Florence. But the Soviet State appeared to have a certain impersonality, and not obviously to lend itself to actions determined not so much by political ideas as by the overt personal plotting which had afflicted those earlier regimes.

There was another powerful factor. Both opponents of and sympathizers with the Russian Revolution thought of the Communists as a group of “dedicated” (or “fanatical”) men whose faults or virtues were at any rate incompatible with common crime—something like the Jesuits of the Counter-Reformation. England has had little recent experience of revolutionary movements, and this idea persists. It is the type of general notion which the uninformed are likely to assume simply out of ignorance, and it has not lost its obscuring power to this day.

Men like Stalin, Kaganovich, Voroshilov, Molotov, and Yagoda had been members of the underground Bolshevik Party in the time of its illegal struggle against Tsardom. Whatever their faults, they had thus established at least enough bona fides to exempt them from the suspicion that they did in fact behave as they are now known to have done. Even now, doubtless, there are those in the West who find it hard to swallow the notion of the top leaders of the Soviet Communist Party writing obscene and brutal comments on the appeals for mercy of the men they knew to be totally innocent. The mistake was, in fact, in the idea held in this country about revolutionary movements. In practice, they not only are joined by simon-pure idealists, but also consist of a hodgepodge of members in whom the idealist component is accompanied by all sorts of motivations—vanity, power seeking, and mere freakishness.

Perhaps the commonest reaction was to believe that the case against the accused in the trials was exaggerated, rather than false in every respect. This formula enabled those who subscribed to it to strike what they felt to be a decent commonsensical balance. In fact, it was simply a mediocre compromise between truth and falsehood, between right and wrong.

And the trials were at least directed against rivals of Stalin. The idea that Stalin had himself organized the murder of Kirov, on the face of it his closest ally and supporter—a murder in strictly criminal style—would have been rejected as absurd. When it was suggested by a few ex-oppositionists and defectors, who knew more about the circumstances than most people, it was hardly thought worth discussing.

Such attitudes showed a basic misunderstanding of the range of political possibility in a nondemocratic culture. More particularly, they showed a failure to grasp Soviet circumstances and, above all, a misjudgment about Stalin personally. For Stalin’s political genius consisted precisely in this: he recognized no limitations, either moral or intellectual, in his methods of securing power.

His calculation about the effect abroad was on the whole sound. It is true that the frame-ups were clumsy fabrications. It is also true that Stalin did not in fact silence everyone who knew anything about them. But he did not have to. The notion that things would have been very different if the frame-ups had been seamlessly perfect and if everyone who had known the truth had instantly been shot is a superficial one. Stalin had a clearer idea of the state of the public mind both in Russia and in the West. It is only too plain that he was right. Those who were prepared to believe his story believed it regardless of its peripheral faults, and rejected accounts put out by people who had had access to the correct information.

Thus a State prepared flatly to deny its own malpractices, and to prevent open access to the facts, could successfully persuade many people abroad, even in spite of a large and growing body of first-hand evidence from those who had actually experienced the Terror. This is a lesson that has clearly been learned by similar regimes in other parts of the world, and is still the basic principle of much misinformation that appears in the West.

The trials were overt acts. The other acts of the Purge were never announced. In particular, the size and nature of the labor-camp system only became known in the West through defectors, some of them former inmates. After the Poles in Russia were released in 1941 and 1942, thousands of accounts were available for checking, and dozens of first-hand descriptions were readily available in print. By 1948, as we have said, a very full analysis of the system listing hundreds of camps, together with reproductions of camp documents, was published by David J. Dallin and Boris I. Nicolaevsky.⁹⁵ The United Kingdom delegation to the United Nations was able to circulate the Corrective Labor Codex of the RSFSR; free trade-union bodies produced their own analyses.

The evidence was as complete and as consistent as it could conceivably be. It was widely rejected. Jean-Paul Sartre even defended the proposition that the evidence about the Soviet forced-labor-camp system should be ignored, even if true, on the grounds that otherwise the French proletariat might be thrown into despair. Why the labor-camp population should be sacrificed to the (rather smaller) membership of the CGT was not clear; nor, indeed, was it ever made plain why the views of the French proletariat, one of the few that has ever come largely under Communist influence, should prevail in world affairs any more than those of the anti-Communist British and American and German proletariats. Nor is it obvious at first sight why falsehood should demand the allegiance even of the intelligentsia. This sort of intellectual and ethical attitude might be treated as a passing aberration, a curiosity of history, and one might have thought that anyone holding it would have forfeited any public standing as a moral arbiter, at least in this sort of sphere. But this does not seem to have been the case, and if only for that reason is worth referring to.

During the 1940s and 1950s, there were many attempts to silence or discredit the evidence of men who had been in the camps, or otherwise given information about the Purge. This was particularly the case in France. In 1950, the writer David Rousset, of the Commission Internationale Contre la Régime Concentrationnaire, sued the Communist weekly Les Lettres françaises for libel. It had alleged that he had falsified a quotation from the Soviet penal code. As often in French political cases, themes much broader than the point supposedly at issue were developed. And, against a venomous defense by Communist lawyers, the facts of the forced-labor system were publicly established. One of the witnesses was Alexander Weissberg. An Austrian, a Jew, and (up to the time of his period in a Soviet prison) a Communist, he was continually subjected to abuse by the defense counsel in the style, “It turns my stomach to see a German testifying before a French court.” The campaign to smear the witness did not work well in this instance, as he was able to produce an appeal which had been sent at the time of his imprisonment to the Soviet authorities testifying to his character and to his loyal service to the Soviet Union, and had been signed by a number of leading physicists, including the Communist Joliot-Curie.

The most useful and interesting I Chose Freedom by Victor Kravchenko was similarly smeared in one of the most thorough and vicious campaigns of the time. Older readers will probably recall the title with a vague feeling of unease, or hostility, induced by these methods.fn5 Kravchenko, too, became involved in a court case in France, and in this instance the Russians sent witnesses to oppose him, while the French Communist Party mobilized a powerful legal and extralegal team.

The French Communist Les Lehres françaises had published an article supposedly by an American journalist called Sim Thomas, who had allegedly claimed that a friend of his in the OSS had admitted that Kravchenko’s book was faked by that organization. Thomas was never produced, and it was later revealed by the editor concerned that he never existed. The trial proved a disaster to the Communists, though the French literary men concerned invariably countered facts supported by an impressive array of eyewitnesses by emotional appeals about the Battle of Stalingrad. They also put forward, to refute men who had actually been in labor camps and had otherwise suffered, witnesses such as the Dean of Canterbury and Konni Zilliacus, who found themselves able to assert that full, or at least admirable, liberty prevailed in the Soviet Union. The Soviet Government also sent a number of witnesses, but they proved unused to hostile cross-questioning, and were on the whole disastrous.

For example, the Soviet witness Vassilenko, who had been an official in the Ukraine during the Purges, answered questions about the period:

Izard:

What became of the following members of the Politburo who were in office before the purges in the Ukraine: Kossior?

Vassilenko:

I don’t know him.

Izard:

Zatonsky?

Vassilenko:

I don’t recall that name.

Izard:

They were the members of the Government of the Ukraine when you were working there. Balitsky?

Vassilenko:

I don’t recall that name.

Izard:

Petrovsky?

Vassilenko:

He’s working in Moscow.

Izard:

He wasn’t purged?

Vassilenko:

No.

Izard:

Khatayevich?

Vassilenko:

I don’t know where he is.

Izard:

Naturally! Lyubchenko?

Vassilenko:

I don’t recall that name.

lzard:

Disappeared! Sukhomlin?

Vassilenko:

I don’t recall that name.

Izard:

Yakir?

Vassilenko:

I don’t know.

⁹⁶

It will be seen that Vassilenko, under pressure, seems to have forgotten that the deaths in disgrace of both Yakir and Lyubchenko had been publicly announced. He was then asked what had happened to the four Secretaries of his own local provincial Party, and “did not know.” Although himself a leading industrialist in the area, when asked about fifteen of the main managers and engineers, he denied knowing anything about what had happened to ten of them (two had died natural deaths). Unfortunately, when pressed about the missing ten, he snarled back, “Why do you make yourself the defender of people like them?”⁹⁷ a remark not compatible with ignorance of their fate. This public illustration of the official Soviet mind at work is of interest far beyond the particular context of the trial.

