THE ROAD TO TERROR was a crooked and winding track. It doubled back on itself, ran into dead ends, and sometimes washed out altogether in unexpected political weather. In fact, there were many roads crisscrossing this strange political terrain, and they had many possible destinations. We single out this one because we know the starting point and the end point, but there is no reason to believe that terror was the only or inevitable outcome of these events.
We used to perceive only one road, and it was straight and simple. The main causal element for the terror has always been Stalin’s personality and culpability. In most accounts there were no other authoritative actors, no limits on his power, no politics, no discussion of society or social climate, no confusion or indecision. Given the narrow focus, it was difficult to say more than “At this time Stalin decided to destroy … ” (Western variant) or “On this date I. V. Stalin signed an order … ” (Soviet/post-Soviet variant).
But even with Stalin in the role of master conductor, orchestrating from a prepared script (which, we have shown, was not the case), a more complete explanation of the terror must include other factors, and it is these factors that we have tried to add to the equation. That other powerful persons and groups had an interest in repression, that the social and political climate may have facilitated terror, and that the road to terror may have been crooked and roundabout are premises too long ignored. It is our contention that the environment was as important as the agent in explaining the phenomenon as a whole. Straight roads do not run through broken and rocky terrain. Put another way, many people and groups contributed to a terror that would destroy them in the long run.
In schematic terms, we can now describe some of the features of the road. The Bolshevik elite, including Stalin, reacted with fear and anxiety to a disorderly and confused situation produced by the “Stalin Revolution” of the early 1930s. Even though the Stalinists had “won,” by implementing their revolution, theirs was an unsatisfying victory. The regime had little doubt that despite its brave proclamations of victory and party unity, there was desperate opposition to it at many levels. Peasants sang about Stalin chewing bones on top of a coffin. Student groups cranked out incendiary pamphlets, and well-known party members gathered in the night to write platforms calling for the overthrow of the leadership. Even within that leadership, some Central Committee members knew about and sympathized with these nefarious activities and didn’t report them. Stalinists were worried about personal meetings and conversations, not only among former oppositionists, but even among themselves. As they had been at the end of the Civil War, the Bolsheviks were insecure at precisely the time of their apparent ascendancy.
Their fears of losing control, even of losing power, led them into a series of steps to protect their position and consolidate the situation: sanctioning and building a unifying cult around Stalin, stifling even the hint of dissent within the elite by closing ranks around a rigid form of party discipline, and embarking on a program of centralization in everything from administration to culture. State building, with uniform laws, alternated with mobilizing terror, but both had the same goal: asserting the control of Stalin and the Moscow elite.
They tried to micromanage their entire political environment. They realized, even subconsciously, how little real day-to-day influence they had out in the countryside. Aware that they had failed to create a predictable and obedient administration, the Stalinists tried to govern by campaign, by creating ideological discourse and rituals, by the use of special plenipotentiaries, by creating parallel bureaucratic channels of information and control, by various “extraordinary situations.” Whether we call it soft versus hard, moderate versus radical, or legalistic versus repressive, there seemed to be two policies, two currents that alternated in rapid sequence.
But these were not factions: the alternating and contending policy discourses often came from the same people, including Stalin, and were really two sides of the same coin. That coin was ending chaos, getting control and centralizing authority. They wanted to control printed discourse: sometimes that meant restraining locals, and sometimes it meant purging libraries. They wanted to control the judiciary: sometimes they chose to reinforce procuratorial sanction, and sometimes they pushed the extralegal Special Board. Sometimes the Politburo called for more arrests; other times it seemed to be narrowly circumscribing them. In either case, the point was that such decisions were to be made centrally, and Moscow, not local authorities, was to decide what was criminal and who should be arrested. Thus the dichotomy was not really “hard” versus “soft,” but rather hard or soft roads to centralization of decision making and enforcing “fulfillment of decisions.” Both the terror and its opposite, the Stalin Constitution, were thus about the same thing.
But despite what appear to be successes in these steps, Stalin and the elite were not able to overcome their insecurity. Stalin’s suspicious nature and the elite’s fears for their position combined to form a natural partnership in favor of centralization. His drive for personal power and the elite’s drive for corporate status and authority made them natural allies for several years. They supported and endorsed each other to the outside world, including not only the Soviet population but also the party rank and file. Although his suspicion and their corporate anxiety fed upon each other, their joint action from 1932 to 1937 ultimately satisfied neither.
