Personally Stalin is a man of average intelligence and subaverage education. His speeches are wooden and clumsy and his style is colorless and fatiguing. Nevertheless, the man has qualities which permitted him, within a decade of the overthrow of Tsarism, to establish a despotism which puts the tyranny of Genghis Khan far into the shade.
He has a will of iron and his energy is boundless. He can keep his mouth shut when the situation calls for silence, and he is prepared to go to the limit.
In the course of his life he has discovered one great secret: the power of the “apparatus,” the machine. He was trained in the school of Marxism, but he has never let himself be hampered by any Marxist dogmatism. He has always used Marxism as a tool, and where it proved useless or a hindrance he has ruthlessly thrown it to one side.
Stalin wanted power—power without limit. He wanted such untrammeled power that when he pressed a button the masses of the Russian people, of the oppressed peoples of Asia and of the revolutionary workers of Europe would swing into movement. He was determined above all to be free of any irritating control of his ideas and his intentions by others. It was intolerable for him to have to give an account of his actions to men like Bukharin and Trotsky, and to have to sustain discussion and argument with them, particularly as they were intellectually very greatly his superiors. He wanted to be absolutely free in all his actions, and the only way open to him was to enslave the Russian people.
He has carried out his intention: today in the Soviet Union there are 160 million slaves and one free man. It is as though 160 million people had surrendered their small share of freedom to him. And now he is at liberty to violate the laws of development. The prohibitions of morality, of origin and of social convention have no validity for him.
Trotsky accused Stalin of forgetting the aims of Communism and of having taken over the aims of hostile classes—first of all the kulaks and then the bureaucracy. Nothing is further from the truth. Stalin, in fact, exterminated the kulaks in the most barbarous fashion. And as for the bureaucracy, there was no privileged bureaucracy when he came to power. He created it in the first place; it did not create him.
Stalin has remained loyal to his own ideas. He wants Communism. He wants the means of production to be concentrated in the hands of the state. Irrespective of the methods used to bring this about, a new society will arise on this foundation, a society in which the exploitation of man by man will no longer exist. That is his one dogma.
His aim is to socialize the productive forces all over the world, and the only means to this end he sees in his own unlimited power. The instrument of this power is the “apparatus.”
Even the Leninist party was fundamentally different from the Western European working-class parties in the old days. The political party, according to Lenin, was a conspiracy of professional revolutionaries voluntarily accepting an iron discipline. The cement of this organization was not only the belief of its members in their world historical mission but also the uniform ideology which dominated them all. The Communists of Lenin’s day were firmly convinced that they had discovered the historical laws of development. For them Marxism was a scientific instrument, and all they had to do was to use it properly, and then at every stage and in all circumstances they would be able to discover the next step to take. The theory of revolutionary Marxism inspired them with the conviction that they were the executors of historical necessity, and this conviction was a source of deep satisfaction and confidence to them. Their task was rendered interpretative instead of creative. The correct policy in every situation was merely a question of the proper application of the scientific principles of Marxism.
Once in possession of the truth, one is entitled to demand unquestioning obedience from one’s followers, and that was the basis of Lenin’s insistence on strict Party discipline and the acceptance of the one true ideology of the revolutionary party.
However, truth as Lenin understood it was not a messianic dogma and it was subject to control on the basis of experience. The lessons of experience were freely discussed in his Party, and it was the result of such discussion which gave the Party its guiding line for the next stage of the historical process.
Now, in the period which followed the death of Lenin the theory of the Communist Party came into growing conflict with historical experience, but Stalin was not prepared to allow facts to refute his theories and he therefore abolished freedom of discussion in the Party and established the iron rule of the apparatus. He continued to insist on a uniform Party ideology, the feature which had distinguished the Party of Lenin from the democratic working-class parties of Western Europe, but in Stalin’s Party this ideology was not the result of free and objective discussion. It was something which he decreed in person. Thus the cement of his Party was no longer only the common opinion held by all its members. Two other factors had arisen: fear and material advantage. These two factors distinguish the apparatus from the Party.
In 1931 a forbidden anecdote went the rounds among Party members in Moscow. Yagoda, the head of the G.P.U., was alleged to have asked Stalin: “Which would you prefer, Comrade Stalin: that Party members should be loyal to you from conviction or from fear?” And Stalin is alleged to have replied: “From fear.” Whereupon Yagoda asked: “Why?” To which Stalin replied: “Because convictions can change; fear remains.”
The story is in all probability apocryphal; above all, because Stalin has no sense of self-irony. Nevertheless, it underlines the prime law of the Stalinist epoch in Russia. The men and women in Stalin’s apparatus—whether in the secret police, in the Party itself or in the state administration—are bound to Stalin not only by a common ideology but also by material interest and fear. Ideology has no longer any independent function. The personal opinions of a Communist no longer play any role in the performance of his tasks. He no longer has anything to decide. He receives detailed instructions from above. An incautious word which was not in line with the official ideology suggested secret and independent thought on the part of the man who had uttered it and led to his destruction. The men in the apparatus knew that as long as they served the Führer in the orthodox fashion they were safe. They belonged to the privileged group in the country, and they were increasingly corrupted by material advantages.
