The Great Terror

It must be admitted that from the point of view of political morals, the conduct of the majority of the oppositionists was by no means of high quality. To be sure, the conditions prevailing in the Party are intolerable. To be loyal, to do every single thing that is demanded of us is almost impossible: to do so would mean to become an informer, to run to the Central Control Commission with reports on every utterance of opposition picked up more or less accidentally, and on every oppositionist document one comes across. A party which expects such things from its members cannot be expected to be regarded as a free association of persons of like views, united for a common purpose. We are all obliged to lie: it is impossible to manage otherwise. Nevertheless, there are limits which should not be exceeded even in lying. Unfortunately, the oppositionists, and particularly their leaders, often went beyond these limits.

… To plead for pardon has become a common phenomenon, on the supposition that the party in power being “my party,” the rules which applied in the Tsarist days are no longer valid. One hears this argument everywhere. At the same time, it is considered quite proper to consistently deceive “my party,” since the party does not fight its intellectual opponents by trying to convince them, but by the use of force. This has given rise to a special type of morality, which allows one to accept any condition, to sign any undertakings, with the premeditated intention not to observe them.²⁴

This attitude had a very demoralizing effect. The border between treachery and compromise became very vague. At the same time, Stalinists could point out that it was impossible to believe the opposition precisely because of their idea that telling lies was permissible.

Zinoviev and Kamenev had been expelled for the third time in 1934, on suspicion of politically inspiring Nikolayev in the murder of Kirov. And in January 1935, as we have seen, they had once again declared their political guilt, this time accepting it in a form which was already a partial plea of guilty before the criminal law.

Their successive surrenders had never been voluntary, in the sense that they would have preferred to avoid them. But they had accepted them, under pressure, as unavoidable moves in the political and moral conditions of the one-party system to which they adhered. They had abandoned in turn each of their objections—to falsification, to undemocratic procedures, to insincere retractions, to arrest. They had chosen to do so in order to remain in the Party, or to gain readmission after they had been expelled. The Rightist Slepkov is reported by a Soviet writer as being brought back from a political isolator and supplying the names of over 150 accomplices, on the grounds, “We must disarm! We must go on our knees to the party.”²⁵

A thoughtful Soviet analysis which appeared recently notes that Ryutin (and later Raskolnikov) flatly denied the legitimacy of the Stalin regime, but that most of the victims of the trials were “paralyzed” by feeling themselves to be “within the system personified by Stalin.” Even in his “last letter” (see here), Bukharin merely says that he has not opposed the Party line for eight years, and has no quarrel with Stalin.²⁶

In the case of the prominent Communists accused at the great show trials of 1936, 1937, and 1938, there is no doubt that the rational, or rationalized, component in their motives included this idea of service to the Party. This theme has been most strikingly and persuasively developed in Arthur Koestler’s Darkness at Noon, and is often taken as the

explanation of the public confessions—though Koestler himself makes no such claim and, on the contrary, remarks:

Some were silenced by physical fear, like Hare-lip; some hoped to save their heads; others at least to save their wives or sons from the clutches of the Gletkins. The best of them kept silent in order to do a last service to the Party, by letting themselves be sacrificed as scapegoats—and, besides, even the best had each an Arlova on his conscience.²⁷

Koestler’s last point—that the oppositionists felt they had lost the right to judge Stalin—is confirmed in various reports. A non-Communist prisoner notes how “nearly every supporter of the regime, before falling a victim to it, has in his time been involved by it in actions which have conflicted with his political conscience.”²⁸ And he agrees with Koestler on the main issue:

It is true that the interrogation methods, particularly when applied for months or years, are capable of breaking the strongest will. But the decisive factor is something else. It is that the majority of convinced Communists must at all costs preserve their faith in the Soviet Union. To renounce it would be beyond their powers. For great moral strength is required in certain circumstances to renounce one’s long-standing, deep-rooted convictions, even when these turn out to be untenable.²⁹