Lenin, Stalin, and Hitler

by Robert Gellately

  As for Patriarch Tikhon, he was indicted on March 20, 1922, threatened, held in detention, and harassed until his death just over three years later. His successors were intimidated, and to the extent the Orthodox Church continued to exist, it was all but taken over by the state.34

  Officials down the line showed their own antireligious enthusiasm. For example, Petr A. Krasikov, in the Russian Federation’s Commissariat of Justice, organized the confiscation of Church valuables in 1922 and advocated closing as many churches as possible. Over the years, the League of Militant Atheists, among others, padlocked churches in the capital city and elsewhere. Major houses of worship were demolished in the capital, the most important of which was the seventeenth-century Church of the Blessed Virgin. It was replaced by a political statue.35

  There was symbolic value to turning former cathedrals of the Solovetski Monastery into concentration camps, with the floors covered in plank “beds.” The facilities were completely unsuited to housing prisoners, who suffered from the cold, lack of space, and deplorable conditions.36

  A second wave of religious repression came in the context of collectivization and was particularly ruthless in Ukraine. Churches were destroyed and the clergy shot on trumped-up charges. In addition, there was the continuing campaign to inculcate Communist ideals, to socialize the population and increase literacy.

  The Cultural Revolution that began in 1928 witnessed more repressive policies toward religion. The Party concluded that anyone who identified with Communism was enlightened and progressive, while those who held on to a belief in God were backward and even counterrevolutionary. In the 1930s, merely talking to a priest could be grounds for concluding a person was an anti-Soviet element who should be “repressed,” that is, arrested or sent to a camp. 37

  During the 1930s, the destruction of sacred places, including venerated cathedrals, continued. The most significant of these actions, backed by Stalin and the League of Militant Atheists, was the leveling of the Cathedral of Christ the Redeemer. Besides getting rid of these reminders of a despised past, the object was to destroy popular religious faith and replace it with secular loyalty to Communist ideals and specifically to the Soviet regime.

  There was a shock, therefore, when the 1937 census showed nearly 60 percent of the population answered yes to the question “Are you a believer” in religion? Seventy-eight percent in their fifties still felt the pull of religion, and as many as 45 percent in their twenties admitted to some religious faith. The question itself, particularly given the context of the times and the raging terror, had to make people nervous. There would have been pressures to give the regime-approved answer to a census taker at the door, so it seems likely that even more people than indicated by the results held on to their religious faiths.38

  Georgy Malenkov of the Central Committee Secretariat wrote to Stalin in April 1937: “The time has come to finish once and for all with all clerical organizations and ecclesiastical hierarchies.” This exchange signaled the third wave of repression. Priests, bishops, and nuns were arrested in the thousands and sent to the camps, where they were executed or subjected to the worst possible treatment. Out of an estimated twenty thousand churches and mosques functioning in 1936, fewer than one thousand were active in 1941.39

  TERROR AS SOCIAL PROPHYLAXIS

  Terror was used in the 1930s to maintain Stalin’s dominant position and undermine opposition. It was also employed with the intention of forcing through the transformation of society. Stalin used the most brutal means to get rid of what remained of old Russia, including the remnants of capitalism, the independent peasantry, and the clergy.

  As well, the Stalinist use of terror had the function of being a social prophylaxis. “Real” opponents would be liquidated and society purified and cleansed of anyone who might become an opponent in the future. “Former” people, women and men whose social backgrounds left indelible traces, could not simply shed their old identities. Social background and old political associations could never be erased, and for hundreds of thousands there could be no redemption. They would be eliminated or sent to concentration camps from which they would never emerge.

  The Nobel Prize winner and former Gulag prisoner Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn provides an instructive quotation about prophylactic terror from Lazar Kogan, one of the bosses of the Gulag, who said to a prisoner: “I believe that you personally were not guilty of anything. But, as an educated person, you have to understand that social prophylaxis was being widely applied.” In this instance “understand” meant that the “educated person,” completely innocent as he was, should nonetheless accept that the punishment he received was just from the perspective of Communism, a system they all presumably revered.

  Solzhenitsyn mentions several cases he knew to illustrate just what this form of terror was all about. In Moscow in the 1930s a group of young people gathered for a musical evening, but without getting written approval beforehand: “They listened to music and then drank tea.” This event, it was alleged by the secret police, “was a cover for counterrevolutionary sentiments,” and the money was to be used not to buy tea, as they claimed, “but to assist the dying world of the bourgeoisie.” These charges would seem laughable, but not in the context of those times. All the participants were arrested and given between three and ten years in the Gulag. Most of the organizers would not confess and were shot.40

  Molotov provides other examples of how the various strands of terror were entwined. He insists, even looking back from the post-Soviet period, that the terror was “necessary” to maintain Leninism. Even if innocent heads rolled, “there could have been sympathizers among them.”

  Felix Chuev, in conversation with Molotov, asked him about the tortures to extract confessions, how clearly innocent family members were killed for nothing, and why it never seemed to occur to Stalin “that we could not possibly have so many enemies of the people” inside the Soviet Union itself. Molotov’s best answer was:

  It is certainly sad and regrettable that so many innocent people died. But I believe the terror of the late 1930s was necessary. Of course, if we had used greater caution, there would have been fewer victims, but Stalin was adamant on making doubly sure: spare no one, but guarantee absolute stability in the country for a long time—through the war and postwar years, which was no doubt achieved. I don’t deny that I supported that view. I was simply not able to study every individual case…. It was hard to draw a precise line where to stop, [and so no lines were drawn at all]….

  That policy of repression was the only hope for the people, for the Revolution. It was the only way we could remain true to Leninism and its basic principles. Today that policy would be out of the question, of course. 41

  16

  “MASS OPERATIONS”

  With Hitler’s rise in the West in the 1930s, Stalin became suspicious of Germans living in the Soviet Union. He hastily wrote at a Politburo meeting on July 20, 1937, an order for the arrest of all Germans then working in war-related industries everywhere in the USSR. He thus initiated a process that would be fateful for hundreds of thousands. The order was soon followed by others that affected many other national minorities.

  AGAINST NATIONAL MINORITIES

  In a follow-up to Stalin’s instructions on July 20, Yezhov signed operational order No. 00439, outlining that Germany had organized a network of “spies and wreckers” in the defense industry and other strategic sectors. He ordered the NKVD to draw up lists and make arrests of German nationals. There were only about four thousand such people in the Soviet Union, but the suspects grew exponentially when police included those who had become Soviet citizens. German refugees, even members of the Communist Party, were closely scrutinized. Soviet citizens who had ever had ties with “German spies, wreckers, and terrorists” were particularly vulnerable.1

  R. M. Traibman, former member of the Moscow NKVD, recalled being given “barely two days” to “uncover a counterrevolutionary, nationalist formation among young Germans.” The NKVD invented charg
es and extorted confessions to implicate about fifty children of German émigrés, aged sixteen to twenty-five. Traibman later (in 1957) admitted that he was “especially outraged” by the incident, typical of the time.2

  Operation 00439, signed by Yezhov on July 25, 1937, was supposed to last three months, but continued until November 1938. Whenever local and regional authorities found the number of suspects “too thin,” they would go after non-Germans. In total, 55,005 were condemned by the “extrajudicial” troikas, and of those 41,898 (76 percent) were shot.3

  Other national operations followed a similar course. Foreign nationals or former foreign nationals singled out included Afghans, Bulgarians, Chinese, Estonians, Finns, Greeks, Iranians, Koreans, Kurds, Latvians, Macedonians, and Romanians. Still other groups or people associated with them were also arrested.

  The complete story of what happened remains to be told, but these national operations had no quotas, and the NKVD, given a free hand, everywhere exceeded expectations. Party Secretary Sobolev for Krasnoiarsk bluntly told them to get on with the job and “stop playing internationalism.” His instruction was that “all these Poles, Koreans, Latvians, Germans, etc. should be beaten, these are all mercenary nations, subject to termination… all nationals should be caught, forced to their knees, and exterminated like mad dogs.”4

  Operation 00485 aimed to liquidate the “Polish diversionist and espionage groups and organizations of the Polish Military Organization (POV).” Even though POV had already been disbanded, its networks allegedly continued. The Poles were accused of being spies who had infiltrated Soviet society and economy. The operation began on August 11, 1937, on Yezhov’s orders, two days after it had been approved by the Politburo.5

  The net was soon cast to include all Polish refugees, political exiles, former members of the Polish Socialist Party, former Polish prisoners of war who stayed in the USSR, and even all Soviet citizens who had contact with Polish diplomatic, consular, military, commercial, or economic representatives in the USSR.

  In Moscow the NKVD came up with cases by reading the telephone directory for foreign-sounding names indicating that the person might be Polish, Latvian, Bulgarian, or some suspect nationality. Such methods confirm the arbitrariness of the police terror.6 The leadership of the Polish Communist Party was thought to be involved in an anti-Soviet conspiracy, and suspicion even fell on ex-NKVD agents or informants dealing with “Polish Affairs.” All Soviet citizens with “family or other suspect ties” in Poland were included, as were all Soviet “clerical elements”—that is, the Church—with connections to Poland.

  Stalin was pleased with a preliminary report submitted by Yezhov for September 1937, even though the program was just starting. He noted on the report: “Very good! Dig up and purge the Polish espionage mud in the future as well. Destroy in the interest of the USSR.” With that encouragement the NKVD promptly extended the operation to include family members of arrested Poles.7

  According to the census for 1937, there were 656,220 Polish people with Soviet citizenship, and sifting through so many was difficult. Around 140,000 were arrested in the Polish operation, of whom just over 111,000 were executed and nearly another 29,000 sent to concentration camps. In the Greek, Finnish, and Estonian operations, the percentage of those executed was still higher.8

  To facilitate confirmation of verdicts by Moscow, Yezhov and Procurator General Vyshinsky adopted the “album method.” Staff copied into an album a brief summary of each “crime” and suggested punishment. When it was full, it was sent for countersignature by Yezhov and Vyshinsky, who took to signing the bottom of the page and approved whole albums at a time. Even so, they could not keep up. Hundreds of albums streamed in and caused long delays before sentences were carried out.

  By July 1938 more than 100,000 cases were “pending.” In the meantime, prisons were filled to overflowing. The Politburo decided in September to end the “album procedure” and dispense with the illusion that the NKVD could not execute as it wished. Special troikas went through the pending cases (for operation 00447 against the “formers”) in two months; of the 105,000 people whose cases were reviewed, 72,000 were shot, with most of the remainder sent to a concentration camp. Only 137 were released.9

  The final count of all the national operations is staggering. Around 350,000 people were arrested and 247,157 executed. Another 88,356 ended up in prison or a concentration camp.10 In addition, countless family members suffered, with children taken away and sent to orphanages.11

  Recently published documents may underestimate the numbers. For example, many men and women were tortured to death in the process of investigating their cases. The demise of these “suspects” in “investigative custody” was likely not counted among the executed. Moreover, those who died in transit to camps, and there were considerable numbers of them, were not included on the final murderous balance sheet.

  GROWTH OF THE GULAG

  The Gulag was already a reality in 1930 and contained 179,000 prisoners. But the number soon grew, and in 1934 there were 510,307; by 1937, 820,881; and in 1940, 1.3 million.12

  At first the main “business” of the camps was logging in the far reaches of the taiga forests. The production of lumber by prisoners came to be regarded by foreign countries as “unfair competition,” and the U.S. Congress considered boycotting goods produced “by convict labor.” The threat forced the Soviets to employ prisoners in areas of the economy beyond lumbering where they could be hidden—as in the gold mines in the Far East at Kolyma—or where “their presence could be celebrated” as contributing to the public good.13