Kravchenko won his case, and won it flatly and clearly, as the non-Communist press of the West agreed. Much credit went to his lawyer, the Resistance hero and former Socialist deputy Maître Izard, who had himself been a prisoner of the Gestapo. But in the main, the result depended on the chance that Kravchenko was of quick intelligence, capable of coping with skilled French lawyers. And even with his victory, as the details began to be forgotten, the mud was again picked up, was flung, and stuck. As for Paris intellectuals without any knowledge of Russia, they had a sound safety mechanism: “All they had to know was that Kravchenko was opposed to the Soviet system. This proved he was wrong.”⁹⁸

Thirty years later, the Les Lewes françaises editor responsible, Claude Morgan, admitted in his autobiography, Don Quichotte et les autres that “Kravchenko was right.” He said that after Kravchenko’s death, he had wished “to pay him homage, but it was as yet too early….”

Even when the existence of camps was admitted, they were described as of a most humane and reformatory nature. Pat Sloan, the British Communist chiefly concerned with cultural liaison with the USSR, wrote:

Compared with the significance of that term in Britain, Soviet imprisonment stands out as an almost enjoyable experience. For the essence of Soviet imprisonment is isolation from the rest of the community, together with other persons similarly isolated, with the possibility to do useful work at the place of isolation, to earn a wage for this work, and to participate in running the isolation settlement or ‘prison’ in the same way as the children participate in running their school, or the workers their factory.⁹⁹

And again: “The Soviet labour camp provides a freedom for its inmates not usual in our own prisons in this country.”¹⁰⁰

In 1966, he was prepared to comment on the above: “Among most writers on the U.S.S.R. in the 1930s, I have least to be ashamed of, or to wish to withdraw.”¹⁰¹

The editor-in-chief of Les Lewes françaises, Pierre Daix, wrote:

The camps of re-education of the Soviet Union are the achievement of the complete suppression of the exploitation of men by men; the decisive sign of the effort by victorious Socialism to achieve the liberation of men from this exploitation in liberating also the oppressors, slaves of their own oppression.

By a considerable irony, when One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich came out in a French edition, sponsored by the Friends of the Soviet Union, they selected Daix to write the preface; but Daix had, in fact, changed his views.

Active falsification by partisans and—worse—theoretical justification of falsehood by philosophers were not the only causes of delusion. In addition, a general vague good will towards the Soviet Union, even in the 1930s, led to a tendency to palliate or ignore the facts.

Dr. Margolin remarks that “an entire generation of Zionists has died in Soviet prisons, camps and exile”; and he comments that the Zionists of the outside world were never able to help them, not only because of the difficulties, but also because “we did not care. I do not remember seeing a single article about them in the prewar papers. Not the least effort was made to mobilize public opinion and alleviate their fate.¹⁰²

If this is true of the intelligent, inquisitive, and internationally minded Zionist movement, with a special interest in a special group of prisoners, it applies much more to those in the West whose interest in the matter was, or might have been, the common bonds of humanity.

Whatever the Zionists felt, we should note that one great Jewish tradition remained clear and forthright in its attitude. The old Bund, the Jewish Social Democratic organization which had played a most important part in the old Left, though crushed in Russia, had continued to work in the Baltic States and Poland. And in the United States, some of the most effective militants in the New York Jewish Left had sprung from Bund circles. A great example is David Dubinsky, who throughout the period combined a firm radicalism with regard for the employers and an equally firm resistance to the Terror in Russia, and even during the war rebuffed pressures from “liberals” and from the State Department, which tried to dissuade him from protest against the executions of Ehrlich and Alter.

The effects of the Stalin era took a long time to sink in in the West. Indeed, they were rejected by many until admitted by the dictator’s diadochi. A curious resistance prevailed in which evidence which would have been thought adequate about any other regime was rejected—a phenomenon ludicrously illustrated by (again) Jean-Paul Sartre in his introduction to Henri Alleg’s book about torture in Algeria. Sartre said that we now know of the existence of torture in Communist countries as well, because of Khrushchev’s admission and the evidence given at the trial of the Hungarian Police Minister Farkas. That is to say, evidence of the Alleg type, mere first-hand accounts, was to be admitted in the French, but excluded in the Russian, case.

