The Great Terror

Right through the Purge, Stalin’s blows were struck at every form of solidarity and comradeship outside of that provided by personal allegiance to himself. In general, the Terror destroyed personal confidence between private citizens everywhere. The heaviest impact of all was, of course, on the institutional and communal loyalties which still existed in the country after eighteen years of one-party rule. The most powerful and important organization drawing loyalty to itself and its ideas rather than to the General Secretary himself was the Party—or rather its pre-Stalinist membership. Then came the Army. Then the intellectual class, rightly seen as the potential bearer of heretical attitudes. These special allegiances attracted particularly violent attention. But in proceeding to attack the entire people on the same basis, Stalin was being perfectly logical. The atomization of society, the destruction of all trust and loyalty except to him and his agents, could only be carried out by such methods.

In fact, the stage was reached which the writer Isaak Babel summed up, “Today a man only talks freely with his wife—at night, with the blankets pulled over his head.”²¹

Only the very closest of friends could hint to one another of their disbelief of official views (and often not even then). The ordinary citizen had no means of discovering how far the official lies were accepted. He might be one of a scattered and helpless minority, and Stalin might have won his battle to destroy the idea of the truth in the Soviet mind. “Millions led double lives,” as the grandson of the executed Army Commander Yakir was to write later.²² Every man became in one sense what Donne says he is not—“an island.”

Not that everyone blamed Stalin. His skill in remaining in the background deceived even minds like Pasternak and Meyerhold.²³

If men—albeit nonpolitical—of this caliber could feel so, it is clear that the idea must have been widespread. The fear and hatred of the population was concentrated on Yezhov, who was thus unconsciously making himself ready to be the scapegoat, the eponym of the “Yezhovshchina.”

MASS TERROR

As “the number of arrests based on charges of counter-revolutionary crimes grew tenfold between 1936 and 1937,”²⁴

the purge extended itself outward from the Party victims to include all their contacts, however slight. For example, in 1932 the Party Secretary of the Urals, Kabakov, had visited some workers’ quarters and chanced to look in at an apartment where he found only the mother at home. She told him that her son had gone on a rest cure after being overworked, but had to do it at his own expense. Kabakov ordered the management of the trust employing the worker to pay the expenses. Five years later, when Kabakov was arrested (see here) someone informed the NKVD that he had visited this worker and given him protection. The worker was himself at once pulled in, and accused of “bootlicking” Kabakov.²⁵

Thirteen accomplices had been found for Nikolayev, who had really acted alone. This became a general principle. “Vigilance” was made the test of a good citizen or employee, as well as of a good Party member. The NKVD everywhere, and all public organizations and economic institutions, were under continual pressure to show their worth in uprooting the enemy. Every man arrested was pressed to denounce accomplices, and in any case all his acquaintances automatically became suspects.

In the show trials themselves, some of the confessions automatically implicated not just individual or groups of political associates, but also wide circles completely outside the Party struggle. For example, in his evidence in the Bukharin Tria1,²⁶ Zelensky pleaded guilty to the fact that 15 percent of the staff of the Central Cooperative Union “consisted of former Mensheviks, Socialist-Revolutionaries, anarchists, Trotskyites, etc. In certain regions the number of alien elements, former members of other parties, Kolchak officers and so on … was considerably higher.” These elements were, he said, assembled to “act as a center of attraction for all kinds of anti-Soviet elements.” The way this would snowball almost automatically, and throughout the country, is obvious.

Yet it was not only this process of association that gave the Purge its increasingly mass character. In the 1930s, there were still hundreds of thousands who had been members of non-Bolshevik parties, the masses who had served in White armies, professional men who had been abroad, nationalist elements in the local intelligentsias, and so on. The increasingly virulent campaign for vigilance against the hidden enemy blanketed the whole country, not merely the Party, in a press and radio campaign. And while the destruction of hostile elements in the Party was going forward, it must have seemed natural to use the occasion to break all remaining elements suspected of not being reconciled to the regime.