The Great Terror

The Russian intelligentsia had for over a century been the traditional repository of the ideas of resistance to despotism and, above all, to thought control. It was natural that the Purge struck at it with particular force. The Communists not only took seriously the whole principle of right and wrong ideas, and the necessity of crushing the latter, but also increasingly developed theories of form and method within the arts and sciences, so that someone otherwise an orthodox Party man in every way could yet hold opinions in biology or dramatic production which would lead directly to his fall.

In Soviet conditions, the academic world overlapped that of government to a larger degree than was then common elsewhere. The economists had been involved in the State Planning Commission, and had mostly been purged in the early 1930s. But in other spheres, too, such as foreign affairs and culture, there was a considerable overlap. We hear of a “professor” in the Foreign Affairs Commissariat appealing to Molotov to intercede for his father, arrested through what he took to be a misunderstanding. Molotov minuted, “To Yezhov: Can it be that this professor is still in the People’s Commissariat of Foreign Affairs and not in the NKVD?” Whereupon the writer of the letter was unlawfully arrested.¹

During March, April, and May 1937, articles appeared attacking deviation in history and economics, and among the “cadres” of literature. A special article by Molotov sharpened the tone of the campaign.²

Historians were particularly vulnerable. The whole school of Party historians which had followed Pokrovsky were arrested. They were often labeled terrorists. In fact, it is extraordinary how many of the leading terrorist bands were headed by historians. Sokolnikov mentioned in the most natural way at his trial that “arrests had begun among the historians.”³ Prigozhin, one of the leading terrorist executives of the group then before the court, was a historian. So were Karev, Zeidel, Anishev, Vanag, Zaks-Gladnev, Piontkovsky, and Friedland, named at the 1936 and 1937 Trials as active terrorists. Friedland is mentioned by Radek as leading a terror group actually “consisting of historians”: this “we, among ourselves, called the ‘historical or hysterical’ group.”

⁴ Professors were a convenient class of suspect because they were in a position to recruit plausible terrorists in the persons of students—also a much-arrested class. It was said in evidence at the 1937 Trial, as a normal thing, that the terrorist organization in Siberia sought its cadres “chiefly among the young people in the universities.”⁵

Friedland and the others were Party historians and automatically involved in controversy. But the non-Party academic world was also in a difficult position. While the man in the street could cease to talk a great deal, the professors were bound to continue giving lectures before public audiences which inevitably contained informers on the alert for anything which could possibly be interpreted as “hostile.” (Colleagues, too, might be serving the police. A successful and erudite professor in Dniepropetrovsk, who had matters in his past which the NKVD used against him, is described as a most efficient agent provocateur.)⁶

A professor of ancient history, Konstantin Shteppa, first lost favor as a result of describing Joan of Arc as high-strung. Joan had been treated in a hostile fashion or ignored until the mid-1930s, but with the coming of the Popular Front in France she had been referred to as a heroine of a national resistance movement, so that the professor’s remarks deviated from the Party line. After considerable trouble about this, he was again censured for a reference to the legend of Midas in an unfortunate context. Then, speaking of ancient and Christian demonology, he happened to remark that country people are always backward. Unfortunately, Trotsky, like many others, had expressed the same thought. Finally, in dealing with the Donatist movement in North Africa, at the time of the Roman Empire, he had shown that it was in part a national as well as a peasant rebellion, thus becoming a bourgeois nationalist. At this time, in 1937, his friends and colleagues were being arrested on a large scale.

I was naturally sorry for my friends, but I was not only sorry for them. I was also afraid of them. After all, they could say things about conversations we had had, in which we had not always expressed the orthodox view. There had been nothing criminal in these conversations; they had contained no attacks on the Soviet power. But the trivial criticisms and grumbles and expressions of resentment and disappointment which occurred in every conversation forced every Soviet citizen to feel guilty.⁷