Stalin

by Ian Grey

  Although often immersed in the details of military, naval, and governmental matters, he did not lose sight of overall policy. In particular, he was concerned about the weaknesses which, he thought, were spreading insidiously in the armed forces, as they had spread in party and government. He must eradicate all possible sources of opposition and unreliability. The danger was that in purging the armed forces, he would weaken them for a time, which, in turn, might encourage Germany and the capitalist powers to make an early attack. But he could not believe that all army and navy commanders would serve with the unshakable loyalty he required. The purge was inevitable, and he must strike with all possible speed.

  In fact, the Red Army had consistently given the party full support. During the collectivization campaign, the Army, although its troops were recruited almost entirely from the peasant class, had never wavered in carrying out its orders from Moscow. In earlier purges, the Army had been found to harbor fewer unworthy elements than the party as a whole. Only 4.3 percent of army personnel had been purged in 1933, compared with 17 percent of the civilian membership. Moreover, party membership in the Red Army was increasing rapidly. By the end of 1934, all senior commanders and 93 percent of divisional commanders were party members.

  Stalin had always shown special attention and favor to the Red Army, and he was popular with the officers and men. In particular, they welcomed the stress he laid on professionalism and patriotism. They were treated as an elite with special privileges, and officers had their own dachas, cars, and servants. He showered honors on senior officers. Toward Tukhachevsky, he was said to have harbored resentment and jealousy because of disagreements during the Civil War. He had, however, recognized his ability and instead of sending him to some distant command, he had appointed him to high office in 1935 as marshal of the Soviet Union. But then, suddenly, he became convinced that Tukhachevsky was a traitor.

  Storm clouds had begun to gather over the Red Army early in 1937. In the Trial of the Seventeen, the evidence had implicated several commanders. Tukhachevsky continued as deputy kommissar of war, but he was known to be under suspicion, and many shunned him. It was ominous, too, that the system of dual command was revived in May 1937. It provided that the military commander had a political kommissar at his side, sharing the command and endorsing all orders. The Army had always resented this system, which after 1925 had given place to the single command system.

  On May 1, 1937, Tukhachevsky stood at Stalin’s side on the Lenin Mausoleum, reviewing the parade on the Red Square. He was nearing the peak of his career, for in the event of war with Germany - and he was convinced that it was imminent - he would probably be made deputy to the commander in chief. He had been appointed to represent the Soviet government in London at the coronation of King George VI. A few days before he was to depart, however, his appointment was canceled. He was relieved of office as deputy kommissar of war on May 20 and sent to command the Volga military district. He arrived there on May 25 and was arrested next day.

  Pravda announced on June 11, 1937, that he and seven others with the rank of general were to be tried in secret. The military court, which took only one day to hear the evidence and find them guilty, included four marshals of the Soviet Union. Voroshilov and Budënny were completely subservient to Stalin’s will. Alexander Yegorov, too, had come under Stalin’s influence during the Civil War. But Vasily Blyukher was an officer of independent mind, who had been severely wounded in World War I and had displayed outstanding ability and courage in commanding Red forces in the Far East during the Civil War. It is difficult to understand how such a man could have sat in judgment on a brother officer and signed the order for his execution. Presumably he accepted as proven the charges against Tukhachevsky and, if not, he was blindly following orders of the Politburo or was under Stalin’s domination. Both Blyukher and Yegorov were later arrested and shot.

  On June 12, 1937, it was announced that all had been found guilty of “espionage and treason to the Fatherland” and executed. Their crime, according to the press, was that they had spied on behalf of Germany and Japan and had conspired to surrender Soviet territory in the Ukraine and the Far East in return for military support to overthrow Stalin and his regime. There was, indeed, some evidence of a conspiracy. It was probably not enough to deceive Stalin, but it aroused his pathological suspicion, which quickly turned to conviction of their guilt.

