The Great Terror

This idea of all morality and all truth being comprehended in the Party is extraordinarily illuminating when we come to consider the humiliations Pyatakov and others were to accept in the Party’s name. For this evaporation of objective standards, though it did not affect all members of the old Party, was widespread. Many had by the end of the 1920s become quite disillusioned with the idea that the workers, let alone the peasants, could play any part in a country like Russia. By 1930, a foreign Communist noted among his students in Leningrad that they thought it entirely natural for the masses to be mere instruments under both Fascism and Communism—the moral distinction being simply one of the respective leaders’ intentions.¹⁰ One Trotskyite remarked that there was much to be said for Stalin: “No doubt Trotsky would have done it with more go and with less brutality, and we, who are more cultured than Stalin’s men, would have been at the top. But one should be able to rise above these ambitions…¹¹

Even those who did not go to Pyatakov’s self-immolating lengths no longer felt capable of the intellectual and moral effort of making a break and starting afresh:

They were all tired men. The higher you got in the hierarchy, the more tired they were. I have nowhere seen such exhausted men as among the higher strata of Soviet politicians, among the Old Bolshevik guard. It was not only the effect of overwork, nervous strain and apprehension. It was the past that was telling on them, the years of conspiracy, prison and exile; the years of the famine and the Civil War; and sticking to the rules of a game that demanded that at every moment a man’s whole life should be at stake. They were indeed ‘dead men on furlough’, as Lenin had called them. Nothing could frighten them any more, nothing surprise them. They had given all they had. History had squeezed them out to the last drop, had burnt them out to the last spiritual calorie; yet they were still glowing in cold devotion, like phosphorescent corpses.¹²

Even the brave Budu Mdivani is quoted as saying, “I belong to the opposition, that is clear. But if there is going to be a final break … I prefer to return to the Party I helped create. I no longer have the strength to begin creating a new party.”¹³ As a psychological hurdle, the fresh start was too high. The oppositionists fell back into submission, surrender.

This loyalty to “the Party” has an element of unreality about it. The original Party of 1917 had been decimated by the expulsion of thousands of oppositionists. By the end of 1930, only Stalin, of the original leadership, remained in the Politburo. His nominees, from the ranks of the new men, controlled the elements of power. The Party itself, diluted by the great influxes of the 1920s, had changed in the style of its membership and now contained a rank and file who had regularly, so far at least, acted as reliable voting fodder for the secretaries imposed by Stalin’s Secretariat.

On the face of it, the opposition could well have argued that Stalin’s control of, and claim to represent, the Party was based on no higher sanction than success in packing the Party Congresses, that in fact he had no real claim to be regarded as the genuine succession. But the oppositionists themselves had used similar methods in their day, and had never criticized them until a more skilled operator turned the weapon against them.

In 1923, Stalin was already able to attack such arguments from his opponents by pointing out that appeals for democracy came oddly from people like Byeloborodov and Rosengolts, who had ruled Rostov and the Donets Basin, respectively, in the most authoritarian fashion.¹⁴

Even more to the point, in 1924 Shlyapnikov ironically remarked that Trotsky and his followers had all supported the action taken against the Workers’ Opposition at the Xth Party Congress in 1921, so that their claims to stand for Party democracy were hypocritical.¹⁵ Kamenev denounced Party democracy in this struggle with Trotsky in revealing terms:

For if they say today, let ud have democracy in the Party, tomorrow they will say, let us have democracy in the trade unions; the day after tomorrow, workers who do not belong to the Party may well say: give us democracy too … and surely then the myriads of peasants could not be prevented from asking for democracy.¹⁶

A year later he was asserting, “We object to the Secretariat, uniting policy and organization in itself, being placed above the political organism.” It was too late. And the Stalinists were able to comment tellingly, as when Mikoyan said, “While Zinoviev is in the majority he is for iron discipline…. When he is in the minority … he is against it.”¹⁷