Under Lenin the Party member feared expulsion as the good Catholic fears excommunication, but that was all. In Lenin’s days expulsion from the Party was not followed by persecution and material suffering. A man who was expelled was not arrested and he did not even necessarily lose his job. But under Stalin heresy means not only expulsion from the Party but the ruin and destruction of the heretic.
Stalin was convinced that with a sufficiently strong and powerful apparatus at his control he could defy the laws of world history. In five years of struggle with the opposition he fashioned an instrument of tremendous power. By 1928 he had attained his object. The opposition was utterly crushed and he was free to act as he liked without let or hindrance.
This unlimited freedom of action led him to commit two blunders of world historical importance. His policy toward the peasants undermined the basis of Soviet agriculture and, incidentally, led to the deaths of eleven million peasants by starvation during the resultant famine. His Comintern policy led to the victory of fascism in Germany, and, in the upshot, to the Second World War.
In each case he finally changed his policy, but too late to repair the damage. In each case his regime was saved by the powerful apparatus he had built up.
In January, 1933, he gave instructions to the Central Committee of the Party to beat a retreat in the peasant question. He abandoned the murderous system of requisitioning and in consequence it once again paid the peasants to work. Soviet agriculture recovered and the autumn of 1933 saw the best harvest for generations.
In August, 1935, he caused the Seventh Congress of the Comintern to condemn the criminal policy he had himself imposed on the German Communists, and the newly adopted policy of the Popular Front strengthened Communist influenc
e in Western Europe.
With this he had won and survived. The old wounds healed. He was now in a position to reduce the despotic pressure. For a while he hesitated.
Had the masses of the people really forgotten what had happened or were they silent out of fear? He decided to put the matter to the test. After his victory on the agricultural front he granted the people a series of democratic concessions. The new Constitution was promised, the clause limiting the categories of candidates for higher schools was dropped, and his decree “The son is not responsible for the father” abolished the discrimination against the children of the old ruling classes. The Soviet Control Commission also forbade the secret dossiers which up to then had accompanied everyone every time he changed his job. Stalin began to talk of a happy life and ordered that increased care and attention should be paid to “the most valuable of all capital,” namely, human beings. And so on.
Through his various control and information organs he carefully studied the reactions of the masses to these new measures. But the masses took good care to keep a still tongue in their heads, and only the informers talked.
In the end Stalin sought refuge in a provocation: in the spring of 1936 he put a bill forward strictly prohibiting abortion, which, up to then, had been legal in the Soviet Union. At his bidding the Communist Party organized a discussion of the proposal up and down the country, in all factories and offices and on all collective farms. But the masses of the people were distrustful; they preferred to wait until the Party had given them some indication, not necessarily of what they had to think, but at least of what they had to say. But this time Stalin was quite serious: it really was to be a free discussion. He had issued his edict. The Party was forbidden to provide any of its usual “directives,” and Party members were not expected to express the same opinion. They therefore began to express their real opinions on the subject; some were in favor and some were against.
Encouraged by the sight of disagreement for the first time in many years, the masses of the people then joined in and a storm swept through the country. The women in particular came forward and vigorously condemned the proposed law.
‘We have no proper homes, there are not enough places in the crèches and the kindergartens as it is; times are too difficult to think of even more children. We don’t want to be only machines for conceiving, giving birth and suckling; at some time or other we want to be able to live like human beings.”
The majority against the proposed new law was overwhelming. But Stalin just ignored it and put the new law into operation at once in all its rigor. An increase in the birth rate was to make good the human losses incurred in the collectivization of agriculture.
But there was one important lesson Stalin had learned from his plebiscite, and that was that there could be no way back to freedom. The masses of the Russian people were still not well trained enough to anticipate his secret desires. If they were offered an inch they took an ell. It is quite possible, even likely, that in a free and open discussion of the past the Russian people would have forgiven Stalin his errors. At that time he had not yet stained his hands with the blood of the Old Guard of the revolution. But they would certainly never have tolerated any perpetuation of the ruling lie. The eleven million victims of the agricultural collectivization would have found a place in the minds and hearts of the people side by side with those slaughtered by German fascism.
But Stalin wanted the falsification of history. He was determined to use his all-powerful apparatus to enforce the maintenance of an historical fiction; the period of his rule was to go down in Russian history as one long succession of victories, as one long epoch of progress uninterrupted by any setback. The great famine and the defeats of the German and the Chinese workers were to cease to exist in history. The memory of the people was to be blotted out.
He gave his secret police a gigantic task: to eliminate the vessels of national consciousness. “There must be hundreds of thousands of people in the country who hate me,” he seems to have said to himself. “The men and women who were my comrades in the revolt against Tsarist despotism cannot now approve of my despotism. They must therefore be liquidated.”
It was Stalin in person who gave Yezhov his instructions for the Great Purge. It was Stalin himself who indicated the groups which were to be destroyed:
1. All former members of the Trotsky, Zinoviev and Bukharin oppositions.{19}
2. All Old Bolsheviki in general.
3. All former Red partisans.
4. All former Mensheviki, Social Revolutionaries, Anarchists, Bundists and former members of all other pre-revolutionary left-wing parties.
All such people had fought in one way or another for freedom, therefore they represented a potential danger to any despotic regime.
5. All people who had lived abroad and knew by their own experience the pre-war period, and all people who had friends and relatives living abroad and maintained correspondence with them; the stamp collectors and the Esperantists.
6. The former political emigrants who had since returned to the Soviet Union, and all people who had at any time been sent abroad on missions.
7. All foreign Communists in the Soviet Union.
8. The members of the military secret service working abroad and all the agents of the G.P.U. abroad.
All the people in the above categories were aware of the truth and would therefore not believe Stalin’s falsification. They had read the liberal newspapers and they had read Trotsky’s books, and therefore they were dangerous.
9. Those people who belonged to national minority groups.
10. All members of religious sects.
Both these latter categories are unusually homogeneous, which makes infiltration by G.P.U. agents very difficult. Therefore it is impossible to control their activities adequately.
11. All former members of the Party who had been expelled.
12. All people who had suffered injustice at some time or other at the hands of Soviet power.
13. The relatives of leading members of the various opposition groups.
Such people must hate those who broke up their families, and therefore they were dangerous.
14. All those who had won any popularity with and influence over the masses of the people without Stalin’s favor—for instance, men like Tukhachevsky and Yakir in the Red Army. Such people could be rallying points for a popular insurrection or at least a military revolt.
15. All those highly placed people in the Party who were horrified at the brutalities of the Moscow trials and of the Great Purge itself and sought to restrain the dictator, including certain members of the Politburo such as Kossior, Postishev and Eikhe.
Whoever expressed or evinced the slightest doubt as to the truth of the “confessions” branded himself thereby as an “enemy of the people.”
The members of the G.P.U. who had organized the Moscow trials and the Great Purge itself.
They knew too much. At the same time they might be useful later as whipping boys for the excesses of the Great Purge.
Stalin’s mind worked very simply: After the Great Purge the memory of the nation would be blotted out. Not a schoolboy would ever again know that Trotsky was a great revolutionary or that millions of peasants had died of starvation at the time of the agricultural collectivization. My own past will appear without blemish. I shall go into history as the organizer of victory. The G.P.U. carried out Stalin’s instructions. The dossiers were filled out and tens of thousands of arrest warrants were made out. But that was not enough for Stalin and Yezhov.
The G.P.U. had not taken long to learn that a prisoner who breaks down under torture gives the names of those who share his views. Everyone whose name was mentioned in this fashion was therefore arrested in his turn and the process began afresh. Every arrested man gave the names of a few more men, and thus the network of the Great Purge extended, and more and more “enemies of the people” were caught. That was Stalin’s guiding idea.
But its cunning overreached itse
lf. As the process extended, ideological connections became more and more tenuous, and at a certain point deliberate resistance on the part of the prisoners arose. Under torture they no longer gave the names of their friends but of Stalin’s friends, the ardent Stalinists, their enemies. The result was that the number of arrests rose to fantastic heights. And all the time the millions of those who were now under arrest were no more hostile to the dictator than the many more millions who were still outside his prisons and camps. Stalin’s idea that the first men arrested would, so to speak, “recruit” others for his net broke down, and once again, for the second time within a decade, the country was brought to the verge of the abyss.
Stalin persisted to the bitter end with the Great Purge. Today there is not a doubter left to disturb his peace. The history of the whole world knows no other example of such limitless power as his. And yet he has not succeeded in blotting out the memory of the Russian people. Under the heavy layer still glows the spark of freedom.
My explanation of the ultimate reasons which led to the Great Purge has been rejected by many critics, including above all the orthodox Marxists. Their argumentation is simple:
“The Great Purge was a mass movement. It drew millions of people into its orbit and changed the course of revolutionary history. Mass movements have social causes. To try and explain them by the psychological motives of an individual, through his ambition, vengeance, persecution mania or his desire for immortality, is contrary to the materialist conception of history.”
It is no task of mine here either to uphold or condemn the Marxian view of history, but even its most loyal upholders would today be prepared to admit some limit to its sphere of validity. It can never reveal more than systematic statistical trends, the laws of large numbers, and that lies not so much in its method as in the nature of the material with which it operates. Inevitably, therefore, its validity is restricted to systems which allow of the application of the statistical conception, i.e., to systems involving many gradations of freedom. But precisely Russian society in the Stalinist era is not such a system. To a very great extent the masses of the Russian people have lost their freedom to move independently of the will of the dictator. The science of sociology is helpless where systems are concerned in which an individual has usurped the freedom of society as a whole.
The Accused Page 66