Seven

STALIN THE EXECUTIONER

The Cleansing

The 1930s in the Soviet Union was a turbulent and significant decade. It began with the launch of a massive programme of economic transformation and ended with a pact between Stalin and Hitler, the most militant opponent of Bolshevism. From a predominantly agrarian society, the country was reshaped as an industrial society in which the masses laboured with the heroic force of unprecedented endeavour and faith in the future, even if it was expressed as the Stalin cult. And from a fractious and outspoken association the Communist Party became an intimidated, obedient and unquestioning flock of bureaucrats and worshippers of the Leader.

However, the single most powerful element in this process was undoubtedly the vast ‘purge’ of party and society that took place in the middle years of the decade – generally known as ‘the purges’.

Beginning in 1929, Stalin began to clear the way towards creating a new image for himself. The greater his claim on Lenin’s inheritance, the less the danger from the opposition. The history of the party was rewritten to show Stalin in a more suitable light: as a prominent hero of 1917 and the Civil War, and as Lenin’s most diligent interpreter. In the process, names that had been well known in the party simply vanished from the page, while the views of others were travestied. Official lying on an unprecedented scale – ‘the Big Lie’ – supplanted earlier efforts to write history from a Marxist-Leninist viewpoint, however unbalanced that may also have been.

Stalin’s image was magnified to godlike stature. He was father, teacher, guide and above all infallible Leader, not merely of the Soviet peoples but of the workers of the world. His comrades – more properly his vassals – vied with each other to find yet more sycophantic compliments, as they quaked before his mounting power. His anger in private was menacing, his eyes were said to glow yellow like a tiger’s.

Unlike his parallels in dictatorship in Italy, Spain and Germany, or even Lenin his mentor, Stalin did not rant when addressing large assemblies but, exploiting the microphone, spoke softly, conversationally, even intimately, eschewing high-pitched climaxes. Neither gesticulating nor jutting his chin, his movements were slow and understated, his expression either benign or sly. He derived sadistic pleasure from the game of cat and mouse. At a large election meeting in the Bolshoi Theatre in 1937, for instance, he thanked the party leaders for ‘dragging’ him to the meeting and ‘forcing’ him to say a few words. Commending the candidates – all top party figures – to their constituents, he said they might be very good Communists. Pausing for the applause to die down, he then added that they might, of course, turn out to be enemies of the people. Such twists of the knife made nervous wrecks of the leadership.¹

If party intellectuals were suspicious of Stalin and his motives, the rank and file, which was hugely expanded after the death of Lenin with people more to Stalin’s taste, readily saw all opposition as an obstacle to progress, even as ‘enemies of the people’. As for the masses, they were misinformed, manipulated, cajoled and prodded into a state of unfeigned adulation for the Leader.

Yet Stalin did not feel secure. Paranoid by nature, he sensed that his critics, though cowed, were still a threat. Two years after his wife’s suicide, he was faced with plain evidence of his unpopularity as party leader. At the Seventeenth Party Congress in February 1934 he reported the huge advances that had been made in all fields. His penitent former critics were now singing his praises: for Bukharin he was ‘the personal embodiment of the mind and will of the party . . . its theoretical and practical leader’; for Tomsky ‘the brightest of Lenin’s pupils’; Kamenev said, ‘this era . . . will go down in history . . . as the Stalin era, just as the preceding era went down in history as the Lenin era . . . ’; Khrushchev and Zhdanov called him ‘a leader of genius’; Comintern leaders addressed him as the leader of the world proletariat.² Stalin himself uttered the even bigger fiction, namely, that the foundations of socialism had been built. This for him was a ‘Congress of Victors’.

As the meeting glided smoothly towards its scripted close, however, Stalin received a shock: he was informed by Kirov that some older party members had asked him to stand against Stalin for the post of General Secretary, but that he would not. Then, when the anonymous election of a new Central Committee took place, nearly 300 delegates voted against Stalin and only three against Kirov. Stalin was contemptuous of these ‘double-dealers’, who eulogized him to his face but were frightened to oppose him openly and schemed behind his back. He ordered his henchmen to alter the figures for appearance’s sake to three against him and four against Kirov. He was bound to win anyway as there were 1,225 delegates, but he now knew that Kirov was a rival and that there was still hostility towards him in the highest reaches of the party. Kirov was assassinated on 1 December 1934 in Leningrad, almost certainly on Stalin’s orders.

Stalin understood that since 1917 large numbers of people – not only former revolutionaries – had acquired standing and self-confidence, and had accumulated experience and responsibility in all spheres. They were the mainsprings of the system. Many owed allegiance to Stalin but others were uncomfortable with his style and policies. The surreptitious show of independence at the congress was, for Stalin, the tip of the iceberg.

On the day Kirov was assassinated Stalin rushed out a new (unsigned) decree ordering the authorities to carry out the death sentence on anyone accused of a terrorist act as soon as the sentence was pronounced. The powers of the NKVD were greatly enlarged. Arrests and executions, already a common feature of daily life, now extended to the party bureaucracy, the military and the intelligentsia, as well as ordinary workers and peasants.

There was a brief hiatus in late 1936 when Stalin introduced a new Constitution, proclaiming that the USSR was a democratic state and that its citizens enjoyed full civil rights. In fact, every kind of initiative depended on party approval, and party authority was embedded in every facet of Soviet life. The law courts were party controlled and political trials were a travesty, evidence fabricated as much by the tortured defendant as by the cynical NKVD, and conspiracies were created to give substance to this parody of justice. The NKVD itself, from its head down, was purged as vigorously as the bodies it purged.

Of the 1,225 delegates at the ‘Congress of Victors’, 1,108 were arrested, most of them were executed by the NKVD or died in the camps, and of 139 Central Committee members 98 were shot. In August 1936, Zinoviev, Kamenev and a large group of other ‘Old Bolsheviks’ were tried and shot, and their wives and children also either shot or exiled. In May 1937 eight marshals were arrested, tried and shot, including Stalin’s bête noire of the Civil War, the military genius Tukhachevsky. By the time the army purge was over, 39,761 officers had been arrested, nearly 15,000 shot and the rest sent to camps. Stalin had purged the entire officer corps and senior administrative structure of the forces, replacing them with comparatively uneducated men who now found themselves in positions far above their abilities. Most of the remaining Old Bolsheviks, along with Bukharin, were finished off in 1938.

The chief – and conveniently absent – defendant in the Moscow trials was Trotsky. He was accused of masterminding a vast conspiracy that had taken over every facet of state and party life. A wink from him, Trotsky himself wrote sarcastically, ‘was enough for veterans of the revolution to become Hitler’s and the Mikado’s agents. On Trotsky’s “instructions” . . . the leaders of industry, agriculture and transport were destroying the nation’s productive resources and shattering its civilization. . . . But here a difficulty arises. . . . If my underlings have occupied all the crucial positions in the apparatus, how is it that Stalin is in the Kremlin and that I am in exile?’³

Trotsky’s writings in exile were all delivered to Stalin by his agents, often even before their publication, and such darts found their target. Since 1930 a special NKVD assassination squad had been hunting Trotsky, and now Stalin ordered them to redouble their efforts. They finally succeeded in Mexico in May 1940, when Trotsky was assassinated with an ice pick in the brain.

Stalin’s campaign of terror destroyed the top layer of the state administration and party, and terrorized the rest of society by its random unpredictability. Yet in the midst of this mayhem Stalin produced his new Constitution and declared that life had become ‘merrier’. The Moscow underground railway – the Metro – opened to reveal lavishly decorated palace-like stations. Such ‘bourgeois’ entertainment as ballroom dancing and cabaret were permitted. Circuses were well endowed and became an important cultural institution. The film industry was mobilized to produce Hollywood-style musicals.

But the terror did not let up. The NKVD had a programme of norms: so many ‘Mensheviks’, so many ‘Trotskyists’, etc., these terms by now meaning simply any group targeted by Stalin, who personally signed the death sentences of hundreds of thousands of innocent men and women. In all, some 20 million people were arrested, 7 million shot and millions more died or languished in camp. Doom for some meant advancement for those who filled their shoes. Denunciation became the order of the day, even of outspoken parents by their well-trained children. A new class of functionaries came into being, owing their loyalty and livelihood to Stalin alone. In 1939 Stalin called a halt. His internal enemies destroyed, he now contemplated the prospect of a new, external threat.