The Great Terror

In the first place, the policy was too abjectly cunning. The constant avowals and humiliations ate into the morale of rank-and-file oppositionists, and wore away their reputations, perhaps irretrievably. But the basic miscalculation was on an even more crucial point. The members of an alternative government have at least got to be alive. It is certainly true that some of the oppositionists—Kamenev, for instance--did not underestimate Stalin’s desire to crush them at all costs. But they did not believe that it would be politically possible for him to face the Party with the execution of its veteran leaders. They underestimated not his ruthlessness, but his determination, cunning, and unscrupulousness. When he had finished, there was no such thing as a living ex-member of the Politburo, with the single exception of Grigori Petrovsky, working on sufferance as a museum administrator.

Their view of history made it hard for them to conceive that the proletarian Party could simply be converted by intrigue or any other method into an apparatus of personal dictatorship. And if they did not understand the unappeasable drive to power in Stalin’s mentality or the fact that with the simplicity of genius he was prepared to undertake actions contrary to the “laws of history” and to do what had never been done before, they also did not understand his methods. That a modern, a Marxist, State could be subverted by intrigue and maneuvers in the political organs, this they had at least begun to grasp. It did not occur to them that their opponent could use the methods of a common criminal, could procure assassination, and could frame others for his own crime. A rank-and-file oppositionist commented (of Rykov), “To spend twenty years with Stalin in an illegal Party, to be with him during the decisive days of the Revolution, to sit at the same table in the Politburo for ten years after the Revolution and still fail to know Stalin is really the end.”²

There were two great preconditions for the Purge. First, the personal drives and abilities of its prime mover, Stalin; and second, the context, the political context, in which he operated. We have traced the changes which had come over the Party after the Civil War and the trauma of Kronstadt. Since then, the final silencing of debate and the extravagantly bitter test of the “Second Civil War,” against the peasantry, had put it on the anvil. Under these new strokes, an ever greater premium was put on ruthlessness and will, but at the same time the idea of the Party itself as an object of devotion and of its membership as an elite brotherhood had strengthened yet further.

For his opponents as well as his supporters, Stalin’s leadership was thus the authentic—or at least the only—representative of the “Party.” While Lenin had always been prepared to split a party if he had felt the majority to be wrong, the oppositionists were now hamstrung by an abstract loyalty. Just as most of the German generals were later to be reduced to impotence by their oath of loyalty to a man who would not himself have thought twice about breaking his word, so the Rightists were brought to ruin by a similar intellectual and moral muddle.

In 1935, Bukharin, who had just been denouncing Stalin’s “insane ambition,” was asked why, in that case, the oppositionists had surrendered to him, and he replied, “with considerable emotion”: “You don’t understand, it is not like that at all. It is not him we trust but the man in whom the Party has reposed its confidence. It just so happened that he has become a sort of symbol of the Party….”³

Bukharin’s faith in the Party, as the incarnation of history, was seen again in 1936, a year before his own arrest, when he remarked to the Menshevik Nicolaevsky:

It is difficult for us to live. And you, for example could not accustom yourself to it. Even for some of us, with our experience during these decades, it is often impossible. But one is saved by a faith that development is always going forward. It is like a stream that is running to the shore. If one leans out of the stream, one is ejected completely. (Here Bukharin made a scissor-like gesture with his two fingers.) The stream goes through the most difficult places. But it still goes forward in the direction in which it must. And the people grow, become stronger in it, and they build a new society.⁴

This view is admittedly an act of faith, of pure theoretical anticipation. Stalin held in effect that his personal rule was essential on precisely the same grounds. The moral distinction between the two attitudes is not a very clear one. The whole general ethic had been expressed most plainly by Trotsky in 1924: