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This below is Chapter 3 Section 5:
5. The “Great Purge" and the Construction Pathos in the Soviet Union
The “great purge” began for the eyes of the world public on August 19, 1936, when a trial of a number of old Bolsheviks was opened in the October Hall of the Moscow Trade Union House, which had been prepared by a large press campaign and was attended by foreign reporters, and a selected Soviet audience had been admitted. In the dock sat former opposition figures, including Grigory Zinoviev and Lev Kamenev, who had once been Lenin’s closest collaborators and who, together with Stalin, had formed the country's leadership troika in the 1924-1926 front against Trotsky. Now, however, they made the confession that as members of the Trotskyist-Zinovievite center, they had planned assassination attempts against the leading men of the Soviet Union and against Stalin in particular. In the case of Kirov, according to their statement, they had actually achieved their goal. Almost all of the defendants confessed. Zinoviev even admitted that he came to fascism via Trotskyism, and Kamenev called on the people to follow Stalin because the verdict on himself and his comrades was just. An Old Bolshevik named Mrachkovsky—no doubt a man of similar determination and bravery as the fighters in Spain—even demanded to be shot himself, since his example had shown that workers too could become counter-revolutionaries. In fact, the prosecutor Vyshinsky demanded “that these mad dogs all be shot,” and the court granted his request. It was barely 24 hours before word came that the accused had been executed.
Public opinion in the Soviet Union was satisfied. The newspapers had waged a hate campaign, and mass meetings all across the country had passed resolutions calling for death for these traitors. In the West, on the other hand, many doubts were voiced. Was it really credible that these tried and tested Old Bolsheviks had turned into terrorists and murderers in order to harm their own party and regime? What or who had prompted them to make such self-accusations? Wasn’t the prosecution obviously based on incorrect information on some points, such as the naming of foreign hotels where conspiratorial meetings with envoys of Trotsky were supposed to have taken place? Nevertheless, the prevailing opinion of Western observers was that the testimonies of the accused must have been credible, and prominent English jurists declared the trials completely unobjectionable. Thus, the waves of initial excitement quickly subsided, especially since hopes resulting from the new “Stalin Constitution” were at their peak: the Soviet Union now seemed to have finally entered the circle of democratic powers, and all Western friends of the policy of great resistance were convinced that the expansion of fascism could now be brought to an end by an anti-fascist alliance of all peace-loving powers.
But even the most determined of the fellow travelers would probably have been greatly concerns if they had known how many investigations, preparations, party purges and closed-door trials had already taken place in the year and a half since Kirov’s assassination and the strange increase in patriotic propaganda, the dissolution of the “Society of Old Bolsheviks” in May 1935, and the further tightening of penal laws (such as extending the death penalty to children over the age of twelve) constituted a unified whole. And they would have been even more alarmed if they had known the telegram which Stalin and Zhdanov had sent from Sochi to some members of the Politburo in Moscow on September 25, 1936. It read: “We consider it absolutely necessary and urgent that Comrade Yezhov be appointed People’s Commissar of Internal Affairs. Yagoda has finally proved himself incapable of exposing the Trotskyist-Zinovievite bloc. The GPU is four years behind in this matter. This is noticed by all party officials and most NKVD members.” The telegram clearly alluded to the Ryutin affair. What Stalin had been unable to achieve in 1932 would now be realized, but instead of the one Ryutin, many tens of thousands, even hundreds of thousands of party members would be the victims, and even Yagoda, who in 1934 as GPU chief had become head of the Interior Commissariat, would not be spared. The “Yezhovshchina” [russian, Great Purge/Great Terror] began.
At first it went almost unnoticed that in the trials of Zinoviev and Kamenev one of the lesser defendants had admitted having contacts with the Gestapo, and that in some testimonies the names of previously unindicted party leaders and senior military figures had been mentioned. But on January 23, 1937, a new trial opened, the trial of the Trotskyist parallel center, and now some of these men stood before the barriers. The charge was no longer primarily terrorist acts, but sabotage and association with the German as well as the Japanese enemy. None other than Grigory Pyatakov, whom Lenin had honored by mentioning in his will and who, like no other, had been the organizer of industrialization, was now supposed to have been willing, together with his co-defendants, to reverse industrialization, to grant territorial concessions to Germany, and to commit sabotage in the event of war. At a meeting with Trotsky in Oslo, Pyatakov had heard from him that a meeting had taken place with Rudolf Hess and that cooperation in war and peace had been agreed upon. The involvement of National Socialist Germany in the trial was further emphasized by the fact that among the accused was Karl Radek, the man who had been Lenin’s emissary in the German revolution in 1919 and who, in his 1923 Schlageter speech, had called for an alliance between communists and German national-revolutionaries. Radek explicitly confirmed that Trotsky was seeking a “Bonapartist” regime for Russia and was prepared to cede Ukraine to Germany. Vyshinsky called the defendants “Judases,” who had sunk lower than the worst supporters of Denikin or Kolchak, and all were sentenced to death and shot except Radek and Sokolnikov, who was one of the twelve men who had made the decision to revolt on October 23, 1917. Both received ten-year prison sentences, but by all accounts were soon killed in one of the labor camps.
This trial made a deeper impression on the Western public and also on a number of communists than the first one, not least because Trotsky organized a kind of counter-trial in New York, at which serious inaccuracies were proved. Now the question was often asked whether Stalin wanted to physically annihilate all the Old Bolsheviks and Lenin’s comrades-in-arms, after he had long since disempowered them politically. Here and there the suspicion was voiced that the GPU must have forced these peculiar confessions by blackmail or promises, or by appeals to deep-rooted party loyalty. It also did not go unnoticed that Nikolay Yezhov had taken Yagoda’s place at the end of September. But many Western observers still considered the confessions to be credible and the conduct of the negotiations to be correct, including the new American ambassador Joseph Davies, who, of course, as a Stalin-friendly capitalist, associated the hope for a far-reaching change in the regime with them.
The world first became aware that something monstrous was going on in the Soviet Union only when it was announced on June 11, 1937 that a number of the highest commanders of the Red Army had been arrested on suspicion of high treason, and the very next day it was announced that they had been tried and executed, among them Marshal of the Soviet Union Mikhail Tukhachevsky and Army Commanders Yakir and Uborevich. Although it was obvious that Stalin wanted to definitively end the arguments about the reintroduction of the institution of political commissars in this way, which to all appearances had preceded the corresponding decision made in May, the fact was nevertheless the focus of public attention that the eight commanders, among whom were several Jews, were labeled as traitors and German agents. The details were never disclosed, there was no public trial, most of the senior officers who acted as judges were also shot shortly afterwards; but from the testimony of SS officers it is known that under the direction of Reinhard Heydrich and obviously with Hitler’s approval, a dossier about Tukhachevsky was falsified, who had actually and quite officially had relations with the Reichswehr during the Weimar period, so that his signatures were available in the archives. This dossier was leaked to Stalin via Beneš, and it is possible that he believed it. The motive of Hitler and Heydrich was, of course, the desire to weaken the fighting power of the Red Army; but there are also indications that, conversely, it was Stalin who allowed the Germans to suggest the falsification, so that they got a false picture of their own possibilities and their effects. In any case, Stalin could not possibly have mistaken the huge number of officers for German and Japanese agents who were now being executed by the thousands in a veritable onslaught on the army by the secret police by the end of 1938. Out of 5 marshals only 2 survived, out of 14 army commanders also 2, out of 8 admirals 0 remained alive, out of 67 corps commanders 60 were shot, and out of 199 division commanders 136 were shot. No army in the world ever suffered such losses in the high ranks of the officer corps before the enemy like the Red Army in the peacetime years of 1937 and 1938. But Yakir died shouting, “Long live the party, long live Stalin,” and he was far from being the only one to remain loyal even in death to the man and the party, which covered and his comrades with dirt and destroyed them. In any case, the secret reports of the German diplomats there is no evidence whatsoever that in the self-accusations of Radek and Pyatakov or in the accusations against the officers there was even a small kernel of truth. On the contrary, the German Ambassador in Moscow, Count von der Schulenburg, called it “completely absurd” that Germany should bring Trotsky-Bronstein and Radek-Sobelsohn to power in Moscow, after a war with the Soviet Union. The actual purpose of the second trial, the ambassador saw, was to warn all those “who do not want to understand Stalin’s policy aimed at increasing Russia’s military power and who walk around with Lenin’s textbooks under their arms.” At the same time, Germany and Japan were also to be denounced by accusing them of meddling in the internal affairs of the Soviet Union, and thus imputing to the opponents “what Moscow is itself doing.” As far as the officers are concerned, von der Schulenburg did not rule out in a later report that they were “friendly to Germany,” but he considered it more important “that Stalin feared independent leaders in the army as possible focal points of discontent or possible ambitions” and therefore sought to eliminate them in time.
But the persecutors were hardly hit less hard than the persecuted, who in turn had been the victors and persecutors in the civil war. The dismissal of Yagoda triggered a wave of self-accusations and mutual denunciations in the GPU, which Krivitsky has reported a very vivid account of. In the end, with only a few exceptions, those investigators who, through the system of all-night interrogations or through torture, had obtained the confessions of Zinoviev and Kamenev, Radek and Piatakov, were eliminated and replaced by the worse Yezhov men.
These prepared the third and largest of the show trials, which began on March 2, 1938, against the right-wing and Trotskyist bloc. This time three former members of Lenin’s Politburo were in the dock, namely Bukharin, Rykov and Krestinsky. Next to them sat several former People’s Commissars, among them Yagoda, who was now accused of murdering Kirov and, incidentally, Gorky. Again there was talk of Trotsky’s willingness to cede Ukraine to the Germans, and Bukharin confirmed it without identifying himself with it. But the main emphasis was now on criminal crimes such as poisoning, and if the picture that emerged was correct, then one had to indeed confirm the old thesis of the most reactionary among the emigres, that the Soviet leadership (with the exception of Stalin and his closest henchmen) had been nothing more than a gang of criminals even in their dealings among themselves. This time, Vyshinsky likened the defendants to “mangy dogs,” before asking for the death penalty, which was imposed on all but three. Bukharin, meanwhile, had made only a partial confession, denying to the end the claim that the bloc had been organized on behalf of the fascist secret service. From this and from the overwhelmingly negative response in the West, Stalin drew the conclusion that there was no point in further show trials.
But the terror was far from over, and the Yezhovshchina continued to gain strength. It had long since ceased to be just about the destruction of leadership cadres. Even in the lower ranks of the party there was veritable hysteria over the whole country, with accusations against others and self-accusations, with, particularly, origin, as if an indestructible brand, playing an important role. Countless proven party members were exposed as the sons and daughters of kulaks or merchants, even though they had had no connection with their parents for many years; indeed, allegations such as that a niece had connections with a “Trotskyist element” were often enough to bring about a party expulsion with all its consequences. A friend of Krivitsky’s was arrested and disappeared without a trace because he had received a letter from his ex-wife’s husband and because his brother had left half of Radek’s face be seen on the wall of a workers’ clubhouse. In the Smolensk archive there were self-accusations such as the following: “After the Party Central Committee unmasked the gang of Trotskyist-Bukharinist spies in the western district led by Uborevich, Rumyantsev and Zhilman, the Obkom plenum unmasked some enemies of the people and removed them from leading positions, but they allowed them to continue to exist in an office composed of old workers, which was not a strong support in the fight against the enemies of the people. I myself am guilty of this kind of negligence."
In a certain sense, it was logical that a party which had always fought and destroyed its enemies first and foremost should now seek enemies within its own ranks. But the ordinary people, who had already suffered so much, were far from being unaffected. The eight million or so people who were deported to “labor reform camps” could not possibly all consist of party members, and a claim as innocuous and correct as that the Soviet shoes were of inferior quality could suffice as the reason for the deportation. These camps, which were subordinate to the main department “GULag” of the NKVD, had long since gained an economic importance that made them almost indispensable, especially in the vast and still undeveloped areas of northern Siberia such as Kolyma, but quite a few of these camps were outright extermination camps in which the average life expectancy was two years, so that after only one year half of the inmates had perished. In the revolutions of this death mill, it was almost no longer a strange occurrence when Yezhov telegraphed the following instruction to the head of the NKVD in a major city: “You are entrusted with the task of destroying 10,000 enemies of the people. Report completion by radio message.” Mass graves containing more than 9000 bodies were discovered in Vinnitsa during the war. All of the victims had been shot in the neck; the date was determined to be summer of 1938. Estimates of the total number are around one million executed and at least two million perished in the camps. The entire population was affected, and there was hardly a large family from which at least one member was not deported or shot. The family members of prominent party leaders and officers were treated particularly harshly, although promises to spare wives and children played an important role in extracting confessions. Almost all of Tukhachevsky’s relatives died that way. Using the term “wife of an enemy of the people” was enough for indictment. Children were often forced to publicly approve the execution of their parents.
