The Great Terror

When Stalin proceeded to the further step of arresting those responsible for the Trotskyite underground printing press, headed by Mrachkovsky, in 1927, he was again able to refute opposition objections, remarking: “They say that such things are unknown of the Party. This is not true. What about the Myasnikov group? And the Workers’ Truth group? Does not everyone know that Comrades Trotsky, Zinoviev and Kamenev themselves supported the arrest of the members of these groups?”¹⁸ Mere truth is a common casualty in all types of political systems, but in nontotalitarian parties this never becomes an overt and overriding principle, remaining sporadic and occasional, and discrediting its authors when exposed. Among the Communists, it was consciously and systematically accepted.

It was ironically enough Trotsky who had publicly denied the existence of Lenin’s Testament. When Stalin attacked Kamenev in 1926 for having sent a telegram of congratulations to the Grand Duke Michael at the time of the February 1917 Revolution, Kamenev pointed out that Lenin had personally signed a denial of this. Stalin retorted quite matter-of-factly that Lenin had, in the interests of the Party, knowingly stated a falsehood.¹⁹

At the XIVth Congress in 1925, Krupskaya appealed, as a member of the defeated faction, to objective truth. Bukharin retorted: “N. K. Krupskaya says truth is that which corresponds to reality, each can read and listen, and answer for himself. But what about the Party? Disappeared, as in the magic picture!”²⁰

Also going back to the earliest days of the Party was the tradition that the best method of winning political argument was to smear the opponent by every conceivable means. Lenin once said to Angelica Balabanoff, “Everything that is done in the proletarian cause is honest.” The great Italian Socialist leader Serrati, though sympathetic to the Communists, had tried to prevent their splitting his movement to suit their strategies, and had been attacked in terms to which Balabanoff, at that time Secretary of the Comintern, had objected. After Serrati’s death, it was Zinoviev who explained the Leninist tactics to her: “We have fought and slandered him because of his great merits. It would not have been possible to alienate the masses [from him] without resorting to these means.”²¹

It was natural, then, that the oppositionists should be required to cast filth on their own motives and ideas.

At the XVth Party Congress in December 1927, Kamenev argued that the denunciation of their own views then required of the opposition would be meaningless. He explained the dilemma. They now had no choice but either to constitute a second party, which would be ruinous for the Revolution and “lead to political degeneration,” or to make “a complete and thorough surrender to the Party.” He and Zinoviev had decided on the latter, taking the view that “nothing could be done outside of and despite the Party.” They would obey, but he pleaded that they should not be obliged to denounce views that they had obviously held just a few weeks earlier. None, he said, had previously made such a demand. (Though, in fact, Zinoviev had made exactly the same demand of Trotsky in 1924!)

Stalin did not accept Zinoviev’s and Kamenev’s recantation. They were trapped. They could hardly go back on what they had already said. Finally, they accepted the terms of the victor, denouncing their own views on 18 December as “wrong and anti-Leninist.” Bukharin told them they were lucky to have made their minds up in time, as this was “the last moment available to them.”

Again denounced, expelled from the Party, and sent into exile in 1932, Zinoviev and Kamenev were readmitted in 1933 on similar but yet more abject self-abasement. Zinoviev wrote to the Central Committee:

I ask you to believe that I am speaking the truth and nothing but the truth. I ask you to restore me to the ranks of the Party and to give me an opportunity of working for the common cause. I give my word as a revolutionary that I will be the most devoted member of the Party, and will do all I possibly can at least to some extent to atone for my guilt before the Party and its Central Committee.²²

And soon afterward, he was allowed to publish an article in Pravda condemning the opposition and praising Stalin’s victories.²³

In crawling as he did,fn1 Zinoviev was acting logically from the point of view of Party ethics. He believed that any humiliation could be undergone for the purpose of remaining in the Party, where he might, in the future, play a useful role. But such logic was in any case to prove inapplicable. And meanwhile, the long process of deception and apology was corrupting the oppositionists. As a close observer commented: