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An imagined Stalin
Nikolai Bukharin, a Bolshevik
gradualist and ally of Stalin,
executed
during the purges of 1938.
While the capitalist West was suffering from economic depression, the Soviet Union was pursuing planned growth of basic manufacturing - for the sake of industry rather than public consumption. It was a "command economy," without unemployment and with as much wealth invested in economic growth as the government could muster. Soviet manufacturing was not advancing in production efficiency but it was in the volume produced. Labor was hard-driven, and by 1935 this volume was more than five times what it had been in 1913, and in percentage of the world's share in manufacturing the Soviet Union had surpassed France, Great Britain and Germany. The United States had a 33 percent share of the world's manufacturing. Russia had 13 percent, and Germany was third at 11 percent.
During the Depression, unemployment in capitalist nations enabled the Soviet Union to import thousands of engineers. And others came, running from unemployment and eager to help build socialism. Not receiving wages high enough to consume much of anything except subsistence food, building socialism had to be an incentive too for Soviet citizens. And they were told that they were sacrificing for the Revolution and for the future.
Meanwhile, the so-called class war in agriculture during the late twenties had extended into the thirties. The rationing of food in cities was combined with a gigantic police operation to collectivize agriculture. All over the Soviet Union, peasants resisted collectivization. They burned their crops, destroyed their tools and their livestock seen in cities as criminal sabotage. In places, peasant resistance became uprisings that were crushed by forces sent by Moscow. Police and army units surrounded rebellious peasant communities, burned homes and shot into crowds. A million peasants are believed to have died in 1932. By 1933 the Soviet Union had lost forty-five percent of its cattle, two-thirds of its sheep and goats and half its horses. And 1933 was a year of famine, the worst areas of the famine being the grain producing regions in the Ukraine and the southern Urals. Starving people invaded cities, banging on doors and rummaging through garbage cans. And while peasants and their children were dying of starvation, the government was exporting millions of tons of grain to earn foreign currency for industrialization.
An estimated three million peasant households had been expropriated. According to Soviet statistics, the number of so-called rich peasants - the Kulaks - had dropped from 5.5 million to 150,000. The homes, barns, land and tools of rebellious peasants had been turned over to the new collective farms. Trainloads of peasants, including children and old people, had been transported to remote areas, some to labor camps or to colonies in Russia's far north or in Siberia. Arrested peasants made up new labor battalions that worked at building railways, cutting timber and building the canal between the White and Baltic seas. The Soviet prison system, which had been founded for re-education, was developing into slave labor camps.
The inhumanity of force against the peasants increased tensions among the Bolsheviks, and it increased Bolshevik fears of those opposed to revolution. More intellectuals stood trial in 1930, and more Mensheviks were persecuted in 1931. That year Stalin spoke of his programs in terms of the need to protect the Revolution against its enemies. "We are fifty or a hundred years behind the advanced countries," he said. "We must catch up in ten years, or they will crush us."
Extending the battle to the home front, there were to be no more diverse schools of thought. Supervision of literature had begun, and Stalin himself intervened in the studies of philosophy and history. Ideological battle erupted in the Comintern. Lenin's approval of Communists working with reformers was reversed. Communist parties outside the Soviet Union pulled their membership out of reformist unions and other organizations and began organizing alone, hoping to benefit from increased visibly and by putting themselves at the forefront of the assault against capitalism. Bukharin and his followers, past supporters of peasant free enterprise, were persecuted. And Stalin's wife committed suicide with the pistol she had been given for self-protection.
Calm returned to countryside in 1933. A good harvest that year brought relief to the nation and the Bolsheviks. With Hitler in power and winning adulation from the German public, the Bolsheviks decided to bolster adulation for their regime. And it worked. The dead had been buried, dissident peasants were out-of-sight in distant work camps, and in the cities the persecuted remained a small minority. While many people in the United States were feeling despair, many people in the Soviet Union had a sense of direction. They believed they were building a new society. Foreigners noted that workers were putting pictures of Bolsheviks on their walls - pictures of Stalin, Molotov, Kalinin and Kirov. And peasants on collectives had icon-like pictures of Lenin and Stalin in their homes. How much all of this was adulation and how much was a demonstration of conformity is hard to measure, but foreign observers did see a good amount of the old Russian tradition of adulation for those in power.
A new breed of Soviet citizen was developing. Young adults were grateful for the opportunities that had been denied their poor parents - opportunities at occupations such as teaching, medicine and engineering. For many of them Stalin was a symbol of unity, and they believed that unity was necessary in the face of a world hostile to their nation.
During 1934, H.G. Wells came again to the Soviet Union, and he was impressed by what he saw. He visited Stalin, and, amid all that they talked about, Stalin pointed out that Wells was proceeding from the assumption that all people are good. Stalin reflected on the struggles he had experienced and gave Wells a rationale for his brutality. "But," he said, " I do not forget that many people are evil."
Other well-meaning and intelligent people visited the Soviet Union, among them the American singer, actor and human rights advocate Paul Robeson. In an interview that he gave in Moscow to a correspondent for New York's Daily Worker, Robeson is reported as saying that wherever he turned in Moscow he had found happiness and "bounding life, the feeling of safety and abundance of freedom." Commenting on recent trials and executions, Robeson said that from what he had seen of the workings of the Soviet Government, "anybody who lifts his hand against it ought to be shot!" [note]
In 1934, the Soviet Union was still devoted to industrializing, trying to catch up, as Stalin had put it, rather than let the other powers overwhelm them - Stalin's version of the Darwinian struggle, vaguely similar to Hitler's. By 1934, the Soviet Union had completed its collectivization of agriculture, and many Party members believed that it was time for reconciliation and a move closer to the communist ideal of happiness and liberty for all. The Communist Party was still supposed to be a family of comrades. The party readmitted some of Stalin's former opponents, the so-called Rightists, Bukharin, Tomsky and Rykov, and the so-called Leftists, the humbled Zinoviev, Kamenev and others of the old "United Opposition." Leon Trotsky, however, was in exile in Turkey, an outcast, trying to organize an alternative to Stalinist rule.
A part of the Marxist ideal was democracy, and Communist Party members still believed in democracy within the Party. One such Party member was Sergei Kirov, who also sat on the politburo and was leader of the Communist Party in Leningrad. It was easier for someone at the top to believe that democracy was functioning than it was for those who still looked with favor upon a dissenter or outcast like Trotsky, and Kirov was one such believer. With other Party members he also believed in the Leninist position that the Party should debate and then close ranks. Kirov was one of those who not only believed in democracy within the Party but also believed that the Party gave democracy to the country as a whole - a democracy for the working class.
Kirov also believed in class struggle, which allowed him to support Stalin's positions concerning industrialization and the collectivization of agriculture. He saw this use of force as having no parallel with fascism. Kirov was genuinely repelled by the barbarism of Germany's National Socialists. He saw Hitler's ideology as medieval. Kirov's wife was Jewish, and he disliked Hitler's anti-Semitism. He disliked dictatorship and rule by terror. The burning of books or the burning of Communists at the stake, he said, would not stop the international communist movement.
On occasion, while continuing to support the Stalinist majority, Kirov was outspoken in his defense of dissent within the Party. He recognized Stalin as the Party's foremost leader, but he had a mind of his own, and Stalin's personality annoyed him. He might argue with Stalin - as friends sometimes do. And Stalin, being the politician that he was, remained friendly with Kirov. The high-ranking Bolshevik, Molotov, after he retired in the sixties, would say that Kirov was Stalin's favorite. But Stalin had reason to be concerned about Kirov as a rival. Kirov was a good speaker and a Russian, without Stalin's accent. The Russian masses were inclined to favor their fellow Russians, and Kirov's show of intelligence, energy and concern added to his popularity outside and within the Party.
In 1934, 1,966 delegates to the 17th Party Congress met to do their duties, including electing members to the Central Committee. Many of the delegates believed that while Stalin had served the Party well, he was not the man to lead the Party into a new era of internal reconciliation. They looked forward to removing Stalin from the position of General Secretary and giving him some other work. A group of senior delegates approached Kirov and asked him if he would be interested in replacing Stalin as General Secretary. Kirov refused, and he reported the incident to Stalin - out of respect and as insurance against Stalin believing that he, Kirov, was a part of any conspiracy. And Stalin responded with anger.
In Party Congress elections, Kirov received more votes than did Stalin. Stalin lost his title as Secretary General and retained the title of Secretary. The friendship between Stalin and Kirov continued, at least in appearance, while the extent of any increase in Stalin seeing Kirov as a rival remains unknown.
In November, 1934, Kirov's bodyguards arrested a man named Leonid Nikolayev, who was carrying a loaded revolver. They gave Nikolayev over to the NKVD, who, with uncharacteristic leniency gave Nikolayev his revolver and released him. Kirov's bodyguards arrested Nikolayev, again with a revolver, a second time in late November. And again the NKVD released him. When Kirov's guards asked the NKVD why, they were told to mind their own business. Then, on December 1, 1934, Nikolayev hid himself in the men's room at the Smolny Institute, where Kirov had his office. Kirov was walking to his office, without his usual bodyguards. It has been said that the NKVD removed most of the Smolny buidling's guards and that Kirov's personal guard was removed from the scene, clearing the way for Nikolayev. When Kirov stepped out of his office into the hallway, Nikovayev stepped behind him and shot him in the back.
In response to the assassination, that same day, Stalin, with Molotov and Voroshilov, rushed by train to Leningrad. Accounts of the following are secondhand. Reliable firsthand accounts do not exist. What is said to have happened is as follows. Stalin was greeted by the head of the Leningrad NKVD, and Stalin struck the man in the face with his fist. Stalin, Leningrad Party Officials and NKVD agents were in a room, and the assassin, Nikolayev, was dragged into the room by NKVD agents. Stalin, sitting behind a table, asked Nikolayev why he shot Kirov. Nikolayev fell to his knees, pointed to a group of NKVD police standing behind Stalin and said, "They forced me to do it." NKVD agents rushed to the assassin and beat him unconscious with their pistol butts and dragged him away.
That evening (December 1) Stalin ordered by telephone a decree that became the legal foundation for a new repression - a decree that speeded and simplified procedures for handling "terrorist acts." The following day, amid the stirred emotions over the assassination, the decree was published. It stated that, in cases involving people accused of terrorist acts, investing authorities were to speed up their work, judicial authorities were not to allow appeals for clemency or other delays in which the sentence was death, and that the NKVD was to execute those sentenced to death immediately.
Such a decree was supposed to have politburo approval before it was established, and on December 4 the politburo approved the decree. And the following day, under the new law, dozens of people not charged in connection with the Kirov assassination were executed by the NKVD, and before the month was over almost a hundred others were eliminated in the same way.
The assassin, Leonid Nikolayev, it was determined, had been a Party member around the years 1917 to 1924. He had harbored a grudge against the Party bureaucracy, and he had been expelled. After the assassination, the NKVD announced Nikolayev's association with a conspiratorial group of youthful supporters of Zinoviev that it had known about - a group in Leningrad, where Zinoviev had been Party leader before being replaced by Kirov. It was a group unhappy over Zinoviev's demotion and perhaps the demise of the positions of their fathers within the Party. It was a group that may have looked with hope to the Soviet Union's leading dissident, Trotsky. Before Kirov's assassination, the NKVD had asked Kirov for permission to arrest this group of "Zinovievites," but Kirov, characteristically, had refused. He had seen no danger in the group and thought that eventually their opposition to Party positions would diminish - a liberal and hopeful approach to dissent quite different from Stalin's.
Now, with Kirov dead, Stalin obtained a NKVD list of Zinovievites in Leningrad. He took some names from a list of Moscow Zinovievites and added them to the Leningrad list, and shortly thereafter everyone on the Leningrad list was arrested.
To crackdown against rivals, Stalin needed more than Nikolayev as the murderer of Kirov. The NKVD declared that Nikolayev and the Zinovievite group in Leningrad had conspired together to murder Kirov and to murder also Stalin, Molotov and Kaganovich. The arrested Zinovievites confessed to belonging to a group but not to any involvement in Kirov's murder, and they denied that Nikolayev had been a member of their group, but their denials were of no avail. On December 27, the indictments were read in court, its details riddled with amateurish contradictions. Nikolayev was led to believe that his life would be spared if he implicated the Zinovievites. He did so and confessed to Kirov's murder. The court presented no other evidence of a link between Nikolayev and the Zinovievites. The court pronounced the death penalty for all. A surprised Nikolayev struggled with his guards as he was dragged away, and he and his thirteen alleged accomplices were shot within hours.
