Comrade Lenin Cleanses the Earth
Figure 1.1 Mikhail Cheremnykh and Victor Deni, of Scum.” 1920.
Source: Photos 12 CoUection/Alamy.
Disbanded, even for the evening, they would not be allowed to reconvene, delegates continued their discussions until early the next morning. At 4 a. m. they were told, memorably, karaul ustal - “The guard is tired.” The assembly was dissolved and, just as feared, not allowed to meet again. The Bolshevik party, not popular congresses, would decide Russia’s future.
The most immediate problem facing the Bolsheviks was the war. The German government had aided Lenin’s return to Russia and their investment appeared to have paid off magnificently.28 But Lenin could not dictate policy on his own, as subsequent events would show. Negotiations began at Brest-Litovsk (now on the
Polish-Belarusian border) where the Bolshevik representatives were shocked at the draconian demands of the Germans. The Germans called for “national selfdetermination” for Poland, Ukraine, Finland, the Baltic provinces, and other territories that in 1914 had formed part of the Russian Empire. While Lenin and the Bolsheviks agreed to the principle of national self-determination, they hoped that most non-Russians would remain in some kind of federated state with the Russians. In any case the German demands were seen as too onerous and the Bolshevik party leadership rejected them in January 1918, much to the realist Lenin’s fury. After further fruitless negotiations Trotsky announced to the astonished German delegation a policy of “no peace, no war” in mid-February, shortly after which the German army simply began marching into Russia. Lenin furiously demanded that any German conditions be accepted, and after several attempts succeeded in convincing the Central Committee that peace at any cost was necessary. The Treaty of Brest-Litovsk was signed on March 3, 1918. Compared with 1914 borders, the treaty deprived Soviet Russia of some 1.3 million miles of territory, including major industrial regions, and 62 million citizens, few of whom were ethnic Russians.
A week after signing the treaty, the Soviet capital was transferred from Petrograd (now some 20 miles from the Finnish border) to the historical capital, Moscow. In the same month the Bolsheviks changed their party name to “communist” to emphasize the difference between themselves and the Social Democrats who in various European countries had initially supported the war. At the same time serious frictions arose between the Bolsheviks and their erstwhile allies, the left SRs. Angered by the shutting down of non-Bolshevik periodicals, the dissolution of the Constituent Assembly, and the ever narrowing of political expression, the SRs reverted to their old tactic: terrorism. On July 6 a member of the left SR party assassinated the German ambassador, Count Wilhelm von Mirbach. SRs led insurrections against communist power in several cities and a number of prominent Bolsheviks were likewise assassinated. SR armed resistance provided the communists with the opportunity to be done with these uncomfortable allies and, at the same time, to sweep away all manner of “class enemies.” The secret police set up already in December 1917 and known as the Cheka (from the first letters in Russian of “Extraordinary Commission for Combating Counter-Revolution and Sabotage”) targeted not just SRs but anyone suspected of opposing the revolution and the Communist Party. Thousands were arrested and many were summarily executed. In the midst of these repressions or “Red Terror” the SR Fanny (Fanya) Kaplan attempted to assassinate Lenin, wounding him in the arm and chest. While the communist leader recovered from his wounds, they are thought to have hastened his early death in 1924.
As Fanny Kaplan was taking aim at Lenin in Moscow, communist rule was facing a far greater threat than the SRs: the so-called Whites. Various anticommunist groups had gathered in the former borderlands of the empire: in summer 1918 General Anton I. Denikin was pushing north along the Volga while troops under Admiral Aleksandr Kolchak threatened Soviet power from the east. Britain and France, furious at the Russian withdrawal from the war, assisted the White effort with materiel and to some extent with men. But the Whites were never unified, either ideologically or militarily. White supporters ranged from liberal democrats, such as former Kadet leader and foreign minister under the Provisional Government Pavel Miliukov, to conservative monarchists and antisemitic nationalists. The White armies were strong enough to threaten the communists in 1918 and 1919, but never succeeded in unifying their efforts to deal the Leninist regime a fatal blow.29
The Soviet regime survived the Civil War for several reasons. First of all, it always maintained control over the central part of Russia, including Moscow and St Petersburg. The fact that Moscow was always in the hands of the “Reds” meant that troops could be shifted by railroad from east to west, north to south. The main munitions factories also remained in Bolshevik hands. The communists also benefited from excellent leadership and a strictly organized party. The Whites had no leaders comparable to Lenin or Trotsky, creator of the Red Army. It is remarkable that this entirely unmilitary man Trotsky, who had spent his life in libraries, cafes, and editorial offices, suddenly proved himself an effective - and ruthless - leader of the Red Army. The one-party state and the Cheka’s repressive apparatus allowed the Reds to introduce such unpopular measures as the military draft and grain confiscations from peasants to feed the troops. It must also be noted that the ruthlessness with which the communists deal with real or imagined enemies was also effective in stifling dissent during these critical years. Peasant support for the Bolsheviks, though never complete or unalloyed, also played a role. While peasants quickly became disillusioned with many communist policies, when push came to shove, they always supported the Reds over the Whites, whom they associated with their former landlords.30 Finally the lack of unity among the Whites and the lackluster support for them on the part of the Allies (support that was to be much exaggerated by Soviet historiography) allowed the Reds to prevail.
