The Grand Inquisitor’s Manual

by Jonathan Kirsch

  The Great Terror, in fact, can be seen as the Soviet counterpart of the medieval Inquisition in many of its particulars. The Soviet inquisitors, for example, devised their own set of useful codes and tropes to avoid speaking plainly about their atrocities. Arrest was called “isolation,” confinement in a labor camp was “the second category” of punishment, and death was called “the first category.” The victims of the Great Terror were commonly demonized as “enemies of the people,” “counter-revolutionaries,” and “wreckers,” all of which were used as loosely as “heretic” or “witch” had been during the Middle Ages. The purging of such malefactors was described as a process of “ongoing purification” by which the Soviet Union resolved to rid itself of “vermin” and “pollution.”67

  Just as a Cathar was called a “traitor to God,” a victim of the Great Terror might be condemned as a “traitor to the fatherland.” Although they were often accused of committing (or conspiring in) acts of terrorism, their real crime was a thought-crime; the twentieth-century heretics of the Soviet Union were “deviationists” who had strayed, whether willfully or inadvertently, from the ever-shifting party line. Like the conversos of Spain, whose conversion to Christianity was seen as inauthentic by the Inquisition, the victims of the Great Terror were condemned as insincere Communists who “crawl[ed] stealthily into socialism,” according to Stalin, “even though [they] ‘secretly did not mean it.’”68

  No one was safe from the Soviet inquisitors during the Great Terror, an era in which “the Revolution devoured its children”—sometimes figuratively and sometimes quite literally. Children were encouraged to inform on their parents, parents on their children, wives on their husbands, and they were praised when they did so. One aggrieved student denounced his teacher for assigning too much homework and was singled out for admission to an elite school in Moscow. Once a man or woman had been seized by the secret police, his or her relations were at heightened risk of arrest as a “Member of the Family of a Traitor to the Fatherland,” a newly coined status crime that recalls the penalties imposed by the Inquisition on the children and grandchildren of convicted heretics.69

  Not even the triggermen and torturers of the Great Terror were beyond the reach of the Soviet inquisition. Thus, the chief of the Soviet secret police, Genrikh Yagoda (1898–1938), was himself arrested and sentenced to die, a moment of rough justice for the man who had directed the work of the agents, jailors, and executioners during the first two years of the Great Terror. “I fall to my knees before the People and the Party,” pleaded Yagoda, who must have known all too well that his words were pointless, “and ask them to pardon me, to save my life.” Yagoda’s plea was unavailing—his life, like those of countless thousands of his victims, ended with a bullet in the back of the head—and he was helpless to protect his wife, parents, siblings, and even more distant relatives, all of whom were arrested by Yagoda’s successor.70

  A vast network of spies and snitches—and the fact that some other victim would be tortured into naming names—put every Soviet citizen at risk. A history professor named Konstantin Shteppa, for example, first came to the attention of the secret police when he was overheard to describe Joan of Arc as “nervous and highly strung,” a notion that was held to be at odds with the then-prevailing party line, which regarded the Maid of Orléans as “a heroine of a national resistance movement.” Shteppa was arrested in 1938 and subjected to fifty days of “severe interrogation.” Although he managed to survive, he later recalled the atmosphere of fear and distrust that was the whole point of the Great Terror: “I was naturally sorry for my friends, but I was not only sorry for them,” said Shteppa, “I was afraid of them.”71

  The men and women who operated the machinery of persecution in the Soviet Union—just like the rank and file of the Inquisition or, for that matter, the Holocaust—were assured (and reassured themselves) that they were serving the interests of “legal justice.” But only a few victims of the Great Terror were afforded even the parody of due process that constituted a show trial. Most were condemned to prison, slave labor, or death by order of the roving three-man tribunals, known as troikas, that operated across Russia in much the same manner as the flying squads of the medieval Inquisition, passing sentence on their victims in absentia and “without benefit of judge, jury, lawyers, or trial.” On September 30, 1937, by way of example, a troika set up operations in a labor camp in the Karelian Republic and issued 231 sentences in a single day.72