Although Stalin and the nomenklatura elite were generally united until 1937, as early as 1934 cracks had begun to appear in their alliance. Stalin’s speech to the 17th Party Congress that year complained about the “feudal princes” of the party apparatus who thought that party directives “were not written for them but for fools.” The nomenklatura’s members were for discipline and obedience—among those below them. They were for using terror to excise opposition—but not in their own machines. They were for legality—as long as they controlled the courts and decided who would be arrested in their territories. Stalin and the Politburo insisted that everyone obey, follow discipline, and bow to central controls.
Stalin and his Moscow intimates tried a variety of tactics in the 1930s to control their own far-flung system. Membership purges, political jawboning about “fulfillment of decisions,” delicate manipulation of texts to form or adjust alliances, investigations by police and control commissions, and various other tactics all failed to produce the results Stalin wanted.1 As we have suggested, it was a delicate game in which Stalin and the other political actors jockeyed for power and advantage. The game had rules: nothing could be allowed to jeopardize the public image of Bolshevik unity or the regime’s control over the country.
The use and content of language also played a delicate and subtle role in crystallizing and changing politics. Thus the evolution from “class enemy” to “the enemy with a party card” transformed a party united against the bourgeoisie into a party whose rank and file were suspicious of highly placed enemies within the elite. Manipulating language ended in the disaster of 1937, when language slipped from anyone’s control, and anyone could be labeled a “Trotskyist” or “Bukharinist” simply in order to be isolated and destroyed. When in July 1937 Yezhov seriously posited the existence of a “left-right, Trotksyist-Bukharinist, German-Japanese-British-Polish espionage ring,” it was clear that language was finished as a tool. The overtuning of language led to the destruction of the entire political system. Stalin and his closest associates, in a panic about loss of control of the country in time of war that still echoes in Molotov’s and Kaganovich’s memoirs, threw the entire political system into the air.
Everything came apart in the summer of 1937. After a series of failed attempts to control the nomenklatura elite and bend them to his will, Stalin turned against that elite; that elite turned against itself; and both struck out at a variety of “enemies” in the population. Characteristically, those enemies could not be identified very precisely. Alliances fractured and reformed; in 1937 and 1938 normal politics was replaced by a hysterical and paranoiac war of all against all.
The road to centralized power was not necessarily a road to terror, and in any case, this road had no map. There were many twists and turns, and it would be a mistake to see in this some sort of grand plan for terror.2 Without a doubt, at every juncture Stalin acted in ways that would increase his personal power; in this, at least, he seems to have had a clear goal. A careful look at events gives us several reasons to believe that the terror unfolded in an unplanned, ad hoc, even reactive way.
Actually, Stalin and his cronies were never very good at planning in general, as if anyone could be in the dramatically changing decades after the Russian revolutions of 1917. In the 1920s they planned for NEP to solve the economic balances. Then they scrapped it and decreed a planned economy without knowing what that meant. Beginning in 1928, they stumbled blindly from restricting wealthy peasants, to deporting them, to full collectivization, to semicollective cartels, all the while lurching back and forth without knowing where they were going with agriculture. In literally every area of domestic or foreign policy, as Politburo decisions and other documents now show, they spent most of their time putting out fires: reacting to crises (some totally unexpected, some that their own policies produced), improvising, mobilizing, and “storming” rather than governing. The Stalinists chronically made bad decisions based on bad information. Even though they were professional ideologists, they could not even produce a coherent ideological explanation for what they were doing—or had already done—that could survive more than a couple of years without drastic modification. There was no planning anywhere, so we should not expect it when it comes to repression.
First, we saw in a multitude of cases that repression moved in fits and starts and circles. The cases of Zinoviev, Kamenev, Smirnov, Yenukidze, Postyshev, Yagoda, and especially Bukharin were hardly handled in such a way as to suggest a plan. In each of these cases, there were false starts and abrupt “soft” but apparently “final” decisions that had to be contradicted later when other decisions were made. Had there been a plan, it would have been much easier and more convincing not to have let them off the hook so repeatedly and publicly.
Accordingly, final and fatal private and, more significantly, public texts had to explain previous and now embarrassing contrary decisions. An authoritative 1935 text exonerated Zinoviev and Kamenev of Kirov’s murder, but the next year’s discourse maintained that, after all, they were guilty. Yenukidze was expelled and then readmitted, both apparently on Stalin’s initiative and amid considerable confusion, and then finally arrested a year later. The Politburo criticized Postyshev, fired him, rehired him, denounced his critics, fired him again. In January 1938 it decided to keep him in the party and then days later expelled him. Bukharin was denounced at the 1936 trial, then publicly cleared in the press, then denounced again in December, but saved by Stalin at a plenum that remained secret for decades. Finally, in February 1937 he was expelled and arrested in a flurry of puzzling paperwork that raises serious doubts about who wanted what. He was brought to trial an entire year later, fully six months after he began to confess to the charges brought against him.
