Lenin, Stalin, and Hitler

by Robert Gellately

  In 1937–38 the officer corps was purged of at least 33, 400, of whom a minimum of 7,280 were arrested. Many who perished were among the top command of the army and navy, including three of five marshals, fifteen of sixteen commanders, and sixty of sixty-seven corps commanders. As happened to Tukhachevsky’s family, their wives and children were often arrested and killed. The entire affair was pushed by Stalin, but not because he really believed there were plans for a coup. His motivation had more to do with his continuing mistrust of the army.30 The purges not only caused direct harm to the armed forces but led to doubts, demoralization, and paralysis of will. The USSR would pay the price for this senseless purge with the German invasion in 1941.

  The Politburo approved holding forty or so additional show trials across the country in the second half of 1937, and in 1938 another thirty were staged. Local and regional Party leaders and other members of the elite were tried in these cases.

  An example of what ensued can be seen in Georgia, where the Party boss, Lavrenti Beria, went after “counterrevolutionaries.” Empowered by Moscow in June 1937, he told the head of the regional NKVD, Sergei Goglidze, that those under arrest should be beaten if they would not confess. Goglidze described what happened next: “After this the Georgian NKVD began mass beatings of those under arrest. They were beaten at will. Testimonies against large groups of people appeared in the records and the numbers of those arrested as a result of having been mentioned in the testimonies grew, which led to falsification of cases and a distortion of reality.”31

  The results were tragic. Out of the 644 delegates to the Tenth Party Congress in Georgia held in May 1937, 425 were arrested and shot. Their wives and children were often arrested and tortured as well. The purge of the ranks went into the thousands. According to one witness, the troika in Tbilisi during 1937 “often did not concern themselves with compiling lists and conducting investigations” to send to Moscow for signing. Instead, the troika there “judged guilty and innocent alike according to the law of the Holy Inquisition, and their decision had the power of God.”32

  Raion, or district-level, show trials differed from those in Moscow and did not always rely on public confessions. The most absurd charges were brought, and outlandish plots were alleged. The need for witnesses to back up the charges provided opportunities for the powerless to assert themselves; there was no want of complaints and denunciations from peasants and other citizens. The provincials were more than mere “bystanders gathered to watch a public hanging,” as they often were the ones who gave the incriminating evidence.33

  To some extent the local trials removed one cohort of officialdom, but the basic structure of the system remained. The same point holds for the larger show trials in Moscow. Nevertheless, the trials and purges made possible the entrance of new people into the elite, those more likely than ever to be loyal Stalin supporters.

  STALIN’S THEORY OF THE SHOWDOWN

  Bukharin was once a favorite in the Party, and getting rid of him represented the last obstacle to Stalin’s unchecked dictatorship. The evidence against him was assembled by Yezhov, but before the ax fell, the Central Committee held its plenum in February-March 1937.

  Stalin addressed some awkward facts, in particular the question: if Socialism in one country was the great success he kept claiming, why were there so many enemies? One explanation was that the nearer the Soviet Union came to achieving Socialism, the more desperate would be the struggle of the “remnants” of enemy classes. This was a theory he had broached in 1928, and he brought it up again at the plenum of the Central Committee in February-March 1937. As he put it:

  The further we move forward, the more success we will have, the greater fury can we expect from what remains of the defeated exploiting classes, the more intense will be the struggle they put up, the harder they will try to harm the Soviet state, and the more desperate they will become as they grasp at the last resort of the doomed. It must be kept in mind that the vestiges of the defeated classes in the USSR are not alone. They are directly supported by enemies beyond the borders of the USSR…and must be aware of this. And so, they will keep up their desperate sorties. This is what history teaches us. This is what Leninism teaches us. We have to remember this and stay on the alert.34

  This theory derived from the claim that as the class struggle became more volatile, it inevitably led to civil war, because no dominant class ever gave in without a desperate fight. Stalin built on that Marxist-Leninist point by suggesting that the “dying classes” would fight to their last breath. The theory also served to explain why Communists felt compelled to eliminate all the “formers” or the relatives and friends of the “formers.” The all-out battle on this “front” against the innocent and defenseless was imagined as the “final showdown” against a vicious and dangerous enemy.

  The idea of a showdown or last stand is common in Western culture. Before the “bad guys” or “evildoers” pass away, they muster renewed strength for a last-ditch effort and are at their most dangerous. The final showdown linked the struggles against the whole range of enemies, from kulaks to “socially harmful elements,” “anti-Soviet elements,” and enemies in the ranks of the Party itself.

  The official discourse of the regime was that it was the most popular in the world. The Communist way to explain industrial accidents or deviant social behavior was to attribute the causes to persons who were “alien infiltrators.” Those with the “wrong” social or political background had ingrained anti-Soviet attitudes that they had “masked” or hidden. Ultimately, the only way to end their opposition was to kill them or put them in concentration camps, from which they were unlikely to return.35

  Stalin was the main mover and organizer of the terror, made the key decisions, and often saw their implementation through. He relished hearing the details of the tortures and the last minute pleas uttered by the condemned. Although other leaders like Molotov, Voroshilov, and Kaganovich certainly played their part in the Great Terror, recent research shows that overwhelmingly it was Stalin who was its author.36The repression and outright murder of hundreds of thousands of completely innocent people revealed the dictatorship in all its horror. Nevertheless, true believers at the time, and ever since, found ways to rationalize it and to support it in the name of the higher cause.

  MAKING WAY FOR NEW PEOPLE

  One of the ways people found to participate in this system was by sending letters to the authorities. Letters of denunciation were sent to all the top leaders, including Stalin, who took a keen interest in them. Not just ordinary citizens but leaders down the line wrote to bring a superior or boss to his attention. If Stalin did not like the person who was denounced, he sent the incriminating letter to the NKVD with a note to investigate. If he was more positively disposed, he simply kept the letter for his files. This was the dictator’s greatest power.

  Party members completely in tune with Stalin became serial denouncers and wrote him so regularly as to win a place in his heart. Polia Nikolaenko, resident of Kiev, is said to have denounced thousands, many of whom paid with their lives. Kiev Party bosses treated her with disdain, but Stalin, under the iron rule that if there was smoke there was fire, came to her aid when she complained of being ignored. Ukrainian leaders were told to “pay attention to Comrade Nikolaenko” and protect her.37

  Nikita Khrushchev was in some ways typical of how Party leaders became enthusiasts for terror. As Party boss of Moscow, he thundered in August 1937 to a Party conference that “scoundrels must be destroyed.” Khrushchev was ruthless; by the time he finished, only 3 leaders were left of 38 in Moscow’s city and Party organizations, and 10 Party secretaries in the wider Moscow district remained out of 146. He happily exceeded the quota, set by the Politburo on June 27, of 35,000 “enemies” to be repressed; within two weeks he told Stalin he had already picked up 41,305 “criminal and kulak elements.” Out of these, he personally assigned 8,500 “to the first category,” as the expression went, that is, they were to be executed.

  Khru
shchev’s reasoning was as follows: “In destroying one, two, or ten of them, we are doing the work of millions. That’s why our hand must not tremble, why we must march across the corpses of the enemy toward the good of the people.”38

  Some of the fears that fueled the purges may have been motivated by a panic to eliminate a fifth column of possible traitors in a time when the threats of war were growing. The sheer scale of the repressions indicates, however, that the process got completely out of control and lost any rational foundation it might have had.39

  The press played up the show trials in the provinces. The coverage seems to have deflected blame away from Stalin and onto the shoulders of lower-range leaders. Even some of the victims blamed the “little Stalins” for what was going wrong.

  Unlike the great show trials, local ones easily found plausible charges and gave citizens an opportunity to redress wrongs suffered at the hands of abusive or incompetent administrators. This populist side of the terror targeted the elites and likely won the regime support. Not just political bosses but managers and foremen were called to account. Workforces in factories and on collective farms were brought into the trials to bear witness, and everything possible was done to publicize the events.

  Members of the Party or its affiliations who were denounced engaged in “self-criticism” meetings that turned into purges of the soul. Children were cajoled in meetings of the Komsomol to defame arrested parents. Any Communists who might have previously supported Trotsky or Bukharin were endangered and were lucky if they were merely expelled from the Party.40

  The Commission for Judicial Affairs of the Politburo determined in advance what the sentences would be of the more prominent people. The names of members or leaders of the Party, or well-known figures in industry, the army, or arts and culture, who were brought to court were submitted on lists to Stalin. He personally signed 362 of these lists, as the ultimate judge, juror, and executioner. It should be noted that other members of the Politburo were involved in this practice as well. Thus, Voroshilov signed 195 lists, Kaganovich 191, Andrei Zhdanov 177, and Anastas Mikoyan 62. There were forty-four thousand names on the lists submitted to these men, and thirty-nine thousand were condemned to death.41

  The Party’s Central Committee was hit hard. By the time of the Party congress in March 1939, the 139 members elected in 1934 were reduced to 32 full and candidate members. Ninety-four had been executed; one had been assassinated; four died by their own hand and five of natural causes; and three were still in prison. Members of the Central Committee elected before 1934 (but not reelected that year) went from ninety-five to forty-four during the purge. All in all, close to 70 percent of the entire Central Committee was wiped out.42

  As for the Party itself, by one accounting, 60 percent of the members in 1933 were gone by the beginning of 1939. Some 1.8 million were expelled, and 1 million new ones were recruited. In the process, the Party was transformed into a more Stalinist institution than ever before.43 If this was indeed the intent behind letting the purges go so far, Stalin could hardly have been unhappy.

  At the local level, this process took on a momentum of its own. Stalin may well have been surprised by the scale of the terror, but he had a hardness and resiliency that defies the imagination, and it certainly fits his profile that he would seize any and all opportunities to outwit his foes and rid himself of troublemakers. The so-called Old Bolsheviks, with their ideas of Party “democracy” or at least of open discussion of the issues, had long been a thorn in Stalin’s side. The purges functioned to remove many of them once and for all and to bring in more enthusiastic new people who had the energy needed to carry the revolution forward and in just the way Stalin wanted.44

  The terror in the 1930s was without precedent. Various estimates of the numbers arrested during that decade range up to 3.5 million and beyond. In 1937 alone, 936,750 people were arrested, of whom 790,665 were “convicted.” Astoundingly, 353,074 of these people were shot, and 429,311 were sent to the Gulag or prison. In 1938, the number of arrests fell to 638,509, but the executions, at 328,618, did not decrease significantly. That year another 205,509 people were consigned to the Gulag or prison.45 These official figures underestimate the full extent of the fatalities in many ways and, for example, do not include the hundreds of thousands who died in the Gulag or in exile.

  No single agency counted all the arrests or registered the deaths and executions, so we are still trying to reconstruct what happened. A conservative and careful estimate (that is admittedly incomplete, but based on all the available documents) now puts the number of those killed in the 1930s at around two million.46

  PART SIX

  HITLER’S WAR AGAINST DEMOCRACY

  18

  WINNING OVER THE NATION

  The new Hitler cabinet gathered at 5: 00 in the afternoon on January 30, 1933. Some ministers met the chancellor for the first time, but they all knew what he stood for, including racism, anti-Marxism, rabid nationalism, and a desire to rearm. Hitler was permitted to have only two other members of his Party in his cabinet, namely Wilhelm Frick (minister of the interior) and Hermann Göring (who was put in charge of the Prussian Ministry of the Interior). The others were conservative figures, and, interestingly enough, it was from that quarter that the most radical initial demands came.

  CABINET CONSENSUS AND POPULAR APPLAUSE

  The meeting agreed that if new elections were called (as was all but certain), the composition of the cabinet would remain unchanged. That was a demand of Alfred Hugenberg, head of the German National People’s Party (DNVP) and the minister of economics and agriculture. He had insisted on this point as the final condition for agreeing to Hitler’s chancellorship.

  Hitler’s animosity toward the Communists was well known, and without his having to say a word, Hugenberg and others argued for banning the KPD immediately. There was agreement in principle on getting rid of that Party, the only issue being one of timing. On Hitler’s advice and out of fear they might spark a general strike, they held their fire. Their goal was to ensure that the government would win the majority needed to pass an enabling law—that is, a measure that would make the Reichstag redundant.

  There was an unsuccessful attempt to avoid new elections. At Franz von Papen’s insistence, Hitler agreed to negotiate with two leaders of the Catholic Center Party to try to bring them into the “government of national concentration,” as it was called. In a meeting on January 31, the Catholics balked when Hitler mentioned a yearlong “adjournment” of the Reichstag. He broke off negotiations, and new elections were on the agenda, subject to President Hindenburg’s consent.

  Later that day when Hitler told the cabinet of this result, Papen sought assurances “that the coming election to the Reichstag would be the last one and a return to the parliamentary system would be avoided forever.” Papen—a man in the cabinet supposedly to keep the radical Hitler in check—had in fact believed for some time that a holiday from democracy was necessary.1

  Before Hitler and Papen approached the president, they agreed that the new Reichstag would be asked to pass an enabling law, a constitutional change that needed a two-thirds majority. The law would be in effect for four years. They told Hindenburg of this plan and their hope that elections would bring the desired result.

  The president agreed to call new elections for March 5, the earliest possible date. Hitler told the cabinet of this decision and presented them with the government’s slogan for the campaign, “Attack on Marxism,” a call to arms that everyone in the government could embrace with enthusiasm.

  What would be different about the March 5 election was that it was designed to mobilize support for the already existing government, not to create a new one. When the Reichstag was dissolved, there was a transition to a novel “experiment” in “dictatorship based on plebiscites.”2There were, therefore, to be many more elections and plebiscites after March 1933, but they, too, were opportunities for the nation to acclaim its support for the government. The new regime would beco
me a hybrid, a “consensus dictatorship.”

  The centerpiece of the Nazi election appeal was the enabling law, supposedly needed to deal swiftly with Germany’s dire crisis. The Reichstag could not do so, it was argued, because it was too slow and cumbersome.

  APPEALS TO THE NATION

  Already by the second meeting of his cabinet, on the evening of February 1, Hitler produced a draft of an address to the German nation, to be delivered on the radio at ten o’clock.

  The speech itself revealed something of the government’s aims, but it was stock-in-trade Hitler, beginning with the lecture about the “discord and hatred” befalling the people since the fateful day of November 9, 1918. It hit the anti-Bolshevik note from beginning to end: “Fourteen years of Marxism have undermined Germany. One year of Bolshevism would destroy Germany. The richest and most beautiful areas of world civilization would be transformed into chaos and a heap of ruins. Even the misery of the past decade and a half could not be compared with the affliction of a Europe in whose heart the red flag of destruction had been planted.” Hitler and the nationalist leaders were not going to let that happen; he declared a “merciless war against spiritual, political, and cultural nihilism. Germany must not and will not sink into Communist anarchy.”

  There was one vital precondition for the political and economic revival of the nation: “We must overcome the demoralization of Germany by the Communists.” That requirement could only be achieved by moving beyond outlawing the Party to reorganizing the economy with two four-year plans. When Papen had first heard these phrases, he had remarked that they sounded too much like Stalin’s five-year plans, but Hitler wanted to give a time frame. His two main points were, first, to rescue the German farmer from poverty and secure the agricultural basis of national life and, second, to aid the worker by a “massive and comprehensive attack on unemployment.”