Without a free press in the Soviet Union, there were no newsmen probing the background of Nikolayev and the others who were accused and executed. There were no news people analyzing the trial, and no news people asking about Nikolayev having been released twice by the NKVD or other details that would have aroused suspicions or exposed the trial as a farce. Nor was there an investigation of the murder of the NKVD official, Borisov, who had been the head of the detail guarding Kirov. Borisov was murdered by other NKVD police with crowbars while being driven in a closed truck. Borisov's wife was sent to an insane asylum. And no newspeople were asking why Stalin had allowed the NKVD to beat Nikolayev unconscious while he was asking Nikolayev questions.
Without an opposition press, the assassination and the trial that followed left the public with the impression that dangerous people were running about trying to wreck the revolution. To the common Russian, any suggestion that Stalin was behind Kirov's murder would have seemed wild and as slander by enemies of the revolution. Many people were ready to believe in conspiratorial theories but they were also reluctant to accept anything that appeared far out of context - just as they would not have accepted that the great Bolshevik leader, Stalin, had once spied on revolutionaries.
In the place of questions from an independent press and comments from liberal editors and journalists, there were pronouncements about the fault of dissidents like Zinoviev having encouraged the likes of Nikolayev and the Zinovievite co-conspirators. Their opinions, it was claimed, encouraged the radical dissidents like the Zinovievites and all of the enemies of the revolution. For their role in having encouraged the conspirators, the Communists supporting Stalin now moved against two more of their old comrades: Zinoviev and his old partner in opposition to Stalin, Kamenev. Zinoviev was sentenced to ten years in prison, and Kamenev to five.
Meanwhile, alongside the new drive against enemies of the revolution, the contrary move toward liberalism that had existed within the Communist Party before Kirov's assassination continued in the form of a new Soviet Constitution. It would be a contradiction that the Stalinists would easily resolve in favor of the drive against enemies.
The new constitution was written largely by Bukharin and was to take effect in 1936. The government was to be divided into two legislative bodies: the Soviet of the Union and the Soviet of Nationalities. The Constitution guaranteed freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, freedom of the press and freedom of religious worship. The Constitution guaranteed the inviolability of individuals, their home and the privacy of their correspondence. According to the Constitution, any of the republics could choose to secede from the Union of Socialist Soviet Republics. And according to the Constitution, the exploiting classes had been defeated, the class war was at an end, and the working class and those on the collective farms, and the intelligencia, and the vanguard of working people were all working together to build a new socialist society.
Stalin was hardly a supporter of such liberality, but he could not very easily do away with the new constitution. Instead, he made a show of supporting it, presenting it as a gift from the Communist Party. The Party press was touting the new constitution. Meanwhile, through 1935 to mid-1936 hundreds of arrests were made. A law was passed that lowered the age of criminal responsibility. A new article was added to the Criminal Code - Article 58 - which defined new offenses that were counter-revolutionary and stated that persons who fled abroad could be executed and families of defectors imprisoned or exiled.
With Stalin pursuing class conflict, he had reason for more fear from dissidents within the Party, and the government passed a law that denied Party members the right to carry guns. Party members did not react to the law, but some of them must have been disturbed by Stalin's moves against so-called enemies. A vicious circle was spiraling toward a purification campaign not unlike the terror during the French Revolution. Stalin would now move against the rank and file opposition that had long festered among Leningrad Party members since Zinoviev's split with Stalin some years before. To eliminate a breeding ground for what he saw as mistaken ideas and weaknesses, Stalin would order thousands of Bolsheviks and their families deported to northern Siberia.