Khrushchev’s revelations in February 1956 did not affect some Soviet sympathizers in the West except to the degree that they feared that the disclosures might prove disturbing to those whose faith was less firmly founded.

After the publication of Khrushchev’s Secret Speech, Professor Joliot-Curie asked Ehrenburg to be cautious when speaking about it, especially to his children; Khrushchev’s revelations were disturbing to many Communists; he personally knew of many errors and mistakes, even of crimes committed,fn6 but he understood also that drastic changes of the whole structure of the State would cause troubles and personal hardships. These troubles could happen in any country, and they would not perturb him personally. They might, however, have a quite different effect on those who knew less. So he wished that Ehrenburg, when speaking about the Soviet Union, would choose positive rather than negative events.¹⁰³

Such is the perhaps rational attitude of a Communist. It is charitable to imagine that the great physicist had not really faced the facts of what he still thought of as unavoidable hardships. In any event, his case and the various others we have dipped into constitute a mere sketch and selection of an extraordinary potpourri of inhumanity and self-deception which a later generation might well take to heart.

THE KHRUSHCHEV PERIOD

When Stalin died on 5 March 1953, his successors appealed against “panic and disarray.”¹⁰⁴ But their qualms were unnecessary. Although the single will of the creator of the new State had now gone, the machinery he had created remained in existence. And aspirations among the citizenry toward a different order of things had no possible means of expression and organization.

We need not rehearse the history of the USSR over the post-Stalin period. It will be enough to note that its politics have been dominated by the problem of Stalin. Within three years came the major breakthrough of Khrushchev’s Secret speech to the XXth Party Congress, which denounced the late dictator’s arbitrary rule and exposed the falsification, based on torture, of the cases against certain non-oppositionist victims such as Kossior and Eikhe. The Secret Speech was a tremendous step forward. And it was followed, over the next eight or nine years, by the publication of a great deal of other material on the truths of the Stalin epoch. But passive and active opposition within the old apparatus was strong, and de-Stalinization remained incomplete and sporadic. The Speech itself had been opposed by Molotov and other members of the Party Presidium—equivalent of the old Politburo—and it was not published in the USSR until 1989. The official line tacked and veered between dramatic though partial denunciations of the former dictator (in, for example, 1956 to 1961) and considerably more positive estimates (in, for example, 1957 and 1963).

“The cult of personality,” a curiously inadequate description, was the invariable category in which the Stalinist past was now criticized. This was, in effect, basically an allegation of vanity and flattery—not quite the essential which had made the rule of Stalin so deplorable. It mattered much less to his victims that towns were named after him than that he was ruling by terror and falsehood. It is true that the expression implies autocracy, but it remained slightly off target.

It proved compatible with allegations of extravagant tyranny, and equally with mere suggestions of the rather excessive application of necessary force—depending on the vagaries of politics. Above all, it made it possible to claim that the Soviet State and the Party were essentially healthy throughout the period:

The successes that the working people of the Soviet Union were achieving under the leadership of the Communist Party … created an atmosphere in which individual errors and shortcomings seemed less significant against the background of tremendous success…. No personality cult could change the nature of the Socialist State, which is based on public ownership of the means of production, the alliance of the working class and the peasantry, and the friendship of peoples.¹⁰⁵

But as the Italian Communist leader, Palmiro Togliatti, commented in 1956:

First, all that was good was attributed to the superhuman, positive qualities of one man: now all that is evil is attributed to his equally exceptional and even astonishing faults. In the one case, as well as in the other, we are outside the criterion of judgment intrinsic in Marxism. The true problems are evaded, which are why and how Soviet society could reach and did reach certain forms alien to the democratic way and to the legality that it had set for itself, even to the point of degeneration.¹⁰⁶

Time and again, the authorities made it clear that, in the words of a 1963 Central Committee resolution, they opposed “resolutely and implacably any attempt to undermine the foundations of Marxist-Leninist theory under the guise of the struggle against the personality cult, and all attempts to rehabilitate the anti-Marxist opinions and trends which were routed by the Party.”¹⁰⁷

