The Great Terror

This sort of reporting is more or less ephemeral. We should perhaps take more serious and studious treatments as still more reprehensible. Scholars and Russian experts were duped to the same degree as journalists and lawyers. When Beatrice and Sidney Webb examined Soviet matters, and put their conclusions into their vast tome Soviet Communism: A New Civilization, the Constitution much impressed them. So did the constitutions and the statutes of the Party, the trade unions, the consumer cooperatives, the collective farms. And, indeed, if these documents had ever been put into operation, they might have produced the society the Webbs thought they saw. It doubtless never occurred to the Webbs, brought up in Britain, that official documents do not necessarily bear much relation to fact. As it is, their book is to be regarded less as an account of a real country than as a successor to the works of Sir Thomas More, Campanella, Plato, Harrington, and William Morris. It was unfortunate—and this, of course, applied not only to the Webbs—that the perfectly natural human activity of constructing Utopias should, through various misunderstandings, have been projected on to a real community with so little claim to it.

The Webbs assert flatly that Kirov’s assassin “was discovered to have secret connections with conspiratorial circles of ever-widening range.” On the executions immediately following the assassination, they say that those shot did not seem to have been proven accomplices in the assassination “or the conspiracies associated therewith,” but that they were “undoubtedly guilty of illegal entry and inexcusably bearing arms and bombs.”⁸⁵ “Undoubtedly” seems a strong word, when the sole evidence was a brief announcement to that effect in the Soviet press.

They describe the Moscow trials as “a tragic hangover from the violence of the revolution and the civil war.”⁸⁶

Of course, there is a sense in which all these events are connected, but the image does not seem appropriate as it stands. A hangover which suddenly reaches its climax sixteen years after the events supposed to have caused it requires some special explanation.

The Webbs comment, truly though not perhaps in the sense in which they meant it, that the trials produced some international revulsion against the Soviet Union and that therefore “the Soviet Government must have had strong grounds for the action which has involved such unwelcome consequences.” Claiming to attempt “a detached and philosophic interpretation” of the trials, they say that the whole manner of the confessions was convincing, and that “careful perusal of the full reports of the proceedings” left them with the same impression, though they express a reservation about Trotsky.⁸⁷

They explain the confessions as due to Russian prisoners

behaving naturally and sensibly, as Englishmen would were they not virtually compelled by their highly artificial legal system to go through a routine which is useful to the accused only when there is some doubt as to the facts or as to the guilt or innocence of the conduct in question.⁸⁸

This curious view of the comparability of the Soviet and British legal systems was shared by Professor Harold Laski, who noted that “basically I did not observe much difference between the general character of a trial in Russia and in this country.” In Vyshinsky, with whom he had a long discussion, he found “a man whose passion was law reform…. He was doing what an ideal Minister of Justice would do if we had such a person in Great Britain—forcing his colleagues to consider what is meant by actual experience of the law in action.”⁸⁹ This was indeed published before Vyshinsky’s great days. But trials had already taken place in Russia, and with Vyshinsky’s active participation, which might have produced qualms.

Another serious student of Russia (and of agriculture in particular) was Sir John Maynard, from whom it had been possible to hide the Ukrainian famine. On the trials, he remarked, “However much falsity of detail there may be, the Trials of the leading personages in 1936–38 were substantially justified by facts: and were probably the means of saving the U.S.S.R. from an attempted revolution which would have given to the Nazi Government an earlier opportunity.”⁹⁰