the arbitrary use of power and the violence that reign at the Solovetsky concentration camp… It is difficult for a human being even to imagine such terror, tyranny, violence, and lawlessness. When we went there, we could not conceive of such a horror, and now we, crippled ourselves, together with several thousands who are still there, appeal to the ruling centre of the Soviet state to curb the terror that reigns there… the former tsarist penal servitude system in comparison to Solovetsky had 99 per cent more humanity, fairness, and legality… People die like flies, i.e., they die a slow and painful death… The entire weight of this scandalous abuse of power, brute violence, and lawlessness that reign at Solovetsky… is placed on the shoulders of workers and peasants; others, such as counterrevolutionaries, profiteers and so on, have full wallets and have set themselves up and live in clover in the Soviet State, while next to them, in the literal meaning of the word, the penniless proletariat dies from hunger, cold, and back-breaking 14–16 hour days under the tyranny and lawlessness of inmates who are the agents and collaborators of the State Political Directorate [GPU].
If you complain or write anything (‘Heaven forbid’), they will frame you for an attempted escape or for something else, and they will shoot you like a dog. They line us up naked and barefoot at 22 degrees below zero and keep us outside for up to an hour. It is difficult to describe all the chaos and terror that is going on… One example is the following fact, one of a thousand… THEY FORCED THE INMATES TO EAT THEIR OWN FAECES…
[I]t is possible, that you might think that it is our imagination, but we swear to you all, by everything that is sacred to us, that this is only one small part of the nightmarish truth…
Of the 100,000 prisoners sent to Solovetsky in the years up to its closure in 1939, roughly half died. Yet when Maxim Gorky visited the camp in June 1929, three years before his return to the Soviet Union from self-imposed exile, he made it sound almost idyllic, with healthy inmates and salubrious cells.
Perhaps nothing illustrates better the diabolical character of the Stalinist regime than the 140-mile Belomor Canal, built at Stalin’s instigation to link the Baltic Sea and the White Sea. Between September 1931 and August 1933, somewhere between 128,000 and 180,000 prisoners – most of them from Solovetsky, with Frenkel directing their efforts – hacked out a waterway, equipped only with the most primitive pick-axes, wheelbarrows and hatchets. So harsh were the conditions and so inadequate the tools that tens of thousands of them died in the process. This was hardly unforeseeable; for six months of the year the ground was frozen solid, while in many places the prisoners had to cut through solid granite. And, as so often, the net result was next to worthless economically: far too narrow and shallow to be navigable by substantial vessels. Yet when Shaw’s fellow Fabians Sidney and Beatrice Webb were given a tour of the finished canal they were oblivious to all this. As they put it in their book Soviet Communism: A New Civilization? (1935), it was ‘pleasant to think that the warmest appreciation was officially expressed of the success of the OGPU, not merely in performing a great engineering feat, but in achieving a triumph in human regeneration’. The Webbs explicitly rejected the ‘naive belief that… penal settlements are now maintained and continuously supplied with thousands of deported manual workers and technicians, deliberately for the purpose of making, out of this forced labour, a net pecuniary profit to add to the State revenue.’ Such notions were simply ‘incredible’ to ‘anyone acquainted with the economic results of the chain-gang, or of prison labour, in any country in the world’. Slavery always has its apologists, but seldom are they so ingenuous. The thirty-six Soviet writers who, under Gorky’s direction, produced the hyperbolic book The Belomor–Baltic Canal Named for Stalin at least had the excuse that the alternative to lying might be dying. The Webbs wrote their rubbish in the safety of Bloomsbury.*
In earlier slave states there had been a clear division between the masters and the enslaved. But that was not the case in the Soviet Union. Those who commanded in the morning might find themselves in chains – or worse – by the afternoon. When the Moscow–Volga Canal was opened by Stalin, the chief contractor made a speech. Immediately afterwards he was taken away and shot. More than two hundred of the project’s other managers were also executed because of delays in the canal’s construction. Indeed, no revolution in history has consumed its own children with such an insatiable appetite as the Russian Revolution. Lenin had first introduced the practice of ‘purging’ the party periodically, to get rid of ‘idlers, hooligans, adventurers, drunkards and thieves’. Stalin, who compulsively mistrusted his fellow Communists, went much further. Few groups were more ruthlessly persecuted in the 1930s than those Old Bolsheviks who had been Stalin’s own comrades in the decisive days of revolution and civil war. Senior Party functionaries lived in a state of perpetual insecurity, never knowing when they might fall victim to Stalin’s paranoia. Those who had been most loyal to the Party were suddenly as likely to be arrested and imprisoned as the most notorious criminal. Loyal Leninists, passionate believers in the Revolution, were now arrested as ‘wreckers’ loyal to the imperialist powers or as ‘Trotskyites’ in league with Stalin’s disgraced and exiled arch-rival (whom he finally succeeded in having murdered in 1940). To other pariah groups, Stalin had shown a kind of mercy. They had been sent to dig canals in the tundra. Towards the enemy within the Party he was entirely pitiless. What had begun as a crackdown on corrupt or inefficient officials in 1933 escalated after the murder (almost certainly on Stalin’s orders) of the Leningrad Party boss Sergei Kirov in December 1934 into a bloody and self-perpetuating purge. One after another the men and women who had been in the vanguard of the Revolution were arrested, tortured, interrogated until they were induced to confess to some ‘crime’ and to denounce yet more of their comrades, and then shot. Between January 1935 and June 1941, there were just under twenty million arrests and at least seven million executions in the Soviet Union. In 1937–8 alone the quota for ‘enemies of the people’ to be executed was set at 356,105, though the actual number who lost their lives was more than twice that. These quotas, too, were over-fulfilled. To visit the gloomy Levashovo Forest outside St Petersburg is to visit a mass grave, where at least 20,000 bodies of those executed were secretly buried.
In Mikhail Bulgakov’s novel The Master and Margarita, the Devil comes to Moscow. What follows is a fearful spiral of denunciation, disappearance and death, at once arbitrary and spiteful, calculated and yet deranged. No work better captures the loathsome quality of the Terror; no scene gets closer to illuminating the surreal atmosphere of the show trials than Nikanor Bosoy’s nightmare of being exposed as a foreign currency dealer while sitting in the audience of a variety show in a Moscow theatre. For not every act in the drama required Stalin’s instigation; his role was to create an environment in which ordinary men and women – even members of the same family* – would denounce one another; in which today’s torturer could be tomorrow’s victim; in which today’s camp commandant could spend the night in the punishment cells. Stalin carefully plotted and tracked the destruction of the Party leaders he personally knew. But the tens of thousands of local officials who were denounced by those they had bullied or robbed were the victims of social forces he had merely unleashed. To Western dupes like Shaw and the Webbs, of course, it was all perfectly excusable. Shaw’s commentary on the show trials in Moscow was a bizarre mixture of the callous and the facile:
The top of the ladder is a very trying place for old revolutionists who have had no administrative experience, who have had no financial experience, who have been trained as penniless hunted fugitives with Karl Marx on the brain and not as statesmen… They often have to be pushed off the ladder with a rope around their necks… We cannot afford to give ourselves moral airs when our most enterprising neighbour humanely and judiciously liquidates a handful of exploiters and speculators to make the world safe for honest men.
The defendants at show trials did not attempt to dispute the charges against them, argued the Webb
s, because they had never been exposed to the pointlessly adversarial Anglo-Saxon system of justice. The accused were guilty and knew it; that was why they confessed. As for freedom of speech, was that really so important? ‘So called “free thought and free expression by word and by writ” mocks human progress, unless the common people are taught to think, and inspired to use this knowledge, in the interests of their Commonwealth… It is this widespread knowledge, and devotion to the public welfare, that is the keynote of Soviet Democracy.’ In truth, at the height of Stalin’s Terror, ‘public welfare’ meant total private insecurity. Literally no one could feel safe – least of all the men who ran the NKVD.* Those who survived this life ‘beneath the gun’ – like the poet Anna Akhmatova, whose ‘Requiem’ best captures the agony of the bereaved, or the composer Dmitry Shostakovich, whose opera Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk, was denounced in Pravda as ‘Muddle Instead of Music’ – were not necessarily the conformists. They were merely lucky.