Now in Norway, Trotsky was announcing to the world that political prisoners in the Soviet Union were being harshly treated, and among Stalin's supporters Trotsky remained enemy number one alongside fascism. The Bolshevik press, which had once claimed Trotsky as their hero, was now demonizing him. In August 1936, the Soviet regime accused Trotsky of conspiring with fascists in a counter revolutionary plot against the Soviet Union, and the Party newspaper, Pravda, announced that German secret police were involved in the plot. Trotsky was now to be portrayed not as a Left deviationist as before, but, having been demonized, he could be portrayed as having surrendered all his scruples and become a Rightist.
That same month, the first of the big show trails in the Soviet Union took place. Sixteen were to be tried. The two leading defendants were the already imprisoned Zinoviev and Kamenev. Before the trail they had been worked on by the NKVD, and Stalin was kept informed. When an official told Stalin that Kamenev could not be broken, Stalin became enraged and told the official not to come back with a report until he had a confession from Kamenev.
The court charged the defendants with complicity in the murder if Kirov and of plotting to kill Stalin. The trail lasted five days. No material evidence was presented, and the Soviet Union's Supreme Court asked for none. The defendants confessed their guilt, Zinoviev saying that because of his having been seduced by Trotskyism he had gone all the way to fascism. Decades later, some people were to believe that the defendants may have confessed to save their families, or that they may have confessed believing that this would spare their lives. Some others were to believe that the defendants had been convinced that the charade was for the good of the Party - as described in Arthur Koestler's novel, Darkness at Noon.
Half way through the trial, Stalin went to the home of an old friend and former politburo member, Tomsky, with a bottle of wine. Tomsky, with Bukharin and Rykov, was facing a charge of treasonable complicity with Zinoviev. Tomsky ordered him out, and Stalin left, shaking with anger. Moments later a shot rang out. Tomsky, the good Bolshevik that he was, was opposed to individual terror. He had chosen to kill himself with his pistol rather than to kill Stalin.
The prosecutor, Vishinsky closed his speech for the prosecution saying, "I demand that these mad dogs be shot, every last one of them." On August 25, Zinoviev, Kamenev and the fourteen others were shot. And Trotsky was sentenced to death in absentia.
The trial caused a sensation through the Soviet Union and the world. Soviet newspapers applauded the executions and demanded more purges of counter revolutionaries. The public in the Soviet Union accepted the confessions of the accused - easier to believe perhaps than that their government had been perpetrating a gigantic hoax. In Norway, Communists demonstrated against Trotsky. In the United States, the Left was stunned. Most of those associated with the Socialist Party denounced the trial, while many if not most Communists believed that bourgeois newspapers and radio stations were distorting the news. In New York City, a mass meeting of Stalinists adopted a resolution urging Stalin to expel all Trotskyists, and the U.S. Communist Party leader, Earl Browder, denounced Trotsky. The popular Leftist magazine, the New Masses, began its description of the purge trials as legitimate judicial procedures. From Germany came Dr. Goebbels' analysis of the trial: the Bolshevik government, he explained, was a Jewish business.
On September 10, it was announced that the charges against Bukharin and Rykov had been dropped due to lack of evidence. Neither had been willing to make the confessions demanded of them. Then the head of the NKVD, Yagoda, was replaced by someone who would take a harder approach to the fight against counter-revolution. This was Nikolai Yezhov, a Bolshevik from before the revolution, a former industrial worker, a former Secretary of the Central Committee, and someone who enjoyed a reputation as an agreeable and conscientious man. The greatest terror came during Yezhov's rule over the NKVD, and people in the Soviet Union would call the Great Terror Yezhovshchina (the times of Yezhov). Yezhov began his new reign by rooting out NKVD commissars that he saw as not fit to serve under him. In 1937, it is estimated, around 3,000 of them were shot.
In January 1937, more Bolsheviks stood trial. They confessed and were executed for participating with anti-Soviet "Trotskyites" and for having spied for Germany and Japan. Trotsky, it was said, had met Rudolf Hess and had agreed to plans for sabotaging Soviet industry and plans to frustrate the Soviet Union's military. Trotsky had moved to Mexico that month, having been booted out of Norway for violating his agreement not to make political statements. And Trotsky was to continue his attempt to expose the fraudulent nature of the accusations against him. Publicly he offered to submit to a trial if the Soviet government published actual details supporting the accusations.