  The execution of Tukhachevsky and the seven generals signaled the start of the purge of the armed forces. It struck with exceptional ferocity during 1937 and 1938. The higher commands suffered most heavily. According to reliable estimates, there were 35,000 victims. They included approximately half of the total officer corps. Three of the five marshals of the Soviet Union, thirteen of the fifteen army commanders, fifty-seven of the eighty-five corps commanders, 110 of the 196 divisional commanders, 220 of the 406 brigade commanders, all eleven vice kommissars of war, seventy-five of the eighty members of the Supreme Military Council were purged. Of the officers below the rank of colonel, 30,000 were purged.

  A major purpose of this purge of the armed forces, apart from the eradication of actual and latent opposition, was Stalin’s determination to rid himself of military attitudes he considered outdated and irrelevant. He disliked defensive strategies. He envisaged massive land and sea forces with the capacity to attack on a scale that made defensive strategies unnecessary. Thus, the strategy generally accepted in the Soviet Navy was wholly concerned with the defense of Russia’s coasts. It emphasized the use of mines, torpedo boats, submarines, and aircraft, deployed to repel invasion by sea. Virtually all proponents of this coastal defense strategy were purged. In their place, Stalin promoted young officers and appointed as kommissar for the Navy the young Admiral Kuznetsov. The emphasis now was on the creation of a powerful ocean-going Navy. In 1937–38, he launched a massive naval construction program. The Third Five-year Plan, from 1938 to 1942, gave warship construction special prominence in the overall rearmament planning. The plan called for the completion of eight battleships, eight battle cruisers, fourteen cruisers, twelve flotilla leaders, ninety-six destroyers, forty-eight escort ships, and 198 submarines. It was a program that recalled Peter the Great’s naval ambitions. But war enveloped Russia before this program could get under way.

  The purge was carried out by Ezhov and the NKVD, assisted actively by Lev Mekhlis and Efim Shchadenko. Mekhlis, a journalist and editor of Pravda, and a party fanatic who was devoted to Stalin, had become head of the Army’s Political Administration. Shchadenko, who had been associated with Voroshilov and Budënny during the Civil War, became assistant kommissar of War. Both men were hated throughout the Army.

  The purge appeared to take place in two stages. The period between them may have been planned to allow for the training officers to take the place of those liquidated. The new generation of officers were the men on whom Stalin was counting. He had deliberately removed nearly all of the veterans of the Civil War. They were the men who might question his commands and become weak in their loyalty to him and his policies.

  The Army itself appeared to accept or at least condone the purge. Men like Shaposhnikov, Zhukov, and many others were silent not merely to save their own skins. They were dominated and even awed by Stalin, but they were also brave, highly intelligent, and patriotic professionals. They tacitly accepted that the officers who were sacrificed might have represented a threat of betrayal, or they believed that their combined opposition to Stalin would have consequences far worse for the party and the country.

  The new officers had been selected and trained to be single-minded, absolutely obedient, and devoted to him. Like the new men in the party and the government, they belonged to the Soviet elite. But, hastily trained and promoted, the young officers were untried and unsure of themselves. Time was needed for them to gain the confidence of command, and it was in the furnace of World War II that they learned and that the Red Army recovered its morale and pride.

  In December 1937, the first elections to
the Supreme Soviet took place under the new constitution. Stalin himself was the candidate in the Stalin district of Moscow. On December 11, he addressed his constituents as a reassuring and benign politician, appealing to them not as a godlike figure but as an equal. He said that he had not intended to speak, but the chairman - Nikita Khrushchev - had “brought me here, you might say, by force and ordered me to ‘give a good speech.’” He did not speak at length, claiming that Molotov, Ezhov, and others had already said what was necessary. He simply wanted to assure them that “You can depend completely on Comrade Stalin. You can depend on him to fulfil his duty to the people.”

  It was this declaration that the people wanted. He understood the popular mood and knew they needed the reassurance of leadership and stability at this time when they were shaken by the news that so many of their leaders were wreckers and traitors. The purge was still raging. It did not strike directly at the great mass of the people, but it filled their lives with uneasiness and fear.

  In the elections, 96.6 percent of the electors cast their votes for the party candidates. The press proclaimed this as a massive vote of confidence in Stalin and the Soviet government. The election figures may have been falsified, but there could be no doubt the nation supported Stalin. Somehow he stood above the purges and betrayals; he was the leader to whom all looked.

  Confirmation of overwhelming popular support did not, however, deflect him from completing the purge program. Preparations went ahead for the third and most important of the great show trials, the Trial of the Twenty-one, which took place in March 1938. The chief accused were Bukharin, Rykov, and Krestinsky, all once members of the Politburo, Yagoda, the former head of the NKVD, who had launched the terror, and Christian Rakovsky, who had been chairman of the Ukrainian Sovnarkom and Soviet ambassador in England and France. The charges against them included the crimes of espionage, terrorism, and wrecking, inspired and organized from abroad by Trotsky. Yagoda faced the additional charge of having murdered Vyacheslav Menzhinsky, his predecessor in command of the NKVD, and of plotting the murder of Ezhov, his successor. It was alleged, too, that he had been an accessory to the assassination of Kirov and to the murder of Kuibyshev and Gorky. Bukharin also faced the special charge of having conspired with the Socialist Revolutionaries in 1918 to murder Lenin, Stalin, and Sverdlov.

  The trial did not proceed entirely to plan. Krestinsky caused a sensation in court by retracting his confession and plea of guilty. Such defiance was unexpected, but he returned later to recant. Under cross-examination, Rykov was at first vague and evasive, then firmly took the line that he was guilty in principle on all the charges, but denied knowledge of, and complicity in, any specific crime. Bukharin took the same stand more strongly, and under examination, his replies often nonplussed and angered the prosecution. His general plea was: “I plead guilty to being one of the outstanding leaders of this ‘bloc of Rights and Trotskyites.’ Consequently, I plead guilty to what directly follows from this, the sum total of crimes committed by this counter-revolutionary organization irrespective of whether or not I knew of, whether or not I took direct part in, any particular act.” Yagoda and others proved unamenable at times under examination. But none of the reservations or partial denials made any real impression. Bukharin, Rykov, Yagoda, and the others had all confessed their guilt. Three of the accused, Dmitry Pletnev, Rakovsky, and Sergei Bessonov, were sentenced to terms of imprisonment. The others were condemned to death and shot.

  The execution of Bukharin illustrated the tragedy of the old Bolsheviks. Bukharin was one of the few among them all who could be described as likable, although he forfeited much sympathy by his vicious and destructive attacks on his former colleagues Trotsky, Zinoviev, and Kamenev. He was a brilliant speaker and a compulsive writer from whom words poured in a fluent stream. He possessed great charm and had many friends. But he was emotional and easily led. Lenin, who had called him “the favorite of the party,” also referred to him as “soft wax,” a man easily impressed and politically unstable. At the time of the introduction of NEP, he had moved from the far left to the far right, becoming the champion of the peasants. In the years from 1924 to 1928, Stalin had allowed him to pursue his policy of persuading the peasants to produce surpluses, and of gearing industrialization to a slow rate of growth. At no time, not even in the summer of 1928 when his policy was reversed, did he speak against Stalin publicly, but privately, in near hysterical outbursts, he had expressed his fears to Kamenev and to Menshevik friends. In fact, he stood in awe of Stalin and was cowed by his savage power, which was inexorably moving to destroy him.

  In February 1936, Bukharin had traveled with his wife to Paris on his last visit abroad. He went as a member of a three-man Soviet delegation with the purpose of buying the archives of the defunct German Social Democratic party. The archives, which included many of Marx’s papers, were in the hands of Boris Nicolaevsky, an émigré Menshevik then living in Paris. Bukharin was depressed and emotional. While abroad, he spoke of his fear of Stalin with a frankness unusual for a party member. André Malraux wrote that “he confided to me absently: ‘And now he is going to kill me.’” But he rejected suggestions that he should remain abroad. Like a man hypnotized, he knew that he had to return to his fate in Russia.

