The Great Terror

For Pyatakov’s “miracle”—the idea that by sheer political organization the Party could create industry and the proletariat, which should in Marx’s view have preceded the coming to power of Socialism, and having done that, go back to the main line forseen by Marx—had not worked out. The reason is plain. It had been a mistake to think that the Party would, after this Marxist detour, simply revert to a humanist democratic representation of the new proletariat. It was not the case that Stalinist methods could be used and then simply cast aside when specific economic and social aims had been achieved. Terror institutionalizes its own cadres, its own psychology. And the Party machine, whose loyalties for so long had been in practice simply to itself, whose interests for so long had been equally circumscribed, had become Djilas’s “New Class,” no more capable of easily changing its ways than the old classes and bureaucracies of the past had been.

The Stalin era was a past so atrocious that its repudiation brought obvious dividends to any succeeding regime, but its successors also inherited a set of institutions and a ruling caste indoctrinated in certain habits and beliefs. And in an important sense, the essence of Stalinism is less the particular periods of terrorism or special views on industrial organization than the establishment of the political set-up. And that still remained substantially unchanged.

Even the Khrushchevite “de-Stalinization” had consisted of little more than the abandonment (or even the denunciation) of a specific set of excesses associated with the late dictator. It did not amount to any change of substance in the system

of political rule in the USSR or in the basic principles behind that system. Russia was still ridden by the Party machine, and the principle of Partiinost—the doctrine of the Party’s right to rule and to decide on all questions of speed and direction—remained untouched. What took place, in effect, was simply the renunciation of excessive use of whip and spur.

There was now, in fact, a considerable effort to rehabilitate the NKVD: criticism was leveled at those who, basing themselves on the organization’s role in the Purges, “are not averse to putting practically all the officers of the Cheka under a cloud.”¹¹⁶ A whole series of novels and plays appeared featuring Secret Police heroes.fn7

Those police officers condemned to imprisonment rather than death in the post-Beria purge were released—Eitingon, the organizer of Trotsky’s assassination, among them. There were complaints that the former Georgian NKVD officer Nadaraya, a “specialist in shooting wives and daughters,” only received ten years after Beria’s death and was now at liberty; that Colonel Monaldiov, who had shot several hundred foreign Communists in the Solovetsk camps at the beginning of the Finnish War, was living in a villa near Leningrad, an attempt to have him expelled from the Party having been prevented by Tolstikov, then First Secretary of the Leningrad province; that the leading interrogator of the Jewish doctors in 1952, A. G. Sugak, had a job as Assistant Director of a museum, and a villa near Moscow; and so on.

In September 1966, new articles were added to the Criminal Code, providing for the imprisonment of those given to uttering or writing material “discrediting the Soviet State” or participating in “group activities” involving “disobedience in the face of the lawful demands of the authorities.”¹¹⁷ Such laws led to those increasing repressions against writers and dissidents which were such a mark of the period.