Unwittingly, it was actually the Soviet regime that was in complicity with the fascists doing damage to the Soviet Union's defense establishment. Hitler's regime was happy to help the Soviet Union damage itself. The chief of staff of the Soviet army was Tukhachevsky, an able man. Stalin had reason to fear him, for it was the army that had the power to overthrow Stalin and his entire regime. Some people were to claim that such a plot against Stalin was actually being hatched by high-ranking military people, although no conclusive evidence of this exists. What is known conclusively is that in early 1937 the Germans forged a letter that Tukhachevsky was supposed to have sent to friends in Germany telling of plans to overthrow Stalin's regime. These documents were well planted by the Germans. The documents were found and passed on to Stalin. The Soviet government put Tukhachevsky and other top army men on trial in June, and they were quickly executed. Then purges began among others in the Army officer corps and in the Navy. Including Tukhachevsky and those executed with him, before it was over the Soviet Union had lost 3 army marshals, 14 of the Soviet Union's 16 army commanders, 65 of 67 corps commanders; 136 of 199 division commanders, 221 of 397 brigade commanders, and all eight of the Soviet Union's admirals. In all, about 35,000 military officers had been shot or imprisoned.
The purging spread to the masses. It was worse than the anti-German hysteria during World War I in the U.S. It was more like the Cultural Revolution that was to take place China in the 1960s. A society that is intense in its struggle for change has a flip side to its idealism: intolerance. People saw enemies everywhere, enemies who wanted to destroy the revolution and diminish the results of their hard work and accomplishments, enemies who wanted to restore capitalism for selfish reasons against the collective interests of the nation. If those at the top of the Communist Party and an old revolutionary like Trotsky could join the enemy, what about lesser people. In factories and offices, mass meetings were held in which people were urged to be vigilant against sabotage.
It was up to common folks to make the distinction between incompetence and intentional wrecking, and any mishap might be blamed on wrecking. Denunciations became common. Neighbors denounced neighbors. Denunciations were a good way of striking against people one did not like, including one's parents, a way of eliminating people blocking one's promotion, and denunciations were a means of proving one's patriotism. Many realized that some innocent people were being victimized, and the saying went around that "when you chop wood the chips fly." As with Lenin, it was believed some who were innocent would have to be victimized if all the guilty were to be apprehended.
Yezhov established denunciation quotas. Labor camps were in need of more people for their enterprises, as they were losing people through expirations of prison terms, and from death. Some in the camps whose terms expired were given second terms without interrogation or hearings. Re-supplying labor for the camps was an unruly business in 1937 and 1938. NKVD prison cells were stuffed with new candidates, and NKVD interrogators were swamped.
The last show trial opened to a packed house on March 2, 1938. Bukharin and Rykov were two of the defendants. The former head of the NKVD, Yogoda, was included among the defendants - getting a taste, it would be said, of his own medicine. Two Uzbek Communists were also included, charged with Bourgeois nationalism, reflecting a clamp down on nationalistic tendencies among the Soviet Union national minorities. Twenty-one Bolsheviks in all were tried, accused of belonging to a rightist Trotskyite bloc. They were accused of having killed Gorky (who would have opposed the trials and had conveniently died in 1936). They were accused of attempting to kill Lenin in 1918 and of trying to give away the Ukraine, Byelorussia, the Far East, Central Asia and Turkestan during the early days of the revolution. To historians today, the charges appear ridiculous. But people then in the Soviet Union accepted the charges as valid.
Again those standing trial confessed. Bukharin confessed to having been one of the leaders of the "rightist Trotskyite bloc." Their goal, he said, was in essence to restore capitalism in the USSR, although some of the Trotskyites might not have been aware of what the consequences of their positions. Bukharin denied direct participation in any espionage or in the murder of Kirov and others, including Gorky, and he denied charges that he had tried to give away the Ukraine and other territories. Bukharin went to his death believing the Cheka under Dzerzhinsky had been heroic in its ruthless fight against counterrevolutionary terror but that it had degenerated into an organization of well-paid bureaucrats living off the reputation of the Cheka.
