The Great Terror

What would a Prygov say if he were required to defend himself in a court of law? He would not, we believe, refer to superior orders, but to the teachings of Marxism and Leninism as he understood them. Prygov was as loyal and obedient as an S.S. man. But his faith was founded on a conviction that it fully accorded with the demands of reason and conscience. He was fully convinced that his was no blind faith, but was founded on science and logic. He was brutal because the general line required him to be brutal. The general line, so long as it accorded with the fundamental tenets of Marxism, was everything to him. Without the allegedly scientific foundation of the general line, which was the backbone of his faith, all the instructions of the Patty authorities would have lost their significance for him. He was convinced of the logical and ethical correctness of his Marxist principles, and on this conviction his faith depended.⁶

For the Stalinist Party maintained, in theory, the old doctrine and the old loyalty. But the discipline which had hitherto been due, in theory at least, to a corporate collective leadership now became the service of one man and his personal decisions. The loyalties and solidarities which had bound the membership now worked in one direction only—upward; sideways, as regards the Party comrades among whom there had subsisted some degree of common trust, only mutual suspicion and “vigilance” remained.

A new political system had been established. Not merely had the new men everywhere taken the place of the veteran cadres, but they had been given a long, severe, and testing exercise in the methods and attitudes of the new style of rule. The experience of the Purge had hardened and tempered them, as the collectivization struggle and, before that, the Civil War had tempered their predecessors. The alloy, however, was a new one. Dostoyevsky remarks, in The House of the Dead

, “Tyranny is a habit; it grows upon us, and in the long run, turns into a disease…. The human being, member of society, is drowned for ever in the tyrant, and it is practically impossible for him to regain human dignity, repentance and regeneration.”

A Communist philosopher saw Stalin

as the apex of a pyramid which widened gradually toward the base and was composed of many “little Stalins”: they, seen from above, were the objects and, seen from below, the creators and guardians of the “cult of the personality.” Without the regular and unchallenged functioning of this mechanism the “cult of the personality” would have remained a subjective dream, a pathological fact, and would not have attained the social effectiveness which it exercised for decades….⁷

At the apex, this led to an extravagant adulation of Stalin. A Congress delegate of 1939 remarked: “… At that moment I saw our beloved father, Stalin, and I lost consciousness. The ‘hurrahs’ resounded for a long time, and it was probably this noise which brought me to myself….”⁸

And this was reasonably typical. A whole literature was devoted to the Vozhd.

In the country as a whole, a new public mood had been created. The experience had given the ruled as well as the rulers a new impress. The population had become habituated to silence and obedience, to fear and submission. In the years which remained of Stalin’s rule after the Purges, the all-out mass terror was no longer necessary. The machine had been started up, and could now be kept rolling without extraordinary efforts. It is true, in a sense, that the comparative calm which may reign in an autocracy following the elimination of all opponents or potential opponents is no less a manifestation of terror than the original killings—is, in fact, merely a product and consolidation of them: “Ubi solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant.”

In any case, the security organs never ceased to strike and strike brutally at all suspects. As late as 1940, Saratov jail was still holding ten men in cells for one or two.⁹ Right through the period, millions of prisoners, replacing the losses by death, were dispatched to the camps, and the threat remained ever present in all minds; yet the intensity of 1936 to 1938 was never reached again. In one vast operation, the country had been silenced and broken, and from then on more selective terror sufficed. This was partly because a good proportion of the new recruitment of forced laborers came from local and partial actions, starting with the Baltic and eastern Poland, where the work of 1917 to 1939 in the rest of the USSR was compressed into a couple of years, in 1939 to 1941.