The Great Terror

Perhaps the commonest reaction was to believe that the case against the accused in the trials was exaggerated, rather than false in every respect. This formula enabled those who subscribed to it to strike what they felt to be a decent commonsensical balance. In fact, it was simply a mediocre compromise between truth and falsehood, between right and wrong.

And the trials were at least directed against rivals of Stalin. The idea that Stalin had himself organized the murder of Kirov, on the face of it his closest ally and supporter—a murder in strictly criminal style—would have been rejected as absurd. When it was suggested by a few ex-oppositionists and defectors, who knew more about the circumstances than most people, it was hardly thought worth discussing.

Such attitudes showed a basic misunderstanding of the range of political possibility in a nondemocratic culture. More particularly, they showed a failure to grasp Soviet circumstances and, above all, a misjudgment about Stalin personally. For Stalin’s political genius consisted precisely in this: he recognized no limitations, either moral or intellectual, in his methods of securing power.

His calculation about the effect abroad was on the whole sound. It is true that the frame-ups were clumsy fabrications. It is also true that Stalin did not in fact silence everyone who knew anything about them. But he did not have to. The notion that things would have been very different if the frame-ups had been seamlessly perfect and if everyone who had known the truth had instantly been shot is a superficial one. Stalin had a clearer idea of the state of the public mind both in Russia and in the West. It is only too plain that he was right. Those who were prepared to believe his story believed it regardless of its peripheral faults, and rejected accounts put out by people who had had access to the correct information.

Thus a State prepared flatly to deny its own malpractices, and to prevent open access to the facts, could successfully persuade many people abroad, even in spite of a large and growing body of first-hand evidence from those who had actually experienced the Terror. This is a lesson that has clearly been learned by similar regimes in other parts of the world, and is still the basic principle of much misinformation that appears in the West.

The trials were overt acts. The other acts of the Purge were never announced. In particular, the size and nature of the labor-camp system only became known in the West through defectors, some of them former inmates. After the Poles in Russia were released in 1941 and 1942, thousands of accounts were available for checking, and dozens of first-hand descriptions were readily available in print. By 1948, as we have said, a very full analysis of the system listing hundreds of camps, together with reproductions of camp documents, was published by David J. Dallin and Boris I. Nicolaevsky.⁹⁵

The United Kingdom delegation to the United Nations was able to circulate the Corrective Labor Codex of the RSFSR; free trade-union bodies produced their own analyses.

The evidence was as complete and as consistent as it could conceivably be. It was widely rejected. Jean-Paul Sartre even defended the proposition that the evidence about the Soviet forced-labor-camp system should be ignored, even if true, on the grounds that otherwise the French proletariat might be thrown into despair. Why the labor-camp population should be sacrificed to the (rather smaller) membership of the CGT was not clear; nor, indeed, was it ever made plain why the views of the French proletariat, one of the few that has ever come largely under Communist influence, should prevail in world affairs any more than those of the anti-Communist British and American and German proletariats. Nor is it obvious at first sight why falsehood should demand the allegiance even of the intelligentsia. This sort of intellectual and ethical attitude might be treated as a passing aberration, a curiosity of history, and one might have thought that anyone holding it would have forfeited any public standing as a moral arbiter, at least in this sort of sphere. But this does not seem to have been the case, and if only for that reason is worth referring to.