Between 1935 and 1938 Stalin’s assistant Yezhov drafted and redrafted a book, “From Fractionalism to Open Counterrevolution,” which was a history of the opposition’s allegedly inevitable turn to terror. During these years, the book had to be constantly rewritten to reflect the contradictory reversals in official discourse on “enemies.” In early drafts, for example, Zinoviev and Kamenev were only morally culpable. In later drafts of the book, this section was rewritten to portray Zinoviev and Kamenev as the direct organizers of the Kirov murder. Later drafts had to make them spies and wreckers as well. Obviously, this interpretation had not been foreseen in 1935. Yezhov’s book was never published.3
We might imagine that Stalin would have had a more convincing and less contradictory plan. He would have gotten his story straight from the beginning, saving himself the awkwardness of having to reverse and revise published decisions. Stalin’s early interventions to defer or delay repression were embarrassing later when the official line praised the complete destruction of the “traitors.” This may explain why several of Stalin’s speeches to the Central Committee in 1935–37 either were not transcribed or were later removed from the archives, and could account for the fact that the plenum where he displayed his most ambiguous attitude (December 1936) was hushed up completely during his lifetime.
Actually, the false starts, contradictions, and reversals have been evident for a long time. But they have been inconsistent with our image of Stalin as not only evil but omniscient, omnipotent, almost supernatural. We have somehow needed to make him a leader who could lay murderous plans years ahead of time, could predict opposition and obstacles, and could successfully execute the scheme. Therefore in order to explain some of these zigzags it was sometimes suggested that Stalin liked to play a sadistic cat-and-mouse game with his victims: he swatted them about, trapped and released them for play. Aside from the fact that there are no sources supporting this idea, the notion is nonsense. No one can read the discourse of the Stalinists throughout the 1930s without sensing their nervousness, indecision, and even frequent panic. Nobody, including Stalin, had the leisure for games; these were serious matters in which lives were sacrificed to save a regime whose leaders felt it was hanging by a thread. Stalin distrusted the NKVD until late 1936 and the army until mid-1937. It would have been insufferably stupid of him to play games with armed elites in such circumstances, and no one has ever accused him of being stupid. Besides, he didn’t need games; nobody would block him.
We see one clue to explaining the zigzags when, at several key junctures, Central Committee members advocated repressive measures that defied and went beyond those prescribed by Stalin’s closest henchmen.4 In one of the concrete glimpses we have of actual discussions in the Politburo, Stalin in 1930 had been outvoted by a Politburo majority that took a more aggressive stance than he did on punishment of oppositionists.5 It may have been about this time, as Kaganovich later recalled, that younger members of the Central Committee asked Stalin why he was not tougher on the opposition.6 We have seen other instances in which Stalin did not seem to have had the most radical or harsh attitude toward persecuting oppositionists. Stalin’s immediate lieutenants had as much or more to gain by the final elimination of the Old Bolshevik opposition as he did: as the alternative leadership they were more of a threat to his lieutenants than to him. The opposition was the former elite, and as long as its members survived, the positions of the current Politburo and Central Committee members seemed even more insecure. It would not have taken much for the Molotovs and Kaganovichs to take implacable and cruel positions toward the opposition, regardless of Stalin’s plans or lack of them. Everyone had his own interests.
The politics of the 1930s—and there was a politics—cannot be understood in terms of Stalin alone. Below him were Politburo members, Central Committee members, powerful chiefs and secretaries of central and territorial organizations, district and city party secretaries, full-time party activists, and ordinary party members. There were disagreements between Stalin and the nomenklatura—and among the nomenklatura—on power, planning, who was an enemy, elections, and a variety of other issues. Each of these groups had its own fears and its own interests to defend vis-à-vis those above them and those below. Everyone was maneuvering. Each of them grabbed as much autonomy as he could from above and used discursive, political, and/or repressive strategies to defend that autonomy and ensure obedience from those below. Everyone imagined that everyone else was trying to overthrow him. Each of them participated in and contributed to a suicidal violence that would eventually consume them.
If politics is defined as the deployment of power and influence through language, among other things, there was politics everywhere in the 1930s, as shifting issues and contingencies produced changing alignments between and among all these groups. This is the way bureaucratic politics works in other times and places, and indeed in all complex organizations. There is every reason to believe that this situation also existed in the Soviet 1930s.
