Introduction

BY 1936 ALEXANDER YULEVICH TIVEL was enjoying a successful career as a journalist and editor. He was born just before the turn of the century in Baku, not far from where a young Stalin was pursuing his career as an underground revolutionary. Despite his parents’ status as white-collar employees of a joint-stock company, Alexander’s life possibilities had seemed limited by his birth in 1899 into a Jewish family in the provinces. But he was a clever boy who at an early age had somehow managed to learn a passable amount of English, German, and French.

He was also political. At age sixteen he had joined a Zionist student organization in Baku. With two strikes against him (the Imperial system had little use for politically active Jews from non-Russian provinces of the empire), he finished high school at age eighteen and wondered what he would do with his life. As it turned out, the determining factor was his graduation year of 1917, the year of the Russian Revolution.

We do not know what role he played in the dramatic events of that year, but in 1918 he was working first in the military office of the Piatigorsk Soviet, then in Moscow in the propaganda department of the new Bolshevik government. By the end of the year he had joined the editorial staff of the Soviet government’s press agency, ROSTA. During the Russian Civil War (1918–21), he served as a correspondent for ROSTA and for several Soviet newspapers in Moscow, the Volga region, and Tashkent. His editing and language skills stood him in good stead with a new regime desperate for such talents.

After the Civil War, Alexander Tivel worked as a editor and writer in Moscow for the Communist International (Comintern), where he met and married Eva Lipman. In 1925 he moved to Leningrad to work in the foreign news department of Leningradskaia pravda, but in 1926 it was back to Moscow for editorial work in the Secretariat of the Central Committee of the Communist Party and in the CC’s department of Culture and Propaganda. Despite his previous jobs working for the Communist press, he had never joined the party. But his new job in the apparatus of the party’s Central Committee required him to be a member. His editorial experience and knowledge of languages made him a valued worker; by special order of the CC Secretariat, he was admitted directly to the party in December 1926 without the required period of candidate membership. During the next ten years, Tivel continued to work in Moscow party headquarters, eventually rising to the position of assistant chief of the International Information Bureau of the Central Committee of the Communist Party.

On the surface, his record seemed exemplary. True, between 1930 and 1936 Tivel had received three party reprimands for such minor infractions as misplacing a telegram or losing his party card, but it was not unusual for party members to have several such small technical blots on their records. Behind the scenes, however, there was a growing fear in the top party leadership that was leading to heightened scrutiny of one’s past. Normal work relationships with political dissidents or with losers in political intrigues were increasingly examined and given sinister interpretations. Alexander had two such suspicious associations. During his year in Leningrad back in 1925, he had worked with followers of the leftist oppositionist Grigory Zinoviev and for a time had been Zinoviev’s secretary. Tivel had been in the wrong place at the wrong time: since Zinoviev was party boss of Leningrad at the time, his supporters had naturally controlled the newspaper where Tivel worked. And by 1936, Tivel’s immediate supervisor in the Information Bureau was the ex-Trotskyist Karl Radek, a well-known and bitingly sarcastic critic of Stalin in the 1920s.

Such suspicions reached new heights in the aftermath of the August 1936 show trial of Zinoviev and other former leftists. The trial had sentenced these dissidents to death, and in its wake those who, like Radek, had sided with the leftists came under intense scrutiny. At the end of August, Radek was arrested and Tivel was taken by the secret police (NKVD) at the same time. His wife and young son never saw him again.

Tivel spent the next six months in prison under interrogation. We do not know whether he was physically tortured by his interrogators, but there is ample evidence that countless others were. Even high-ranking officials under arrest were beaten or, as Molotov would put it, “worked over.”1 Ten years later, a high-ranking police official wrote to Stalin describing interrogation procedures. First, prisoners were to be offered better conditions—better food, mail, and so on—in return for a confession. If that failed, appeals to the prisoner’s conscience and concern for his family followed. The next step was a solitary confinement cell without exercise, a bed, tobacco, or sleep for up to twenty days. Food was limited to three hundred grams of bread per day, with one hot meal every third day. If all this failed, the use of “physical pressure” was authorized in accordance with a Central Committee decree of 10 January 1939.2 These procedures refer to a later, less terrible period, but the routine was hardly lighter in the 1930s when Tivel was in custody.

In 1936 the Stalinist leadership’s paranoia reached new heights. A wave of arrests engulfed former party dissidents of both the left and the right. Prominent Bolsheviks with oppositional pasts, including diplomat Grigory Sokolnikov, Deputy Commissar of Heavy Industry Georgy Piatakov, and many others, found themselves in prison. All were accused of the most fantastic crimes: sabotage, espionage, and a variety of other treasonable actions. The Bolshevik elite was consuming itself.

Even within the precincts of the Central Committee where Tivel had worked, the wave of suspicion reached ludicrous proportions. In one of the paranoid waves, someone remembered that two young women party workers in the central apparatus, Toropova and Lukinskaya, had been seen with Tivel at a social event. M. F. Shkiriatov, the high-ranking chairman of the Party Control Commission, dashed off a memo to the NKVD requesting that Tivel be asked about the women, frustrated that “we cannot verify everybody with whom Tivel had danced.”

On 7 March 1937, the NKVD replied that there was nothing incriminating from Alexander Tivel against the women. But on the same day, the Military Collegium of the Supreme Court convicted Tivel not only of knowing about terrorists’ intentions to assassinate Bolshevik leaders but of directly “preparing to commit a terrorist act against [NKVD chief] Yezhov.” Tivel was shot, probably on the same day. Unlike many others who were badgered and tortured by the NKVD, he had not confessed.

But the Tivel story does not end here; the terror that swallowed him also destroyed the families of those “repressed.” Immediately after Tivel’s arrest, his wife Eva had been fired from her job “for political motives” and now found it impossible to find any work with this notation on her record. Shortly thereafter, she was evicted from her Moscow apartment and, facing destitution on the streets, she and her sickly young son moved into her mother’s crowded flat. But in May of 1937 she and her son were banished from Moscow altogether and exiled to the far-off Omsk province in Siberia. Her mother lost her apartment and was exiled along with her daughter and grandson, apparently for sheltering them.

In October 1937 Eva Tivel was herself arrested in Omsk. After eight months in the Tobol’sk jail, she was sentenced by the NKVD’s Special Board (which had the right to sentence people even if they had committed no crime) to eight years in a labor camp for being a “member of the family of a traitor to the Motherland.” The savage human destruction of the terror did not stop even there. Shortly after Eva’s arrest, the NKVD arrived at her mother’s apartment and took the Tivels’ nine-year-old son to an orphanage. He would not see his mother for nearly two decades.

After completing her eight-year sentence in the camps, Eva, like so many others, received an additional term: eight more years in Siberian exile. She was freed only in 1953, the year of Stalin’s death, when she returned to Moscow. She soon began a campaign to have her husband’s name cleared. Even though Tivel had been dead for sixteen years and Eva was now free, their twenty-five-year-old son still carried a stigma as a “child of an enemy of the people,” which limited his work and educational possibilities. From the beginning of 1955 Eva began to write letters to party authorities seeking posthumous rehabilitation of Alexander Tivel “in order to remove this false conviction from the father of my son.” Her first letter was in January 1955; another followed in March.

Such letters from relatives and survivors were numerous in 1955, and would eventually lead to Nikita Khrushchev’s de-Stalinization campaign, with its mass rehabilitations. But the process began slowly. Eva received no answer until January 1956, when Major Tishchenko, a case worker in the Military Procuracy, informed her that her appeal had not been acted upon. She then demanded an appointment with the procuracy but was told there that “the question of rehabilitating Tivel cannot now be decided because he had been accused in connection with a group of people [evidently Radek] convicted at an open trial in 1937.” Eva now joined the legion of widows, relatives, and former convicts who trudged from office to office in search of justice.

Khrushchev’s anti-Stalin “Secret Speech” of February 1956 stimulated the reconsideration of old cases, but even then the pace was slow. Shortly after Khrushchev’s speech, Eva wrote once again to the Military Procuracy asking for Tivel’s case to be reopened. This time, Major Tishchenko actually took up the matter and began an investigation of Tivel’s conviction. But again there was no movement. In September 1956 Eva had another appointment at the procuracy and received another infuriating bureaucratic answer: “Because A. Y. Tivel was accused in connection with a group of people whose cases are now being reexamined, the question of his rehabilitation cannot be decided until the reexamination of those cases is completed.” In December of 1956 Eva wrote another letter, this time to the Party Control Commission.

Finally, on 23 May 1957, more than twenty years after Tivel’s execution, the Military Collegium of the USSR Supreme Court reversed his 1937 conviction, which, in the court’s words, “had been based on contradictory and dubious materials of the preliminary investigation, which the court [in 1937] did not verify.” A month later, on 18 June, Tivel’s August 1936 expulsion from the party was reversed and his party standing posthumously restored.3

Questions and Culprits

Alexander Tivel was not a high party leader. He was a minor figure whose records in no way stand out in the archives, and we will not meet him in the corridors of power. Despite his obscurity, his fate illustrates many of the elements of the terror process; personal and work connections became crimes that spurred insane and paranoid investigations. The physical pain and deep suffering of the Alexander Tivels and their families have been well documented in a huge corpus of powerful memoir literature, including Eugenia Ginzburg’s Into the Whirlwind, Anna Larina’s This I Cannot Forget, and Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago, to name only a few.

What led the Soviet Communist Party elite to destroy its own? Why were valuable but politically harmless people like Alexander and Eva Tivel destroyed in what might otherwise have been a historically common internecine fight among the elite? Why did it take so long, even after Stalin’s death, to begin to reverse the miscarriages of justice? What was the mindset of the Stalinist and post-Stalinist party elite?

Although we have had memories and powerful portrayals of the process from its victims, until the recent opening of some of the political archives of the former Soviet Union we have been forced to guess about the process at the other end, from the top. We have not been able to write the history of the origins of the terror from the standpoint of those who administered it. The laconic official documents at our disposal until recently have been tips of Soviet historical icebergs. In the past two decades, a tremendous quantity of heretofore secret documentation from the Soviet period has been declassified and made available to us. We now have the texts and words of those in power; we can hear and study their language.

Historians have often posed the question “How did one man—Stalin— manage to inflict such wholesale terror on an experienced political elite?” The historical literature refers to Stalin’s careful plans, cunning, deception, threats, and blackmail.4 In some views, Stalin simply decided to kill a lot of people and then tricked or intimidated large numbers of otherwise intelligent people into helping him do it. Society plays no role in these explanations, and there is no real politics at work here. The only factors worth mentioning are the plans of the ruler; everyone else was a passive recipient. Many basic accounts of the terror operate at this interpretive level: once one decides who is guilty, there are no more questions to ask, and research becomes the further enumeration of foul deeds by the evil prince.5 The road to terror seems straight, direct, and brightly lit.

The figure of Iosif Vissarionovich Stalin does indeed hover like a specter over these events. As the most powerful political leader of the state and the center of a growing semireligious cult, he is personally responsible for much of the bloodshed. His motives and plans and the exact sequence of his actions are still not completely clear, but we do have sufficient evidence of his enormous guilt. Although we do not have a diary or journal, a clear list of his orders and commands, or even many documents with his signature, we have enough to posit for him a vicious and cold participation in the killing. His fingerprints are all over the archives.

We shall see in the course of this study how Stalin’s power grew so dramatically throughout the 1930s that by the end of the decade he was a virtual autocrat. Although Russia had always been a country ruled by men rather than laws, more and more in the 1930s people would refer to Stalin or other leaders to guide their behavior and solve their problems. We shall also see, however, that this process was uneven and characterized by zigs and zags. Sometimes Stalin was a referee or makeweight, balancing various interests and groups against one another. He made and changed alliances with different groups at different times either by explicit pronouncements or by implicitly allowing them to use his name and authority. At other times, he directly asserted his personal authority. Although by the end of the decade he was unquestionably the supreme leader, he was never omnipotent and always functioned within a matrix of other groups and interests.

In the witch hunts of the seventeenth century, to which the Stalinist terror bears many similarities, a small number of authoritative persons identified the victims and organized their execution. Behind and around them, though, were other groups and constituencies that abetted the proceedings, acquiesced in the process, or simply looked on, believing that all of this was necessary, reasonable, or at least acceptable. These included members of religious and political hierarchies, policemen of various kinds, and ordinary citizen-members of “the crowd.” As Hugh Trevor-Roper wrote, “[No] ruler has ever carried out a policy of wholesale expulsion or destruction without the cooperation of society…. Gre at massacres may be commanded by tyrants, but they are imposed by peoples…. Afterwards, when the mood has changed, or when the social pressure, thanks to the blood-letting, no longer exists, the anonymous people slinks away, leaving public responsibility to the preachers, the theorists, and the rulers who demanded, justified, and ordered the act.”6 Our curiosity and attention are drawn to those who helped, approved, or simply accepted the necessity of fatal purges of perceived enemies. Both in colonial America and in Stalinist Russia, there were bureaucratic constituencies and popular masses who went along with the bloodletting and who thought it was right and even proper.

It is, after all, possible to analyze and even on some level to understand a homicidal maniac or a serial murderer. Such phenomena are unfortunately common events in today’s newspapers, and the tools of modern psychoanalysis give us quite a few clues to the motivations of such criminals. In the case of Stalin, a good bit has been written on his presumed personality.7 Yet to understand how a generalized terror erupted in the USSR in the 1930s we must look further afield. Why were his orders carried out? Why was there fertile soil for terror to grow? Even if we decide that Stalin was always the main actor, unless we study the party and the political system, the scale and spread of the terror would remain incomprehensible.

The Bolshevik (or Communist) Party was the administrative tool for Stalin’s policies, the forum for conflicting and feuding bureaucracies, and the only politically articulate stratum of a politically fractured society. It was the priesthood, the military commander, the chief of police, and the sole landowner. This elite represented and was representative of society, including as it did workers, peasants, foremen, collective farm chairmen, local political bosses, economic administrators, and others in a wide array of social and political roles. The party was the state. It had a monopoly on political organization and control of the press, courts, army, and police. It established and defended the only permissible ideology; it suppressed and controlled traditional religion and promulgated its own system of beliefs in the Communist millennium, complete with saints and demons.

Yet the party, which could have stopped the terror, actively cooperated in its own destruction. It embarked on a series of policies that disorganized its regime, fractured society, and destroyed itself. This bears explaining.

The Bolshevik Party was descended from idealistic, egalitarian, and socially progressive strands in the Russian intelligentsia and working class. By the 1930s much of the original idealism had been lost or transformed as Bolshevik revolutionaries became state officials. But even the remaining idealists—and there were many—supported and followed policies that facilitated terror, not only against traditional “enemies” but against themselves. This too requires an explanation.

By dealing with such questions, we hope to give some insight into the most difficult question of the terror: how was it all possible?

We shall see that the terror was facilitated by certain interests that wanted to increase or decrease repression, by traditional Bolshevik Party unity that mutated into a fanatical party discipline, by customary and ritual practices, and by the transformation of political sins into judicial crimes.

One key to these processes is the position and corporate self-interest of the party elite. Since the early 1920s, full-time professional party leaders had become the administrators of the country. They became accustomed to giving commands, enjoying privileges, and living well. The process of the formation of an official social stratum had begun. This had been the gist of Lev Trotsky’s critique of the Stalin regime and one of the reasons the ruling elite had been so fierce in its destruction of Trotsky’s group. This ruling segment of the party, its elite, became more and more conscious of itself as a group separate from the party rank and file and from the population in general. Self-selected and replenished by a system of hierarchical personnel appointment, the party elite, or nomenklatura, enjoyed increasing power, prestige, and privilege as time went on.8

It was an elite that included members and staffs of the Politburo and Central Committee, first secretaries of provincial party committees, and full-time paid officials and organizers at many levels down to urban and rural districts. But although these various subgroups had differing parochial interests that sometimes conflicted with those of other nomenklatura groups, they shared a group identity as “insiders.” They were the ones with power, great or small, whose membership in the ruling caste distinguished them from the multitudinous “outsiders.”

If the regime fell, their various privileges and immunities would disappear. The more exclusive and authoritative they could be, the more secure were their personal fortunes. On another level, though, there is no reason to believe that they were not also true believers in communism. In fact, there was little contradiction between the two. In the worldview they had constructed, the future of humanity depended on socialism. Socialism depended on the survival of the Soviet revolutionary experiment, which in turn depended on keeping the Bolshevik regime united, tightly disciplined, and in control of a society that frequently exhibited hostility to that regime. The long-standing Bolshevik self-image as “midwives of the revolution” was alive and well through the 1930s. Even without crass self-interest as a conscious motive, this Bolshevik tradition made it easy to equate nomenklatura power with the good of the country.

Stalin was simultaneously creator, product, and symbol of the nomenklatura. As chief of Central Committee personnel, he controlled the most important appointments. But he was also a product and representative of the new official stratum; they supported him as much as he supported them. As several scholars have noted, Stalin had “won over a majority cohort of high- and middle-ranking party leaders” rather than creating that cohort.9 Trotsky agreed, and indeed maintained that Stalin was simply the representative of the new official stratum.

Schisms in the party, which were neither about ideology nor limited to the articulate political stratum, constitute an important key to this story. Fault lines ran not so much between “right” and “left,” as they had in the 1920s, but between and among strata. The party was by no means a united organization, and there are several ways to disaggregate it into its component groups. Various players jockeyed with one another in a system bound by rules they did not always control.

Even Stalin’s room for maneuver was limited. Stalin and his Politburo together made a collective player in the matrix, with their own interests. Frequently, as we will show, they sided with the centralization-minded elements of the elite nomenklatura when their mutual interests coincided. At other times, they united with the regional chiefs. But again, along with the central and regional elites, Stalin and the Politburo made up part of the broader governing stratum that more often than not closed ranks against the party rank and file. He needed these elites to maintain power and run the country. His dilemma, therefore, was how to rein in other players’ powers without advertising elite discord to the spectators outside the arena of politics. Although groups within the elite feuded with one another and combined and recombined in various coalitions, their fears of splitting the party or “going public” to reveal internal divisions to the outside world provided strong incentive to keep their squabbles hidden.10

Stalinist Mentalities and Language

Much of this delicate and covert maneuvering was accomplished (and hidden) with language. In the past two decades, a tremendous quantity of previously secret documentation from the Soviet period has been declassified and made available to us. We now have the texts and words of those in power; we can hear and study their language.

In fact, language plays a major role in this book, as it did in the unfolding of the terror. The regime’s official language was as much a tool of rule as police, ideology, education, and propaganda. It was deployed by those on high, but was also modified by those who received it. Common folk learned the official language in order to speak properly and get what they wanted. Officials at all levels used official texts in ways that suited them. Language was used and abused, prescribed and proscribed, detailed and twisted in the service of the Stalinist regime and its component constituencies. This book is also about how language created and determined people and events, as much as vice versa.

The Bolsheviks were active creators and deployers of words. Lenin had spent much of his life producing and debating political programs. For the Bolsheviks before the revolution (and especially for the intellectual leaders in emigration), hairsplitting over precise points of revolutionary ideology was much of their political life. To a significant extent, Bolshevik politics had always been inextricably bound with creating and sharpening texts. Leninists and then Stalinists were professional wordsmiths as well as professional revolutionaries; their very founding events—including the 1903 break with their Menshevik Russian Social Democratic rivals—were about how to word a resolution.

Their close attention to language continued once they were in power. Statements emanating from the top Stalinist leadership were produced and written with great care and were meant to provide rules and parameters for political and social behavior according to the needs of those creating them. Phrasing was exact, reflecting prescribed linguistic formulations and agreed-upon slogans and phrases. Thus the Central Committee announced the official slogans of the season, which were then republished for study across the country.11 Typically, Pravda issued a list of numbered official slogans for the new year on January 1, and even high officials were taken to task for using incorrect or unapproved formulations. As we shall see, variant texts of the same document were deliberately produced for different audiences in an attempt to shape precisely the behavior of those audiences by providing targeted narratives, which were mandatory for use by various groups. In turn, texts from on high were studied and combed by those below for explicit rules and implicit codes and clues to guide political life. The relationship among written laws and regulations, transcripts of authoritative political meetings, and oral speech often held the key to proper behavior, and the successful politician was the one who best understood the relative powers of various texts.

Much of our story involves Stalinist attempts to create an interpretive template, a collective representation of reality that made sense of a society in crisis, and a corresponding rationale for a dominant hegemony to control that society. As many social theorists have shown, elites attempt to control societies by creating and promulgating an ideology: a “master discourse” or “master narrative” for society to follow. Whether we call it a ruling myth, a transcript, or a hegemonic ideology, elites everywhere support a basic system of beliefs, assumptions, and tenets.12 Whether they are about democracy, socialism, fascism, patriarchy, or religion, they provide an organizing thought pattern and validation of the existing order (even if that order be revolutionary). They seek to legitimize the existing class and status order: “This is the way things are, and this is the way things should be.” They also provide a “self-portrait of dominant elites as they would have themselves seen.”13 They facilitate a unified elite self-representation, cohesion, and integration and offer a means of social control by insisting that citizens adhere to the belief system; they thereby provide a definition of heresy in the form of nonadherence.

Every regime creates and uses symbols, which are often crafted with language. Stalinist rhetoric was attributive, rather than strictly definitional, in its categories, symbols, and images. Labels (really symbolic codes) like kulak or Trotskyist, along with many types we shall encounter, like the “politically careless” official, the “heartless bureaucrat,” the “provocateur,” and the “little person,” represented not so much categories as tropes, or metaphors, meant to carry symbolic content that changed over time. Rebels are labeled as “bandits;” reluctant peasants become “kulaks;” dissenters become “Trotskyists.” Any unauthorized political organization becomes ipso facto a “counterrevolutionary organization.” Such official high-level use of symbols was a convenient tool of rule. But it was also unpredictable in its effects because the same flexibility to define each symbol enjoyed by the Politburo was employed at every step down the chain of command. As we shall see, regional and local party leaders could fill and refill these tropes with meaning in order to deflect the fire from their friends and focus it on their opponents.

Official texts and transcripts tolerated no competing discourses, branding them as “anti-Soviet agitation” or “enemy propaganda,” and finally making them equivalent to treasonous acts. Competing ideologies and texts, whether oral or written, were not considered simply to be heretical or slanderous but were rather equivalent to overt political rebellion. Hostile language and hostile actions were seen as the same thing. The regime had mechanisms to enforce adherence to the dominant line, including the party and the secret police. Deviation from the line was even a specific state crime: “anti-Soviet agitation.”

Use of approved language (“speaking Bolshevik”) was an obligatory part of functioning in Stalinist society.14 Using the official mode of speech was a way to survive and maneuver within the Stalinist system and was practiced by everyone from the poorest peasant to the most senior official. It was a way in which individuals reacted to and made their way within the prescribed parameters of the system. Whether they were producing official documents, writing letters, or speaking at party meetings, many members of the Stalinist elite consciously “spoke Stalinist” as a matter of group conformity and even individual survival. Even more pragmatically, it was important for the top leaders to use the official language because they were producing texts for use by others at lower positions in the party hierarchy and in society. If they expected everyone to use the lingua stalina, they had to use it themselves.

But language was not only a vehicle to cloak politics, promote self-interest, or maintain social control. Language did work: it had the power to make politics as well as express politics. And it could make people as well as portray them. Their language created them as much as vice versa.

The ways Stalinists used official language, metaphors, and symbols were not necessarily cynical or false. One of the big surprises in party documents is that the Stalinists said the same things to one another behind closed doors that they said to the public: in this regard their “hidden transcripts” differed little from their public ones. The Stalinists were themselves products of the symbolic construction—the ideology—that they created. They were ultimately no more capable of escaping it than is the priest of any religion. “The ‘great’ are those who can least afford to take liberties with the official norms…. The price to be paid for their outstanding value is outstanding conformity to the values of the group, the source of all symbolic value.”15

It may be useful to think of another possible effect of language: its impact on the self-understanding and consciousness of those using it.16 Educational systems stressing recitation and religious practices of liturgical repetition have long been based on the simple notion that if one repeats something often enough in a particular form, one will come to believe it. Employing language in this way, therefore, is more than using it as a personal tool. It involves complex processes of identity-shaping and formation and the creation of personal subjective meaning through use of language. Belief, therefore, can be understood as a dynamic and evolving process as much as an a priori motivation. As the Stalinists used language instrumentally and obligatorily, they were also being shaped by that language. Their political identities were a product of the texts they created just as much as that language was a tool for individual advancement.

But the question of belief was and is a complicated one, connected to collective representations common both to the elite and the general population and to language. Some have pointed out that language can be “constative” or “performative.” Constative speech makes descriptive statements that state facts or characterize reality. Performative speech, on the other hand, changes or creates reality in some way. Constative speech can be true or false; performative utterances do work and are neither true nor false. They do their work not because of the intention of the speaker but because of the accepted conventions and circumstances surrounding its utterance. It is therefore not the intention of the speaker that characterizes speech or makes it successful or not; it is the extent to which it follows prescribed codes in certain venues and contexts.

For others, the speaker does not necessarily determine meaning in advance, only to perform a discourse later on. Instead, she or he is “enabled” (but not completely determined) by the performative speech itself. Through the repetition of ritualized events and speech, persons are themselves transformed or produced. It is not, therefore, the case that a “real,” finalized person “precedes” his ritualized speech, and then either lies (wears a mask) or “reveals truth,” depending on what she or he believes. This view has important implications for our Stalinists and their beliefs. Speakers were “ritualized agents,” partially produced in the very process of speech performance in ritual settings. Therefore we must allow for the possibility that things—and persons—are in fact created by speech in ritualized contexts: political truth, the meaning of symbols and political words, the “meaning” and role of persons themselves, and what in fact they believe, all as a result of their performative speech.17

Therefore it follows that any speech act can break with convention in unforeseen ways and come to mean things that were not intended in advance. As with the previously discussed politician-creates-language mode, the language-defines-politics phenomenon could unfold in unpredictable ways. If, for example, performative speech in a certain ritual setting did not precisely follow the norms, it could create unforeseen and inconvenient meanings: comrades could be redefined as enemies, enemies as friends, regardless of the presumed intentions of the speaker or the plans of those managing the event.

We can see a strange confluence of Stalinist and postmodern understandings of speech as politics and politics as speech. For both, to a considerable extent it was speech and action that defined and created the subject, not vice versa. In critical theory, it is the ritualized performance that helps create and shape the subject, as much as or even regardless of his previous subjective intent. For Stalinists it was the political “objective consequences” of one’s speech, not one’s subjective intent, that defined and governed one’s “political physiognomy.” As we shall see, in ritualized party meetings one’s adherence to proper performative speech created meaning, both for those present and for others who would receive the performed text, and to a considerable extent made politics and defined the speaker himself.

Fear

Finally, we must introduce another element that strongly affected politics in the 1930s: fear inside the elite. The Stalinists never felt that they really controlled the country. Transportation and communication were poor, and the regime’s representatives were few in number, especially outside the cities. There was not even a telephone line to the Soviet Far East until the 1930s. In the relatively developed European part of Russia, most communications with party committees were by telegraph or letters delivered by couriers on motorcycles. Mud and snow isolated numerous villages from any contact with the regime for months out of the year. Local party officials frequently interpreted and misinterpreted Moscow’s directives in ways that suited their local purposes. The Central Committee complained constantly throughout the decade about the lack of “fulfillment of decisions” and spent a great deal of time creating mechanisms to check up on miscreant and disobedient local leaders.18

Established regimes that rest on a base of general popular acceptance and consensual order do not need to resort to terror; they can rely on consensus (and/or hegemony in a Gramscian sense) to ensure stability and compliance. As Pierre Bourdieu noted, “Once a system of mechanisms has been constituted capable of objectively ensuring the reproduction of the existing order by its own motion, the dominant class have only to let the system they dominate take its own course in order to exercise their domination; but until such a system exists, they have to work directly, daily, personally, to produce and reproduce conditions of domination which are even then never entirely trustworthy.” The Bolsheviks, even into the 1930s, never enjoyed this level of acceptance and constantly feared for the safety of their regime. They could not simply “let the system they dominate take its own course” and felt that they had to work at it. They thought they had “to work directly, daily, personally, to produce and reproduce conditions of domination which are even then never entirely trustworthy.”19

The regime’s monopoly on force, the sheer scale of the terror, and the apparent grim, mechanical efficiency of the secret police have produced a literature dominated by images of an unstoppable, monstrous, and omnipotent “terror machine.” Indeed, from the vantage point of the victim, or that of observers who associate themselves with the victim, the objective reality seems clear. To civilians killed by an artillery barrage, the force seems huge and powerful. Yet to those firing the shots, the nature of the persons targeted might seem quite different; they are perceived as invisible, evil, monstrous, and threatening. To these shooters, the weapons of the state might seem dubious or even weak. Ultimately, of course, there is no difference: people are killed by a terrible mechanical process. But for an understanding of the event as phenomenon, the subjective perceptions of those administering terror are important. To date, studies of the terror, when they have dealt with the motives of those carrying out terror, have treated them simply as evil men who killed a lot of people. But the perpetrators were also, collectively, frightened of their surroundings. And they were as afraid of political and social groups below them as of authorities on high.20

This was a political system in which even Politburo members in the 1930s carried revolvers. Recalling in the 1930s their formative experiences in the Civil War, the Stalinists always felt figuratively surrounded, constantly at war with powerful and conniving opponents. Twenty years after the event they reflexively fell back on Civil War metaphors and branded all categories of enemies as “white guards.”

Of course, should one discover that the Bolshevik recourse to terror involved regime anxiety, the awful results of that terror remain unchanged. There is no insanity defense or excuse for the Stalinists; given the scale of the suffering they caused, there can be none. But if we are interested in the “why” surrounding the terror (or that part of it sponsored from above) it is relevant to inquire into the leaders’ construction of reality and their place in it.

More than a few caveats are in order. First, our study does not touch on all questions relating to the terror. Because our sources are predominantly internal political records of the upper Communist Party, we are unfortunately not able to deal comprehensively with foreign policy, agricultural or industrial affairs, or cultural matters. We rather focus on party policy as it relates to internal repression of perceived and identified “enemies,” and hope that this exercise may shed some light on other areas. Our concentration on high politics in this collection does not imply that other factors were unimportant or even less important. Local conflicts between leaders and led, social and status conflicts on the shop floor or the kolkhoz, populist resentment from below, even popular culture played active roles that have been documented in other studies. But because of the categories of documents we present, these important elements cannot receive a great deal of attention here except as the objects of central concerns and policies. This is a bias of the source base, not necessarily a reflection of historical reality.

Second, even within a subject focus, all scholars are necessarily selective in their use of sources. Because our subject is the Communist Party, much of our source base is from the former Central Party Archive of the Soviet Communist Party, which is technically responsible for party documents for the period to 1953. Accordingly, we have not made extensive use of the collections in the various state, economic, and cultural archives.

Similarly, for a variety of reasons, we have not used much of the large corpus of memoir literature. This reflects no claim that Stalinist archival documents are inherently trustworthy or that they are inherently superior to literary accounts in general. Because of the special relation of Stalinist discourse to the truth (or more accurately because the Stalinists were “creating truth” through their documents), archival documents must be handled with utmost critical care.21 With that in mind, it is important also to observe that they were produced by the people in power. On the other hand, the vast majority of existing memoir accounts were not written by persons in a position to report accurately the maneuvers of high politics we are studying. Much of the information they provide is in the form of second- or thirdhand gossip and hearsay. Even secret police memoirs were written decades later by agents stationed outside the USSR during the 1930s. Such memoirs are suspect not only because of their distance from the events they discuss; they also contain major mistakes and errors of fact. For example, concerning only some key events of the terror discussed in this volume, the two most important police memoirs misdate (sometimes by years) the Riutin opposition, the purge of 1933, the implication of Marshal Tukhachevsky, the arrest of Piatakov, and the execution of the army generals in 1937.22

Memoirs of victims who were not part of the elite or who were far removed from the seat of power, although they contain poignant and revealing material, cannot be taken as sources for central decision making even when they provide tantalizing rumors repeated in the labor camps. By contrast, Molotov’s and Kaganovich’s memoirs, although they were written decades after the events they recount, are more important sources because of the key positions their authors held in the 1930s. Nevertheless, they deserve the most strict critical treatment because of their ideological and self-serving nature.

The Great Terror of the 1930s in the Soviet Union was one of the most horrible cases of political violence in modern history. Millions of people were detained, arrested, or sent to prison or camps. In 1937 and 1938 alone, three-quarters of a million supposed “enemies of the people” were shot, many without any trial or other legal proceedings. Countless lives, careers, and families were permanently shattered. Honest, loyal people were destroyed. Relatives were persecuted and descendants lived with stigma and tragedy for decades. Beyond this, the experience left a national trauma, a legacy of fear that lingered for generations. When confronted with undeniable and unimaginable evil, our natural impulse is to condemn and to denounce. Although these are righteous and appropriate responses, they should not substitute for our duty as scholars and social scientists to explain phenomena, both positive and negative. Cancer researchers are no doubt repelled by the ravages of the disease they study, but they do not write of their repulsion in their scholarly works or allow it to replace or obviate their need to analyze and explain dispassionately. Their question, like ours, is “how was this all possible?”