13. The Great Terror

1937-38

13.1 Introduction

The Great Terror of 1937-38 was the means by which the rising Stalinist bureaucracy finally confirmed itself as the ruling stratum in Soviet society, destroying all actual and potential opposition. The entire older generation of Bolsheviks was exterminated, as were the best elements amongst the new.

The period of the purges coincided with the industrialisation of the Soviet Union which meant there were numerous political, economic, and social pressures, sometimes competing, sometimes complementing, sometimes overlapping: removing those who had worked with Lenin, remembered 1917 and could contradict the official version of events which praised Stalin to the skies; eliminating those in the party who might oppose the openly anti-Marxist policies and methods being adopted; and re-establishing the family as a bulwark of conservatism, while recruiting millions of women workers to carry through the industrialisation programme. These were carried out in ways largely determined by Russian culture and history, but with some novel features, such as party and factory meetings where comrades, colleagues and co-workers were turned against each other in an atmosphere poisoned with distrust and fear.

However, to understand the Great Terror, it is necessary to view it as a logical response by the bureaucratic caste to protect itself, to eliminate actual and potential opposition in the Communist movement, both within the Soviet Union and internationally.

With the body politic under increasingly strict control, the bureaucracy turned their attention to education, literature, philosophy, science, and the arts. Stalin was very sensitive to not having been a leading figure in the October Revolution, and extensive re-writing of history took place to present him as Lenin’s first lieutenant, as the real organiser of the Revolution, and to belittle and downgrade his opponents. The notorious History of the CPSU (Bolsheviks) Short Course, was drafted by Stalin personally and approved by the CC. Consequently, it was indisputable, and used in all Russian universities and schools, lowering party history to a string of lies and tall stories. Alternative views such as John Reed’s Ten Days that Shook the World, which Lenin had praised as a truthful account of the Revolution, were banned.

The Short Course played an important role ideologically and historically. All secondary school children and university students were immersed in this compilation of Stalinist myths and deceptions. Generations of Soviet teachers were condemned to parrot the absurdities it contained. The Short Course was used to restructure history. Honest historians were amongst the first to disappear.

It also meant teachers, overwhelmingly women, had to be evaluated and approved. In April 1936, the CC called for an assessment of the fitness of every teacher in the Soviet Union. All teachers were to be interviewed by a “certification commission” which was concerned more with political background than lesson plans or teaching ability. Reasons for refusing a certificate (dismissal) included “not worthy of political trust” and many were refused certificates on the grounds they had been associated with opposition currents, or had a relative arrested for “sabotage” or “wrecking”.^[1] Teachers not only had to teach the Short Course, but also had the responsibility of vetting school textbooks and pasting card over the photos of party leaders who had fallen into disgrace. Due to the shortage of printed material in some areas, the only available reading books were those that had been officially banned. In Magnitogorsk, in one year, four teachers were removed for using such material.^[2] Librarians were instructed that once a prominent party member was arrested, all copies of his/her writings were to be purged from their stocks, with any oversight deemed a counter-revolutionary act. Back copies of Pravda and Izvestia were classified as forbidden reading.

Literature and the arts were now crudely and quickly brought to heel. The most popular authors were assigned a “co-author” who, page by page, would ‘ask’ for certain passages to be removed, or re-written to a different effect, and so on. The Writers’ Union formed ‘mopping-up’ squads to tour second-hand book shops to remove the works of writers criticised by the leadership.^[3] The intellectual spirit of the country was warped by the poisons of deception, falsehood and out-and-out historical falsifications, which assumed an ever more vulgar and brutish character.

Stalin and his cabal now introduced into the party the corrosive idea that, because open criticism had been suppressed, anti-party elements – “double dealers” – would voice agreement with party policy to hide their real intentions. From now on everybody was under suspicion, because counter-revolutionary elements had to appear as good party members to conceal their real intentions. Younger party members were being prepared to accept previously venerated Old Bolsheviks as anti-party wreckers.

13.2 Why the Purges?

Toward the end of 1930, signs of stress in the First FYP were obvious. The breakneck speed, authoritarian attitudes, and lack of any democratic control were creating one disaster after another. Party members voiced their concerns, but these conscientious and honest local party cadres were not listened to, and instead they were sacked.^[4]

During the First FYP, the party had expanded from just over 1.25 million at the start of 1928, to about 3.5 million on 1 January 1933. With such a rapid expansion, during which the workforces of whole factories had been recruited in their entirety, the quality of new members was generally poor, many did not meet the minimum standards of honesty, integrity and sobriety required of even a Stalin-ised Communist Party. Thus, there were several purges of the AUCP(B) between 1929 and 1933 to increase the efficiency of, and respect for, the party. Expulsion usually resulted in little more than personal embarrassment – only oppositionists faced losing their jobs and arrest.

“Complete collectivisation in five years” had generated such hostility, especially amongst peasants in the Ukraine and the adjoining Caucasus, that open revolt was avoided only by the presence of troops, artillery, and tanks.^[5] Better weather, the leavening of the collective farms with thousands of party members and the partial retreat from complete collectivisation that permitted the return of peasant small holdings, ameliorated the situation with a noticeable improvement in living conditions.

However, most peasants remained sullenly hostile to the regime. All too often NKVD summaries of local opinions now included statements to the effect that soon the Soviet Union would be attacked by Germany “and we will help them” – a nightmare scenario for the bureaucracy.^[6] Naturally, the bureaucracy attempted to place the blame for its failings elsewhere. It launched a series of trials for sabotage of meat supplies, of coal supplies, of the Department of Agriculture, of the Planning Commission, of the Finance Commissariat, of bacteriologists, and historians. Opposition parties such as the ‘Industrial Party’ and the ‘Peasant Party’ were conjured up by the secret police and provocateurs. Trials were held, in which “bourgeois specialists” confessed profusely to “sabotage” and “wrecking”, were found guilty and liquidated. The definition of wrecking was increasingly extended so that responsible technical personnel would be arrested and indicted for sabotaging the production process whether a worn out machine failed or was shut down for repairs. They were summarily tried and sent to prison (or executed).^[7] For large enterprises that were not exceeding their production targets, the entire party apparatus could be ‘cleaned out’ with the local media making every effort to blame these individuals for systemic failings. In Magnitogorsk, this happened three times in consecutive years resulting, of course, in an even lower output.

In the outlying districts it was common practice to arrest the wives and families for not having informed their husband or relative. Despite that, women often led the few protests that took place. Several hundred women gathered outside the NKVD headquarters in Magnitogorsk with packages of food and clothing for their husbands. After waiting for hours, they were told no packages would be accepted. Within five minutes every pane of glass was shattered. The authorities arrested no-one since the jail was already full – where would they put 500 women?^[8] By the mid-1930s it was clear that the leadership’s methods of determining AUCP(B) policy had been to falsify information, distort the discussions and physically silence their opponents. In such a party, unquestioning obedience was essential, free discussion was impossible, and no opposition could be allowed because it might co-ordinate the widespread dissatisfaction with the regime. However, thousands of Bolsheviks who had participated in the October Revolution formed a stratum in the party and state that could coalesce into a potential opposition if they had the necessary motivation. Some dire shock or sudden danger to the whole of the Soviet system might rally the scattered and downhearted. Such cadres might become centres of mass opposition to the dictatorial regime. The Great Terror unleashed by Stalin had the “goal of preventing the possibility that any people or groups would arise in the party who wished to return the party to Lenin’s inner-party democracy …”.^[9]

The joint CC and Central Control Commission launched a purge in January 1933 with the declared aim: “to guarantee iron proletarian discipline in the party and to expel from the party’s ranks all unreliable and irresolute elements and hangers-on”.^[10] Stalin was clearing the decks not only of drunks and incompetents, but also of those whose ‘Bolshevik’ firmness and resolution was deemed inadequate for the dirty tasks ahead. This purge would last until 1936 and reduce the party membership from about three and a half million full and candidate members to two million. Stalin would proclaim a firmer and more unquestioning unity than ever at the Seventeenth Party ‘Victory’ Congress (January 1934), but within five years, over half of the participants would have ‘disappeared’.^[11]

Even as the party was purged, the expansion of the economy meant the bureaucracy was constantly recruiting capable individuals from the lower strata who, by demonstrating unquestioning and unthinking servility, could be recruited to the nomenklatura. The flood of recruits further transformed the composition of the party. Plant managers, chiefs of construction and engineering, and the new intelligentsia (technical specialists in industry and the state machine) made up the majority of new members. Stalin threw open the gates to upward mobility and greatly increased the rewards on offer to those prepared to carry out his most vile instructions. At the same time, to underline the need for loyalty to the regime, the families of party members found to be ‘enemies of the people’ lost not only their loved ones to the camps, but were thrown onto the streets as pariahs, losing their homes, furniture, income, and friends.

The peculiar nature of the bureaucracy as a ruling caste usurping the rights of the proletariat, gave rise to all sorts of contradictions. It spoke in the name of Bolshevism, while systematically trampling underfoot all the traditions of Bolshevism. The illegitimate nature of their privileges and perks, the obvious contradiction between the proclamations of ‘socialism’ and the growing inequality in society, meant the upstart bureaucrats feared for those privileges. They concluded it was essential to silence everyone who could point an accusing finger and remind the masses – or even the bureaucrats themselves – of how things used to be, or should be.

Eliminating all opposition – actual or potential – and the implantation of a totalitarian regime, was a necessary condition for the final consolidation of the ruling bureaucracy. The Society of Old Bolsheviks and the Society of Former Political Prisoners and Deportees, by custom and practice, considered they had the right to criticise the leadership. The former was summarily dissolved by the Politburo on 25 May 1935, and the secretary of its central executive committee expelled from the party for “political and moral corruption”. The latter was closed on 23 June.^[12]

13.3 The Party, Trade Unions, and the Great Terror

On 1 December 1934, Kirov, head of the Leningrad party and Politburo member, was assassinated while in his office. A secret directive issued on Stalin’s instructions on the day of the assassination, and subsequently approved by the Politburo, effectively deprived those accused of terrorist acts of any right of defence, and investigation was to be followed by immediate execution. With the Kirov assassination, the situation in the party changed dramatically and the purges to root out undesirables became a massive witch-hunt of possible dissidents under Stalin’s personal control.^[13]

The primary aim of the purges was to eliminate those who remembered October and the Leninist party. To achieve this Stalin had to be able to rely on the higher levels of the hierarchy to carry out a cull of comrades, friends, even family members, and that is why the purge was doubly severe at the higher levels of the party and the armed forces. To achieve the goal of defending its interests, the bureaucracy needed complete domination of party and state. A major contradiction of the Great Terror was that to uproot all actual and potential opposition, the very people to be removed had to participate in the exercise. Practically the whole ruling layer was to be replaced by a younger generation, lacking any ties to Bolshevism and raised in the spirit of unlimited devotion to Stalin.

On 19 August 1936, the curtain rose on a scarcely credible scene in a Moscow court room. Accused of the murder of Kirov (at Trotsky’s behest) were Zinoviev, Kamenev and fourteen other outstanding figures from Lenin’s ‘general staff’, co-founders of both the Bolshevik Party and the Communist International. Prosecuting them was Andrei Vyshinsky, a former right-wing Menshevik. Zinoviev and Kamenev freely confessed their ‘guilt’ to all major charges and vied with the prosecutor in painting the worst possible picture of their ‘crimes’. On the sixth day, all sixteen victims were sentenced and within twenty-four hours they had been shot.

At a Nuremburg rally in September 1936, Hitler laid claim to the Ukraine as part of the German Lebensraum. A frightened Stalin continued to pursue Popular Frontism in the Western bourgeois democracies, but concluded that such alliances were unlikely to offer real protection against the German army. A deal with Hitler seemed the safer bet. Given the likely length of the negotiations between Hitlerite Germany and Stalinist Russia, we can say with some certainty that Stalin, during 1937, concluded that a deal with Hitler was necessary even if it meant the Soviet Union becoming the quartermaster for the Nazis’ war ambitions in Western Europe.

Foreign communists living in the Soviet Union were seen as a threat to the regime. By August 1937, the entire Central Committee of the Communist Party of Poland was in prison and the party disbanded by the ECCI Presidium on the trumped-up charge that it had been infiltrated by Polish fascist and Trotskyite-Bukharinite agents.^[14] As many as 50,000 Poles living in the USSR were shot – by 1940 it was safer to be in jail in Nazi occupied Warsaw than ‘at liberty’ in Moscow. The German Communist Party (KPD), the leadership and thousands of members of which had fled to the Soviet Union, also suffered badly, and by mid-1938 not a single German immigrant remained at liberty. Many of the arrested Germans were handed over to the Gestapo in early 1940 in a horrifying deal between the two dictators.^[15] By November 1941, over 600,000 ethnic Germans had been deported to settlements in Kazakhstan and Siberia with their children and elderly family members.

German expansion into Austria and the Sudetenland (1938) confirmed Stalin’s view that a deal with Hitler was necessary, and a non-aggression pact was ratified by the Supreme Soviet on 1 September 1939, the very same day that Germany invaded Poland. This Hitler-Stalin Pact was greeted by the ECCI as a triumph of the great Socialist Republic’s peace policy. The anti-fascist alliance was discarded. In an attempt to buttress its western defences, the Red Army invaded Poland on 17 September, Finland on 30 November 1939, and Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania on 14 June 1940. The reason why the German, Polish and Baltic communist parties suffered so badly was now obvious. Extensive and bloody purges were necessary to get the remnants of these parties to support a deal which strengthened Hitler, partitioned Poland and had the Red Army invade the Baltic states.^[16]

On 23 January 1937, a second trial opened in Moscow. The seventeen accused included figures who had been acclaimed heroes of the Revolution. Making a pact with Hitler to bring back the capitalism they had overthrown was the principal accusation against Trotsky and the defendants in these public trials. However, the campaign against leading oppositionists was giving them hero status in the eyes of many who were suffering under industrialisation and collectivisation. The accused had to be hated by the masses, and charges of criminal actions against the Soviet people were added; of having kept Soviet stores empty of necessities such as butter, salt, sugar, and tobacco, of putting ground glass into the butter supply, and so on. Of course, the accused confessed to all charges.^[17]

The CC Plenum from 22 February to 5 March 1937, was held in an atmosphere of fear – deliberately conjured by Stalin – that oppositionists might mobilise the discontent of the workers and give a revolutionary lead to the widespread hostility to the regime.^[18] The solution proposed was for the party itself to take a high-profile lead in a struggle against unpopular local leaders. Cynically presented as revitalising links between party tops and the rank and file, the prime targets were those who had been a member of the party under Lenin’s leadership or expressed oppositional views.

At the Plenum, Stalin and Andrei Zhdanov, secretary of the CC and the Leningrad party organisation, criticised numerous violations of party democracy: local officers appointed wholesale ahead of elections, lack of accountability by officials to the organisations they notionally represented, decision-making bodies not meeting for years. Zhdanov demanded a revitalised party with greater internal democracy, purged of all oppositionists. He called for “an end to appointments from above,” for “multi-candidate, secret-ballot elections from top to bottom,” and “greater accountability of Party leaders before their members”. The party had to be rebuilt “on the basis of unconditional and full realisation of internal party democracy”.^[19] For a short time, at the base of the party, some of these promises were believed.

The Plenum agreed that the widespread anti-democratic practices in the party were the work of counter-revolutionary Trotskyites, who had seized the leadership of cities and even entire regions in order to generate dissatisfaction with the party apparatus. At the last moment, Stalin proposed that to avoid unnecessary disruption to the party and state machines due to the to-ing and fro-ing of leading cadres during the promised election campaign, each leader should prepare someone to act as their replacement. Behind the scenes Stalin had estimated the numbers involved: “three to four thousand high-ranking leaders. … thirty to forty thousand middle level leaders. … about one hundred thousand to one hundred fifty thousand in the lower party command staff”.^[20]

Stalin was moving beyond uprooting members of an opposition; he was now proposing full replacement of all the “number one people” in all the apparatuses of power. The minutes of the Plenum, when distributed, contained an ominous change in the title of his report – it now read ‘On the Shortcomings of Party Work and on Measures to Liquidate the Trotskyites and other Double-dealers’. No-one was in any doubt about what it meant to “liquidate the Trotskyites”, but Zhdanov’s statement that Trotskyites had taken control of entire cities and even regions, had many top-level bureaucrats shaking in their shoes. However, these apparatchiks^[21] were effectively isolated by the vertical and anti-democratic structure of the party.

Stalin was out to destroy those within the party and administration who might have been capable of forming an alternative government – all party members who had been part of the Leningrad administration under Zinoviev, or the Moscow administration under Kamenev, all those in the trade unions promoted by Tomsky, all those within the government machine promoted by Rykov, diplomats who owed their careers to Rakovsky, officers who had served under Trotsky, and so on. Years later Molotov confirmed the reasons for the trials and purges: “Of course … we went too far, but I feel that all this was admissible for the sake of one fundamental thing: to somehow retain power!”.^[22]

The Politburo, Stalin’s ‘team’, most of whom went on to die of old age in their beds, were selected because they could be blackmailed; in their background was something that Stalin could use to bring them down. The chosen men (women were a rare exception) were hard working but without initiative; they were political mediocrities who could never challenge their leader. “Kliment Voroshilov was the worst marshal in the Soviet army (and he knew it). When the others were being arrested, he told the equally dim-witted Mashal Budionny, ‘Don’t worry; they are only arresting the clever ones’”.^[23]

Vadim Rogovin, in his detailed and authoritative history of the Great Terror, concluded that the total number of persons arrested for political crimes during the Stalin period reached almost four million.^[24] He also claims that between 700,000 and 800,000 were executed, about 350,000 in each of 1937 and 1938, after which there was a sharp drop.

Despite the camouflage of assurances that his measures were to be taken as a widening of inner-party democracy, the final version of Stalin’s report published at the end of March made clear his plan for fully replacing the upper echelons. From the smallest cell to the largest national republic, there would be the replacement of those in power with a new, amenable, and acquiescing generation who were yearning to hold positions of power and privilege. Having been trained in the Stalin school, they accepted that hierarchy and obedience were inviolable laws of party structure and questioning of decisions had no part in political life.^[25] The removal of the older generation enhanced chances of promotion, and the ambitious and able could find themselves being chauffeur-driven in limousines, occupying spacious apartments in buildings specially constructed for the Soviet elite, and enjoying all kinds of other privileges. This new generation of career-minded youth would show their commitment to Stalin by zealously carrying out the despicable acts he demanded.^[26] It was noticeable that the term “Old Bolshevik” was dropped from the press and party literature at this time, after all, it would have been embarrassing to identify so many of those denounced as traitors as having been heroes of the October Revolution with direct links to Lenin.

The promised re-election of party officials was a democratic façade meant to deceive the masses. NKVD supervision of all aspects of party life ensured no big surprises. On 21 March 1937, Pravda published the CC’s call for free and open nomination of candidates for party office with election by secret ballot; this was accompanied by a series of local show trials over the summer and autumn of 1937. In contrast to the Moscow trials, with their over-the-top tales of international intrigue and conspiracies, these local trials tended to feature indictments that were plausible: accusations of abusive, arbitrary, and incompetent behaviour that were typical of lower-level Soviet officials who had got too big for their boots.

In March 1937, the VTsSPS (All-Russian Central Council of Trade Unions) held its first plenum since 1931. Here, Nikolai Shvernik, first secretary of the VTsSPS – appointed by Stalin to replace Tomsky – reprimanded union leaders for violating democratic principles by occupying posts to which they had not been elected. Strongly hinting that oppositionists occupied numerous posts, he announced new elections in all unions with “unlimited right to criticise candidates”. His message was clear, the elections would be an opportunity for the unions to actively identify and denounce the enemies in their midst; wreckers and saboteurs who included officials who had supported the Right Opposition when Tomsky headed the VTsSPS.

The VTsSPS leadership attempted to lay the blame for industrial accidents, breaks in production, violation of safety rules, and sub-standard housing, on wreckers who had flourished because democracy had withered. The fault lay with lower-level union officials who had not listened to the grievances of workers. Lower and intermediate layers of officials attempted to present themselves as victims of higher-grade bureaucrats, hoping to shift the blame and escape condemnation. Workers replied: ‘A plague on both your houses’, and linked calls for improved health and safety to a clean sweep of union bureaucrats. The belief was that they could elect new leaders who would take working conditions seriously. For rank and file workers, the Great Terror began as an anti-bureaucratic call for more democratic control of workplaces and improved working conditions.

Workers embraced the campaign for union democracy. In every union there was almost a complete replacement of those tops inherited from the Right Opposition, and this electoral shake-up enabled a new generation of party members, subject to NKVD approval, to catapult themselves from local leadership into positions of national importance.^[27]

During this period when the voices of workers could be heard, Voronina, a woman in her fifties working at Elektrozavod, a large Moscow electrical factory which employed over 20,000 people, was appointed to the VTsSPS Presidium. In her maiden speech, she argued that if VTsSPS leaders genuinely cared about workers they would attempt to increase wages and improve living conditions, and then she addressed topics of particular concern to women.

Her first issue was the segregation of women into less well-paid jobs. In Elektrozavod, women workers, some with two or three children and no husbands, earned only 150 roubles a month when the average monthly wage in the factory was nearly 200 roubles. She compared actual conditions with the promises made in the Stalin Constitution. Everyone had the right to work, to education, and to rest. But her fellow women were forever being turned down when they applied for more advanced training. Voronina complained that working conditions for women were generally deplorable and getting worse. After the 1936 decree prohibiting abortion, the factory director had promised to build a crèche for 180 infants. She explained that because of the decree, there were 500 women on maternity leave, 300 more ready to take maternity leave, and 200 women bringing their babies to the factory, but did the factory build the crèche? No.

She continued; housing had not kept pace with the massive influx of new workers from the countryside. People slept on the factory floor, or on benches, or in make-shift huts. Older workers who had lost their strength could not retire on miserly pensions. They deserved better. Sick workers were deprived of rightful insurance awards by bureaucrats determined to ‘economise’ on funds. She roundly criticised union officials for ignoring the plight of the very people they were supposed to represent. When she had finished speaking, the entire audience burst into spontaneous applause.^[28] Yet these were the people largely responsible for the conditions described. Voronina’s critique posed a dangerous dilemma for the VTsSPS leaders – if they accepted that working conditions were bad, why had they not done anything to rectify them?

Aleksandra Artyukhina, a Stalin stalwart, and from 1934-38 head of the cotton workers trade union with 350,000 members, also criticised the VTsSPS leaders for failure to come to the aid of the smaller unions. Her members, predominantly women, could scarcely feed their children on their regular wages but because they were on piecework, the incessant machine stoppages seriously reduced their already-small pay packets. Despite her numerous visits to VTsSPS headquarters seeking advice and assistance, the tops had always been too busy to see her. Echoing Voronina, she stated that she, too, was furious about the lack of childcare facilities needed more than ever after the abortion decree, and demanded to know why VTsSPS hadn’t concerned itself with that.

On the twentieth Anniversary of the October Revolution the Moscow News reported:

Soviet trade unions are in the process of thorough re-organisation … In the new conditions brought about by the gigantic growth of Socialism, the leading trade union bodies were not up to the mark. They had become isolated from the masses and could not, therefore, lead their matured political activity …

The article then indicated the extent of the changes:

90 per cent of the members of the Central Committees of the Unions are newly elected. 55 per cent of the chairmen of Central Committees and 85 per cent of the secretaries are also serving their first terms. The most capable men and women loyal to the Party are being promoted to leadership …^[29]

Trade union officials were the section of the apparatus closest to the masses and most directly affected by their pressure. Elected against a background of democratic phrases, many of the new officials tried to remedy the ills of the systems. But the real meaning of the elections became clear with NKVD arrests of both new and old leaders. These “most capable” and “loyal” party members were soon found wanting. Pravda ecstatically greeted the newly-purged 1939 model trade unions led by: “The flower of the working class … the chosen of the people … people worthy of highest awards … trade union activists who had matured in recent years, educated by the party of Lenin-Stalin.”^[30] But within nine months, and in their turn, these “flowers” were found to be darmoyedniki (scoundrels who eat bread which they hadn’t earned) and bezdelniki (scoundrels who idled away their time), virtually all of them would be imprisoned, exiled or shot. The reality was that there was no room at the top for anyone but a hardened Stalin supporter appointed from above.

Party elections scheduled for June 1937 were to be preceded by ‘accountability’ meetings at which questions and criticisms from the rank and file were encouraged. The lower down the hierarchy the more intense the scrutiny, the higher up the more likely a phone call from the NKVD would confirm with the meeting organiser who was to be elected, and without too much fuss. This was not always a smooth operation. Khrushchev was in charge of the relevant Moscow meeting, he stepped out to receive a phone call from Stalin, and on returning found Politburo member Georgy Malenkov, being aggressively questioned and on the point of being rejected. Khrushchev hurriedly intervened to save the day.^[31] There was no repetition of such open elections for top posts.

On 2 March 1938, the third great public trial began. Among the twenty-one accused sat Bukharin, editor of Pravda from 1918 until April 1929, and from 1926 the official head of the CI; Rakovsky had been the head of the Ukrainian government and later Soviet ambassador to London and Paris; and Yagoda ex-head of the NKVD and Stalin’s most trusted henchman, who had cooked up the Zinoviev-Kamenev trial in its entirety (and not too well). Once again, the NKVD made the mistake of introducing claims that could be independently tested and, as expected, they were found to be a pack of lies. Exposure of these lies and proof that the confessions were total fabrications did not, of course, save the accused from execution.^[32] The means by which the ‘confessions’ were obtained were revealed in Khrushchev’s speech at the Twentieth Congress of the Russian Communist Party: “… all their cases were fabricated. Confessions of guilt of many arrested and charged with activity were gained with the help of cruel and inhuman tortures”.^[33] The threats included, as we now know, the murder of family members.

These trials provided only the most spectacular incidents in the blood purge that swept the Soviet Union. Less spectacular than the Moscow trials, but of equal importance, was the liquidation of party members who could possibly be a threat in the future: those who had been associated with one or other of the Oppositions, those whose membership pre-dated the Civil War, those who had gained their post independently of Stalin, and those in the younger generation who had retained their idealism. The best qualities (e.g., independently minded, loyal to Leninist ideals) of Old Bolsheviks in senior positions in the party were coming into ever sharper conflict with the tasks which Stalin was placing before them. Old Bolsheviks had long enough memories to know that the charges made in the show trials were nonsense, as were the claims by Stalin to have been the organiser of the October Revolution. Thus, there was a certain inevitability to the extermination of the Old Guard, including those who had never joined any anti-Stalinist opposition, and even been party, to one degree or another, to the process of degeneration.^[34] Many simply disappeared and were expunged from the historical record with no charges, no explanations, no trials, and no reports of executions.

Daniels noted that the national minorities were hardest hit.^[35] The elimination and replacement of local leaders by appointed figureheads with fewer independent roots was a preventive measure against the development of local oppositions to the Kremlin’s authority. The Ukraine had suffered disproportionately in the famine and voices had been raised within the Ukrainian CP calling for a change in policy. When Khrushchev visited the Ukraine at the beginning of 1938 the party membership “was what they called ‘clean’: not a single secretary of an area committee, not a single chairman of an area executive committee was left … nor any of his deputies”.^[36] Most of these had been executed – many without any formal charges having been brought.

The duration of the Great Terror and the depth to which it penetrated Soviet society showed it was something quite different from a reaction to treasonous conspiracies. The purpose of the trials and the purges:

… was to draw a line of blood between the bureaucracy and the real traditions of Marxism-Leninism. It was necessary to break the knot of history, to destroy utterly the old traditions of workers’ democracy and internationalism, to leave nothing behind that could remind future generations of the real meaning of October. Thus, it was not enough to torture and murder the Old Bolsheviks. They had to be made to cover themselves in filth, to publicly renounce their ‘crimes’, and to sing the praises of Stalin.^[37]

Between 1935 and 1939, apart from Stalin’s chosen henchmen entrenched in the Politburo, Orgburo and Secretariat, who escaped almost unscathed, practically every representative of the Old Guard on the CC simply disappeared, presumably dispatched by the NKVD. In the same period, the proportion of local secretaries who had joined the party before the civil war fell from about 80 per cent to about 20 per cent.^[38] Daniels claims that by 1939, outside of the Politburo there remained at liberty only seven individuals in the whole party who had held any senior position before Lenin’s death.^[39]

13.4 Women and the Purges

During the run up to, and in the early stages of the purges, women in the USSR were confronted by a series of issues that appeared independent but were integral to the growing social conservatism imposed by the bureaucracy. An anti-abortion propaganda campaign was followed by the 1936 law which meant abortion was banned, unless continuing with the pregnancy threatened the woman’s life. Combined with the absence of effective contraception, women were no longer in control of their own fertility, effectively barring the great majority from ever achieving their aspirations and from planning their lives. As would be expected, the number of illegal abortions rose substantially, resulting in a sharp upturn in abortion-related haemorrhages, infections, fevers, peritonitis, and mortality.

The new ‘Soviet family’ was becoming an important state-supported institution, and this had a serious political, economic, and social impact on the status and role of women. In contrary to the original aim of the Revolution, the new regime deliberately fostered a patriarchal household, strengthened the family and imposed domestic responsibilities on women, setting serious practical limits on their participation in all aspects of Soviet life. The family was to be a pivotal social institution, a bulwark of the new bureaucratic society. The value attached to family stability was at the cost of restricting freedom to marry, divorce, and choose whether to bear children. Such attitudes resulted in declining female participation, verging on almost exclusion from political positions of any real importance. Lapidus later confirmed what Trotsky had said forty years previously, the “socialist” family had a “critical role in sustaining new patterns of authority”, providing a base of support for the bureaucracy.^[40] Of course, when the mass arrests of 1937 began, the official attitude to the family underwent a corresponding change, and filial duty and loyalty to one’s parents became secondary to complete loyalty to the state.^[41]

Once again women were at the focus of the contradictions between the driving forces of the planned economy and the bureaucracy’s imposition of policies designed to defend its interests. Women were strongly encouraged to take advantage of the plethora of opportunities offered to progress their education and take better paid and more prestigious jobs. Education was accepted as essential to transform the Soviet Union from a backward agrarian society to a modern society. It was a channel that offered women opportunities for advancement not previously seen anywhere. For those women who were able to benefit this was a great time, and tens of thousands of women graduated as doctors, lawyers, teachers, scientists, engineers, and managers. This period laid the basis for the Soviet Union to have the highest proportion in the world of women doctors, engineers, scientists, and technologists. The legacy would continue, and in the 1970s, about 40 per cent of all engineering students across the Soviet bloc were women, while in the United States women were awarded less than 5 per cent of engineering degrees.^[42]

Simultaneously, very real barriers were being placed in their way. The family policy of the bureaucracy strengthened traditional patriarchal attitudes towards women which, as Lewin has correctly pointed out, gave bourgeois academics a major criticism to level at “state socialism”.^[43] Women returned home after a hard working day to hours of household chores, contributing to widespread chronic fatigue and dissatisfaction, aggravated by the inadequate supply of domestic appliances.

A great advance in Soviet life that had a triple impact on women, as women, mothers, and carers, was the introduction of a national health service, named after Nicolai Semashko, USSR’s health minister from 1918 to 1930. The system caused an international sensation both on the political left and in the medical profession.^[44] For the vast majority of the population, the Semashko system was life changing, and to a much greater extent than the introduction of the NHS in the UK because, before the revolution, the masses of Russian people received so little health education that even antiseptics and disinfectants were largely unknown outside the towns. Visitors to the Soviet Union were especially impressed by the maternity hospitals and childcare facilities, not least because the majority of doctors were women. Of course, as with any brand-new system of such complexity it had faults, and for some time was not fully available everywhere. At that time, in the advanced western countries, including the United States, such care was beyond the means of most of the population. Typically, an average grade doctor would be paid the same as an engineer. However, by the mid-thirties, doctors were permitted to do supplementary work at a second institution and be paid accordingly, and later doctors could set themselves up in private practice; in their majority these would serve the nomenklatura.

The first wave of mass arrests following the December 1934 murder of Kirov, included perceived enemies and their family members, and bore down hard on women. In the spring of 1935, the NKVD rounded up over 10,000 so-called ‘Kirov’s assassins’ and their families and deported them to northern Siberia. An internal memorandum dated 3 July 1937, ordered NKVD units to compile lists of the family-members of all those who had been sentenced. When arranging deportations to settlements, the local NKVD was supposed to keep families together, not as a charitable act, but as a cost-effective measure because separated families fled settlements to reunite.

Although a far greater number of men than women were arrested and executed, women were members of every group targeted by the state. In May and June of 1937, former Oppositionists who had been excluded from the party were exiled from key cities along with their families. Women also fell victim to the mass and national operations, being included among kulaks and Polish, Latvian, and German immigrants successively singled out for arrest. The deportation of German “enemy nationals” gives an example of how terror practices under Stalin were gendered. According to the instructions given to the NKVD, families considered German for the purposes of deportation were only those in which an ethnic German represented the male head of the household. A German wife of a Russian man would not be subject to deportation.