One of Stalin’s principles—the theory that the intensity of the class conflict, and hence the necessity of terror, increases as the power of the defeated classes diminishes—was denounced, though in its official form in the Party Program adopted at the XXIInd Congress in 1961, this denunciation was hedged with reservations:

The general trend of class struggle within the socialist countries in conditions of successful socialist construction leads to the consolidation of the position of the socialist forces and weakens the resistance of the remnants of the hostile classes. But this development does not follow a straight line. Changes in the domestic or external situation may cause the class struggle to intensify in specific periods. This calls for constant vigilance….¹⁰⁸

The period also saw an evolution in the forms of the enforcement of State power. The Special Board of the MVD was abolished in September 1953.¹⁰⁹ The “Terror” Decree of 1 December 1934 was annulled on 19 April 1956.

In December 1958, the new Decree on State Crimes replaced the relevant articles of the Criminal Code dating from Stalin’s time. Certain notorious excesses, such as Article 58 (i.c.), which openly inflicted penalties on the families of “traitors” fleeing abroad, even if they were totally unimplicated, were dropped. But the Decree remained Draconian and provided severe punishment for all forms of action, organization, or discussion hostile to the Government. Legal practice, too, received some degree of reform: Vyshinsky was denounced, together with his theory that confessions are the main element in a good case. But confessions were still used, and treated as valid—as in the Powers and the Penkovsky cases, in 1960 and 1963, respectively.

The labor-camp system remained in being, and no information about it was officially available. The general impression is that measures had already been taken to cut the death rate and to make forced labor economically more rational in 1950–1951. After the death of Stalin, camp regulations seem to have been more equitably enforced, partly as the result of mass strikes in the northern camps. The release of a large number of prisoners took place under amnesties and through rehabilitations. We are told, though this was given no publicity, that eventually about 100 commissions—1 for each main camp group—were sent out. Consisting of 3 members, they examined all the files and rehabilitated millions, mostly posthumously; present-day estimates are that about 8 million of the 12 million in the camps in 1952 were released.

The general picture is of some camps being virtually dissolved, some losing many of their inmates, and others remaining about the same. In many areas, prisoners were released into free exile. After rebellions in the camps in 1953 (Norilsk and Vorkuta) and 1954 (Kingur), prisoners seem to have been transferred farther east. Reports at the end of 1956, when the operations to reduce the number of prisoners were virtually at an end, showed little change in the Kolyma–Magadan complex. Repatriated prisoners of war estimated that over 1 million then still remained in the far eastern camps. Avram Tertz (Andrei Sinyavsky) remarked ironically of one camp, in The Trial Begins, that earlier “the amnesty had virtually emptied the camp of its inmates. Only some ten thousand of us, dangerous criminals, were left.”

Discipline remained rigorous. Indeed, a decree of the Supreme Soviet of 5 May 1961 for the first time imposed the death penalty for certain “acts of aggression against the administration,” short of murder, in the camps.

However one looks at it, the penal and police systems were reformed in the Khrushchev period. Equally, however one looks at it, they did not undergo essential change, did not become truly liberal.

The regime owed its legitimacy to its descent from Stalin and was committed to the correctness of Stalin’s line as against both the Left and the Right oppositions of the 1920s and 1930s, and hence to his correctness on basic policy matters. At the XXIInd Party Congress in 1961, Khrushchev was indeed able to say publicly what had been “secret” in 1956, and Stalin’s body was removed from Lenin’s tomb; though even in 1989 it still lay in a fairly honorable position under the Kremlin wall, among the bodies of important “positive” figures of the second rank—and, perhaps significantly, next to that of Felix Dzerzhinsky, founder of the Secret Police.

Many of Stalin’s personal group died in good odor after their patron’s own death—Shkiryatov in 1954, Vyshinsky in 1955. Men like Kaganovich and Malenkov, though publicly accused by the Prosecutor-General of the USSR of “criminal violations of Socialist legality,”¹¹⁰ also remained at liberty. The fall of Beria entailed the trials of a series of police officials of the old regime. In all, thirty-eight Security generals were deprived of their military ranks.¹¹¹ But others survived, such as Serov, who was Head of Army Intelligence until 1964. General Gorbatov, writing in the early 1960s, speaks quite naturally of his torturer, Stolbunsky—“I don’t know where he is now”—and mentions meeting the despicable Commissar Fominykh, who had organized his removal, in a group of senior officers in 1962.