The Bolsheviks had counted on a European-wide revolution when they took power in October 1917. Battles between Reds and Whites in Finland and the Baltic region, radical uprisings in some parts of Germany from late 1918, and the creation of the “Soviet” governments in Munich and Budapest in 1919 made it seem that world revolution might really be on the horizon. In fact by the end of the year the radicals had been defeated in all of these places. As the Civil War wound down in late 1919, Soviet Russia was drawn into a war with Poland over Belarusian and Ukrainian territory. Polish troops took Kiev in early May 1920, but the Red Army’s counterattack was so successful that it was decided - against
Trotsky’s advice - to pursue the war onto Polish territory. By taking Warsaw, the communists hoped, direct contact with the German working classes could be established to spark revolution there and throughout western Europe. It was not to be. In August 1920 Polish troops led by Marshall Jozef Pilsudski defeated the Red Army on the Vistula River north of Warsaw, an event celebrated in Poland as the “Miracle on the Vistula.” Exhausted by war, Soviet Russia and the Republic of Poland signed the Peace of Riga on March 18, 1921, ending hostilities and setting the Polish-Soviet border that would be in place until 1939.31
The phrase “War Communism” is traditionally used to describe communist policy in 1918-20, that is, during the Civil War. The Bolsheviks came to power without any real experience in administration, running enterprises, or supervising an economy. While Lenin and his colleagues did not set out to nationalize all aspects of the economy, within months this process was already far advanced. Factory and enterprise owners, not surprisingly, seldom welcomed communist rule. They were thus pushed aside (or worse); their place was taken by workers’ councils or appointed administrators. Lack of managerial experience and simple incompetence devastated the already weak Russian economy. Basic infrastructure from railroads to electricity functioned fitfully if at all; citizens went hungry and cities remained cold and dimly lit. It became common to see a formerly well-to-do woman at the market trying to convince a peasant to give her a few kilograms of potatoes for a silk shawl, a silver spoon, or some piece of jewelry.
By late 1920 the Civil War was over. The country lay in ruins, factories and mines lay abandoned, millions were hungry and without shelter. The currency was ruined (in late 1920 a ruble was worth less than 1 percent of its 1914 value), basic foodstuffs and heating material were expensive and hard to find. The utter misery of everyday life led to strikes and demonstrations, despite severe repressions. Most shocking of all for the communist leadership was the Kronstadt rebellion of February-March 1921. Baltic sailors had been among the most fervent supporters of the Bolshevik cause, so this uprising at the island naval base near Petrograd showed just how far popular support for Soviet rule had eroded. The sailors’ demands ranged from the practical (such as the right to bring food from the countryside to the cities, abolition of special “privileged” rations) to the political (return to secret ballot, reestablishment of press freedom for the left). The Communist Party, meeting at its Tenth Congress in Moscow, rightly viewed the uprising as a direct challenge to Soviet rule. After negotiations failed, communist troops stormed the island and crushed the rebellion in blood.32
Lenin remarked that the Kronstadt rebellion “illuminated reality like a flash of lightning.” Presumably he meant that the fury expressed by the sailors revealed that the continued existence of Soviet rule in Russia required rethinking. While the communists resolutely rejected the sailors’ call for more democracy and freedom of expression, their practical economic demands were to some extent met by the New Economic Policy (NEP). Faced with almost total economic collapse in early 1921, the Tenth Party Congress decided to make concessions to the market, small business, and in particular to the peasantry: these became the main NEP reforms. NEP left much of the economy unchanged in state hands: all big business, international trade, banks, and a state-run (and much reviled) system of retail stores remained under government control. NEP did, however, open up a certain space for the individual entrepreneur, trader, and farmer. Peasants had to pay a tax on the foodstuffs they produced but could freely market their produce. Butchers and bakers could set up small stores with a limited number of employees. Overnight the retail trade was back in private hands. Artisans like shoemakers, tailors, and seamstresses could also legally produce and sell wares. Cafes, restaurants, music halls, and other such entertainment establishments could open again. Politically, however, the NEP did not bring any change. The Communist Party remained the only tolerated political grouping and even factions within the party were banned at the Tenth Party Congress.
As the terrible famine of 1921-2 (especially in the Volga region) showed, the NEP did not instantly solve Soviet Russia’s economic problems. This tragedy in which millions starved (and many others were saved by the foreign assistance reluctantly allowed into the region by the communist leaders) was itself a bitter legacy of the Civil War period. Only a year or two later, however, the economy showed distinct signs of improvement. (On the economic effects of NEP, see chapter 4, “Modernization,” pp. 130-2.) By 1926 existing factories had been repaired, railroads put back in operation, mines pumped out and returned to production, but, for impatient communists, this was all too little. They longed for crash industrialization and a leap from a mainly agrarian country to a modern, industrialized Soviet Union.
Unhappiness among communists with the slow pace of economic growth and with the toleration - at least at the retail level - of a market economy was exacerbated by the strikingly negative social aspects of NEP. In an effort to prevent runaway inflation, government expenditures were severely limited. Many orphanages were shut down for lack of funding, and city streets filled with abandoned or orphaned children who engaged in petty crime, sold their bodies, and threatened law-abiding citizens. This phenomenon was so widespread that the Russian language acquired a new word for such children - bexprizornyC’ those without anyone to look after them. At the opposite end of the income scale were the so-called nepmen, profiteers who made large profits and spent it ostentatiously (while honest communists had to scrimp). The revolution was to have brought about a fairer, more egalitarian Russia, but during the NEP years social injustice and inequalities continued to exist. The dissatisfaction - disgust even - felt by many at the social injustice and vulgarity of NEP society encouraged many communists to support an end to NEP and a more radical line. Many of those disgusted with NEP would thus support Stalin’s agrarian collectivization and crash industrialization of the late 1920s.33
NEP did not bring about any significant political liberalization. Institutionally the USSR was proclaimed on the last day of 1922, which further cemented the position of the Communist Party and its leadership. Since 1917 the undisputed leader - though not dictator - of the communists had been Lenin. But the “old man” (as he had been called since his thirties) suffered a stroke in May 1922 that left him partially paralyzed. Against doctors’ orders he tried to continue work while bedridden by dictating texts to his faithful wife, Nadezhda Krupskaia, but Lenin would never be the same. Among the texts set down by Krupskaia was one that has come to be known as “Lenin’s Last Testament” in which he angrily called Stalin “too rude” and recommended that other members of the Central Committee “think about a way to remove Stalin from [his] post [as General Secretary of the party].” At the same time Lenin critically evaluated members of the Central Committee, praised Trotsky’s “outstanding ability” but also noted his (and everyone else’s) weaknesses. When the great man finally passed on in January 1924, the Politburo read aloud the “testament,” Stalin offered his resignation (which was not accepted), and it was decided to keep the text secret and to govern as a body.34
While the Politburo (Stalin, Trotsky, Grigory Zinoviev, Lev Kamenev, Alexei Rykov) publicly minimized differences between themselves, behind the scenes battle lines were being drawn. At first Stalin allied with Zinoviev and Kamenev, who feared and resented Trotsky’s arrogance, charisma, and popularity with much of the rank and file. Trotsky’s Menshevik past and pre-1917 statements critical of Lenin were brought up against him in party circles. But soon Zinoviev and Kamenev began to mistrust Stalin’s motives and switched their support to Trotsky after the Fourteenth Party Congress in 1925. This ill-advised move allowed Stalin to play on the resentment against internationalist Jews (the three were born Ovsei-Gershon Radomyslsky [Zinoviev], David Bronshtein [Trotsky], and Lev Rozenfeld [Kamenev]) felt by many rank and file communists. Cooperating with Rykov and the new Politburo member Nikolai Bukharin, Stalin had Trotsky expelled from the party in 1927 and exiled from the USSR in 1929. Once Trotsky was out of the way, Stalin went ahead in 1928 with a program of crash industrialization (the First Five-Year Plan) and the brutal collectivization of agriculture. When Bukharin, Rykov, and Mikhail Tomsky (the head of the labor unions) opposed Stalin’s policy (in particular the violence used against the peasantry), they lost their influential positions and their places on the Central Committee. By 1930 Stalin was by far the most powerful man in the USSR.
