The Great Terror

Further, in 1966 pressure from Party traditionalists grew for a “partial or indirect” rehabilitation of Stalin at the XXIIIrd Party Congress that year. It was laid down that the concept “the period of the personality cult”—the mildest of all hostile descriptions of the Stalin period—was “mistaken and un-Marxist.”¹¹⁸ Strong resistance to this neo-Stalinism was aroused, being expressed in particular in a letter by the leading members of the Soviet intelligentsia, and for the moment no more was said. But in 1969, the neo-Stalinists had consolidated, and a further determined attempt was made, in connection with Stalin’s ninetieth birthday. A statue was planned; special lectures at the Institute of Marxism-Leninism were to take place; orders for busts and portraits were made; an edition of Stalin’s Works was prepared. A set-piece article in Kommunist wrote of Stalin’s malpractices that “these were mistakes in practical work which was essentially correct in fulfilling the scientifically based general line of the Party.”¹¹⁹

A pro-Stalin novel by Kochetov appeared in Oktyabr’ . By the birth date in December, a long Pravda article was ready. But by now, foreign Communist leaders started to put pressure on the Soviet leadership. Finally, the Politburo decided “by a small majority” to cancel most of the celebrations.¹²⁰ Nevertheless, the trend remained regression, not progress.

It may be argued that the élan of the regime was now dead and that only momentum, habit, and institutions remained. If this view is taken, the system might appear like the legitimist monarchies of the early nineteenth century—impressive, powerful, but dead at heart, and remaining only as an integument which eventually broke.

The argument of the Communist heroine and martyr Rosa Luxemburg against the suppression of hostile opinion, and against the closed society, was not a moral one. It was simply that

without general elections, without unrestricted freedom of press and assembly, without a free struggle of opinion, life dies out in every public institution, becomes a mere semblance of life, in which only the bureaucracy remains as the active element…. Yes, we can go even further: such conditions must cause a brutalization of public life….¹²¹

This was a sound prediction of developments in Russia. Until its recommendations were complied with, the Soviet Union could best be described as not fully cured, but still suffering from a milder and more chronic form of the affliction which had reached its crisis in the Yezhov years.

The Khrushchev period, in spite of its inconsistencies, had to some extent shown the way forward. And it had made the major falsifications of the Terror period untenable. In the two decades which followed Khrushchev’s fall, the regime was in the intellectually scandalous position of having no official story at all, true or false, about the trials.

But the twenty-year “period of stagnation,” as it is now officially designated, saw ubiquitous falsification eating away at the intellectual, the social, the economic, and the political structure until little was left but a hollow shell. The command economy—“barracks socialism,” as it is now called—drove the country deeper and deeper into unacknowledged crisis. By the mid-1980s, this had become so profound that, first, all serious economic and social observers had seen the imminent danger, and second, there had been time for this knowledge to percolate to an important section of the political leadership.

The decisions taken to attempt a radical reconstruction and abandonment of the false socio-economic principles which had led to this crisis involved freeing the forces of intellectual criticism, repudiating the heritage of Stalinism, and releasing the truth.

Epilogue

THE TERROR TODAY

Whoever knew Truth put to the worse, in a free and open encounter?

Milton

As the world knows, from 1986, and much more so in the ensuing years, the USSR entered the period of glasnost. Among the first products of glasnost was truth about current economic and social disasters. Its sponsors made it plain, moreover, that the command-economy system of Stalinism, based on endless coercion, was in itself a dead end and needed dismantling. Thus the horrors of Stalinism were at first often attacked less on humanitarian grounds than as economically counterproductive: the Soviet economist Nikolai Shmelyov, in a crucial (though in theory confidential) speech in June 1987, told for the first time of 5 million peasant families having been deported, of 17 million souls having passed through the Gulag. But his theme was that this was economically worthless. What had the prisoners contributed—three canals, one of which was useless (a reference to the Baltic–White Sea Canal) and a quantity of lumber which could have been better produced by free labor.¹