The Great Terror

There was, indeed, much resistance among the tougher-minded Left. Edmund Wilson, reading the charges against Zinoviev and Kamenev while still in Russia, saw at once that they were faked. In the United States, the Dewey Commission had as its lawyer John F. Finerty, who had appeared for the defense in the Mooney and Sacco–Vanzetti trials. The Liberal Manchester Guardian was the strongest and most effective of British exposers of the trials. The orthodox Labour Party press did the same; that party also put out Frederick Adler’s forthright and accurate pamphlet on the subject. And on the extreme Left, some of the most effective exposure was done by Emrys Hughes in the Scottish Forward

. In fact, some Leftists (and not only Trotkyists and so on, who had a direct partisan interest) were perfectly clear-headed about the matter, while some people opposed to the principles of Communism accepted the official versions.

But on the whole, in the atmosphere of the late 1930s, fascism was the enemy, and a partial logic repressed or rejected any criticism of its supposed main enemy, the USSR. The Western capitals thronged with “the thousands of painters and writers and doctors and lawyers and debutantes chanting a diluted version of the Stalinist line.”⁷⁵

Appeals in favor of the trials were made by various Western writers, Feuchtwanger, Barbusse—even the sensitive Gandhi fan, Romain Rolland. In the United States, a manifesto attacking the Dewey Commission was signed by a number of authors, poets, professors, and artists—Theodore Dreiser, Granville Hicks,fn4 Corliss Lamont, and others.

Speaking of the attitude of many British intellectuals to the trials, Julian Symons remarks on the “monstrous incongruities that they willingly swallowed.” He adds: “But they had not been deceived. In relation to the Soviet Union they had deceived themselves, and in the end one has to pay for such self-deceits.”⁷⁶

In the non-Communist, Popular Front–style Left, there were signs of unease. Britain’s leading journal of the intellectual Left, the New Statesman

, found the first trial “unconvincing,” yet added, “We do not deny … that the confessions may have contained a substratum of truth.” On the 1937 Trial, it said, “Few would now maintain that all or any of them were completely innocent.” On the 1938 Trial, which it claimed was “undoubtedly very popular in the U.S.S.R.,” it said that the confessions remained baffling, “whether we regard them as true or false,” but that it could be concluded that “there had undoubtedly been much plotting in the U.S.S.R.”—curiously combining a sense of the incredibility of the charges with a willingness to believe them.

One of the achievements of Stalinism was, in effect, that in spite of the fact that plenty of information was available contradicting the official picture, it was possible to impose the latter upon journalists, sociologists, and other visitors by methods which, on the face of it, seem crude and obvious, but which worked splendidly. Tourists visited Russia on a bigger scale in the Yezhov period than ever before. They saw nothing. The nighttime arrests, the torture chambers of the Lefortovo and the crowded cells of the Butyrka, the millions of prisoners cold and hungry in the great camps of the north were all hidden from them. The only dramatic scenes were the three great public trials. And these, too, were strictly controlled and did not depart much from a prepared script.

For if access to Russia was extensive, it was also imperfect. The Soviet Government at this time maintained its model prison at Bolshevo, which many foreign visitors were shown. The Webbs give it a laudatory account,⁷⁷

and it had also attracted favorable comment from D. N. Pritt, Harold Laski, and many others. One friendly visitor had the opportunity of gaining a rather broader view: Jerzy Gliksman, who, as a progressive member of the Warsaw City Council before the war, visited and reported enthusiastically on Bolshevo and the new humanitarian methods of criminology. A few years later, he found himself in camps more representative of Soviet penal practice.⁷⁸

Other prisoners report occasionally passing through the model blocks—known to prisoners as “Intourist Prisons”—which were shown to foreign sociologists and journalists. Herling,⁷⁹ while in an ordinary cell in the Leningrad Transit Prison (which he describes as better than usual, with only seventy prisoners in a cell intended for twenty), was taken by chance through a model wing—evidently that described by Lenka von Koerber in her enthusiastic book about the Soviet prison system, Soviet Russia Fights Crime.