The Great Terror

The effects of the Stalin era took a long time to sink in in the West. Indeed, they were rejected by many until admitted by the dictator’s diadochi. A curious resistance prevailed in which evidence which would have been thought adequate about any other regime was rejected—a phenomenon ludicrously illustrated by (again) Jean-Paul Sartre in his introduction to Henri Alleg’s book about torture in Algeria. Sartre said that we now know of the existence of torture in Communist countries as well, because of Khrushchev’s admission and the evidence given at the trial of the Hungarian Police Minister Farkas. That is to say, evidence of the Alleg type, mere first-hand accounts, was to be admitted in the French, but excluded in the Russian, case.

Khrushchev’s revelations in February 1956 did not affect some Soviet sympathizers in the West except to the degree that they feared that the disclosures might prove disturbing to those whose faith was less firmly founded.

After the publication of Khrushchev’s Secret Speech, Professor Joliot-Curie asked Ehrenburg to be cautious when speaking about it, especially to his children; Khrushchev’s revelations were disturbing to many Communists; he personally knew of many errors and mistakes, even of crimes committed,fn6 but he understood also that drastic changes of the whole structure of the State would cause troubles and personal hardships. These troubles could happen in any country, and they would not perturb him personally. They might, however, have a quite different effect on those who knew less. So he wished that Ehrenburg, when speaking about the Soviet Union, would choose positive rather than negative events.¹⁰³

Such is the perhaps rational attitude of a Communist. It is charitable to imagine that the great physicist had not really faced the facts of what he still thought of as unavoidable hardships. In any event, his case and the various others we have dipped into constitute a mere sketch and selection of an extraordinary potpourri of inhumanity and self-deception which a later generation might well take to heart.

THE KHRUSHCHEV PERIOD

When Stalin died on 5 March 1953, his successors appealed against “panic and disarray.”¹⁰⁴

But their qualms were unnecessary. Although the single will of the creator of the new State had now gone, the machinery he had created remained in existence. And aspirations among the citizenry toward a different order of things had no possible means of expression and organization.

We need not rehearse the history of the USSR over the post-Stalin period. It will be enough to note that its politics have been dominated by the problem of Stalin. Within three years came the major breakthrough of Khrushchev’s Secret speech to the XXth Party Congress, which denounced the late dictator’s arbitrary rule and exposed the falsification, based on torture, of the cases against certain non-oppositionist victims such as Kossior and Eikhe. The Secret Speech was a tremendous step forward. And it was followed, over the next eight or nine years, by the publication of a great deal of other material on the truths of the Stalin epoch. But passive and active opposition within the old apparatus was strong, and de-Stalinization remained incomplete and sporadic. The Speech itself had been opposed by Molotov and other members of the Party Presidium—equivalent of the old Politburo—and it was not published in the USSR until 1989. The official line tacked and veered between dramatic though partial denunciations of the former dictator (in, for example, 1956 to 1961) and considerably more positive estimates (in, for example, 1957 and 1963).

“The cult of personality,” a curiously inadequate description, was the invariable category in which the Stalinist past was now criticized. This was, in effect, basically an allegation of vanity and flattery—not quite the essential which had made the rule of Stalin so deplorable. It mattered much less to his victims that towns were named after him than that he was ruling by terror and falsehood. It is true that the expression implies autocracy, but it remained slightly off target.

It proved compatible with allegations of extravagant tyranny, and equally with mere suggestions of the rather excessive application of necessary force—depending on the vagaries of politics. Above all, it made it possible to claim that the Soviet State and the Party were essentially healthy throughout the period:

The successes that the working people of the Soviet Union were achieving under the leadership of the Communist Party … created an atmosphere in which individual errors and shortcomings seemed less significant against the background of tremendous success…. No personality cult could change the nature of the Socialist State, which is based on public ownership of the means of production, the alliance of the working class and the peasantry, and the friendship of peoples.¹⁰⁵