Leopold Trepper, a Jewish Communist later famous as a Soviet intelligence agent, has described in his memoirs life in Comintern at that time: “In our hostel, where Party activists of all countries lived, no one went to sleep before 3:00 A.M. We waited with our hearts in our mouths. At 3 A.M. precisely, light from automobile headlamps pierced the darkness and swept over the facades of buildings.… You were crazy with fear, your guts ached.… We stood at the window waiting to see where the NKVD car would stop.… When we realized that they were making for the other end of the building we calmed down until the following evening.”
Trepper’s Jewish Communist friends were also ruthlessly suppressed. The leaders of the Communist Party of Palestine were liquidated one after another. Ephraim Leszinsky, a member of the Central Committee of the Palestine Communist Party, was savagely beaten to make him confess and name his accomplices in espionage. He went mad, and, according to Trepper, banged his head against the wall shouting, “What’s that other name I’ve forgotten? What’s that other name?”
Daniel Auerbach, one of organizers of the Communist Party of Palestine, was in the USSR, and in Comintern, in 1937. Trepper writes that “his son and his brother had already perished. But they were a long time coming for Auerbach himself. The agonizing suspense drove him mad. His wife’s brother ran about the apartment shouting, ‘My God, shall we ever find out what they’re arresting us for?’ ”
Leopold Trepper met Auerbach’s wife many years later, in Khrushchev’s time. The old woman was hugging a shabby handbag holding the family photographs she had treasured through all her ordeals. She told Trepper that “my husband, my sons, my brother, and my husband’s brother were all arrested and killed. I’m the only one who survived. But do you know—in spite of everything I believe in communism.”
And in spite of everything, Trepper himself went on working for the USSR. After all that he had gone through, he became a Soviet agent in Germany. He was indignant at the silence of Western Communist leaders. But he had a ready explanation for his own silence. “What could we do? Give up the fight for socialism? We had dedicated our whole lives to it. Protest, try to intervene? We remembered what Dimitrov had said to the poor Bulgarians.”
The Boss was familiar with this way of thinking. He had judged them all correctly, and made child’s play of destroying the Tower of Babel.
One by one the old Comintern hands disappeared. Stalin left only those who had passed their examination in servility by betraying friends. Another who vanished was M. Gorkic, head of the Yugoslav Communist Party. Josip Tito, future president of Yugoslavia, was his betrayer. In his letter to Dimitrov, Tito said that “nobody in the country knows him, except a few intellectuals. What has happened to him [his arrest] can have no serious consequences for the Party.” When Tito visited Moscow in 1938 he found that eight hundred prominent Yugoslav Communists had been arrested. Dimitrov tested his loyalty in long discussions. On this visit Tito had to betray not only his friends but his former wife. She had been arrested as a Gestapo agent, and Tito wrote an explanatory note to the Boss, which is preserved in the Party Archive: “I thought that she was reliable because she was the daughter of a poor working man, and subsequently the wife of a prominent member of the German Communist youth movement, who was sentenced to fifteen years in a German labor camp.… I now consider that I was not sufficiently vigilant and this is a big blot on my life. I believe that various people intent on harming our Party may use this against me, and that must be taken into account.” Tito need not have worried. By abandoning someone so close to him without demur he had passed his exam, like Kuusinen, Togliatti, Kaganovich, Kalinin, Molotov, and so many others who renounced their nearest and dearest without a murmur. Nothing now stood between Tito and a general secretaryship. And in 1939, when the legendary Yugoslav Communist P. Miletic arrived in Moscow after many years in prison, Stalin showed his preference for Miletic’s tried and tested rival. The hero and martyr Miletic disappeared into the cellars of the NKVD.
A new Comintern was born. In 1939 this well-drilled and absolutely docile body would approve the Soviet pact with Hitler, and, a little later, when the Boss found it necessary, it would obediently self-destruct.
