The Great Terror

The Yiddish writers shot in August 1952 were accused of the political offense of wishing to set up a secessionist state in the Crimea—a charge faintly linked with reality through the fact that a proposal had indeed arisen in the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee, after the war, to resettle Jews in the then-desolate peninsula. In the Doctors’ Plot of 1952–1953, a majority of those accused were Jews, but some were not. The Jewish element was publicly emphasized, but it was under the guise of a link with “Zionism,” just as in the campaign leading up to it, Jewish literary men were called “cosmopolitans” (“cosmopolitans … that long-nosed lot,” a bureaucrat comments in one of Avram Tertz’s stories). When critics in the West pointed out the undoubted anti-Semitic element in the alleged “Plot,” there were still people to come forward and say that, no, Gentiles were being accused too, and that Zionism was, after all, more or less implicitly anti-Soviet. For, as we shall see, Stalin’s policies in strictly political matters were never elaborated clearly in such a fashion that they could be refuted. There was never any complete certainty in an individual case about what his disposition would be.

This enigmatic attitude misled even experienced and clever people. Lion Feuchtwanger (Ehrenburg remarks), a passionate defender of the Jews, could never believe that Stalin persecuted Jews—just as Romain Rolland, devoted to freedom in the arts, was easily deceived by Stalin on the absence of freedom in Soviet literature.⁴⁸

The “anti-Semitism,” thus disguised, was in accord with Stalin’s general exploitation of prejudices and of the gullibility and pliability of men in general. In a broader sense, this was doubtless at the root of Stalin’s acceptance of the theories of the physiologist Pavlov (who loathed the Soviet regime). Moreover, he interpreted Pavlov in the crudest way as applying to human beings, sponsoring an attack on the view that Pavlov had dealt with the elementary nervous process of animals only and that in the case of man it was necessary to take into account the phenomenon of “resistance to the formation of conditioned reflexes.”⁴⁹

But the dull, cool, calculating effect given cumulatively through Stalin’s long career, the air of a great glacier moving slowly and by the easiest path to overwhelm some Alpine valley, is only part of the picture. At various times—and especially in his early career—the calm of his general manner was broken, and expression given to the driving emotions that possessed him.

In Lenin’s time, if offended, Stalin would sulk and stay away from meetings for days.⁵⁰ Lenin noted of him that he often acted out of anger or spite and that “spite in general plays the very worst role in politics.” He also noted Stalin’s hastiness and his tendency to solve everything by administrative impulse. At the time of Lenin’s death, he had nearly ruined himself by this “capriciousness” and needed all his skill to retrieve the situation.

Nor, later, was his terrorism wholly rational. He “practiced brutal violence, not only toward everything that opposed him but also toward that which seemed, to his capricious and despotic character, contrary to his concepts.”⁵¹

As George Kennan has remarked, to Stalin’s “darkly mistrustful mind no political issue was ever without its personal implications.”⁵² His daughter takes it as central to his character that “once he had cast someone he had known a long time out of his heart, once he had mentally relegated that someone to the ranks of his enemies, it was impossible even to talk to him about that person any more.”⁵³ There can be no doubt that Stalin pursued his grudges implacably, even after many years. But, of course, this cannot be more than a partial motive for the killings he ordered. For these involved friends as well as enemies, and men he hardly knew as much as personal rivals. Men who had injured him did not survive the Terror. And nor, of course, did men whom he himself had injured, like Bauman.

Nevertheless, when Khrushchev represents Stalin as a capricious tyrant, this is not necessarily incompatible with a basic rationale. It is true that anyone Stalin had a personal grudge against was almost automatically included on the death list, but even a long life of quarrelsome intrigue could not provide anything like the required number of victims from that source alone. To obtain the terror effect, after all those who really had stood in his way or annoyed him had been dealt with, the quota could just as efficiently be made up by caprice as by any other method.