  Stalin became involved in the “Socialist reconstruction” of Moscow in 1930 and was drawn to the idea of using Gulag prisoners on giant construction projects. The Moscow-Volga Canal that would link the capital city with the Volga River had been a dream of Russian rulers. After lengthy planning, the Politburo resolved to go ahead on May 23, 1932, and work began in June. It would use workers and the same secret police supervisors available when the White Sea-Baltic Canal (Belomor) was completed. The Moscow-Volga Canal (or the Dmitrovsky Canal, as it went through the city Dmitrov) covered roughly a hundred miles, and in digging it, Gulag workers displaced more cubic meters of earth than the building of the Suez Canal. It was a nightmare. The canal had to go uphill more than half the way, necessitating locks, dams, and reservoirs, and, on Stalin’s orders, had to be built quickly (about two years) and cheaply. Work went on around the clock by zeks—the slang name given to Gulag prisoners—most of it done by hand and without machinery.14

  The project was presented in the press as an opportunity for the rehabilitation of many “criminals” who “burned with creative fever.” The slogan of one camp newspaper, called Perekovka (Reforging) was “Let us drown our past on the bottom of the canal.” The message was that hard labor would transform “criminals” into good citizens, the same rationalization for the camps as in Lenin’s time.15

  The press in the West, including in Germany, France, Great Britain, and the United States, continued to report on conditions in the camps, most often in condemnatory articles. Molotov, given the task of counteracting the foreign-press campaign, did not deny the use of forced labor, but said it was not slavery. On March 8, 1931, at the Sixth Congress of Soviets, he put the matter as follows: “The labor of those deprived of liberty who are healthy and capable of working is being used by us on certain communal and highway tasks. We did this before, we are doing it now, and we shall continue to do so. This is profitable for society. This is beneficial for the culprits, for it teaches them how to work and makes them useful members of society.”16

  The Moscow-Volga Canal opened, somewhat behind schedule, in July 1937 to great fanfare, but without a word about the thousands who died building it. Nor was anything said about the thousands who perished while working on Belomor.

  Recent analyses by economists show that the entire Gulag forced-labor system was uneconomical. It was not just a matter of the unneeded railway lines to nowhere and s
hallow canals that soon went all but unused. The Gulag “promoted the wide proliferation of padded statistics and false reports.” Cheap slave labor “became a kind of narcotic for the economy, which it found increasingly difficult to give up by replacing prisoners with civilian workers.” Thus, the overall effect of the Gulag was to corrupt what remained of the “free” economy.17

  “FIRST ARCHITECT”

  The Soviet Writers’ Congress held in 1934 gave credit to Stalin for the new concept of socialist realism and adopted it as its guiding principle. The theory posited that authentic works of art in a workers’ state had to spring from and reflect Socialist experience. In practice it demanded that artists give up any remnants of independence from state authority and, in strict conformity with Party dictates, focus on creating works of art meant to glorify Communist ideals.

  Not long after the congress, the All-Union Congress of Soviet Architects hailed Stalin as “the first architect and builder of our socialist motherland,” and embraced socialist realism as the great breakthrough in giving expression to a truly Socialist culture. Their building projects would be “guided by the great ideas of Lenin-Stalin.” They expressed their willingness and duty to take their cues from Stalin as the paragon of good judgment and wisdom: “We, the architects of the USSR, gathered at this All-Union meeting, greet you, the first architect and builder of our socialist motherland, organizer of the greatest historical victories of the working class, beloved leader of the world proletariat, and best friend of the Soviet intelligentsia.”18

  Stalin’s interests in architecture developed with the first Five-Year Plan. During the first eight years of the Soviet Union, ten thousand buildings were protected by the state because of their special interest, and just under one-third of them were restored. From 1928 the emphasis changed, and numerous historic buildings were torn down. These included the Church of Savior in the Wood (1330) and other religious structures inside the Kremlin itself.19 Nothing was sacred but the grand historical mission as Stalin defined it. He turned to transforming Moscow into the world’s great beacon of modernization. By 1931, he had backed three big projects in Moscow: the subway, the canal, and the Palace of Soviets. He usually made final decisions himself about which proposals would be accepted from the architects. He insisted the palace had to be “a little taller” than the Empire State Building in New York. A Lenin statue was to adorn its top and had to be triple the size of the Statue of Liberty.20