The Great Terror

Stalin, Khrushchev later told the world, had not been to a farm since 1928; for him, the collectivization operation was a desk-bound one. Those who had to carry it out in the field had a more shaking time. With all the ruthlessness with which men like Kossior put through the Stalin policies, there seems no doubt that their nerves were strained and they felt something of the battle exhaustion which affected the entire organization in the field.

Now the worst tensions had somewhat slackened. The Party machine everywhere was firmly in the hands of operators who had shown their devotion to Stalin’s policies. If Stalin wanted only this—political victory and the enforcement of his plans—he had won. It was now only necessary to consolidate—to consolidate, and perhaps to relax, to reestablish the Party’s links with the people, and to reconcile the embittered elements in the Party itself.

Such were the ideas which seem to have entered the minds of many of the new Stalinist leadership. But they did not enter Stalin’s. His aim remained, as is now clear, unchallenged power. So far, he had brutalized the Party, but he had not enslaved it. The men he had brought to the top were already adequately crude and ruthless, but they were not all vicious and servile. And even the hard-won brutality might peter out if reconciliation were practiced, if terror became thought of as not an institutionalized necessity, but only a temporary recourse.

For the moment, however, the new “unity” of the Party was celebrated. In January 1934 its XVIIth Congress, the “Congress of Victors,” assembled. The 1,966 delegates (of whom 1,108 were to be shot over the next few years)³³

listened to the unanimously enthusiastic speakers.

Stalin himself set the theme:

Whereas at the XVth Congress it was still necessary to prove the correctness of the Party line and to fight certain anti-Leninist groupings, and at the XVIth Congress, to finish off the last supporters of these groupings, at the present Congress there is nothing to prove and, it seems, nobody to beat.³⁴

Former oppositionists were allowed to speak: Zinoviev, Kamenev, Bukharin, Rykov, Tomsky, Preobrazhensky, Pyatakov, Radek, and Lominadze. It is usually said that they were received respectfully, and it is true that on the whole there was much less bitterness expressed against them than at the previous Congress.fn2 The line they took was one of complete Stalinist orthodoxy, replete with compliments to the General Secretary and abuse of his enemies.

Kamenev said that the first wave of anti-Party opposition had been Trotskyism; the second, the right wing; and went on:

The third was not even a wave, but a wavelet; this was the ideology of the most rabid kulak scum, the ideology of the Ryutinites…. It would have been absurd to fight them by theoretical means, by ideological exposure. Other, more tangible weapons were needed, and these were brought to bear against the members of this group and their accomplices and protectors alike.³⁵

We have spoken of the miscalculation, as it turned out, in the oppositionist line of abject repentance, now repeated. The oppositionists’ basic error was that they did not understand Stalin. If he had been less determined and unprincipled, they might have succeeded. Doubtless Zinoviev had little chance of returning to power. But the Rightists, at least, were not in a bad tactical position. During the extreme crisis of 1930, they had not rocked the boat, and, as a result, the crisis had been overcome by methods which represented at least to some slight degree of concession to their views. Their admission of their faults to the Congress was received in much better part than had been the case on previous similar occasions. At the same time, there was everywhere hope that the worst strain was over, that the terrible efforts and sufferings of the first Five-Year Plan and of the collectivization drive could now be forgotten. The second Five-Year Plan pointed to a rather more moderate approach to the economy.

All these circumstances were favorable for the Right. They were most unfavorable to Stalin. The mood, in fact, was one of intra-Party reconciliation, and of an attempt to rebuild the bridges between the Party and the people. And such a formulation seems to have been the conscious line of thought of Kirov and others.³⁶