More basically, there was no serious attempt to deal with the Terror as a whole. The great plot ostensibly headed by Trotsky, backed by the Nazis, involving politicians, generals, engineers, doctors, and ordinary citizens by the thousand, was not explicitly denounced as a fabrication. Statements were made that demolished the authenticity of some of the main public accusations. Several of those named as conspirators in the 1938 Trial were rehabilitated. One major crime of the 1937 accused—the “attempt” on the life of Molotov—was openly described at the XXIInd Party Congress in 1961 as a frame-up. On the centerpiece of the whole Purge story (and the main crime of the 1936 accused in particular), the Kirov murder, we have seen that the official line was already rejected as unsatisfactory by Khrushchev in his Secret Speech of February 1956, and again, publicly, in his report to the 1961 Congress—each time with strong hints that Stalin had been the real organizer of the assassination. So, although the full truth was being extracted with painful slowness, enough had already been said to concede the total falsehood of the original Stalinist version.

We now know that the Tukhachevsky group were legally rehabilitated by the Supreme Court on 31 January 1957, and posthumously restored to Party membership on 27 February 1957. This and similar decisions were not published. It simply became plain from their reappearance in a favorable light in books and articles that they were now cleared of the charges. In this and the other cases, the published formalities were merely a note at the end of the encyclopedia entries: “Illegally repressed. Posthumously rehabilitated.” Similarly, the executed Stalinists—Rudzutak, Chubar, Postyshev, Eikhe, Kossior, and the others—were seen to be in good odor, as were such men as Yenukidze and Karakhan.

One distractive ploy by the forces of obstruction was to give to the rehabilitated death dates differing from the true ones. This was done in part, Nadezhda Mandelshtam tells us, to transfer purge victims to the war period, and thus distance them from the Purges. Marshal Yegorov, Army Commander Fedko, and Vlas Chubar were among those given wartime deaths. And others were spaced out, if not so far; for example, Postyshev’s was for twenty years dated to 1940.

No one was cleared from the Zinoviev or Pyatakov Trials. And in the Bukharin Trial, a fantastic situation persisted for years in which some of the accused were fully rehabilitated, and others not. Ilcramov, Khodzhayev, Krestinsky, Zelensky, and Grinko were now in favor. But to rehabilitate, for example, Krestinsky without rehabilitating Rosengolts was to rehabilitate Burke while leaving Hare accused.

Yugoslav sources said, in the autumn of 1962, that Bukharin would shortly be rehabilitated.¹¹² This did not take place, though at a meeting of an All-Union Conference on Measures to Improve the Training of Scientific-Pedagogical Cadres in the Historical Sciences,¹¹³ Pospelov said: “Students ask whether Bukharin and others were spies of foreign States…. I may state that it is sufficient to study the documents of the XXIInd Congress of the C.P.S.U. in order to say that neither Bukharin nor Rykov, of course, were spies or terrorists.” This little-publicized partial exculpation is important in principle. But Bukharin’s and Rykov’s names were not restored to Party favor. Zinoviev, Kamenev, Pyatakov, I. N. Smirnov, Sokolnikov, and Rosengolts—to name some of the other leading figures at the public trials—remained totally unrehabilitated. So did a good many men who had not even come to public trial—for example, Preobrazhensky, Smilga, Uglanov, and Shlyapnikov.

Rehabilitation, as well as being done in this illogical and partial fashion, took a variety of forms. The maximum was the full-scale article with at least a remark at the end that the man named had fallen victim to slander as a result of the personality cult. The minimum was simply the mention of the former purgee’s name in a neutral or favorable context. There was, indeed, something even more minimal, if one can so express it, than the above. It was now conventional in the “biographical notes” on people who had played a part in the earlier history of the Party and who were listed at the end of works dealing with that time to give, in addition to those of birth and death, the date of entering the Party. In the case of all those in good odor, this was phrased “Member of the Party from 1910,” or whatever the date might be. In the case of those still unrehabilitated, this was invariably “Got into the Party [Sostoyal v partii] 1910.” From this minor convention, it can be seen that, for example, Syrtsov was now, to this degree at least, restored to favor, while Preobrazhensky was not.

