The Great Terror

Few would now maintain that Stalin’s method was the only, or the best, way available—even to a one-party regime—to attain the degree of increased industrialization actually realized. But in any case, the basic economic benefits obtained, or supposedly obtained, by the Stalin regime were already in hand before the Purge proper started. Economically, in fact, there is no doubt that the Purge was disadvantageous: it removed a high proportion of the most skilled industrial leaders, from Pyatakov down; and at the same time, the camps were filled from an already overstretched labor pool. The rationale was that not of economics, but of despotism. With all the incentives to attain, or at least claim, the opposite, economic advance admittedly slowed down in 1938 to 1940.⁵⁷

The lesson might seem to be that the use of terror in conditions when it may seem to some degree economically effective is nevertheless not a good idea even economically. For it cannot simply be switched off. It builds up its own interests and institutions, its own cadres and habits of mind. Any good it may be (in this sense) at a particular moment is likely to be offset at a later stage when it is no longer applicable, but still applied.

But even if one were to accept the Stalin method as a whole, writing off later losses as the inevitable payment for earlier successes, other issues arise. Stalinism might be one way of attaining industrialization, just as cannibalism is one way of attaining a high-protein diet. The desirability of the result hardly seems to balance the objections.

Meanwhile, Stalin pervaded every sphere. In philosophy, for example, he was celebrated as a profound critic of Hegel, as the first to elucidate certain pronouncements of Aristotle, as the only man to bring out the full significance of Kant’s theories. On the tercentenary of Spinoza’s birth, Pravda had put in several quotations from Stalin, having nothing to do with Spinoza or even philosophy.⁵⁸

At a Moscow conference of experts held in 1963, a historian complained that in the postwar period “it was impossible frankly to share one’s thoughts and doubts even with one’s comrades, for fear of placing them in a difficult position.”⁵⁹

Academician Evgeni M. Zhukov spoke of the “psychological trauma” suffered by historians who were “systematically imbued with the idea that theoretically sound works could only be written by a select vozhd and that profound thoughts and fresh deeds could proceed only from him.” Thus “for almost twenty years—the period of the formation of the consciousness of a whole generation—independent creative thought by ‘ordinary mortals’ in the sphere of theory was placed in doubt.”

A doctor, denouncing the effect on Soviet medicine, summed up:

The main harm caused to science by the cult of the personality lay in the proclamation of a single opinion … “an inexhaustible fount of wisdom” as the supreme truth.…It is not accidental that in the course of discussions of concrete scientific problems, one concept or another was not verified by the experiments of its proposers but by references to scientific heritage, by mere quotation from the works of others.⁶⁰

In the even more sensitive field of economics, independent thought was naturally treated with greater rigor. The Director of the Institute of Economics of the USSR Academy of Sciences remarked in 1962:

Many Communists can still remember the havoc wreaked in the forties on the journal Problems of Economics for publishing an article by Professor Kubanin. In this article he expressed the completely correct thought that we were lagging behind America in labor productivity in agriculture. The great scholar and major expert on the economics of agriculture paid for this correct thought with his life, while the journal was closed for its “heresy.”⁶¹

The effect of the Stalinist attitude at the lower level is adumbrated by the First Secretary of the Georgian Communist Party, Mgeladze, who summoned workers from the Institute of Marxism-Leninism and the Institute of History of the Georgian Academy of Science and had them write a book on the history of the Party in Transcaucasia. When he was given the result, he announced, “I, as the author, like it. But be sure if there are any mistakes in it, you, dear friends, will all go to prison.”⁶²

Again, Stalin happened to say in an aside that the Azerbaijanis were obviously descended from the Medes. Although there is no basis for such a notion, it became established doctrine among the historians. Linguists spent fifteen years trying to find Median words in Azeri. “Eventually thirty-five dubious Median words were found, although the Median language itself is mythical.”⁶³

These few examples—which omit, for instance, the major scandal of Lysenkoism in Soviet biology—must serve as a general impression of the effect of Stalin’s new regime on the intellect.