The fate of foreign communists and refugees was also particularly harsh. No fewer than four members of the Politburo of the Communist Party of Germany disappeared, among them Heinz Neumann and Hermann Remmele, who had sung a true hymn of glory to the Soviet Union in a two-volume work in 1932. Hans Kippenberger was also drawn into the death vortex, just like Hugo Eberlein, the only German who had been a co-founder of the Third International. The purge claimed a strikingly large number of victims among Jews, Latvians, Poles and generally among members of national minorities. Zinoviev, Kamenev, Gamarnik, Yakir and numerous others were Jews; General J.K. Bersin, who for many years had headed the intelligence service of the Soviet Army and then served in a prominent position in the Spanish Civil War, was Latvian; almost all Poles working in the Comintern lost their lives, and the Polish party as a whole was dissolved because it had allegedly been infiltrated by fascist agents. The leaderships of the Union republics, which had retained a certain independence or even tried to preserve the traditions and identity of their people, were hardly less affected. In the Ukraine, the proven communist Skrypnik, who had distinguished himself in the fight against “bourgeois nationalism,” was eliminated, and Nikita Khrushchev eliminated everyone even in the lower ranks who still dreamed of Ukrainian independence within the framework of the “Union of Councils.”
By the summer of 1938 Lenin’s party had been practically annihilated, with the sole exception of the staunchest Stalin supporters. Around this time, Yezhov’s power was curtailed, and in December he was replaced as head of the NKVD by Stalin’s compatriot Lavrenty Beria, who in turn now purged the purgers and sent almost all of Yezhov’s men to their deaths. When the 18th Congress of the CPSU met in March 1939, of the 1,966 delegates to the 17th Congress of 1934, no fewer than 1,108 were dead or missing. But even of the rest only 59 were back in the hall. No communist party in the world had previously been subjected to such a massacre, not even the Communist Party of Germany under Hitler. No nation had ever inflicted such losses on their own leaders in peacetime. National Socialist Germany in 1937 and 1938, with its few concentration camps and no more than 30,000 political prisoners, almost looked like a normal Western European state in comparison.
And yet, this Soviet Union remained a land of construction and construction pathos in the midst of all the events that had to put everyone, with the sole exception of Stalin, in constant fear for their position and their lives. The second five-year plan, no longer quite as ambitious as the first, was successfully completed. Countless Komsomol members continued to volunteer for duty and enthusiastically went to desolate areas to build new and massive industrial combines under the most difficult conditions; it was no mere propaganda when the newspapers enthusiastically eulogized the great achievements of Soviet aviators and polar explorers; it was hardly a question of mere manipulation when mass meetings of several hundred thousand people passionately demanded the “death of the traitors.” The relatively large number of tourists who flocked to Moscow in the summer of 1937 gave the impression of a vibrant and lively city, and Sidney and Beatrice Webb, without much finding much opposition, continued to praise the Soviet Union in the numerous new editions of their book as the beginning of a “new civilization,” as a country without crises and without “unearned income” of parasitic existences.
It is therefore probably incorrect to see the cause of the great Tschistka [russian, Stalin’s Purges] merely in Stalin’s unrestrained striving for power. In any case, it was the third great revolution with millions of victims that took place in Russia or the Soviet Union, and in this respect one could call it consistent. In the civil war, which it itself provoked by its seizure of power, the Bolshevik party had destroyed those whom it understood to be “class enemies” and thereby made them into irreconcilable enemies, and these were indeed entire classes: the nobility, the intelligentsia, the bourgeoisie and, moreover, the party enemies of the Socialist-Revolutionaries and Mensheviks. In the period of collectivization, the individually managed and relatively prosperous peasantry was the target of the attack, and it was not unreasonable to assume that this was intended to eliminate Stolypin’s by no means hopeless or rootless attempt to inaugurate a Western individualistic line of agricultural development and thus at the same time of industrialization in opposition to the collectivist tradition of the “Mir.” [peasant village communities as opposed to individual farmsteads, or khutors, in Imperial Russia.] But this western-individualistic tendency also existed in the party. The author of the “Letter of an Old Bolshevik” probably assessed himself and those like him correctly when he wrote: “Unwittingly, we think in a direction that is critical of the existing order; we look everywhere for the weak points. In short, we are all critics, destroyers, not builders… It is impossible to build anything with such human materials, with critics and skeptics.”
