The Great Terror

But the NKVD did not, of course, leave denunciation on an amateur and voluntary basis. Everywhere it organized a special network—the seksots, recruited from among the general population.

Seksots were divided into two types: the voluntary, malicious degenerates out to injure their neighbors, together with “idealists” who were convinced that they were working for the cause; and the involuntary, who were drawn into it out of fear, or (very often) promises of the alleviation of the fate of an arrested member of the prospective

seksot’s family. These last hoped that if they kept strictly to the truth and reported nothing disadvantageous about their friends, no harm would be done. But once started, they were trapped; the pressure became greater and greater. The seksot who failed to produce information was himself automatically suspect. As the population became more and more careful in its talk, more and more harmless acts and words had to be reported, misinterpreted, and finally invented to slake the NKVD’s insatiable appetite for plots.¹⁴

One Ukrainian seksot is described as having become a genuine convert to Communism, though unable to join the Party owing to former White Army connections, and therefore wishing to serve the cause in the one way which appeared to be open to him. At first, he abused no confidences and reported impartially. “He was only doing his duty, and doing one’s duty is always pleasurable. When he had occasionally to overcome his own scruples or likes and dislikes in carrying it out, he felt a positive hero.”¹⁵ But naturally, simple hints of feelings hostile to the Government were not in themselves sufficient, for the NKVD of course knew that such could be found in a large section of the population. He put up a struggle, but was himself threatened as having concealed evidence. Gradually going to pieces, he started first to “interpret” remarks, until slowly the distinction between truth and falsehood faded out in his mind. Even so, he failed to give satisfaction because he retained a sense of the plausible, and his inventions were too limited for his superiors, so he was himself arrested.

The Soviet press had recently published material from the archives about informers—for example, a letter from one who was by now himself a prisoner, claiming clemency because of his earlier services in denouncing Vareikis and a number of others, including writers and actors, and after his own arrest, numerous fellow prisoners.¹⁶

In some areas, bounties were paid for denunciation. In one Byelorussian village depicted in a recent Soviet article, 15 rubles a head was paid, and a group of regular denouncers used to carouse on the proceeds, even singing a song they had composed to celebrate their deeds.¹⁷

Every account of life in a Soviet office or institution, even before the Great Purge, is replete with intrigues. Such, doubtless, would be true of most other countries. But the resources available to a keen intriguer in Soviet conditions made it a far greater menace, since the normal method of getting on was to “compromise” and have expelled from the Party, and as often as not arrested, either one’s rival or, if his position was for the time being too strong, one of his subordinates—through whom he could eventually be undermined. One rough estimate was that every fifth person in the average office was in one way or another an NKVD stool pigeon.¹⁸

Weissberg speaks of the foundry industry, with which he had connections through experiments to improve blast furnaces. Following Gvakharia, Ordzhonikidze’s nephew and one of the geniuses of the industrialization drive, all the directors of the big foundries in the Ukraine were arrested:

A few months later their successors were arrested too. It was only the third or fourth batch who managed to keep their seats. In this way the direction of the foundry industry came into the hands of young and inexperienced men. They had not even the normal advantages of youth in their favour, for the choosing had been a very negative one. They were the men who had denounced others on innumerable occasions. They had bowed the knee whenever they had come up against higher authority. They were morally and intellectually crippled.¹⁹

And, of course, this applied not only to industry, but to the whole of the new ruling cadre. As a Soviet periodical complained in 1988, it was “the conscious result of negative selection, of the horrible social selection which went on in this country for decades.”²⁰