The Great Terror

Stalin, on the contrary, attained complete control at a time when general conditions were calm. By the end of the 1920s, the country had, however reluctantly, accepted the existence and stability of the Soviet Government. And that Government had, in turn, made slight economic and other concessions which had led to comparative prosperity. It was in cold blood, quite deliberately and unprovokedly, that Stalin started a new cycle of suffering. First had come the Party’s war on the peasantry. When this had done its worst and things were settling down again in the mid-1930s, the Great Terror was again launched cold-bloodedly at a helpless population. And the cold-bloodedness was compounded by the other distinguishing quality of the Stalin purge—the total falsehood of all the reasons given for it and accusations made during it.

There was another factor. In the First World War, as Robert Graves notes in Goodbye to All That

, a soldier could stand the squalor and danger of the trenches only for a certain time. After that, the wear and tear became too great. After the first month, under the tensions of trench life, an officer began to deteriorate a little. “At six months, he was still more or less all right; but by nine or ten months … he became a drag on the other officers. After a year or fifteen months, he was often worse than useless.” Graves notes that over the age of about thirty-three, and particularly over forty, men had less resistance. Officers who had done two years or more often became dipsomaniacs. Men went about their tasks “in an apathetic and doped condition, cheated into further endurance.” It had taken Graves himself, he says, some ten years to recover. He adds that none of this was due simply to physical conditions; in a good battalion, physical illness was rare.

What is so hard to convey about the feeling of Soviet citizens in 1936–1938 is the similar long-drawn-out sweat of fear, night after night, that the moment of arrest might arrive before the next dawn. The comparison is reasonable even as to the casualty figures. The risk was a big enough one to be constantly present. And again, while under other dictatorships arrests have been selective, falling on genuinely suspected enemies of the regime, in the Yezhov era, just as in the mudholes of Verdun and Ypres, anyone at all could feel that he might be the next victim.

The whole people were the victim, including those who were not directly affected by the repressions. Even those who had not had a family member, relative, or friend suffer (true, there were not all that many of them): even they experienced the fear and all sorts of burdens and, in general, to put it mildly, had by no means an easy time of things—the exceptions to this general rule were relatively insignificant in number.¹

And the public trials, as another Soviet periodical points out, everywhere “created an atmosphere of total suspicion and fear.”²

Fear by night, and a feverish effort by day to pretend enthusiasm for a system of lies, was the permanent condition of the Soviet citizen.

DENUNCIATION

For Stalin required not only submission, but also complicity. The moral crisis arose in a form well described by Pasternak. In 1937 (he later told Dr. Nilsson),

on one occasion they came to me … with something they wanted me to sign. It was to the effect that I approved of the Party’s execution of the Generals. In a sense this was a proof of their confidence in me. They didn’t go to those who were on the list for liquidation. My wife was pregnant. She cried and begged me to sign, but I couldn’t. That day I examined the pros and cons of my own survival. I was convinced that I would be arrested—my turn had now come! I was prepared for it. I abhorred all this blood. I couldn’t stand things any longer. But nothing happened. It was, I was told later, my colleagues who saved me indirectly. No one dared to report to the hierarchy that I hadn’t signed.³

But few could match the moral grandeur of the great poet. Everyone was isolated. The individual, silently objecting, was faced with vast meetings calling for the death “like dogs” of the opposition leaders, or approving the slaughter of the generals. How could he know if they were not genuine, or largely so? There was no sign of opposition or even neutrality; enthusiasm was the only visible phenomenon. Even the children and relatives of the arrested got up to denounce their parents.

The disintegration of family loyalty was a conscious Stalinist aim. When, in November 1938, Stalin destroyed the leadership of the Komsomol, headed by Kosarev, his complaint was that the organization was not devoting itself to vigilance activities, but sticking to its statutory obligation as a political training ground for young Communists. Stalin’s idea of a good young Communist demanded not this sort of political training, but the qualities of an enthusiastic young nark.