Among those arrested were fifty-three members of the Leningrad Society for the Deaf and Dumb. The charges against this alleged ‘fascist organization’ was that they had conspired with the German secret service to blow up Stalin and other Politburo members with a home-made bomb during the Revolution Day parade in Red Square. Thirty-four of them were shot; the rest were sent to the camps for ten or more years. One of the victims was Jacob Mendelevich Abter, a thirty-year-old Jewish worker. The idea of a society of deaf mutes trying to assassinate the devil incarnate would almost be comic if the fate of this gentle-looking man had not been so cruel.†
KILLING PEOPLES
We tend to think of class as a category quite distinct from race, since in Western societies today the former can be more readily changed than the latter. Yet the dividing line is not always so clear-cut. In most medieval and early modern European societies, class was a hereditary attribute; in India today it remains difficult to shed one’s caste origins. In 1930s Russia, too, class was treated as an inheritable trait. If your father was a worker, you were a worker; if your father belonged to one of those groups defined as ‘class enemies’, then woe betide you – unless you were somehow able to get a forged internal passport or to marry someone from a respectably proletarian family. One local soviet reported that it had expelled thirty-eight secondary school students because:
They are all sons of big hereditary kulaks… In the great majority of cases, these kulaks’ sons were instigators in stirring up nationalism, spreading various kind of pornography, and disorganizing study… All these 38 persons hid their social position while they were in school, registering themselves falsely as poor peasants, middle peasants, and some even as agricultural labourers.
In 1935 a Leningrad newspaper published a series of exposés of class enemies in a local hospital; they give a nice flavour of the atmosphere of the time:
Troitskii, a former White officer and son of a priest, has found a refuge [in the hospital]. The economic manager considers that this lurking enemy is ‘an irreplaceable accountant’. Registrar Zabolotskaia, nurse Apishnikova and disinfector Shestiporov are also offspring of priests. Vasileva changed her profession from nun to nurse, and also got a job at that hospital. Another nun, Larkina, followed her example… A former monk, Rodin, got himself a job as doctor’s assistant and even substitutes for the doctor in making house calls.
No one could expunge their or their parents’ pre-revolutionary class origins. Yet it was not only classes that were to be crushed under the wheels of the Stalinist juggernaut. Whole peoples were also marked down for destruction. For Stalin regarded certain ethnic groups within what was still a vast multi-national Russian empire as inherently unreliable – class enemies by dint of their nationality.
Foreigners and all those who had contact with them were by definition suspect, regardless of their ideological credentials. Of the 394 members of the Executive Committee of the Communist International in January 1936, 223 had fallen victim to the Terror by April 1938, as had forty-one of the sixty-eight German Communist leaders who had fled to the Soviet Union after 1933. Those Old Bolsheviks who had spent significant periods in exile before 1917, or who had been involved in fomenting revolution abroad in the 1920s, were among the first to be purged.*
Almost equally suspect were those ethnic groups who inhabited the borders of the Soviet Union, since they were more likely to have contact with foreigners than were people in the Russian heartland. In 1937 the new third secretary in the British embassy in Moscow was a bold young Scotsman named Fitzroy Maclean. Curious to visit the great cities of Central Asia – he was apparently more interested in sight-seeing than in gathering intelligence – Maclean ignored the regime’s travel restrictions and took a train to Baku, where he caught a steamer to the Caspian port of Lenkoran. The next morning he was amazed to see a convoy of trucks ‘driving headlong through the town on the way to the port, each filled with depressed-looking Turko-Tartar peasants under the escort of NKVD frontier troops with fixed bayonets’. Their arrests, a local man explained, ‘had been decreed from Moscow and merely formed part of the deliberate policy of the Soviet Government, who believed in transplanting portions of the population from place to place as and when it suited them. The places of those now being deported would probably be taken by other peasants from Central Asia’. Undeterred by his subsequent arrest by NKVD border police and forcible return to Moscow, Maclean resumed his peregrinations a few months later by taking the Trans-Siberian Express to Novisibirsk, where (once again illegally) he caught a train south to Barnaul. At Altaisk station he noticed a number of cattle trucks being hitched onto his train:
These were filled with people who, at first sight, seemed to be Chinese. They turned out to be Koreans, who with their families and their belongings were on their way from the Far East to Central Asia where they were being sent to work on the cotton plantations. They had no idea why they were being deported… Later I heard that the Soviet authorities had quite arbitrarily removed some 200,000 Koreans to Central Asia, as likely to prove untrustworthy in the event of a war with Japan.
What Maclean had witnessed was just one episode in a vast programme of ethnic deportation that modern historians have only recently rediscovered. On October 29, 1937, Nikolai Yezhov, the head of the NKVD, wrote to inform Vyacheslav Molotov, Chairman of the Council of People’s Commissars, that all Koreans in the Soviet Far East – a total of 171,781 people – had been deported to Central Asia, the consummation of plans first contemplated in the mid-1920s as a way of securing the Soviet Union’s eastern frontier.
Koreans were only the first ethnic group to come under suspicion. Balkars, Chechens, Crimean Tatars, Germans, Greeks, Ingushi, Meskhetians, Kalmyks, Karachai, Poles and Ukrainians – all these different nationalities were subjected to persecution by Stalin at various times. The rationales for this policy subtly mixed the languages of class and race. Baltic Germans were ‘kulak colonizers to the marrow of their bones’. Poles were informed: ‘You are being de-kulakized not because you are a kulak, but because you are a Pole.’ One internal OGPU report contained the telling phrase Raz Poliak, znachit kulak: ‘If it’s a Pole, then it must be a kulak.’ As early as March 1930 thousands of Polish families were being deported eastwards from Byelorussia and the Ukraine, partly because of their resistance to collectivization and partly because the authorities feared they planned to emigrate westwards. There was a fresh wave of deportations in 1935, which removed more than eight thousand Polish families from the border regions of Kiev and Vinnitsya to eastern Ukraine. Two years later, an investigation into what was alleged to be ‘the most powerful and probably the most important diversionist-espionage networks of Polish intelligence in the USSR’ led to the arrest of no fewer than 140,000 people, nearly all of them Poles.
Perhaps the most remarkable case of all is that of the Ukrainians. Indeed, it is not too much to say that the man-made famine caused by collectivization in the Ukraine was Stalin’s brutal answer to what he regarded as the ‘Ukrainian question’. A backlash against the
relative autonomy of the Ukraine had begun as early as the spring of 1930. ‘Keep in mind’, Stalin had warned darkly in 1932, ‘that in the Ukrainian Communist Party… there are not a few… rotten elements, conscious and subconcious Petlyurites’ (supporters of the Ukrainian nationalist leader Simon Petlyura). To be sure, the effects of the 1932–3 famine were not confined to the Ukraine; Kazakhstan, the northern Caucasus and the Volga region were also affected. Careful analysis, however, reveals that the victims of the famine were disproportionately Ukrainian. It is surely no coincidence that fewer than one in ten Ukrainians had voted for the Bolsheviks in the elections to the Constituent Assembly in 1917, whereas more than half had voted for Ukrainian parties. It was in fact one of the stated aims of collectivization to achieve ‘the destruction of Ukrainian nationalism’s social base – the individual land-holdings’. Collectivization was pushed further and faster there than in Russia. Grain quotas were deliberately stepped up even as production was falling. This explains why about half the victims of the famine were Ukrainians – nearly one in five of the total Ukrainian population. Nor did Stalin regard starvation as a sufficient solution to the problem of Ukrainian disloyalty. The composer Shostakovich recalled how itinerant Ukrainian folksingers were rounded up and shot. All of this was possible because the Ukraine was in effect being run as a Russian colony. Although Russians accounted for just 9 per cent of the republic’s population, 79 per cent of the Ukrainian Party and 95 per cent of government officials were Russians or Russified.
The War of the World: History's Age of Hatred Page 29