The Great Terror

I have not the slightest desire to be in a high post. If my party, for which I lived, and for which I was ready to die any minute, forced me to sign this, then I don’t want to be in the Party. Today I envy the most ignorant non-Party man.³⁶

And yet Ter-Vaganyan was one of those who gave in. We can be sure that similar views, even more strongly held, determined the attitudes of men who could not be broken. Kuklin is reported in prison as saying that “all was lost” as far as the Party and the Revolution were concerned, and a new start would be necessary.³⁷

The argument that Party-style thinking, the idea of Party discipline, is the

main explanation for the public confessions has one obvious objection. This logic, if it existed, was as formally true at the moment of arrest as it was later. We have seen how Safonova took it to be her Party duty to confess and to try to persuade Smirnov to confess. Similarly with other recent Soviet accounts. For example, one such tells, as illustrative, of another old Party member: “The interrogator asked him whether he considered himself a Bolshevik and, receiving an affirmative answer, continued: ‘Well, the Party demands that you, as a Bolshevik, confess that you are an English spy.’ To this the former member of the Supreme Court replied: ‘If the party demands it, I confess.’”³⁸ Yet in most cases the accused resisted for a longer or shorter period. Why was the idea of Party discipline convincing to Muralov in December 1936, when for eight months previously he had found it unconvincing? Why did Bukharin resist for three months?

Bukharin, indeed, gave an answer at his trial: cut off and exposed, removed from the Party, with nothing to live for, he started a reexamination of his thoughts, a reevaluation which led him to surrender. If it comes to that, Boguslavsky went through the whole process in eight days, during which “owing to my arrest, I recovered my balance and I was able to bring my still largely, if not utterly, criminal ideas in order”³⁹—which, though expressed suitably to the trial, amounts to the same thing.

Thus it is not the case that good Communists automatically obeyed when told “The Party needs your evidence”; they did so after a varying length of imprisonment and interrogation. Even Bukharin himself (who is supposed to have been the main follower of this line) did not after all produce a confession wholly in accord with the prosecution’s wishes, but chose to speak in such a way that anyone of any sense could see that the charges were false. And we have already noted that when Kaganovich, one of the keenest supporters of the Purge, himself fell from power, he omitted to suggest that the Party’s image would be best served by bringing him to trial and blackening him as a spy, terrorist, and saboteur and shooting him amid public execration. On the contrary, he rang up Khrushchev and begged him “not to allow them to deal with me as they dealt with people under Stalin”⁴⁰

—a grave dereliction from the point of view of service to the Party. Clearly, without denying that in many cases the idea of being useful to the Party was a component of the intellectual and psychological conditions of surrender, we can at least say that it took effect in combination with a good many other pressures.

It is obvious enough that the oppositionists did not expect just fair treatment and political persuasion. Tomsky’s suicide the day he heard of the charges against him is enough to show that, and his was not the only one. The political argument about service to the Party can, in fact, be seen as a component in some cases (but not all) of a larger system of physical, intellectual, and moral pressures. In a case like Kamenev’s, where the argument about the Party’s interests was combined with exhausting interrogation, heat, lack of food, threats to his family, and promises of his life, we can hardly expect to decide which played the most important part.