The Great Terror

Many denunciations were made out of fear. If someone heard an incautious word, and failed to report it, it might be he who would suffer. There are many accounts of Party members, unable to think of any enemies of the people among their acquaintances, being severely censured by their own branch secretaries as “lacking in revolutionary vigilance.” There are many stories of conversations between old acquaintances which became too frank and ended with each of them denouncing the other. Any conversation that strayed even slightly from the orthodox could only be conducted between old and trusted friends, and with great circumspection. Ilya Ehrenburg’s daughter had an old shaggy poodle which had learned the trick of closing the dining-room door as soon as the guests began to talk in a guarded way. As it was given a slice of sausage for its vigilance, it became expert at guessing the type of conversation.⁴

Not every responsible citizen did his duty as a delator. One director gave a lift to the mother of an enemy of the people, an old woman, and was told by his chauffeur:

Comrade Director, I may be a son of a bitch who must report everything he sees and hears. Believe me or not, but I swear by my own mother that I will not report this time. My own mother is just a plain woman, not a fine lady like this one. But I love her and, anyhow, thank you, Victor Andreyevich, as one Russian to another.

And in fact this incident was never brought up against the director, though many less serious “crimes” were to be alleged against him.⁵

Nevertheless, just as Nazism provided an institutionalized outlet for the sadist, so Stalinist totalitarianism on the whole automatically encouraged the mean and malicious. The carriers of personal or office feuds, the poison-pen letter writers, who are a minor nuisance in any society, flourished and increased.

“I have seen,” says Ehrenburg, “how in a progressive society people allegedly dedicated to moral ideas committed dishonorable acts for personal advantage, betrayed comrades and friends, how wives disavowed their husbands and resourceful sons heaped abuse upon hapless fathers.”⁶ A Soviet story of the Khrushchev period tells, as reasonably typical, of a geology student who denounced another because he heard him, at a dance, telling his girl friend that his father had been executed—a fact that he had failed to disclose at the Institute.⁷ After the first student reported it, his colleague disappeared, to serve fifteen years in a labor camp.

Individual denouncers operated on an extraordinary scale. In one district in Kiev, 69 persons were denounced by one man;⁸ in another, over 100.⁹ In Odessa, a single Communist denounced 230 people.¹⁰

In Poltava, a Party member denounced his entire organization.¹¹

At the XVIIIth Party Congress, when the “excesses” of the Purge period were being belatedly and peripherally criticized, one was now made to confess his methods, which had involved removing fifteen local Party Secretaries. Another well-known slanderer, in Kiev, applied for a free pass to a resort on the grounds that he had worn out his strength in “the struggle with the enemy,” a remark which caused loud laughter at the Congress.¹²

Extraordinary results came from purely lunatic denunciations. Many poison-pen letters were mere malignant fantasy. There were odder cases yet, such as the Red Army deserter Sylakov, who gave himself up in Kiev with a dramatic tale of an anti-Soviet plot in which he played the leading part. His original story was of planning an armed raid on a post office to provide funds for a terrorist organization, but of having decided instead to throw himself on the mercy of Soviet justice. This was not much use to the NKVD. After Sylakov had been badly kicked and beaten, a quite different version was worked out, involving not him and a few vague friends, but his military unit. The leader of the plot was now not Sylakov, but his commanding officer. They had planned terroristic attacks on Government leaders. Almost the whole unit, from the C.O. to the drivers, were arrested, with many of their wives. Sylakov’s two sisters, both working girls, his old and crippled mother, and his father were all pulled in too. So was an uncle who had only met his nephew once and who, having served as a corporal in the old Army, was transmuted into a “Tsarist general.”

This absurd case proliferated fantastically until “there was not a single cell in Kiev prison which did not contain someone involved in the Sylakov plot.”¹³ When Yezhov and his latest representative in Kiev, Uspensky, fell late in 1938, Sylakov and his fellow accused were reinterrogated with a view to getting them to withdraw their confessions. Some of them, fearing a trick, refused, and had to be given tough treatment once again—to force them to withdraw false confessions involving them in crimes carrying the death penalty! Sylakov himself was finally sentenced to three years’ imprisonment for denunciation only.