This curious, and typical, indirectness marked a failure to come to grips with the past. It is easily explicable. After Stalin’s death, the machine he created continued to rule the country. The principle of one-party rule, the overriding competence of that party in all spheres of life, the preservation of its “monolithic” nature—and rule over it by a small central body—all continued.

All the leaders had arisen in the old machine during Stalin’s time. The channels through which they rose remained as then established. And the principles of rule were, in general, those then brought to fruition.

The efforts of Khrushchev personally and of a number of intellectual and other figures had nevertheless made important, if partial, progress in uncovering the truth. The resistance from the whole traditionalist cadre at every level was natural. And it beat him.

THE BREZHNEV REACTION

After the fall of Khrushchev in October 1964, an end was gradually put to speculative and risky initiatives in every field. This applied also to the matter of “Stalinism.” The rehabilitation process virtually ceased, as did written discussions of the more sensitive areas of the Stalinist past. Stalin himself began to be treated at first with a rather cold respect and later with considerable favor, in spite of the protests of intellectuals. The system of government he created, as amended and improved under Khrushchev, was consolidated.

The extent of the reaction since Khrushchev’s time could be seen in the treatment of Raskolnikov. In his military Memoirs (published in 1964), the introduction states flatly, “The C.C. of the C.P.S.U. has completely rehabilitated him, and restored him posthumously to party membership and to Soviet citizenship.” Even as late as 1968, his Civil War record was favorably referred to;¹¹⁴ but soon his photograph was removed from books, and various editors who had permitted favorable reference to him were reprimanded or dismissed. Finally, an article in the authoritative party organ Kommunist spoke of him as “a deserter to the side of the enemy and a slanderer of the party and the Soviet State.”¹¹⁵

This was, indeed, a special case. More generally, those rehabilitated remained so, though the expression “Illegally repressed. Posthumously rehabilitated” disappeared from the reference books. And accounts of events of the Purges simply ceased to appear. For the moment, at least, the promise of better things after forty years in the wilderness showed little sign of fulfillment. The reason, basically, seems to be that the caravan was led by men skilled in the ways of the wilderness, and enjoying the powers they had gained and would certainly forfeit in a lusher land.

For Pyatakov’s “miracle”—the idea that by sheer political organization the Party could create industry and the proletariat, which should in Marx’s view have preceded the coming to power of Socialism, and having done that, go back to the main line forseen by Marx—had not worked out. The reason is plain. It had been a mistake to think that the Party would, after this Marxist detour, simply revert to a humanist democratic representation of the new proletariat. It was not the case that Stalinist methods could be used and then simply cast aside when specific economic and social aims had been achieved. Terror institutionalizes its own cadres, its own psychology. And the Party machine, whose loyalties for so long had been in practice simply to itself, whose interests for so long had been equally circumscribed, had become Djilas’s “New Class,” no more capable of easily changing its ways than the old classes and bureaucracies of the past had been.

The Stalin era was a past so atrocious that its repudiation brought obvious dividends to any succeeding regime, but its successors also inherited a set of institutions and a ruling caste indoctrinated in certain habits and beliefs. And in an important sense, the essence of Stalinism is less the particular periods of terrorism or special views on industrial organization than the establishment of the political set-up. And that still remained substantially unchanged.

Even the Khrushchevite “de-Stalinization” had consisted of little more than the abandonment (or even the denunciation) of a specific set of excesses associated with the late dictator. It did not amount to any change of substance in the system of political rule in the USSR or in the basic principles behind that system. Russia was still ridden by the Party machine, and the principle of Partiinost—the doctrine of the Party’s right to rule and to decide on all questions of speed and direction—remained untouched. What took place, in effect, was simply the renunciation of excessive use of whip and spur.