  “Assuming a ten-hour workday, with no breaks,” observes Anne Applebaum in Gulag, “less than three minutes would have been spent considering the fate of each prisoner.”73

  By the end of 1938, after some 750,000 men and women had been put to death, Stalin ordered an abrupt halt to the Great Terror. He was apparently satisfied that the ranks of the party, the armed forces, the bureaucracy, and the intelligentsia had been sufficiently purged of wreckers and deviationists to preserve his absolute authority over the Soviet Union. Or perhaps a better explanation is that Stalin finally awakened to the fact that his counterpart in Berlin was actively preparing for war, and the time had come for him to do the same.

  Even if the show trials and summary executions now abated, however, the Soviet secret police and the Gulag continued to operate without pause through Stalin’s death in 1953, and Soviet citizens in the countless millions continued to be arrested and sentenced to hard (and sometimes killing) labor. Although the absolute number of victims is still debated, as many as 18 million men and women may have passed through the Gulag between 1929 and 1953, and Applebaum proposes a total of 28.7 million when all Soviet victims of forced labor are included. The death toll, which surely numbers in the millions, is simply uncountable.

  According to such calculations, the Soviet inquisitors were Stakhanovites who outperformed not only their medieval counterparts but also their rivals across the fighting front in Nazi Germany. But the core idea of the Stalinist war on “wreckers” and “deviationists”—as with Nazi Germany’s war against the Jews—had occurred to the popes and grand inquisitors of the Middle Ages seven centuries earlier. In that sense, the Stalinist and Nazi models of the machinery of persecution are unique only in their industrial-scale production capacity and not in their purpose.

  Still, we are morally obliged to ask if any distinctions can be drawn between the two great secular inquisitions of the twentieth century, if only to extract some meaning out of these nightmares of history. The question has been even more hotly argued than the Inquisition itself, and the debate forces us to confront the vexing issue of whether we are, as Spanish poet and philosopher George Santayana famously suggested, condemned to repeat the past. To ignore the question renders history itself meaningless.

  On the surface, Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia can be seen as a pair of opposites, each the mirror image of the other. Both Hitler and Stalin were dangerous and even deluded visionaries, capable of acting out of true belief even when realpolitik might have suggested a compromise of principles. On a less exalted level of comparison, the Gestapo and the NKVD resorted to the same tools and techniques in service to their masters, including even the use of the medieval “queen of torments,” the reliable old strappado. Indeed, many of the parallels between these two totalitarian states owe something to the fact that the machinery of persecution can be readily repurposed and put to use by any totalitarian regime in the service of any ideology.74

  Other similarities between Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia are even more striking because they seem to transcend the purely practical problems that all persecutors are forced to address. Both the Gestapo and the NKVD understood that ordinary men and women can be made to confess to extraordinary acts of wrongdoing if only they are properly tortured, which explains why both resorted to the strappado. But some other explanation must be sought for the fact that both Hitler and Stalin, like Torquemada, singled out Jews for special treatment. Here, too, is a clue to perhaps the single most dangerous component of the inquisitorial project—the wil
lingness to punish anyone whose faith, ethnicity, nationality, sexual orientation, or physical appearance is somehow different from that of those who enjoy the power to decide what is permitted and what is forbidden.

  To be sure, Soviet anti-Semitism was deeply rooted in history. Imperial Russia had its own long and ugly tradition of Jew hatred, including official segregation in the so-called Pale of Settlement, state-sponsored mob violence in the form of pogroms, and exclusion of Jews from land ownership, the professions, the universities, and the government. The revolutionary movement in Russia had attracted Jewish participation precisely because it offered an opportunity to overthrow a system that had oppressed the Jewish people for centuries. But the stain of anti-Semitism can be detected in the Stalinist regime no less than in the tsarist one it replaced, and it was no accident that Jewish defendants figured prominently in the Great Terror, a fact that did not escape the attention of Joseph Goebbels.

