The Great Terror

Thus in a manner almost unprecedented in history, he continued his “coup d’etat by inches,” culminating in a vast slaughter, while still giving an air of moderation. Through his silences and unprovocative talk, he not merely deceived many foreigners, but even in Russia itself, at the height of the Purge, was to some degree able to avoid popular blame.

A friend who had contact in the higher circles in both Stalin’s Russia and Rakosi’s Hungary remarks that Rakosi was indeed much the more educated and in a sense more intelligent man. But he laid himself open in the most unnecessary way. The most important example was that during the period of the Rajk Trial in 1949, he made a speech saying that he had spent sleepless nights until he himself had unraveled all the threads of the conspiracy. When Rajk was rehabilitated, this was a deadly weapon against Rakosi. But quite apart from that, it meant that even at the time he personally was blamed by the people and the Party for all malpractices in connection with his purge.³⁶

Stalin, who never said a word more than was necessary, would not have dreamed of making so crude a revelation. It was his triumph that the Great Purge was very largely blamed on Yezhov, the Head of the NKVD. “Not only I but very many others thought the evil came from the small man they called ‘the Stalinist Commissar.’ The people christened those years the ‘Yezhovschchina’ [Yezhov Times],” remarks Ilya Ehrenburg. Ehrenburg also tells of meeting Pasternak in the Lavnishensky Lane on a snowy night. Pasternak raised his hands to the dark sky and exclaimed, “If only someone would tell Stalin about it!”³⁷ Meyerhold, too, remarked, “They conceal it from Stalin.”³⁸

In fact, the opposite was true. The cartoonist Boris Efimov describes his brother Mikhail Koltsov telling him of a conversation with Mekhlis, who explained how the arrests were taking place. Mekhlis showed him, in confidence, “a few words in red pencil addressed to Yezhov and Mekhlis, laconically ordering the arrest of certain officials.” There were, Koltsov noted, “people still at liberty and at work, who had in fact already been condemned and … annihilated by one stroke of this red pencil. Yezhov was left with merely the technical details—working up the cases and producing the orders for arrest.”³⁹

Stalin’s achievement is in general so extraordinary that we can hardly dismiss him as simply a colorless, mediocre type with a certain talent for terror and intrigue. He was, indeed, in some ways a very reserved man. It is said that even in his younger days if beaten in an argument, he would show no emotion, but just smile sarcastically. His former secretary penetratingly remarks, “He possessed in a high degree the gift for silence, and in this respect he was unique in a country where everybody talks far too much.⁴⁰

His ambitions, and even his talents, were not clear to most of his rivals and colleagues.

Because he did not elucidate and elaborate his views and plans, it was thought that he did not have any—a typical mistake of the garrulous intellectual. “His expression,” an observer writes, “tells nothing of what he feels.”⁴¹ A Soviet writer speaks of “the expression which he had carefully devised for himself over the years as a fixture and which Comrade Stalin, as he had long been in the habit of calling himself in his thoughts and sometimes aloud, in the third person, had to assume in the presence of these people.”⁴²

He would listen quietly at meetings of the Politburo, or to distinguished visitors, puffing at his Dunhill pipe and doodling aimlessly—his secretaries Poskrebyshev and Dvinsky write that his pads were sometimes covered with the phrase “Lenin-teacher-friend,” but the last foreigner to visit him, in February 1953, noted that he was doodling wolves.

All early accounts agree that one of Stalin’s characteristics was “laziness” or “indolence,” which Bukharin impressed on Trotsky as Stalin’s “most striking quality.⁴³ Trotsky remarked that Stalin “never did any serious work” but was always “busy with his intrigues.” Another way of putting this is that Stalin paid the necessary attention to the detail of political maneuver. In his words, “Never refuse to do the little things, for from the little things are built the big.”⁴⁴ One may also be reminded of a remark by a former German Commander-in-Chief, Colonel-General Baron Kurt von Hammerstein-Equord, about his officers:

I divide my officers into four classes…. The man who is clever and industrious is suited to high staff appointments; use can be made of the man who is stupid and lazy; the man who is clever and lazy is fitted for the highest command, he has the nerve to deal with all situations; but the man who is stupid and industrious is a danger and must be dismissed immediately.