The Great Terror

Sir Bernard Pares, a serious historian and long-established expert on all things Russian, was equally duped. The later editions of Pares’s History of Russia cover the period to the end of the Second World War. Dealing with the Purges, he permits himself to say, “Nearly all admitted having conspired against the life of Stalin and others, and on this point it is not necessary to doubt them…. Radek, who spoke with consummate lucidity, gave what is probably a true picture.”

⁹¹ On the Tukhachevsky case—of which, it may be remembered, no evidence whatever was made public—he merely points out that the Russian and German General Staffs had earlier been in contact, and therefore “it is by no means unlikely that there was a plot.” A generation earlier, the conscience of the civilized world could be aroused by the false condemnation to imprisonment of a single French captain for a crime which had actually been committed, though not by him. The Soviet equivalent of the Dreyfus Case involved the execution of thousands of officers, from Marshals and Admirals down, on charges which were totally imaginary. It called forth instead, and not from Pares alone, comments like the above!

Of the trials in general, Pares concludes, “The plea that Stalin acted first to disrupt a potential fifth column … is by no means unwarranted.” Elsewhere he remarks that “the bulky verbatim reports were in any case impressive”⁹²

—perhaps the most fatuous of all comments, and the fine fruit, as Walter Laqueur has said, “of fifty years of study of Russian history, the Russian people, its country, its language.”

As an old authority on Russia, Pares had been opposed to the Soviet Government and revised his attitude in view of the Nazi threat. “Towards the end of 1935,” his son comments, “my father set foot in Russia once more and any remaining doubts vanished at once. He had not left the Moscow railway station before his mind was flooded with the realization that the Bolsheviks were, after all, Russia.”⁹³ This reliance on personal revelation and intuition, inadequately related to the real situation, is surely inappropriate and egocentric—a point worth making when we read similar accounts from more recently totalitarianized lands.

What happened in Russia under Stalin could not be understood or estimated in any commonsensical fashion, if by common sense we mean notions that sound reasonable and natural to the democratic Westerner. Many of the misunderstandings which appeared in Britain and America during the Great Trials were due to prejudice—not necessarily to prejudice in favor of the Soviet regime or of Stalin, but at least prejudice in regard to certain events or interpretations of them as inherently unlikely. The Great Trials were, and it should have been plain at the time, nothing but large-scale frame-ups. But it was extraordinarily difficult for many in the West to credit this, to believe that a State could really perpetrate on a vast scale such a cheap and third-rate system of falsehood. Bernard Shaw typically remarked, “I find it just as hard to believe that [Stalin] is a vulgar gangster as that Trotsky is an assassin.”⁹⁴ Presumably, he would not have been surprised at some such events in quite highly organized societies like Imperial Rome or Renaissance Florence. But the Soviet State appeared to have a certain impersonality, and not obviously to lend itself to actions determined not so much by political ideas as by the overt personal plotting which had afflicted those earlier regimes.

There was another powerful factor. Both opponents of and sympathizers with the Russian Revolution thought of the Communists as a group of “dedicated” (or “fanatical”) men whose faults or virtues were at any rate incompatible with common crime—something like the Jesuits of the Counter-Reformation. England has had little recent experience of revolutionary movements, and this idea persists. It is the type of general notion which the uninformed are likely to assume simply out of ignorance, and it has not lost its obscuring power to this day.

Men like Stalin, Kaganovich, Voroshilov, Molotov, and Yagoda had been members of the underground Bolshevik Party in the time of its illegal struggle against Tsardom. Whatever their faults, they had thus established at least enough bona fides to exempt them from the suspicion that they did in fact behave as they are now known to have done. Even now, doubtless, there are those in the West who find it hard to swallow the notion of the top leaders of the Soviet Communist Party writing obscene and brutal comments on the appeals for mercy of the men they knew to be totally innocent. The mistake was, in fact, in the idea held in this country about revolutionary movements. In practice, they not only are joined by simon-pure idealists, but also consist of a hodgepodge of members in whom the idealist component is accompanied by all sorts of motivations—vanity, power seeking, and mere freakishness.