The Great Terror

Although no more such trials were seen in Moscow, all over Eastern Europe the old method was employed, under direct Russian control, first (as in Russia) against non-Party elements, such as the Agrarian leader Nikola Petkov in Bulgaria and Cardinal Mindszenty in Hungary, and later with Communist leaders like Laszlo Rajk in Hungary and Traicho Kostov in Bulgaria.

The system of public confession to entirely false charges came to an abrupt halt in December 1949fn3 when Kostov, Secretary of the Central Committee of the Bulgarian Communist Party, retracted his confession in open court and maintained this stand throughout the trial.

Kostov refused to change his mind in spite of the moral indignation of the court and the tearful appeals of his co-accused. Kostov was perhaps in a stronger position than most accused in earlier trials; he must long ago have become accustomed to the idea of death and torture in pursuit of his political aims. His conduct under “fascist” interrogation had been held up as an example to the Bulgarian Communist Party. He was still close to the period of his illegal life and had not—as perhaps Bukharin and others had—gone to seed after years of comfort. Moreover, he knew that the bulk of his party was silently behind him, and thus, perhaps, did not feel quite the isolation of the Russian oppositionists. In addition, he seems to have been particularly tough; in him, typical Bulgarian mulishness and resilience were developed to a high degree.

In Russia itself, there were almost no death sentences for three or four years after the war, apart from those on a few leading Vlasovites. Genuine collaborators with the Germans had been rounded up by the tens of thousands, and merely sentenced to labor camps, where they were joined by the Soviet soldiers returned from internment in Germany. In 1946 and 1947, a great wave of arrests struck at Jews, Army officers, and others, and soon afterwards all those who had been released in the meanwhile were again arrested. This reversal of an act of “rotten liberalism” was given official authorization by a decree of 1950, said to have been adopted “on the initiative of Beria and Abakumov.”⁵²

The camps were at first more deadly than ever. Of those sentenced in 1945 and 1946, few survived by 1953. The famine of 1947⁵³ was, of course, reflected in the camp rations, with the usual results. By the beginning of the 1950s, however, a reform and rationalization of the forced-labor system led to a drop in the death rate. Since almost no releases took place (one Kotlas commandant is quoted as saying that he had been in his post for eight years and had released one prisoner),⁵⁴

the camp population mounted, by Stalin’s death, to its probable maximum of approximately 12 million.

This general consolidation of the labor-camp system reflected a consolidation of the whole State and economy into the form Stalin had evidently been aiming at since his achievement of full power. In the new society, forced labor was evidently intended as permanent economic form.

What Stalin had established was essentially a command economy and a command society. This applied at every level. The collective farms, with their tractors, were producing less food than the ill-equipped muzhik

of 1914. But they were now economically and politically under control. They could no longer hold the market to ransom.

And so it was the whole way up the scale. Everywhere, orders from the center were not merely binding in principle, but enforceable in practice. There was no significant area in which the important decisions could not be taken in the Kremlin.

The resemblances between this and “Socialism,” as Marx and others had envisaged it, were, formally speaking, not negligible. The capitalist no longer existed. The “petit-bourgeois” individual peasant had gone. The State controlled the economy. For those who held that in a modern industrial society the absence of capitalists could only mean Socialism, this was enough. Defined more positively, Socialism had indeed always had one further characteristic—in effect, its very keystone. The control of the State by the proletariat had been regarded as the essential. In Stalin’s Russia, there was no sign at all of any such thing. This point was got over by verbal means. All the phraseology of the Workers’ State was employed, in every conceivable context.

One may wonder how far Stalin thought that he had produced the Socialism the securing of which he had, as a young man, been converted to. There was indeed no longer any “ruling class.” Although Stalin created (and admitted he was creating) a large privileged stratum, it had no rights of ownership over the means of production. Every privilege was held, in the last analysis, at the whim of the ruler.