The Great Terror

Stalin’s Terror, in fact, begins to show a more rational pattern if it is considered as a statistical matter, a mass phenomenon, rather than in terms of individuals. The absence of strict categories of victims, such as a Trotsky might have listed, maintained the circumspect deviousness of the Purge and avoided presenting any clear-cut target to critics. The effect of terror is produced, he may have argued, when a given proportion of a group has been seized and shot. The remainder will be cowed into uncomplaining obedience. And it does not much matter, from this point of view, which of them have been selected as victims, particularly if all or almost all are innocent.

Ilya Ehrenburg, as late as 1964, still asked himself why some were shot and some spared. Why Litvinov was never in serious trouble (though kept away from active work for years), while all the diplomats associated with him were eliminated; why Pasternak, independent and unyielding, survived, while Koltsov, anxious to do everything required of him, was liquidated; why the biologist Vavilov perished, and the even more independent-minded Kapitsa remained in favor.⁵⁴

Whatever the “statistical” rationale, the way Stalin’s caprice operated is a useful sidelight on his character. A British writer of great political experience noted in the 1940s, “It seemed almost … as if Stalin simultaneously demanded and hated the sycophancy of absolute obedience.⁵⁵ This was confirmed and elaborated in a more recent Soviet account by the novelist Konstantin Simonov, who had much direct contact with the high Soviet leadership. In his Soldiers Are Made, Not Born

, Stalin receives a letter from a general during the war asking for the release of a colleague, whose Civil War services he recounts:

Serpilin’s recalling of past efforts had failed to touch Stalin. It was the directness of the letter that had interested him. In his ruthless character side by side with a despotic demand for total subservience, which was the rule with him, there lay the need to come across exceptions—which was the obverse side of the same rule. At times he evinced something akin to flashes of interest in people who were capable of taking risks, of expressing opinions which ran counter to his own opinions, whether genuine or assumed. Knowing himself, he knew the degree of this risk and was all the more capable of setting store by it. Sometimes, that is! Because it was far more frequently the other way around and this was where the risk lay.

Stalin gives Serpilin an interview, which goes fairly well:

Still, on his way out, Serpilin considered that his fate had already been finally settled during his conversation with Stalin. But in actual fact it had been settled not while they had been talking but a moment ago when Stalin had silently looked at his back as he left. That was the way he often finally decided people’s fate, looking at them not in the eyes but from behind as they left.⁵⁶

With certain categories, Stalin seems to have had different standards. His former Georgian rivals and friends were mostly shot, like their Russian counterparts. But whereas Stalin showed nothing but contempt for most of his victims, the execution of his Georgian Old Bolshevik brother-in-law Alyosha Svanidze in 1942, on charges of being a Nazi agent, brought out a different attitude:

Before the execution, Svanidze was told that Stalin had said that if he asked for forgiveness he would be pardoned. When Stalin’s words were repeated to Svanidze, he asked: “What am I supposed to ask forgiveness for? I have committeed no crime.” He was shot. After Svanidze’s death, Stalin said: “See how proud he is: he died without asking forgiveness.”⁵⁷

An even more extraordinary example is that of another Georgian, S. I. Kavtaradze. He had been Chairman of the Council of People’s Commissars in Georgia from 1921 to 1922, and had fallen with the rest of the Georgian leadership during Stalin’s clash with them before and after Lenin’s death. He was expelled from the Party as a Trotskyite in 1927, and was among those not readmitted during the following years. He was arrested and sentenced in connection with the Ryutin affair, and is reported in Maryinsk and Kolyma labor camps in 1936, thoroughly disillusioned.⁵⁸ In 1940, he was still in camp. One day the commandant called him, and he was sent off to Moscow. Much to his surprise, instead of being shot, he was taken directly in his prison clothes to see Stalin, who greeted him affably, asking him where he had been all these years. He was at once rehabilitated, and sent to the Commissariat of Foreign Affairs, where he shortly became Assistant People’s Commissar. After the war, he was Ambassador to Romania for a time. In his biography, as given in various Soviet reference books, a bare mention is made of the thirteen-year gap in his Party membership between December 1927 and December 1940!⁵⁹ This is a clear and conscious example of Stalin indulging a caprice.