  In conversation with Dan and Nicolaevsky on one occasion, he spoke heatedly about Stalin. “You say you don’t know him well, but we do! He is unhappy at not being able to convince everyone, himself included, that he is greater than everyone; and this unhappiness of his may be his most human trait, perhaps the only human trait in him. But what is not human, but rather something devilish, is that because of this unhappiness he cannot help taking revenge on people, on all people but especially those who are in any way higher or better than he. If someone speaks better than he does, that man is doomed! Stalin will not let him live, because that man is a perpetual reminder that he, Stalin, is not the first and best. If someone writes better, matters are bad for him because he, Stalin, has to be the premier Russian writer. . . . No, no, Fedor, he is a small-minded, malicious man - no, not a man, but a devil!” It was the outpouring of an emotional and frightened man.

  For his part, Stalin did not consider Bukharin a serious threat. He was a popular man, but by Stalin’s code, he was gutless. At the same time, he was an intellectual and cosmopolitan, more Western than Russian in outlook. He was impressionable and, as an orator and a writer who became excited under pressure, he might well give influential support to an opposition movement at a time of crisis. For these reasons, rather than personal vindictiveness, Bukharin had to be liquidated.

  In all of these show trials, the charges were hardly credible. Stalin himself cannot have believed them and probably knew they had been fabricated. But with his deep-rooted conviction that Trotsky’s influence was a pervasive cancer, he suspected that all oppositionists were somehow linked with him. In any case, he was not concerned with particular crimes. To him, the accused were real or potential oppositionists and traitors. They were guilty in principle, but their trial and execution must be seen to be just. He did not mislead himself that the Russian people and world opinion would share his belief in their guilt. The show trials had to expose them as self-confessed traitors. In fact, the trials were successful in convincing the Russian people, the diplomatic corps, and opinion abroad that the accused were justly condemned. Sir Bernard Pares, the foremost Russian specialist of the day, who had devoted himself to interpreting Russia to the West, considered that the charges of sabotage had been “proved up to the hilt” and that the rest of the evidence was “convincing.” Joseph E. Davies, the U.S. ambassador from 1936 to 1938, considered that the guilt of the accused had been proven, adding that this was the general opinion among diplomatic observers.

  The chief reason for the plausibility of the trials was that the accused readily and wholeheartedly confessed their guilt. Nothing is more bewildering than these confessions in which dedicated party men declared themselves guilty of crimes against the party which they d
id not commit. The NKVD had an armory of physical and mental tortures which they used freely. Families and especially children of the accused were held as hostages, and their safety was bargained for a confession. There was no limit to the sadism, deceit, and corruption applied to extract confessions not only from the accused in the show trials but also from the thousands dealt with summarily by the NKVD.

  The evil methods employed by the NKVD are not sufficient, however, to explain why men of courage, like Bukharin, Pyatakov, and many others, who had devoted their lives to the revolutionary ideal, should have confessed to crimes against that ideal. There was in this capacity for confession and self-immolation a Russian element, which Stalin understood. They were like the Old Believers in the seventeenth century, who, having rejected Patriarch Nikon’s innovations, assembled in their log-built churches and, chanting the old liturgy, set fire to the timber, burning themselves to death. The revolutionaries of the twentieth century were members of a secular religion, embodied in the party. They had surrendered themselves to it completely, and now they believed they had no alternative but to sacrifice themselves to it. In holding and promoting views contrary to the party’s policies and threatening factionalism, they had sinned and must confess. Bukharin and others among the accused had been critical of Stalin in private circles, and this, too, was sinful. Trying to explain his attitude to Stalin, Bukharin had said, “It is not him we trust, but the man in whom the party has reposed its confidence.” In this surrender of will, conscience, and judgment to the party lay the tragedy of these men who were betrayed by their blind doctrinaire idealism.

  The purge reached out from Leningrad and Moscow into the regional organizations of the party and the government. The union republics suffered and none more severely than the Ukraine. Stalin was particularly mistrustful of the Ukrainians. They had allied themselves with the Germans in 1917 and were obdurate nationalists, ready to break from Moscow’s rule. His suspicion was aggravated by Hitler’s declared intention to annex the Ukraine, and he feared that Ukrainian separatism might lead again to alliance with Germany. It was a major grain-producing region and of crucial importance to the Soviet economy at this time when the industrial labor force was expanding rapidly.