20
TENDING TERROR’S SACRED FLAME
The madness of Terror, when the arrest of each “enemy of the people” was followed by the arrests of all his relatives and acquaintances, when people were picked up for a careless word, or a misprint in a newspaper, when textile designs were scrutinized through magnifying glasses—all this, needless to say, served good practical purposes. Every arrest helped to build the magnificent Bonfire of Fear. Every arrest threw a little chip of its own onto the mysterious nocturnal fire which needed to burn forever; only constant fear kept the country and the system stable. (One day the collapse of the Communist empire would confirm this.) The Boss had to tend the sacred fire unremittingly, to keep the flames leaping higher and higher. However fiercely it burned, it stopped short of reducing the country to ashes.
TWENTIETH-CENTURY SLAVES
The Terror, originally directed against the Party, suddenly turned upon the masses. The families of enemies of the people, their acquaintances, acquaintances of their acquaintances—endless chains of people were turned into convicts. In the hands of the army, mass terror consigned thousands of physically strong people to the camps. The Boss now had at his disposal the army of unpaid laborers of which Trotsky once dreamed. Stalin could carry out the most incredible projects at the lowest possible cost. His prisoners built the great White Sea–Baltic and Moscow-Volga Canals, laid roads in impassable places, erected factories beyond the Arctic Circle. In the thirties a considerable proportion of the country’s copper, gold, coal, and timber was produced by this secret unpaid labor force. Before any major project was begun, the NKVD received direct instructions about the number of arrests it needed to make. The Boss himself devised the ruthless regime of the camps, and kept a close watch on those whom he had ordered into the night.
The everyday reality of the camps was hideous. In Kolyma, in the northeast corner of Asiatic Russia, a godforsaken region of marshland and permafrost, a wild beast called Garanin was let loose as commandant. He used to parade sick prisoners who were suspected of malingering, walk along the ranks and shoot them point blank, while camp guards followed with a change of pistols. The bodies were stacked by the camp gates, and parties of prisoners on their way to work were told they’d get the same treatment if they tried slacking. I shall not attempt to describe the hell of Gulag. Volumes have been written about its horrors. The banks of Russia’s canals are studded with the graves of their nameless constructors. After all these years, communal graves are sometimes waterlogged by the spring floods and human bones rise out of the ground to confront us.
The Boss valued the labor of these slaves of the land of socialism very highly. On August 25, 1938, when the Terror was ebbing, the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet discussed the possibility of early release for prisoners who had distinguished themselves in the camps. But the Boss said, “Can’t we find some other way of showing appreciation of their work? From the point of view of the economy it is a bad idea. The best people would be freed, and those left would be the worst.” In 1939 he decreed through the Presidium that “a convicted person must serve the full sentence.” “The best” were left to die slowly.
“LET THEM EAT CAKE—BUT DON’T LET THEM OUT”
The arrest of scientists and technicians was an inspired part of the Boss’s plan to provide cheap labor. Molotov touches on this in the book of conversations with him that the poet Chuyev published. Asked why brilliant engineers like Tupolev, Stechkin, and Korolev were arrested, he answered, “People have said all sorts of things.… Tupolev belonged to that part of the intelligentsia which the Soviet regime very much needed. But at heart they were very much against us, it was as natural as breathing to them. So a way was found around the problem. The Tupolevs were put behind bars and the Chekists were told to make sure they had the best
possible conditions. Let them eat cake, but don’t let them out. Let them work, construct things the country needs, things for the army.”
I had heard of the Boss’s secret plan for scientists and technicians, and had always thought that it was just another myth. But the fundamentals of the plan emerge quite clearly from Molotov’s account. Intellectuals were at heart against the Soviet regime. They could therefore easily be drawn into anti-Soviet activity. For that they were liable to be liquidated. Obviously, the best of them should, for their own sake, be isolated. Once isolated, they should be given perfect working conditions: food, books, and even visits from women. Bringing these intellectuals together created a favorable work situation and made it easier to keep them under observation. Most important of all, isolation ensured maximum secrecy. This was very important for military reasons. Determined as he was to realize the Great Dream, he wanted the country’s best minds to be working day and night, with no distractions, and under strict control, on its military needs. This was why he had invented the sharashki, scientific institutes staffed by convicts. Most of the country’s outstanding technical brains—engineers and scientists—were destined to end up sooner or later in the sharashki. The intelligentsia were gradually rehoused in these prison institutes. The first rehabilitation program (when he decided to release a number of scientists to show that he was trying to combat illegality) and then the war prevented complete realization of the plan. But he would reactivate it after the war.
The Boss had given a great deal of thought to the creative intelligentsia. [Terror was meant to transmute secret hostility with its sacred fire.] He began his 1936 campaign with an abrupt attack on culture. A “restructuring of the cultural front” was proclaimed. Art must henceforward be comprehensible to the toiling millions. The remnants of the avant-garde were smashed. Shostakovich was lambasted. Under the headline “Chaos instead of Music” the January 28 Pravda published an annihilating criticism of his opera Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk. Everybody understood who was behind this unsigned article. All Party organizations, and indeed the whole country, were required to study it. Shostakovich’s name was on everybody’s lips. Standing in the shops, or in the Metro, people discussed the noxious composer. Workers met to condemn in the same breath enemies of the people and an opera of which they knew nothing. The bombardment continued all through 1936. Party critics wrote menacing articles against non-Party writers. Literurnaya Gazeta advised Pasternak to “ask himself where his present path of parochial arrogance and conceited preciosity is leading him.” The rumor in Moscow was that the poet’s days of freedom were numbered. A Pravda review, “External Brilliance—Spurious Content,” demolished Bulgakov’s play Molière. His wife wrote in her diary: “Misha’s lot is clear to me. He will be alone and hunted till the end of his days.”
Ideological terror persisted throughout 1936. “We saw the New Year in at home,” Bulgakov’s wife wrote. “We made a lot of noise smashing cups inscribed ‘1936.’ God grant that 1937 will be happier than the past year.”
In 1937 the Boss called a halt. The Party administrators of the arts, the Party critics had done their job. The ideological bombardment had left the artistic intelligentsia scared.
Now the dread accusers were to be destroyed themselves. Under the plan for the destruction of the old Party, all the former leaders of RAPP (the Russian Association of Proletarian Writers), the group that had persecuted Pasternak and Bulgakov, perished one after another in 1937–1938. The old Bolshevik Kerzhentsev, who had been in charge of cultural matters in the Central Committee, was also shot. Two of Bulgakov’s old enemies, Lev Bezymensky and A. Afinogenov, were expelled from the Party.
The Party critics disappeared one by one into the night. Bulgakov’s wife was in raptures as she listed in her diary each day those who had “got it in the neck”: “Article after article in Pravda, they go flying head over heels, one after another. It is comforting to think that Nemesis exists after all.… The day of reckoning has arrived: very bad things about Kirshon [an important figure in Soviet theater].… As we were walking along the lane Olesha caught up with us. He urged Misha to go to the meeting of Moscow playwrights which begins today. They are going to give Kirshon his deserts. [Bulgakov, however, refused to persecute the persecutors.] … Everybody who reads the papers thinks that Misha’s position must change for the better.” That is how she felt about 1937. And many people in Moscow were glad to think that the Terror, this Terror, spelled the end of that hateful and bloody revolution.
A NOVEL ABOUT THE BOSS
“Misha read his novel about Voland,” Bulgakov’s wife wrote in her diary on May 15. Bulgakov’s novel The Master and Margarita, published only after the author’s death, would become the favorite novel of the Russian intelligentsia. Its main hero is the Devil, operating under the name Voland. But this is an unusual kind of Devil. The epigraph to the novel is from Goethe’s Faust:
Say at last—who art thou?
That power I serve
Which wills forever evil
Yet does forever good.
At large in Soviet Moscow, Voland visits the fullness of his diabolical power on those in authority who act illegally. He also deals with the persecutors of a certain writer whom Bulgakov calls “the Master.” Bulgakov wrote his novel under the burning summer sun of 1936 and 1937, during the Moscow show trials, when another devil was destroying the Devil’s Party, and Bulgakov’s literary enemies were perishing one after another. It is not difficult to see who was the model for Voland.
Bulgakov, like all writers of note, was kept under continuous surveillance by the NKVD and was surrounded by informers. The omniscient Boss must, therefore, have known about the strange novel, parts of which were often read aloud to Bulgakov’s guests. But the novelists fascination with the activities of his strange devil evidently pleased the Boss. Perhaps this was what first gave him the idea of commissioning a play about himself from Mikhail Bulgakov?
A. Bulgakova’s record of the horrors of 1937 continues: “June 6. Read Pravda. Rushed to wake Misha.… They’ve arrested Arkadiev, the manager of the Moscow Arts Theater.… The artist Dmitriev (to whom he had promised a new apartment) was laughing, telling how Knipper, Chekhov’s widow, quite speechless, thrust the paper with the piece about Arkadiev under his nose.… Misha kept imitating Knipper, in a white peignoir, wringing her hands.”
It had become a laughing matter! Only Chekhov’s widow, with her nineteenth-century mentality, was still horrified by executions. The new generation of intellectuals preferred to laugh. And in that laughter, from the author of the novel about Voland, there was something diabolical.
Bulgakova’s diary goes on describing all-night parties, practical jokes, excursions to the Moscow river, canoeing, while all around her people were disappearing in the “unbearable heat” of that bloody summer.
But however hard they tried to suppress their dread of the interminable vengeance exacted by Voland, however hard they tried to persuade themselves that only “nasty people” were perishing, it was then that the fun-loving Bulgakov became, as his wife wrote in her diary, “afraid again to walk in the streets.”
The writers sacrificed that year were mainly the Party hacks who ran RAPP. Bulgakov himself was left alone, as were Shostakovich and Sholokhov. Nor would the Boss authorize Pasternak’s arrest. The newspapers at the time were printing an endless series of enthusiastic responses from Soviet writers to the show trials. Pasternak alone dared to refuse to add his signature to a demand for the execution of the “vermin, wreckers, and spies.” His pregnant wife implored him to sign, but he was adamant. And yet the Boss permitted him to live. There was plenty of time.
Mandelstam he did not forgive. Mandelstam tried to defend himself, even writing verses extolling the Leader, but the ex-poet who had written such poor verses could neither accept nor forget certain good ones. Stalin was purging the country, and could not leave in it a man who had openly insulted him. Mandelstam was arrested, for the second time, on May Day, when the drunken m
errymaking was in full swing.
There are many strange legends about Mandelstam’s death. The truth is this: A madman, as poets always have been, an overgrown child in the camp, he quickly turned into a living corpse. He caught typhus, and did not survive it. A fellow prisoner, Yuri Moiseenko, told the story: “He was sick with typhus for four days, lying motionless in bed, his nose (pardon me) was running, and he didn’t wipe it, just lay there with his eyes open, not saying anything, his left eyelid kept twitching, he said nothing, but his eye kept winking. Maybe it was from his thoughts, he couldn’t go on living without thinking of something.” That was how the greatest Russian poet of the century departed: silently, in pain, lying in the filth of a prison camp. Bulgakov’s wife had noted Mandelstam’s arrest in her diary, without comment. She was happy at the time: Misha had been commissioned to write a play about Stalin.
HURRAH FOR TERROR!
Many Russian émigrés supposed that the Great Terror spelled the end of revolution. They remembered V. Shulgin’s prophecy, from his book, 1920: “Lenin and Trotsky cannot renounce socialism. They must carry that burden to the last. Then someone else will come along. He will be truly Red in strength of will, and truly White in the objectives he pursues. He will be a Bolshevik in energy, and a nationalist by conviction.” G. Fedotov wrote in the magazine Sovremennye Zapiski (Contemporary Notes) in 1937: “This is a real counterrevolution, carried out from above.… The Marxist symbols have not yet been abolished, and they obscure the reality: that Stalin is indeed a Red tsar.”
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