The Great Terror

It is very hard for the Western reader to envision the sufferings of the Soviet people as a whole during the 1930s. And in considering the Terror, it is precisely this moral and intellectual effort which must be made. To demonstrate the facts is to provide the bare framework of evidence. It is not the province of the investigator to do more. Yet it cannot but be that these facts are offered for moral judgment. And however coolly we consider them, we should think in terms of Pasternak, breaking off his Sketch for an Autobiography before the Terror with the words “To continue it would be immeasurably difficult…. One would have to talk in a manner which would grip the heart and make the hair stand on end.”

Thus far we have dealt with the Purge as it struck the Party. Information about this side of it, especially from Soviet sources, is much richer than for the larger but less dramatic fate of the ordinary Soviet citizen. Yet for every Party member who suffered—and many of them were scarcely political in any real sense—six or seven others went to the cells.

The figures we have so far been covering were consciously involved to a greater or lesser degree in a political struggle whose rules they understood. They had themselves in many cases been responsible for the imprisonment or death of peasants and others by the million in the course of collectivization. Our pity for their own sufferings should doubtless not be withheld, but it can at least be qualified by a sense of their having a lesser claim to sympathy than the ordinary citizen of the country. If Krylenko was to go to the execution cellars, he had sent to their deaths, on false charges, hundreds of others. If Trotsky was to be assassinated in exile, he had ordered the shooting of thousands of the rank and file, and gloried in it. Pushkin once described an earlier generation of Russian revolutionaries as “positively heartless men who care little for their own skins, and still less for those of others.” We may accept this about such people as Rosengolts. But it plainly does not apply to his wife. In her, we can already see the fate and the feelings of an ordinary non-Communist, caught up in the frightful tensions and agonies of the Great Purge.

The oppressive feeling that hung over everything is well illustrated by a comparison made by Dudorov, in Doctor Zhivago:

It isn’t only in comparison with your life as a convict, but compared to everything in the thirties, even to my favorable conditions at the university, in the midst of books and money and comfort; even to me there, the war came as a breath of fresh air, an omen of deliverance, a purifying storm…. And when the war broke out, its real horrors, its real dangers, its menace of real death, were a blessing compared to the inhuman power of the lie….

It is difficult for those of us who have lived in fairly stable societies to make the imaginative effort of realizing that the heads of a great State can be men who in the ordinary course of events would be thought of as criminals. It is almost equally hard to get the feeling of life under the Great Terror. It is easy to speak of the constant fear of the 4:00 A.M. knock on the door, of the hunger, fatigue, and hopelessness of the great labor camps. But to feel how this was worse than a particularly frightful war is not so simple.

Russia had undergone Terror before. Lenin had spoken of it frankly as an instrument of policy. During the Civil War period, executions simply of “class enemies” were carried out on a large scale. But the circumstances were different in many ways. In those days, it was, as it were, a hot Terror. Injustices and brutalities were perpetrated throughout the country, but they were seldom part of a big planned operation from above. And they were openly described in their true colors. Those were indeed terrible days, when the Cheka squads were shooting class hostages in scores and hundreds. Those who went through them might have though that nothing could be worse.

But Lenin’s Terror was the product of the years of war and violence, of the collapse of society and administration, of the desperate acts of rulers precariously riding the flood, and fighting for control and survival.