The Great Terror

… hope once crushed, less quick to spring again.

Matthew Arnold

15

HERITAGE OF TERROR

None of the evils which totalitarianism … claims to remedy is worse than totalitarianism itself.

Albert Camus

“Zachto—why?” The last words of Yakov Livshits, Old Bolshevik and Deputy People’s Commissar, as he awaited execution on 30 January 1937, got no answer. During the few remaining months that old Party members were still at liberty and able, occasionally at least, to talk of such things, his question was much repeated. If experienced politicians felt baffled, the man in the street was even more uncomprehending. “I asked myself and others, why, what for? No one could give me an answer.”¹

As for victims, the first words on entering a cell were almost always, we are told, a shaken “But why, why?”² The prison and camp literature tells of the same phrase, “Why?” often found written on cell walls, and carved into the sides of prison wagons and on the planks of the transit camps.³ The old partisan Dubovoyfn1 (whose long white beard, of which he was very proud, the examining magistrate had torn out) even developed in jail the theory that the Purge was the result of an increase in the number of sunspots.⁴

The simplest form of true answer would, of course, be “to destroy or disorganize all possible sources of opposition to Stalin’s progress to absolute rule.” But we can also see, in the system he created after his victory, the specific form of despotism for which he had sacrificed the nation and Party.

The victory was inevitably marked by a good deal of dislocation, and stability had not been achieved when the Soviet Union was faced with international emergencies, starting with the Finnish War of 1939 to 1940, which became a desperate struggle for mere existence in the four-year war with the Nazis from 1941 to 1945, and its of reconstruction. It was not until 1947–1948 that the Stalinist State became politically and institutionally stabilized.

But meanwhile, two main objects had already been accomplished. A vast number of past or potential “hostile” elements had been destroyed or sent to labor camps, and the rest of the population reduced to the most complete silence and obedience. And, on the other hand, the Communist Party itself had been turned into something entirely new.

This political transformation is to some extent masked by the fact that the organizational forms remained the same. But, in fact, the discontinuity between the Party of 1934 and the Party of 1939 was radical. The people opposed to Stalin had already been almost entirely eliminated from the leading organs of the party. Over the Purge period, the Stalinists themselves, except for a small and peculiar personal following, were destroyed. The extent of the discontinuity is plain if we consider the delegates to the XVIIth and XVIIIth Congresses. As we have seen, and it is worth repeating, less than 2 percent

of the rank-and-file delegates of 1934 held their positions in 1939. The Communist Party of 1939 was more different from that of 1934 than Buchanan’s Democratic Party was from Andrew Jackson’s. If the latter case is more evident to historians, it is partly because, in the Communist case, emphasis on the continuous tradition, and thus concealment of the change, were of much greater political importance to the rulers.

The earlier leaders had wished to reserve all political rights for the limited leading membership of the old Party. Stalin, in destroying that Party, in a sense threw the positions of power open. He instituted the carrière ouverte aux talents in place of the old system. It is true that the “talents” required were of a special type. But at least any man, whatever his origins and however recently he had joined the Party, could be sure of a good post if he exhibited adequate servility and ruthlessness. But at the same time, among the new cadres of Stalinism, Party theory in its old justificatory form was still to be a basis. As Hitler had remarked, “Any violence which does not spring from a firm spiritual base, will be wavering and uncertain. It lacks the stability which can only rest in a fanatical outlook.”⁵

A close student of, and victim of, the Purge acutely analyzes the thoughts of the truly orthodox among Stalin’s operatives. Taking the case of a former NKVD officer known for his brutality, but gentle and even sentimental when himself a prisoner, he concludes: