The Great Terror

In the less stormy atmosphere of the post-Yezhov years, moreover, more careful attention could be paid to thought-crime and face-crime. An authoritative instruction, typical of many, ran:

One must not content oneself with merely paying attention to what is being said, for that may well be in complete harmony with the Party program. One must pay attention also to the manner—to the sincerity, for example, with which a schoolmistress recites a poem the authorities regard as doubtful, or the pleasure revealed by a critic who goes into detail about a play he professes to condemn.⁶⁴

The last years of Stalin’s life saw a major, though unpublicized, series of purges. In 1949–1950 came a new “Leningrad Case.” Voznesensky, member of the Politburo; A. A. Kuznetsov, Secretary of the Central Committee; and other leaders were shot. About 3,000 senior Party members in Leningrad were arrested, and treated with particular brutality, many of them being shot; and there were similar purges elsewhere. In 1952 and 1953, leading Jewish intellectuals perished by the hundred, and a wave of arrests culminated in the Doctors’ Plot, with Stalin ordering the investigators, “Beat, beat and beat again,” as Khrushchev tells us.

Stalin’s execution of the main Yiddish writers in the “Crimean Affair” of 1952 is among the most extraordinary of all State acts. As Manès Sperber has said, these were Communists who had submitted to all the imperatives of the regime and of Stalin. “Like the others, they had betrayed their friends and their brothers every time that fidelity to the Party demanded it; but they were to die because they remained incapable of betraying their language and their literature.”

Not long before Stalin died, Pravda, by an extraordinary exception, published an article by Herbert Morrison, the British Foreign Secretary.⁶⁵ It calmly but cogently set forth democratic objections to the Soviet system. An answer appeared at once, saying that Morrison was asking for freedom of speech for those it would be wrong to give it to—“the criminals who … killed… Kirov.” It now turns out that it was precisely those people, and no others, who had freedom of speech.

The Stalinist version of the events of the Purge was, of course, the only one permitted in Russia itself. Many people there knew at first hand that this version was false, but anyone susceptible of indoctrination by terror or by sheer pressure of propaganda fell in with the official line.

Abroad, things were different. The West was not forced to accept the Stalinist version. Freedom of judgment and freedom of information prevailed, then as now. This did not prevent an extraordinary degree of success for the official Communist view.

FOREIGN MISAPPREHENSIONS

If thou canst not realize the Ideal thou shalt at least idealize the Real.

Calverley

During the Purges, a young English Communist, John Cornford, published a poem:

SERGEI MIRONOVICH, KIROV

(Assassinated in Leningrad, December 1934)

Nothing is ever certain, nothing is ever safe,

To-day is overturning yesterday’s settled good.

Everything dying keeps a hungry grip on life.

Nothing is ever born without screaming and blood.

Understand the weapon, understand the wound:

What shapeless past was hammered to action by his deeds,

Only in constant action was his constant certainty found.

He will throw a longer shadow as time recedes.⁶⁶

Cornford, with a first-class record at Cambridge University, went to Spain in 1936 and was killed near Córdoba, with the International Brigade, at the end of that year. There can hardly be a better illustration of the way in which the generous impulse in Western Communism could be befouled by Stalinism. The young man who gave his life in the cause of a supposed revolutionary humanism had been led by his allegiances to produce what is little more than a versification of Stalin’s theory that the class struggle grows more bitter as the opponents of Communism become weaker, using as its text a crime allegedly committed by counterrevolutionaries, but actually by Stalin himself.

Time having, as Cornford suggests, receded, what has become plain is that not even high intelligence and a sensitive spirit are of any help once the facts of a situation are deduced from a political theory, rather than vice versa.