While Marxism was not individualistic in its content, but it had nevertheless emerged entirely from the Western tradition of criticism, and it had very quickly become apparent that Marxist concepts could also and especially be applied with a critical intention to Soviet reality, such as the concepts class, exploitation and autonomy of state power. Stalin had been the embodiment of the party since the mid-1920s; if the party was to be brought to real identity with this embodiment of itself, then the critical and competitive element, as represented in Trotsky and Zinoviev and numerous smaller figures, had to be eliminated. Ultimately, Trotsky’s prediction of 1904 that the Leninist party organization would lead to the party members first being incapacitated in favor of the Central Committee and then to the substitution of one dictator taking the place of the Central Committee was realized. The fact that the main representatives of the critical, western or intellectual tendency were predominantly Jews facilitated the elimination, although the Soviet Union was the only country in the world in which anti-Semitism was subject to the death penalty: the xenophobic character of the Great Purge cannot be overlooked. The critical tendency in the party corresponded to the anarchist or at least autonomist tendencies of the population and the various nationalities: the terror that reigned over the heads of each individual at the same time gave an inkling of the power of the closed collective and to that extent its own power, so that it was not merely frightening, but at the same time, fascinating. The corps of commander, in turn, was recruited to a large extent from the civil war veterans, and not a few of these men, with their independent merits, really wanted to see themselves as “comrades” of Stalin and not as the unconditionally obedient children of the “father of the nations” and “greatest man of all time.” Eventually, the extensive annihilation of the party and officer corps created a myriad of vacant positions, as the first and second revolutions had done, and Stalin could count on the unconditional loyalty of these new party leaders and officers. If the monstrous event of the Tschistka can be understood at all and does not have to be regarded as the outbreak of collective madness, then it can best be understood, with a Hitlerian phrase, as the creation of an “iron-hard national body” which, in absolute unity is at the service of the will of its own personification, the Vozhd [russian equivalent of Führer], so that it is able to endure even the most extreme without falling prey to division or even disintegration.
But what was the purpose of this unity with which (one might say) the national spirit was preparing for an extraordinary test?
The answer seems easy. In all events from 1936 to 1938 the constant reference to Germany and the fascists as well as to the Japanese is palpable. No impression had to force itself more strongly on the ordinary citizen than that the German fascists were ready to attack and that they had numerous helpers in the party and in the army. The Great Purge can therefore be seen as an inevitable measure of preparation for the defensive war of life and death. The measures that foreign observers often judged to be restorative or un-Marxist fit easily into this picture: the strengthening of the family, the positive emphasis on national traditions, not least that of Alexander Nevsky, the victor over the Germans, the elimination of those emphatically Marxist historians who had only ever criticized Russian history.
But besides this prevailing opinion, a second interpretation has existed for a long time, which was apparently first put forward by Walter Krivitsky and has representatives even today. According to this interpretation, Stalin was heading towards an agreement with Hitler from an early stage, whom he both feared and admired. It is obvious that if he seriously aspired to such a turn, he would have to smash the old party and send the heroes of the Civil War to their deaths. A third interpretation sees in Stalin the unshakable world revolutionary who had to eliminate the rhetorical world revolutionaries if he wanted to consolidate the only citadel of the struggle against capitalism and fascism. As a fourth possibility, it is abruptly opposed by the very negative and often Marxist judgment that in this purge Stalin has become an oriental despot or else a kind of National Socialist.
All of these judgmental tendencies were already present in 1938, if only in the form of implications and untheoretical statements. For example, Antonov-Ovseyenko contemptuously hurled the following sentence at the NKVD examining magistrate, who had called him an enemy of the people: “You are an enemy of the people. You are a downright fascist.” But the examining magistrate was a mere tool. If the accusation made any sense, then it was directed at Stalin.
If he was correct, it was one of the greatest victories Hitler won in the triumphant year of 1938. If he was wrong, then for Stalin, as the personification of the Bolshevik and world-revolutionary Soviet Union, the most dangerous of all tests began that year.
“But even the most determined of the fellow travelers would probably have been greatly concerns” typo.