There was now, in fact, a considerable effort to rehabilitate the NKVD: criticism was leveled at those who, basing themselves on the organization’s role in the Purges, “are not averse to putting practically all the officers of the Cheka under a cloud.”¹¹⁶ A whole series of novels and plays appeared featuring Secret Police heroes.fn7

Those police officers condemned to imprisonment rather than death in the post-Beria purge were released—Eitingon, the organizer of Trotsky’s assassination, among them. There were complaints that the former Georgian NKVD officer Nadaraya, a “specialist in shooting wives and daughters,” only received ten years after Beria’s death and was now at liberty; that Colonel Monaldiov, who had shot several hundred foreign Communists in the Solovetsk camps at the beginning of the Finnish War, was living in a villa near Leningrad, an attempt to have him expelled from the Party having been prevented by Tolstikov, then First Secretary of the Leningrad province; that the leading interrogator of the Jewish doctors in 1952, A. G. Sugak, had a job as Assistant Director of a museum, and a villa near Moscow; and so on.

In September 1966, new articles were added to the Criminal Code, providing for the imprisonment of those given to uttering or writing material “discrediting the Soviet State” or participating in “group activities” involving “disobedience in the face of the lawful demands of the authorities.”¹¹⁷ Such laws led to those increasing repressions against writers and dissidents which were such a mark of the period.

Further, in 1966 pressure from Party traditionalists grew for a “partial or indirect” rehabilitation of Stalin at the XXIIIrd Party Congress that year. It was laid down that the concept “the period of the personality cult”—the mildest of all hostile descriptions of the Stalin period—was “mistaken and un-Marxist.”¹¹⁸ Strong resistance to this neo-Stalinism was aroused, being expressed in particular in a letter by the leading members of the Soviet intelligentsia, and for the moment no more was said. But in 1969, the neo-Stalinists had consolidated, and a further determined attempt was made, in connection with Stalin’s ninetieth birthday. A statue was planned; special lectures at the Institute of Marxism-Leninism were to take place; orders for busts and portraits were made; an edition of Stalin’s Works was prepared. A set-piece article in Kommunist wrote of Stalin’s malpractices that “these were mistakes in practical work which was essentially correct in fulfilling the scientifically based general line of the Party.”¹¹⁹ A pro-Stalin novel by Kochetov appeared in Oktyabr’ . By the birth date in December, a long Pravda article was ready. But by now, foreign Communist leaders started to put pressure on the Soviet leadership. Finally, the Politburo decided “by a small majority” to cancel most of the celebrations.¹²⁰ Nevertheless, the trend remained regression, not progress.

It may be argued that the élan of the regime was now dead and that only momentum, habit, and institutions remained. If this view is taken, the system might appear like the legitimist monarchies of the early nineteenth century—impressive, powerful, but dead at heart, and remaining only as an integument which eventually broke.

The argument of the Communist heroine and martyr Rosa Luxemburg against the suppression of hostile opinion, and against the closed society, was not a moral one. It was simply that

without general elections, without unrestricted freedom of press and assembly, without a free struggle of opinion, life dies out in every public institution, becomes a mere semblance of life, in which only the bureaucracy remains as the active element…. Yes, we can go even further: such conditions must cause a brutalization of public life….¹²¹

This was a sound prediction of developments in Russia. Until its recommendations were complied with, the Soviet Union could best be described as not fully cured, but still suffering from a milder and more chronic form of the affliction which had reached its crisis in the Yezhov years.

The Khrushchev period, in spite of its inconsistencies, had to some extent shown the way forward. And it had made the major falsifications of the Terror period untenable. In the two decades which followed Khrushchev’s fall, the regime was in the intellectually scandalous position of having no official story at all, true or false, about the trials.

But the twenty-year “period of stagnation,” as it is now officially designated, saw ubiquitous falsification eating away at the intellectual, the social, the economic, and the political structure until little was left but a hollow shell. The command economy—“barracks socialism,” as it is now called—drove the country deeper and deeper into unacknowledged crisis. By the mid-1980s, this had become so profound that, first, all serious economic and social observers had seen the imminent danger, and second, there had been time for this knowledge to percolate to an important section of the political leadership.

The decisions taken to attempt a radical reconstruction and abandonment of the false socio-economic principles which had led to this crisis involved freeing the forces of intellectual criticism, repudiating the heritage of Stalinism, and releasing the truth.