The Great Terror

But as the Italian Communist leader, Palmiro Togliatti, commented in 1956:

First, all that was good was attributed to the superhuman, positive qualities of one man: now all that is evil is attributed to his equally exceptional and even astonishing faults. In the one case, as well as in the other, we are outside the criterion of judgment intrinsic in Marxism. The true problems are evaded, which are why and how Soviet society could reach and did reach certain forms alien to the democratic way and to the legality that it had set for itself, even to the point of degeneration.¹⁰⁶

Time and again, the authorities made it clear that, in the words of a 1963 Central Committee resolution, they opposed “resolutely and implacably any attempt to undermine the foundations of Marxist-Leninist theory under the guise of the struggle against the personality cult, and all attempts to rehabilitate the anti-Marxist opinions and trends which were routed by the Party.”¹⁰⁷

One of Stalin’s principles—the theory that the intensity of the class conflict, and hence the necessity of terror, increases as the power of the defeated classes diminishes—was denounced, though in its official form in the Party Program adopted at the XXIInd Congress in 1961, this denunciation was hedged with reservations:

The general trend of class struggle within the socialist countries in conditions of successful socialist construction leads to the consolidation of the position of the socialist forces and weakens the resistance of the remnants of the hostile classes. But this development does not follow a straight line. Changes in the domestic or external situation may cause the class struggle to intensify in specific periods. This calls for constant vigilance….¹⁰⁸

The period also saw an evolution in the forms of the enforcement of State power. The Special Board of the MVD was abolished in September 1953.¹⁰⁹

The “Terror” Decree of 1 December 1934 was annulled on 19 April 1956.

In December 1958, the new Decree on State Crimes replaced the relevant articles of the Criminal Code dating from Stalin’s time. Certain notorious excesses, such as Article 58 (i.c.), which openly inflicted penalties on the families of “traitors” fleeing abroad, even if they were totally unimplicated, were dropped. But the Decree remained Draconian and provided severe punishment for all forms of action, organization, or discussion hostile to the Government. Legal practice, too, received some degree of reform: Vyshinsky was denounced, together with his theory that confessions are the main element in a good case. But confessions were still used, and treated as valid—as in the Powers and the Penkovsky cases, in 1960 and 1963, respectively.

The labor-camp system remained in being, and no information about it was officially available. The general impression is that measures had already been taken to cut the death rate and to make forced labor economically more rational in 1950–1951. After the death of Stalin, camp regulations seem to have been more equitably enforced, partly as the result of mass strikes in the northern camps. The release of a large number of prisoners took place under amnesties and through rehabilitations. We are told, though this was given no publicity, that eventually about 100 commissions—1 for each main camp group—were sent out. Consisting of 3 members, they examined all the files and rehabilitated millions, mostly posthumously; present-day estimates are that about 8 million of the 12 million in the camps in 1952 were released.

The general picture is of some camps being virtually dissolved, some losing many of their inmates, and others remaining about the same. In many areas, prisoners were released into free exile. After rebellions in the camps in 1953 (Norilsk and Vorkuta) and 1954 (Kingur), prisoners seem to have been transferred farther east. Reports at the end of 1956, when the operations to reduce the number of prisoners were virtually at an end, showed little change in the Kolyma–Magadan complex. Repatriated prisoners of war estimated that over 1 million then still remained in the far eastern camps. Avram Tertz (Andrei Sinyavsky) remarked ironically of one camp, in The Trial Begins, that earlier “the amnesty had virtually emptied the camp of its inmates. Only some ten thousand of us, dangerous criminals, were left.”

Discipline remained rigorous. Indeed, a decree of the Supreme Soviet of 5 May 1961 for the first time imposed the death penalty for certain “acts of aggression against the administration,” short of murder, in the camps.

However one looks at it, the penal and police systems were reformed in the Khrushchev period. Equally, however one looks at it, they did not undergo essential change, did not become truly liberal.