In July 1937, the Politburo ruled that children aged fourteen and younger should be taken to orphanages, and the fate of older children would be decided individually depending on their ages and attitudes. On 30 July 1937, the NKVD received Order 00447, ‘On repressive operations against former kulaks, criminals and other anti-Soviet elements’, which specified that “as a rule” family members would not be punished, although the order did list as exceptions those “capable of active anti-Soviet activities.” The document split those liable to “punitive measures” into two categories: the most active were to be subject to immediate arrest and, after consideration of their case, to be shot; the remaining less active but, nonetheless, hostile elements would be arrested and confined for a term ranging from eight to ten years, in either a camp or prison as determined by the NKVD. The ‘fairness’ of the process can be seen by the NKVD being set regional targets, totalling some 70,000 in the first category and about 200,000 in the second, with individuals moved from one category to another to balance the books. Order 00447 led to over 1.5 million arrests, and of these 236,000 people were executed.^[45] These decisions were made by extra-judicial NKVD Troikas which had no standing in the Soviet legal system. The quality and accuracy of the individual decisions made by the Troikas can be gauged knowing that a single Troika could deal with several hundred cases in one morning, less than one minute per person.^[46] The orders received by the NKVD meant the treatment received by political prisoners and their families was substantially worse than for any other prisoners:

… now, they were to be subject to hard labour, political discussion was to be ruthlessly suppressed, food was to be limited, an animal-like existence was to be imposed to break both their physical and mental capacity to resist. … from now on the inmates should be made incapable of the normal processes of thinking and formulating their views.^[47]

On 15 August 1937, Nicolai Yezhov, head of the NKVD, signed order 00486 which was kept secret for over fifty years, specifying that wives of convicted “traitors to the motherland”, and the “right-Trotskyist spying-sabotage organisations” were to be singled out for especially harsh treatment. Kinship itself became punishable. The order specified that, “henceforth the wives of unmasked traitors of the Motherland and right-Trotskyist spies should be arrested with their husbands” and subject to detention in a labour camp for “no less than five to eight years”, the length depending on how “socially dangerous” they were deemed. These wives included common-law wives, separated wives and divorcees, regardless of their beliefs or prior activities. Wives who denounced their husbands were exempted from the order, but the Finance Ministry instructed that they be denied child benefit. Exact numbers of ‘wives’ detained under Order 00486 are difficult to determine. A memorandum sent to Stalin in October 1938 noted that more than 18,000 wives had been arrested under its terms, including 3,000 from Moscow and 1,500 from Leningrad.^[48]

Stalin showed a particular concern with kinship, and the diary of Georgi Dimitroff, has Stalin declaring at a Kremlin reception on 7 November 1937: “we will eliminate every such enemy [of the state] … we will eliminate his entire lineage, his family! … Here’s to the final extermination of all enemies, both themselves and their clan”.^[49] Stalin was, of course, referring to those revolutionaries he believed posed a threat to the regime, to the bureaucracy. Thieves and murderers would continue to be dealt with as individuals; their relatives not punished. Only those accused of counter-revolutionary activities experienced the Terror as family units. As the Terror continued, ‘family’ became an elastic term, extending to co-habitants, relatives, friends and even work associates.

Overall, women constituted only a small percentage of those arrested, executed, or sent to the camps for political crimes during the Terror, but they suffered greatly as family members of those arrested. Between 24,000 and 34,000 women were executed in 1937-38, some 4 to 5 per cent of the total number of executions. Many were nuns rounded up as part of the anti-religious campaign. However, as the Terror proceeded, the number of women inmates rose both numerically and proportionately. In 1934 some 30,000 women comprised 5.9 per cent of inmates, in 1936, 51,000 and 6.1 per cent, and in 1938, 110,000 and 8.4 percent.^[50]

During the Terror, male kin were more likely to receive a death sentence than female. Tomsky’s two sons were shot, as were all the male relatives of Trotsky (except for one nephew). On the other hand, the daughters of Tukhachevsky were placed in a home for the children of purged officers. Once the mother was arrested the children were seized; the women were sent to camps and children to orphanages. Nursing mothers were separated from their babies when the child reached an age of between 12-18 months, and then the child was sent to an orphanage. The parents were not allowed to keep any reminder of the child, no photographs, no birth certificate, no keepsake. The separation of ‘enemy’ families was intended to be complete. Between August 1937 and May 1938, the NKVD sent 15,347 such children to orphanages.

Children under three were sent to orphanages close to home, and grandparents brave enough and politically ‘clean’ could adopt, subject to passing a systematic and all-embracing NKVD inspection. Children between three and 14 years old were sent to distant orphanages in other republics and regions. “Socially-dangerous children” were held in special NKVD camps, isolated from their families, and subject to intense ‘re-education’. Many of them were victims of abuse. After leaving the orphanages all children of “enemies” were barred from living in major urban centres, such as Moscow, Leningrad, and Kiev, and border or coastal cities. The children of arrested Oppositionists were placed in special orphanages – from which most of them disappeared.

On 7 April 1935, it had been decreed that children as young as twelve could be subject to all measures of criminal punishment, including the death penalty, and “at the time of execution of a male (political) prisoner, his imprisoned wife was automatically liable to capital punishment; and when it was a question of well-known members of the Opposition, this applied equally to any of his children over the age of 12”.^[51]

As the Terror unfolded, the state targeted a succession of political, social, and national groups, whose members were invariably connected to others outside the group through family ties. A loyal party member could have, for example, a so-called ‘kulak’ uncle, a former Trotskyist sister, or a Polish husband. Family members could be pulled into the vortex of terror solely due by the arrest of a distant relative who belonged to a persecuted group. Generally, ordinary citizens had no idea why their relatives had been arrested, nor did relatives receive information from NKVD or prison officials about the fate of those arrested. For most people, the Terror was experienced as an extended, continuous threat.

Every party member was required to provide written reports of events in their own lives and the lives of all those close to them. They were encouraged to include accusations of both a personal and political nature, as was the public at large. Since there was no requirement of proof, many reports were little more than gossip and the settling of personal scores. All too often it was a case of ‘telling on you, before you tell on me’, a trend which was greatly amplified in the later stages of the Terror when, after an arrest, those who had not made accusations were asked to justify their inaction.^[52] In much the same way, NKVD personnel were desperate not to be seen as shirking their responsibilities, and so there was a degree of competition to ensure they were not seen as negligent and an “anti-Soviet element”.

During the Great Terror, even family members of Stalin’s closest associates were arrested. The wives of party tops, including Mikhail Kalinin’s wife Ekaterina Kalinina and Molotov’s wife Polina Zhemchuzhina, spent periods in prisons or the Gulags. The big difference between these “enemies of the people” and others is that the wives were tried and found guilty of specific crimes. Their spouses were not then sent to a Gulag and, of course, they returned alive.

A party member who lost a spouse to prison was required by the party to denounce and sever all contact with them. Not every party member was willing to obey this injunction – brave women refused to denounce their husbands and were expelled from the party. As factory and party committees became pre-occupied with the degree of guilt of relatives, friends, and colleagues of those arrested, their actions became ever more extreme. A rapid divorce and denunciation by the spouse of the accused were insufficient; the wife had to answer the demand “How could you live with someone and not realise they were an enemy?”. Branch meetings, which had been largely devoted to increasing production, became bear-pits of accusation and counter accusation, all the more fierce and bitter because one or the other could end up in a Gulag based on nothing more substantial than a baseless allegation. Industry was being reduced to chaos and production nose-dived.

Stalin’s psychological peculiarities and cruelty can help to explain the grotesque and monstrous character which he gave to the Great Terror, but not the phenomenon itself. Stalin played on the worst sides of those who carried through his plans. In the absence of political principles and moral restraints, anything and everything could be used – slander, conjecture, lies. So deep was the gulf between Stalinism and Bolshevism, so great was Stalin’s need to eliminate all vestiges of the past and all witnesses, that the Soviet Union was subjected to a long and bloody nightmare.

13.5 The Comintern and the Terror

Ever the practical man, Stalin saw no reason to waste time by holding Congresses. As stated earlier, after Lenin’s death there were only three Comintern Congresses – one in 1924 to denounce Trotsky, one in 1928 to eliminate Bukharin’s influence and formally adopt the ‘theory’ of socialism in one country, and the third in 1935 at which the Popular Front was proclaimed. The reality was that the centre of gravity for the CI rapidly shifted from international congresses to the ECCI, then to the Presidium (where all significant decisions were determined by the Russian fraction), and finally to Stalin personally.

The Stalinist Comintern consigned the first four Congresses of the CI to the dustbin of history. The first reason was the absence of Stalin from the proceedings. In Jane Degras’ meticulous work, Stalin appears only twice before 1922, once in the appendix, where he is listed as a member of the large executive committee elected at the Second Congress, and once in a note by the editor that although the future dictator was supposedly a delegate at the First Congress, “there is no evidence, either in the records of the congress or in the accounts written by participants and observers, that he took any part in its meetings”.^[53]

Second, leading participants, such as Bukharin, Radek, Trotsky and Zinoviev were later murdered by Stalin’s secret police as “fascist mad dogs”. In the Moscow frame-up trials it was claimed that the wrecking activities of these people extended back to the first days of the Soviet Union. How then could their real activities be brought before the rank and file of the national sections?

Third, the policies followed by the Stalin regime were in open contradiction to those developed and adopted at the first four congresses. The membership of the CPs could hardly be encouraged to study the very texts on which the Trotskyists were basing their criticisms.

Fourth, a study of the first four Congresses reveals a picture of collective leadership. Lenin and Trotsky may have been the leading figures, but they were members of a team containing such contrasting types as Bukharin, Radek, and Zinoviev and which was able to combine knowledge, experience, and various skills, and not even the greatest member completely dominated. The Stalinist image of a genius laying down the correct political line after which the rank and file immediately and unquestioningly plunged into action was completely at odds with Lenin’s actual practice. Horror of horrors, the top leaders could find themselves in a minority and a majority vote did not always coincide with a correct estimate of events.

Fifth, with the rise of Stalinism, a study of the first four Congresses would have shone a spotlight on his quite reactionary personal attitude to women. The enthusiasm of the first Congresses for a Communist women’s movement, the importance given to organising women in and around the national parties, the journals and campaigns of Communist women were all crushed. The International’s women’s magazine was closed in 1925, the women’s secretariat in 1926, and the Zhenotdel in 1930.

Under the auspices of the CI, many communists took advantage of Article 129 of the ‘most democratic constitution in the world’, which unambiguously guaranteed the right of asylum to foreign citizens. Events in Europe, especially the coming to power of Hitler in Germany, meant that the Communist Party was banned in a swathe of countries (Austria, the Baltic countries, Finland, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Poland and Romania), so tens of thousands of communists fled to the USSR. The fate of these people can be summarised as: all foreign communists who had co-operated with Lenin before October 1917, during the October Revolution or during the first years of the CI, were exterminated. Virtually all the leaders of parties which had been outlawed in their own countries and who then sought asylum in the Soviet Union were exterminated. Of non-party individuals who sought the right of asylum in the USSR, over three quarters disappeared during the Great Terror. The figures are chilling: the number of communists exterminated by Stalin far outnumbered the total killed by Hitler and Mussolini. More communists from Eastern European countries were killed in the Soviet Union than died in their own countries during Nazi occupation.^[54]

The central apparatus of the Comintern had always been financially dependent upon the Russian Party, and with Stalin’s victory over Bukharin, was soon at the mercy of the NKVD. The Comintern was studded with members of the Soviet secret police from the Presidium and Secretariat downwards, and these had direct control of the CI’s financial affairs. Stalin established an interlocking network of party and secret police control over the Comintern’s top representatives so that top functionaries in the CI doubled as active agents of the NKVD. Thus, when the Great Terror was launched, there already existed within the CI a well-oiled machine as ready for the purge as any Soviet institution.^[55] By 1939 at the latest, all major policy decisions and personnel issues, including the composition of foreign communist party leaderships, were submitted to the NKVD in advance.^[56]

In the rare cases when a national party was called on to change its line, and the prestige of the October Revolution was insufficient to convince it, other means were available. “Financial serfdom … was one of the main levers used to keep the doings of all Comintern Parties subservient to the interests of the Soviet Union”. Funds raised by national CPs were required to be placed, in one way or another, under the direct or indirect control of Moscow which decided how much of it should be used by what organisation and for what purpose. For example, “it was an unwritten but iron law in the Comintern … that the wages of CC members must be paid not out of money obtained from membership dues, but out of the regular monthly subsidy from … Moscow”.^[57]

The ferocity of the persecution of the foreign communists was explained, to a significant degree, by Stalin’s fear that the socialist revolution in other lands might arise outside his control. As a result, the centre of the revolutionary movement might shift from Moscow, and the movement itself might end up under the leadership of Trotskyists, whose prestige was growing rapidly at that time. To maintain his control, Stalin ruthlessly annihilated foreign communists, except for those who showed their personal devotion and reliability through joint participation in his criminal actions.^[58]

As with the Politburo of the AUCP(B), the majority of Presidium and Secretariat of the Executive Committee of the Communist International survived. Previous ‘Bolshevisation’ campaigns had first removed Trotskyists, then Zinovievists, then Bukharinists. Those remaining at the top of the CI had proven their loyalty to Stalin and enjoyed privileges on a par with the highest Soviet bureaucrats. They had been selected precisely because they lacked independence of political thought or any other quality necessary for being a genuine communist. The surviving leaders had shown themselves prepared to betray their former friends and comrades, and now loyally recommended themselves as Stalin’s obedient executors in the struggle against all oppositions and deviations in the international communist movement.

Stalin maintained a constant pressure on the leaders of the Comintern, drawing them into the execution and justification of the political terror. Take for example the Yugoslav CP; all the top Yugoslav leaders – with the sole exception of Josip Broz, known as Tito – were declared “enemies and spies” and met the fate reserved for such unfortunates. By the time Tito arrived in Moscow in August 1938, about 800 Yugoslav communists had been arrested. At the 1939 Yugoslav Communist Party conference, it was announced that a successful purge had been carried out, in which Tito was an active participant. Tito may have believed in the justice of the Moscow trials, taking place in his beloved Soviet Union, but must have known the falseness of the charges made against comrades with whom he had worked hand in hand for years.

Secret police killings were not limited to the Soviet Union. Agents of the foreign departments of the NKVD murdered hundreds (even thousands) of people outside the Soviet Union, mostly during the civil war in Spain, when it became more important to ensure the defeat of the Spanish revolution than prevent the victory of Franco. To justify such actions, on 29 September 1936, the Politburo issued a declaration ‘On our attitude towards counter-revolutionary Trotskyists-Zinovievists’, which stated, “They are the spies, wreckers, and saboteurs of the Fascist bourgeoisie in Europe. … we need to finish them off”. Trotsky concluded: “If the Soviet bureaucracy succeeds … in ensuring the victory of reaction in Spain … A bourgeois counter-revolution (in the USSR) rather than an insurrection of the workers against the bureaucracy will be on the order of the day”.^[59] As events turned out, the Second World War cut across Trotsky’s prediction and, contrary to all expectations, saved the day for the bureaucracy.

The Politburo declaration was followed by a report by Stalin to a CC Plenum in February-March 1937, which sought to inoculate the national CPs from political criticism by re-defining the nature of his major political adversaries. Trotskyists were no longer to be seen as ideological or political opponents, but as criminals of the lowest order. Trotskyism had ceased to be a political tendency in the working class; it had turned into an unprincipled band of wreckers, saboteurs, spies and assassins, acting on the orders of the intelligence organisations of foreign states. No longer was it the methods of argument and discussion that were used, but “new methods, the methods of uprooting and routing”.^[60] Communist Party members internationally were freed from the impossible task of ideological struggle against ‘Trotskyism’, no longer did they have to justify the unjustifiable (the Moscow Trials, the Hitler-Stalin pact, etc.). From now on they could reply to political argument with physical punches. Some CPs had anticipated Stalin; as early as 1928 the leaders of the American CP had been inciting their members to physically attack sellers of The Militant, the paper of the US Trotskyists. The approved tactics appear to have been to choose women sellers, surround them, and hurl vile abuse at them, and if that did not work then attempts would be made to seize the papers they were selling and throw them to the ground. If the women resisted, they would be physically assaulted. At the appropriate point in the proceedings a CP member would phone the police to claim the women were causing a riot.^[61]

13.6 How Did Stalin Get Away With It?

In the period leading up to the Great Terror, Stalin began a charm offensive, appearing to offer the country positive and progressive growth towards a more open-minded and tolerant regime based on the economic successes achieved. The new Soviet Constitution of 1936, “the most democratic in the world” was to be the culmination of this process. However, by the 12 December 1937 elections to the Supreme Soviet, the Terror was in full swing, and while the election had been proclaimed as multi-candidate, reality made that impossible, and it was reduced to single, party-approved candidates. Article 125 guaranteed freedom of speech of the press, of assembly – including the right to demonstrate – but there are no records of any approved candidates utilising any of these freedoms either before, during or after the election.

In The Revolution Betrayed, Trotsky emphasised the importance of the 1936 Constitution, presenting it as a significant stage in the degeneration of the bureaucracy, as a step backwards, away from the Soviet system of election according to class and industrial group. Trotsky pointed out that Soviets in their essence are organs of class rule and cannot be anything else. In abolishing the soviets, the new constitution dissolved the workers into the general mass of the population. The new constitution was a step towards a bourgeois democracy based upon the universal, equal and direct vote of an atomised population, a means of “juridically liquidating the dictatorship of the proletariat”. The state remained ‘Soviet’ in the same way that Napoleon’s France continued to be a republic. The new constitution exposed the decay of the political machine and the threat it posed to the very existence of the Soviet state. It was no longer an instrument for the socialist transformation of society, but a means of protecting the power, income and privileges of the ruling stratum.

The new constitution reinforced the position of the bureaucracy, together with the restoration of the bourgeois family, the resurrection of ranks and decorations, and the growth of inequality, it represented a huge step back from socialist to bourgeois principles. By introducing an absolute extra-class bureaucracy, it “created the political premises for the birth of a new possessing class”.

The political significance of the new constitution of the USSR is in direct contradiction to its official interpretation. The ‘Stalinist constitution’ is no step forward, ‘from socialism to the communist society,’ as the official authorities brazenly assert, but it is on the contrary a step backward, from the dictatorship of the proletariat toward a bourgeois political regime. The development of socialist society should find its expression in the political field in the dying away of the state. The degree of this dying away is the surest measure of the successes of socialist development. The beginning of the dying away of the state should be the complete liquidation of the bureaucracy lifting itself above society. In actual fact, however, the new constitution raises exactly the opposite process of development to a law. Nor can it be otherwise. The growth of privileges requires a gendarme for their supervision.^[62]

Simultaneously, the gains to be made from promotion to, and within, the nomenklatura were put on display; better food and housing, family holidays, exclusive access to leisure activities, fashionable clothes, access to the best schools, and so on – all at public expense. The generation of party members in front of whom Stalin was dangling prospects of promotion and privilege, had little in common with the Bolsheviks of 1917 or those that fought in the Civil War. The purges offered a layer of young, aspiring technocrats the possibility of rapid advancement. Removing just one top person generated four, five or more promotions, but at the expense of creating a generation of functionaries who were unquestioning, unthinking, self-seeking, deeply cynical and possibly even hostile to the Soviet system.

Given the importance of the Red Army, Stalin went to extraordinary lengths when preparing the ground for the coming purge. The Red Army was made to feel relatively safe. Between 1929 and about 1935, the rate of expulsions from the party was typically only a third of what happened elsewhere. In 1935, Stalin re-introduced ranks and provided officers with better housing, more consumer goods and substantial pay increases. Scott was impressed by how neatly-dressed, well-fed and clean shaven officers were, in contrast to the hungry-looking, tired and dirty workers he was familiar with, and noted their access to specialist stores where they could spend their salaries which had been increased to about five times that of a construction worker.^[63] The January 1935 concessions, restoring private plots of land in the countryside, had a big impact on conciliating the peasant soldiers. Importantly, by 1937, three-quarters of the officer corps, predominantly the lower ranks, owed their positions to the Stalin regime.^[64]

Marshal Mikhail Tukhachevsky, the leading figure in the Red Army, was forty-four years of age, typical of the senior officers who had risen from the ranks and had been given command in the Civil War. These men were promoted based on natural talent and had learned their skills on the job; they tended to appear coarse and ill-educated compared to the lower ranks who had passed through the military academies and colleges. Being so young, they were a block for promotion and advancement of the junior ranks for decades to come. Stalin skilfully exploited the friction between the newer officers and the veterans when he ordered the waves of arrests that took place during 1937 and 1938. The most popular of the senior officers were ordered to new commands where they had no personal base of support and arrested on arrival. All eleven Vice Commissars for War, seventy-five out of eighty members of the Supreme Military Council, 90 per cent of generals and 80 per cent of colonels were arrested. In parallel, and to paralyse the ability of the officers to organise resistance, the political commissar system was re-introduced whereby the commissars had to counter-sign all orders before they could be issued.

13.7 End of the Purges

To justify the ruthless character of the repression, the bureaucracy first designated social and political critics as “Trotskyists” or “Zinovievists”, but soon they became “anti-party”, “wreckers”, “saboteurs”, then “criminals” and “terrorists”. Critics of the Stalinist regime no longer risked a period in a prison or labour camp, but immediate execution with no right of appeal. The Great Terror and the blatant falsifications accompanying it profoundly deformed the social consciousness of the Soviet people, and drove millions of people away from the communist movement at home and abroad. This was a setback that the bureaucracy would overcome as, at the end of the war, the communist parties on a world scale had more than made up their losses. However, a major tragedy that was never overcome was that Bolshevik methods and world outlook were purged from the Communist International.

By the end of 1938, the original goal of the Great Terror had been achieved. This had meant the removal of all those in the party (and elsewhere) who posed a potential threat to the bureaucracy, and a restocking of the elite of the country with people loyal to Stalin. But, at the lower levels of the party and society the Great Terror was chaotic, arbitrary and self-perpetuating as the accused implicated others to reduce their own penalties.

The annexation of Austria by Nazi Germany in March 1938, was a clear indication of the growing threat to the Soviet Union. By that time, Stalin understood that the removal of so many tops had caused severe dislocations in the functioning of the party and state. The initial enthusiasm of the newer, younger party members had largely evaporated; being a party member could be dangerous. Instead, the preferred route to promotion to senior posts was via the state apparatus and industry. Ambitious young people were seeking advancement outside the party and recruitment had been reduced to a trickle.

The party tops took stock: a viable party, essential in the face of the Nazi threat, required an end to the Great Terror. The situation had snowballed to such an extreme that to prosecute all those named in confessions would have resulted in the arrest of most remaining party members. Stalin, having launched the Terror, having demanded the harshest measures, having personally approved the death sentences of many thousands of good Bolsheviks now, as he had done with Dizzy with Success, turned volte-face, and blamed the “excesses” on “slanderers”, not the system.

In Magnitogorsk, which supplied much of the steel used to produce guns and tanks, production fell from 1,200 tons per furnace in late 1936, to 1,100 hundred in 1937, and to below 1,000 at the end of 1939. The common attitude was, “It’s best to be a telegraph pole”, and shun any responsibility. Thus, no-one would take the decision to shut down a blast furnace to repair a leaking supply of cooling water. Instead, it was left to burst, and the mix of water and molten iron led to an explosion. The resulting blast killed and injured dozens of workers, and the furnace was closed for two months for repairs.^[65] Articles began to appear in the technical press suggesting breakages were not the fault solely of wreckers; attention had to be paid to careless attitudes, inadequate technical knowledge, and the absence of “production discipline” on the factory floor.^[66]

The first sign of a reduction in the terror was a change in policy regarding the punishment of kin. On 9 January 1938, the Politburo warned against expulsions from the party of “honest Communists”, and urged party committees to re-consider the appeals made by the thousands of party members who had been expelled on the basis of ‘slanders’. The same CC meeting declared that the relatives of persons who had been arrested on counter-revolutionary charges should not be automatically fired from their jobs. NKVD Order 00689, of 17 October 1938, explicitly ended the practice by which wives were punished with their husbands.

In November 1938, the CC passed a resolution critical of unwarranted arrests, violations of procedural norms, the fabrication of cases against innocent people, and other commonly-used NKVD methods. The fault, of course, lay not with the instructions issued by the CC but with the “enemies of the people … who had forced their way into the NKVD”.^[67] The CC washed its hands of the ‘excesses’ of the process. The blame was placed on the shoulders of Yezhov and NKVD personnel, who were guilty of having failed to thoroughly investigate cases, failed to provide proper explanations for verdicts, and failed to give proper weight to appeals or to process them in a timely manner. They were guilty of “criminal frivolity”. This set the scene for the final spasm of the Great Terror. Lavrenty Beria, who replaced Yezhov that autumn, had the majority of the local and national leaders of the NKVD apparatus arrested, tried and shot during 1939-40. Dead men tell no tales. In 1939, over 300,000 prisoners were released from the Gulags, accompanied by reports in the press of the arrests of those whose false denunciations had led to the jailing of innocent party members.

The Great Terror meant the AUCP(B) was desperate for new cadres to replace those who had either been executed or disappeared into the camps. At the Eighteenth Party Congress in March 1939, it was agreed that because capitalists, kulaks, and merchants had been eliminated in the Soviet Union, there were no longer any class boundaries between workers, peasants, state employees and the intelligentsia. The acceptance of these new layers as party members marked a significant shift in the social basis of the regime; further away from the working class and peasant masses. The new rules also considerably loosened the conditions for membership. In future, membership required only a recommendation from three current party members who had known the nominee for at least three years.^[68] As the Congress took place, the Nazis occupied Czechoslovakia.

The nationalisation of the land, public ownership of the means of production, distribution and exchange, together with the monopoly of foreign trade and a planned economy, defined the Soviet Union as a proletarian state deformed by the presence of the bureaucracy. This was the social basis of the nomenklatura. They were people who owned little or nothing, the amenities of life – car, apartment, dacha (country house) were state issued. Marxists have been clear that the new elite, the bureaucracy, did not constitute a new class. Its privileges depended on defending Soviet economic relations.

As with every previous bureaucracy, the Soviet bureaucracy used its regulatory powers to exploit the state apparatus for personal gain, but in no other regime in history had a bureaucracy ever achieved such a degree of independence. It was the privileged and commanding stratum in Soviet society and in doing so it took on bourgeois customs. In The Revolution Betrayed, Trotsky warned of the dangers of the restoration of capitalism. The appropriation of political power in a country where the principal means of production were in the hands of the state, effectively meant the riches of the nation ‘belonged’ to the bureaucracy and were distributed amongst them as they decided. Trotsky saw this as a contradiction at the heart of the Soviet regime, giving it a “dual character”:

(T)he distribution of life’s goods is carried out with a capitalist measure of value and all the consequences ensuing therefrom … If these relations continued or should solidify, become the norm and be legalised, whether with or without resistance from the workers, they would, in the long run, lead to a complete liquidation of the social conquests of the proletarian revolution.^[69]

World War Two would slow this process, but it would not stop it.

History would show that the Great Terror was even more of a severe blow against the October Revolution than appeared at the time. More than three times as many Communists died in the Great Terror as in the Civil War. In fact, the Great Terror was a form of a civil war, a class struggle for the “extermination of the Bolshevik Party”.^[70] From this date on, the bureaucracy would defend the social conquests of the October Revolution only to defend its privileges. In the end that would undermine the entire Soviet system and ensure the return of capitalism.

Immediately, the Great Terror greatly weakened the Soviet working class. On 28 December 1938, through administrative decrees, Stalin (1) took away the right of workers to quit their employment, (2) reduced wages by 14 per cent, and (3) ordered productivity of labour to be increased by 25 per cent.

On 26 June 1940, the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet made, by decree, the punishment for quitting a job an obligatory two to four months in prison and for being twenty minutes late, a deduction of 25 per cent of pay. The more draconian the regulations, the clearer was the existence of deep social divisions within Soviet society and the alienation of the mass of the population from the party tops. Stalinist methods to increase production never solved the two essential issues that would be key factors in the fall of the Soviet Union: the quality of the goods produced (appalling) and worker productivity (amongst the lowest in the industrial world).

Endnotes

[1] T. Ewing, ‘Stalinism at Work: Teacher Certification (1936-39)’, Russian Review, 57(2), 1988, pp. 218-235.

[2] See J. Scott, Beyond the Urals.

[3] See V. Serge, Memoirs of a Revolutionary 1901-1942.

[4] See L. Schapiro, The Communist Party of the Soviet Union.

[5] See J. Haslam, ‘Political Opposition to Stalin and the Origins of the Terror in Russia, 1932-1936’.

[6] J. Redman, ‘From “Social-Fascism” to “People’s Front”’, Labour Review, 2(5), 1957, pp. 148-153.

[7] See V. Serge, Memoirs of a Revolutionary 1901-1942.

[8] See J. Scott, Beyond the Urals.

[9] N. Khrushchev, ‘The Road to Communism – Report of the Twentieth Congress CPSU’, 1956. Available at: https://www.marxists.org/archive/khrushchev/1956/02/24.htm (accessed 2 February 2023).

[10] V. Rogovin, Bolsheviks Against Stalinism, Mehring Books, 2019, p. 426.

[11] See J. Haslam, ‘Political Opposition to Stalin and the Origins of the Terror in Russia, 1932-1936’.

[12] See B. Souvarine, Stalin, a Critical Survey of Bolshevism.

[13] See T. Rigby, Communist Party Membership in the USSR.

[14] K. McDermott, ‘Stalinist Terror in the Comintern’.

[15] See ibid.

[16] See V. Rogovin, 1937: Stalin’s Year of Terror.

[17] See J. Hansen, ‘Stalin’s Frame-Up System’.

[18] See V. Rogovin, 1937: Stalin’s Year of Terror.

[19] Ibid, pp. 286-7.

[20] Ibid.

[21] An apparatchik was a full-time, professional functionary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union

[22] Ibid, p. 140.

[23] S. Fitzpatrick, ‘On Stalin’s Team’, The Guardian, April 2016. Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/apr/27/on-stalins-team-sheila-fitzpatrick-review-living-dangerously-soviet-union (accessed 2 February 2023).

[24] See V. Rogovin, Stalin’s Year of Terror 1937-38.

[25] See S. Fitzpatrick, Everyday Stalinism.

[26] See V. Rogovin, Stalin’s Year of Terror 1937-38.

[27] See W. Goldman, ‘Stalinist Terror and Democracy: The 1937 Union Campaign’.

[28] See ibid.

[29] Quoted in J. Wright, ‘The Crisis in the Soviet Union’, 1941. Available at: https://www.marxists.org/history/etol/writers/wright/1941/01/ussr.htm (accessed 2 February 2023).

[30] Quoted in J. Wright, ‘The Crisis in the Soviet Union’, 1941. Available at: https://www.marxists.org/history/etol/writers/wright/1941/01/ussr.htm (accessed 2 February 2023)

[31] See V. Rogovin, Stalin’s Year of Terror 1937-38.

[32] See J. Hansen, ‘Stalin’s Frame-Up System’.

[33] N. Khrushchev, ‘The Road to Communism – Report of the Twentieth Congress CPSU’, 1956. Available at: https://www.marxists.org/archive/khrushchev/1956/02/24.htm (accessed 2 February 2023).

[34] See V. Rogovin, Bolsheviks Against Stalinism.

[35] See R. Daniels, The Conscience of the Revolution.

[36] V. Rogovin, Stalin’s Year of Terror 1937-38. Mehring Books, 1998, p. 185.

[37] T. Grant, Russia: From Revolution to Counter-Revolution, Wellred Books, 2017, p. 165.

[38] L. Schapiro, The Communist Party of the Soviet Union.

[39] R. Daniels, The Conscience of the Revolution.

[40] G. Lapidus, Women in Soviet Society, University of California Press, 1978, p. 237.

[41] See R. Thurston, ‘The Soviet Family During the Great Terror, 1935-1941’.

[42] See Q. Lippmann, and C. Senik, ‘Math, Girls and Socialism’.

[43] M. Lewin, The Soviet Century, Verso, 2005, pp. 315-6.

[44] See A. Newsholme, Red Medicine: Socialized Health in Soviet Russia.

[45] See J. Getty, ‘Excesses Are Not Permitted’.

[46] See B. McLoughlin and K. McDermott, Stalin’s Terror.

[47] I. Deutscher, Stalin, Pelican, 1984, pp. 355-6.

[48] See M. Ilic, Arrest of Wives.

[49] G. Alexopoulos, ‘Stalin and the Politics of Kinship: Practices of Collective Punishment, 1920s-1940s’, Comparative Studies in Society and History, 50(1), 2008, pp. 91-117.

[50] See E. Mason, Women in the Gulag in the 1930s.

[51] G. Saunders, Samizdat: Voices of the Soviet Opposition, Pathfinder Press, 1974, pp. 215-6.

[52] See W. Goldman, Inventing the enemy.

[53] J. Degras, The Communist International 1919-1943, Routledge, 1971, p. 6.

[54] See B. Lavitch, ‘Stalin’s Massacre of the Foreign Communist Leaders’.

[55] See P. Huber, ‘Structure of the Moscow Apparatus of the Comintern’.

[56] See K. McDermott, ‘Stalinist Terror in the Comintern’.

[57] J. Valtin, Out of the Night, Alliance Book Company, 1941, p. 370.

[58] See V. Rogovin, Stalin’s Year of Terror 1937-38.

[59] L. Trotsky, The Revolution Betrayed, Wellred Books, 2015, p. 208.

[60] V. Rogovin, Stalin’s Year of Terror 1937-38, Mehring Books, 1998, p. 289.

[61] See J. Cannon, ‘Gangsterism’.

[62] L. Trotsky, Writings of Leon Trotsky 1935-36, Pathfinder Press, 1975, p. 357.

[63] See J. Scott, Beyond the Urals.

[64] See L. Schapiro, The Communist Party of the Soviet Union.

[65] See J. Scott, Beyond the Urals.

[66] See W. Goldman, Inventing the Enemy.

[67] V. Rogovin, Stalin’s Year of Terror 1937-38, Mehring Books, 1998, pp. 414-5.

[68] See W. Goldman, Inventing the Enemy.

[69] L. Trotsky, The Revolution Betrayed, Wellred Books, 2015, p. 179.

[70] L. Trotsky, Stalin, Wellred Books, 2016, p. 681.