The Great Terror

In the West, the facts were readily available. Hundreds of articles and books were published in which all these points were clearly and flatly demonstrated. Trotsky, the one accused at liberty, exposed the frame-up with incisive skill. The distinguished Commission headed by Professor Dewey examined the whole evidence in the most judicious and meticulous fashion, and published its findings. It was not a question of political argument, properly speaking, but of facts. Yet in spite of everything, these went unheard among large sections of well-informed people. There was no reasonable excuse for believing the Stalinist story. The excuses which can be advanced are irrational, though often couched in the formulas of intensive rationalization.

The Communist Parties everywhere simply transmitted the Soviet line. Communist intellectuals, some of them better informed about Soviet conditions and more inclined to frame their own answers, reacted variously. There were those who simply repressed the difficult material. Stephen Spender quotes an English Communist friend, when asked what he thought of the trials, as replying, “What trials? I have given up thinking about such things long ago.”⁶⁹

More representative was the attitude of Bertolt Brecht, who remarked to Sidney Hook at the time of the first trials, “The more innocent they are, the more they deserve to die.”⁷⁰

Meanwhile, he had written a play about Nazi Germany: a father and mother are worried because friends of theirs are under investigation, and they fear the block warden. The husband, a teacher, does not know if they have anything against him at the school. “I am ready to teach whatever they want me to teach. But what do they want me to teach? If only I were sure of that.” They worry about whether to put Hitler’s picture in a more prominent position, or whether that will look like a confession of guilt.

Wife:

But there’s nothing against you, is there?

Husband:

There’s something against everybody. Everybody is suspected. It’s enough if someone expresses any suspicion of you, to make you a suspected person.

And later one remarks, “Since when have they needed witnesses?”⁷¹

But the main theme of the play—taken as completely destroying the moral basis of Nazism—is the father’s and mother’s fear that their schoolboy son may have denounced them. This was at a time when, as Brecht evidently knew, the same sort of thing was going on in the Soviet Union. In fact, there was a widely praised and celebrated Soviet example of sons denouncing their parents. During collectivization, Pavlik Morozov, leader of his village group of young Communist “Pioneers” who were acting as auxiliaries in the attack on the peasantry, “unmasked” his father—who had previously been president of the village soviet but had “fallen under the influence of kulak relations.” The father was shot, and on 3 September 1932 a group of peasants, including the boy’s uncle, in turn killed the son, at the age of fourteen—thus, as it were, anticipating Stalin’s age limit for executions. All the killers were themselves executed, and young Morozov became, until very recently, a great hero of the Komsomol. The Palace of Culture of the Red Pioneers in Moscow was named after him.⁷²

Even in the Khrushchev period, the Soviet press celebrated the “sacred and dear” Pavlik Morozov Museum in his own village: “In this timbered house was held the court at which Pavlik unmasked his father who had sheltered the kulaks. Here are reliquaries dear to the heart of every inhabitant of Gerasimovka.”⁷³

In Brecht’s own case, it is noteworthy that a close connection, his former mistress the actress Carola Neher (who had played the lead in the Dreigroschenoper), was arrested in Russia and never seen again.

As Hubert Luthy has argued, Brecht himself was not attracted to Communism as part of the “Workers’ Movement, which he had never known, but by a deep urge for a total authority, a total submission to a total power, the new Byzantine State Church—immutable, hierarchical, founded on the infallibility of the leader.”⁷⁴ His political and semipolitical work invariably shows this pleasure at rolling in the muck for the sake of the idea. It seems to represent an extreme and degenerate version of Pyatakov’s view of the Party.

It is perhaps natural that committed Communists should in principle have accepted and propagated untruths, in the old tradition of “pious fraud.” But curiously enough, such a consideration seems partially to apply also to many elements of the non-Communist Left. Not in such a clear-cut manner, not so fraudulently or so piously, they yet tended to temper criticism, to put the best complexion on, or ignore, refractory events.