The Great Terror

None of us desires or is able to dispute the will of the Party. Clearly, the Party is always right…. We can only be right with and by the Party, for history has provided no other way of being in the right. The English have a saying, ‘My country, right or wrong’; whether it is in the right or in the wrong, it is my country. We have much better historical justification in saying, whether it is right or wrong in certain individual cases, it is my party…. And if the Party adopts a decision which one or other of us thinks unjust, he will say, just or unjust, it is my party, and I shall support the consequences of the decision to the end.⁵

And this, as we shall see, is absolutely cardinal in explaining not so much Stalin’s rise to power, as the almost total failure to oppose him after

his aims and methods had declared themselves.

A very revealing account of the attitude of an old oppositionist to the already Stalinized Party—more revealing than official statements, since it was made in the heat of the moment in private—had been given in a series of remarks made by Pyatakov in 1928 to a former Menshevik friend, N. V. Volsky. Pyatakov had just “capitulated”⁶ and, meeting the Menshevik in Paris, provoked him by a suggestion that he lacked courage. Volsky replied warmly that Pyatakov’s capitulation a couple of months after his expulsion from the Party in 1927, and repudiation of the views that he had held right up until then, showed a real lack of moral courage.

Pyatakov, in an excited and emotional manner, replied with a long harangue. Lenin, he said, had become a tired and sick man towards the end of his life:

The real Lenin was the man who had had the courage to make a proletarian revolution first, and then to set about creating the objective conditions theoretically necessary as a preliminary to such a revolution. What was the October Revolution, what indeed is the Communist Party, but a miracle? No Menshevik could ever understand what it meant to be a member of such a Party.⁷

Pyatakov’s “miracle” was a reasonable description from the Marxist point of view of what the Party, as he thought, was attempting to do. For it was contrary to the natural “Laws of Society” as propounded by Marx: instead of socialism arising as the result of the conquest of political power by a Party representing a large proletarian majority in a country already thoroughly industrialized, the Communist Party in the Soviet Union was (in theory) attempting to create by mere will power and organization the industry and the proletariat which should in principle have preceded it. Instead of economics determining politics, politics was determining economics.

‘According to Lenin’, Pyatakov added, ‘the Communist Party is based on the principle of coercion which doesn’t recognize any limitations or inhibitions. And the central idea of this principle of boundless coercion is not coercion by itself but the absence of any limitation whatsoever—moral, political and even physical, as far as that goes. Such a Party is capable of achieving miracles and doing things which no other collective of men could achieve…. A real Communist … that is, a man who was raised in the Party and had absorbed its spirit deeply enough becomes himself in a way a miracle man’.⁸

From this attitude, significant conclusions followed:

Tor such a Party a true Bolshevik will readily cast out from his mind ideas in which he has believed for years. A true Bolshevik has submerged his personality in the collectivity, “the Party”, to such an extent that he can make the necessary effort to break away from his own opinions and convictions, and can honestly agree with the Party—that is the test of a true Bolshevik’.

There could be no life for him (Pyatakov continued) outside the ranks of the Party, and he would be ready to believe that black was white, and white was black, if the Party required it. In order to become one with this great Party he would fuse himself with it, abandon his own personality, so that there was no particle left inside him which was not at one with the Party, did not belong to it.⁹