The year ended with Yezhov's demotion, marking the end of his campaign against Trotskyite subversion. Then Yezhov was himself arrested. In conversations that were recorded when Molotov was in his seventies, Molotov described Yezhov as having exceeded his authority, as having been overzealous. In these conversations, Molotov denounced Yezhov for having set quotas - no fewer than two thousand "liquidated in such and such region," he said, and "no fewer than fifty in such and such district." Yezhov, claimed Molotov, was shot when he was "unmasked." And, when asked whether the politburo had placed too much trust in security agencies, Molotov said "No. There were deficiencies." The main problem he said was that "oversight was inadequate." [note]
Yezhov was replaced by Stalin's old friend and fellow Georgian, Lavrentry Beria - the man Stalin's dead wife had disliked and had not wanted in her house. Beria claimed the NKVD fascists had been responsible for excesses, and, striking against those guilty of these excesses, Beria arrested and executed nearly all senior NKVD officers and sent many NKVD officers to labor camps, where they were to join some of those they had interrogated or tortured.
It was a general rule, claim some historians, for Stalin to eliminate those who knew too much. Molotov was to describe it differently. Late in his life, Molotov believed that Stalin would be rehabilitated. He denied that Stalin was behind Kirov's murder, and he blamed others for what he called excesses. He claimed that Stalin knew little about the purges - although Stalin signed death warrants sometimes numbering more than a thousand a day, in the presence of Molotov.
Counts of the number of people who were purged vary. The Russian historian Roy Medvedev has written of reliable Soviet records indicating 1,116 having been sentenced to death in 1936, and 353,680 in 1937. The decline in 1938, it is estimated, may have brought the number of executed to 200,000 or 300,000. Stalin's opponents in the Party had been effectively silenced. Of the 1,966 delegates to the 17th Party Congress - the Party Congress of 1934 that had threatened Stalin's position within the Party - 1,108 had been shot as enemies of the people.
Perhaps it can be said that ten percent of the Soviet Union's adult population were executed or deported to labor camps. The total had to be small enough for the Soviet regime to maintain the support that it needed to survive. It was, it seems, a majority again letting a minority go under. In 1938 and beyond Stalin was still receiving loud cheers and applause. After the trials and deportations, Stalin appeared smiling at festivals, handing prizes to athletes, or appearing among happy workers or peasants, still father to his people - a stern father. The purges had not reached the level of imploding Soviet society. Soviet citizens were still hard at work. In 1937 industrial production in the Soviet Union was 14.1 percent of world production, and in 1938 it had risen to 17.6 percent.
To a lot of Soviet citizens, a lot of traitors and wreckers and misguided old revolutionaries had been driven from the ranks of good people. Old revolutionaries were of little use, anyway. Old revolutionaries become old cranks. In their place, a younger generation of people had risen, and they were enthusiastic about the revolution and making the nation strong.
A few old Bolsheviks would survive Siberia, but hardly any of Trotsky's old supporters would. Nor would Trotsky's family, or Trotsky. In May 1940 an attempt on Trotsky almost succeeded, led by David Siqueiros, the Mexican artist and Mexico's Communist Party leader. In August that year, another succeeded. Ramon Mercader had become one of Trotsky's trusted helpers, and one night he drove an ice pick into Trotsky's head. Mexican authorities sentenced Mercader to 20 years in prison. The Soviet Union awarded him with the title of Hero of the Soviet Union and awarded Mercader's mother the Order of Lenin.
Meanwhile, the Soviet regime had been increasing its appeal to Russian tradition and patriotism, and it was adopting stricter social policies. Divorce laws were tightened. Abortions were made illegal, and women were encouraged to bear more children. In education it was back to basics rather than any new theories. Plans to Latinize the alphabet were dropped. Russian became a compulsory subject throughout the Soviet Union. Military schools and other establishments for national minorities were closed, and no more criticism about Russian arrogance toward national minorities could be found in the Soviet press. Instead came comments about the Russian people extending unselfish and constant help to every other Soviet nation.
Additional Online Reading
Communist Party Power Structure
Recommended Books
Let History Judge, by Roy Medvedev, 1989.
Stalin, by Edvard Radzinsky, Doubleday, 1996.
Darkness at Noon, by Arthur Koestler.
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