Why the delay and confusion in the unfolding of the terror? The answer is that politics everywhere and always produces a fluid situation. Multiplayer political maneuvering, even in conditions of growing personal dictatorship, is always messy, contradictory, and inconsistent with straight lines. The answer is that no one, including Stalin, knew where things would lead in the end. Although Stalin was a master of tactics, it may be only hindsight that makes us see a long-term Byzantine strategy in his actions. Following the principle of Occam’s Razor, the simplest explanation is usually the best: Stalin’s policies were confused and contradictory because he was confused and contradictory. If “quicksand society” aptly describes a situation of constant change and shifting where it was impossible to get one’s footing, this was surely “quicksand politics.”7
Given what we now know, it is ironic to read, as we still can, that the political events and documents of 1932–37 were some kind of preparation, a building crescendo of repression. In fact, the recourse to blind terror from the summer of 1937 was the opposite of the politics that had gone before. It was an abandonment not only of the varying hard/soft, moderate/radical, legalist/repressive discourse, but of policy discourse itself. In the preceding period, even the repressive trend had always implied a Moscow-directed repression and had been aimed at securing obedience and central control. The 1937–38 terror was different. Although it specified centrally planned quotas and procedures, it did not specify targets and left the selection of victims to local troikas and other bodies. Unlike the competing discourses about control and centralization in 1932–37, the 1937–38 terror was centrally authorized chaos. It was the negation of politics, speech, and language.
The terror left human disaster and titanic social change. Alexander Tivel’s relatives were not alone in the 1950s as they tried to win legal and moral rehabilitation for their persecuted kin. Those who had survived the Stalinist camps would never be the same; even those who maintained their health were scarred forever. A generation of Soviet citizens never found out what happened to their friends and family; a generation of children wondered forever about their parents. Huge numbers of lives had been destroyed in one of the greatest human and personal tragedies of modern times.
People of the former Soviet Union still live with the social and political consequences of the 1930s terror. In our days, the victims, ghosts, and heirs of the terror still walk the earth. Stalin has been in his grave for more than half a century, but his victims are still being counted and remembered, and even today not many months go by without the discovery of hidden mass graves or nameless human bones washing up on some river bank. Stalin, his last henchmen Molotov and Kaganovich, and their countless victims have all now gone to their rewards. But in social and political terms, something survives from that time.
Stalin wanted an orderly and predictably functioning state to fulfill economic and military plans and policies. This required a professionally competent bureaucracy with some kind of career security, functioning within a rule-based system. But the heritage of Bolshevik revolutionary mobilization and energy made him fear a bureaucratic class outside party control. Social opposition, dissidence, and alternative discourses of all kinds constantly encouraged the resort to terror and lawlessness to maintain Bolshevik control. In the long run, the problem of “two models in one,” as one scholar described it, would be a basic contradiction of the Stalinist system.8
In the long run, there would be steady and growing tension between statism and radicalism. Stalin and his circle would use (or threaten to use) a number of tools to prevent the solidification of an independent bureaucratic class, including membership screenings, party interventions that circumvented laws, and terror. The population of the GULAG camps continued to rise steadily up to the time of Stalin’s death.9 As long as Stalin lived, and to a lesser extent as long as his closest lieutenants remained in power, the state could not “normalize.” As a result, the nomenklatura bureaucracy could not finally consolidate its hold on power. After Stalin’s death in 1953, however, it was gradually freed. Terror was renounced, the rule of law was solidified, and a multipolar politics took shape in which a number of bureaucratic constituencies outside the Politburo became players in a system that did not constantly threaten their lives and interests. Rationalization and bureaucratic interests replaced high-level dictatorship and control. The fall of Khrushchev in 1964 was another significant landmark in the nomenklatura’s freeing itself from Bolshevik political control and the power of a single leader.
Even though Stalin killed huge numbers of them in the 1930s, and even though the Communist Party and Soviet Union were dismantled in the early 1990s, the nomenklatura elite lives on. It survived Stalin and Stalinism. Although Stalin managed to destroy the elite of the 1930s, he did not and could not destroy the nomenklatura as a component of the regime. Back in the 1930s, Trotsky had predicted that the growing power of the nomenklatura could have one of two results. Either the workers would rise up and overthrow the elite, or that elite would ultimately be successful in converting itself into a true ruling class that not only wielded political power but owned the means of production outright.10 As we know, there was no workers’ revolution. Instead, the nomenklatura survived socialism and did in fact inherit the country. Its cohesion, connections, and experience were sufficient to allow its members to become not only the “new” governing elite, but the legal owners of the country’s assets and property.