  The story is told that the execution of Kamenev and Zinoviev was sometimes reenacted for the amusement of Stalin in the privacy of his dacha, with his own bodyguard in the role of Zinoviev, “begging for Stalin to be fetched and then crying out ‘Hear O Israel.’” Even after the Great Terror subsided, Yiddish culture in general and Jewish writers in particular were repeatedly targeted by the Soviet secret police. After the defeat of Nazi Germany, a new wave of persecution was directed against the Jewish population of the Soviet Union, and Jewish figures in the Communist regimes of various satellite countries in Eastern Europe were put on display in a whole new round of show trials.75

  A new purge was being prepared for the Jewish population of the Soviet Union in the last years of Stalin’s life. The signs of the impending catastrophe could be read between the lines in Pravda, where the phrase “rootless cosmopolitans” was adopted as a code for “Jews”—yet another repurposing of the figure of the Wandering Jew—and Jewish men and women were pointedly identified in print by their original family names in addition to their adopted revolutionary ones. The medieval slander of the Jew as a poisoner was revived in a campaign against the Jewish doctors serving on the medical staff of the Kremlin, who were accused of conspiring to murder the Soviet leadership en masse. Only the death of Stalin in 1953 prevented these seeds of anti-Semitism from flowering into yet another Great Terror.

  It is also true, however, that both Hitler and Stalin singled out various other victims for mass arrest, deportation, and execution. Hitler persecuted homosexuals, Gypsies, Jehovah’s Witnesses, and otherwise good Germans who suffered from birth defects and mental illness; Stalin persecuted the landowning peasantry called the kulaks, the Polish officer corps, and various national minorities—the Balts, Chechens, and Tartars. What the victims actually believed and what they actually did were ultimately less important than the fact that they provoked fear and loathing in these two powerful men. Here, then, is yet another example of how the inquisitorial apparatus can be repurposed and redirected at will: “[T]he task of the totalitarian police is not to discover crimes,” as Hannah Arendt puts its, “but to be on hand when the government decides to arrest a certain category of the population.”76

  What Hitler and Stalin had in common was the same aspiration that animated the first inquisitors—the simple but deadly notion that it was both possible and desirable to rid the world of anyone whom the regime deemed to be unworthy of life. Significantly, Hitler, Stalin, and Pope Innocent III all used the word filth to apply to a different set of victims, but each saw himself as the ordained agent of purification, each arrogated to himself the absolute power to decide who lived and died, and each was convinced of both the rightness and the inevitability of his role in history. If all three were arguably suffering from symptoms of megalomania, it is also true that all of them found a way to validate their madness in the inquisitorial idea.

  On a few other points, though, useful distinctions can and should be made between Nazism and Stalinism. Like the medieval and Roman Inquisitions, the Stalinist regime insisted only on correct belief—at least in theory if not always in practice—and was willing to entertain the prospect that “deviationists” might recant their thought-crimes and return to the party line; but the Nazis, like the Spanish inquisitors, saw Jewish blood as a crime for which no expiation was possible. Again like the first inquisitors but unlike their Nazi counterparts, the Soviet secret police more often imprisoned and enslaved their victims rather than simply murdering them. And the Soviets felt obliged to preserve a faint semblance of “legal justice,” even if it was strained and sometimes wholly symbolic—a burden of conscience that never seemed to trouble the German police and soldiers who served in the death squads or the men and women who staffed the death camps.

  “No one tried and sentenced the Jews in Nazi-occupied Europe, but the vast majority of inmates in Soviet camps had been interrogated (however cursorily), tried (however farcically) and found guilty (even if it took less than a minute),” observes Anne Applebaum. “Undoubtedly, the conviction that they were acting within the law was part of what motivated those working within the security services.”77

  Yet there is a certain moral risk to making such fine distinctions in the culpability of torturers and executioners. We might conclude that one practitioner of terror is more egregious than all the others and thus more worthy of our condemnation. But if the long history of the Inquisition teaches us anything at all, it is that the machinery of persecution, once switched on, cannot be easily slowed or directed, much less stopped. Nor does the machinery require the high technology of a modern industrial state; little inquisitions have been conducted by impoverished regimes throughout the Third World, and we have seen for ourselves in recent years that it is quite possible to carry out a campaign of genocide in a jungle or a desert with nothing more than clubs and machetes.

  Above all, we cannot and should not try to distance ourselves from any of these inquisitions by reassuring ourselves that no abuse of “moral justice” could occur in the American democracy. The naming of names as a test of earnest confession is hardly unique to the Inquisition, and neither is the insistence on referring to “harsh interrogation techniques” when we are talking about torture. We need only pause and reflect on the plain fact that at least one of the tools that was used for six centuries by the hooded friar-inquisitors has also been used more recently by young men and women in American uniforms. We call it “waterboarding,” they called it “ordeal by water,” but torture under any name is still torture, even if the inquisitorial habit of mind has always preferred a euphemism over plain speech.

  AMERICAN INQUISITION

  There is prodigious danger in the seeking of loose spirits. I fear it, I fear it. Let us rather blame ourselves….

  ARTHUR MILLER,

  The Crucible

  Only once did the Inquisition operate on the soil of England, and then only because the pope prevailed upon a reluctant English king to grant permission to a flying squad of inquisitors to complete the destruction of the Knights Templar. Like other Templars across Europe, some 229 English members of the order were arrested and interrogated under torture on the same charges of heresy, blasphemy, and sexual perversion that resulted in the burning of so many of their fellow warrior-monks. With the exception of the Templars, the only other English victims of the Inquisition were a few inoffensive merchants and sailors who showed up in a Spanish port with an English translation of the Bible in their baggage and thus faced prosecution for the heresy of being Protestants.

  The fact remains, however, that England had its own sorry tradition of terror in the name of God. The Jewish community of York, sheltering from a mob in the keep of a castle, was massacred en masse in 1190. A man who had converted to Judaism was burned at the stake as a heretic in Oxford in 1222, and every Jew in England was expelled by royal decree in 1290, more than two hundred years before the same idea occurred to Ferdinand and Isabella. The preaching of the Lollards, who resembled the Waldensians in their defiance of the Roman Catholic church and their insistence on the r
ight to translate the Bible into vernacular languages, prompted Parliament to adopt the death penalty as “a settled punishment for heresy” in 1400. The persecution of religious dissenters ran so deep in England in the sixteenth century that one London goldsmith made a bequest in his will “to buy faggots for the burning of heretics.”1

  Women accused of witchcraft fared no better in England than they did on the continent during the Witch Craze. Even without the assistance of the Inquisition, the civil courts were not reluctant to pass judgment on poor, eccentric, or troubled women who were imagined to have trafficked with the Devil and worked various kinds of diabolical mischief on their neighbors. So it was that the land of the Magna Carta also produced such horrors as the burning of a pregnant young woman on charges of sorcery in 1555—she suffered a miscarriage at the stake, and the baby, still alive, was “tossed back into the flames as an offspring of Satan.”2

  Defenders of the Inquisition like to point out that England, so proud to have avoided the worst excesses of the inquisitors, was hardly kind or gentle when it came to the use of torture and capital punishment. “The Spanish Inquisition was certainly no worse than contemporary secular courts in other countries,” writes one historian, “including England.” Defendants who refused to plead guilty or not guilty when charged with a crime under English common law, for example, were subjected to a form of torture called peine forte et dure (“strong and hard pain”) in which stones were piled on the victim’s chest until he or she answered or died. Convicted criminals were still being drawn and quartered—and hangings still served as a gruesome form of popular entertainment—well into the nineteenth century. Not until 1868, in fact, did the practice of public hanging come to an end in England.3