Why did Stalin prevail over Trotsky, an opponent undoubtedly more intelligent, charismatic, and with a far better understanding of Marxist thought? In part Trotsky’s own strengths worked against him: he was brilliant, no one denied, but
Map 1.1 USSR in 1922 (or post-Civil War but pre-1945).
Source: based on Donald Treadgold, Twentieth Century Russia, 8th edn., Westview Press, 1995, p. 152.
Could also be brutally intolerant of incompetence and stupidity among his subordinates. Like many intelligent men, Trotsky underestimated his opponent: Stalin did not possess a scintillating intellect, but he did grasp human psychology and probably understood the ill-educated communist rank and file better than his more intellectual fellows at the party’s top levels. Stalin’s acceptance of the job of general secretary when this position was first created in April 1922 also helped him in his struggle for power. The majority of members of the Politburo, including Trotsky, were only too happy to let Stalin assume the bureaucratic drudgery that this administrative position represented. Stalin, however, saw clearly that the general secretary, who had control over all party files, could easily use that information for his own benefit. While recent archival research has called into question the thesis that Stalin was able to “stack the party ranks” with his own men, it is clear that Stalin’s position as general secretary gave him unfettered access to information that helped him win power.35
Trotsky’s brilliant public speaking and charisma earned him a wide following among communists, but his dynamism and arrogance also offended - and frightened - at least as many. For many communists, Trotsky, more interested in his own brilliance than in party unity, seemed a much greater danger than Stalin. Stalin might well have been, in the communist David Riasanov’s famous words, “a gray blur,” but he was a far better politician than Trotsky. Stalin’s careful use of fears and resentment toward Trotsky, as well as his utter lack of scruples in switching positions and misrepresenting his own and others’ positions, helped bring about Trotsky’s downfall. It should also be remembered that Stalin was skillful at subtly playing on antisemitic and anticosmopolitan resentments within the party. In his suspicion of Jewish intellectuals, even those with impeccable communist credentials, Stalin was also closer to the average party member than his opponents. For many, supporting Stalin made sense from the viewpoint of party unity as well as personal ambition.
NEP was never formally ended but, for practical purposes, the expulsion of Trotsky from the party and the adoption of the First Five-Year Plan on October 1, 1928, spelled its abandonment. The next decade would be one of immense human suffering but also impressive economic transformation. As we have seen, many communists saw NEP as a compromise with market forces unworthy of a workers’ state. Controversies raged within the Communist Party, however, on just what steps should be taken to replace the NEP with a more socialist economic order. For the communists, as for Marxists in general, the “free market” was nothing more than a fiction that allowed capitalists to exploit workers. While the nepmen of the 1920s were hardly “capitalists” on a grand scale, they certainly used market forces to make profits, and spent their money nearly as rapidly as they made it. The adoption of the First Five-Year Plan meant a transition to a planned and supposedly more rational economy. The plan set down production targets not only for entire industries (coal mining, steel making, machine building, etc.), but for individual factories and enterprises. The advantage of the plan was that it allowed the government to coordinate resources and inject capital and manpower where needed in the economy. In reality, however, this supposed advantage was often reduced or eliminated by the disadvantages of bureaucracy and unrealistic targets.
The most serious potential obstacle to crash industrialization was the attitude of the peasantry. In order for quick industrialization to go forward it would have to be financed by the payment of low prices for agricultural goods (produced by peasants) and charging high prices for consumer goods (consumed by peasants). Would the peasants simply stockpile their grain rather than sell it? Would they even rebel against Soviet power? These were the fears that propelled the communist leadership to embark on a mass campaign to collectivize agriculture. The harvest of 1928 had not been terrible, but the amount of grain actually put up for sale (at relatively low prices) was inadequate to feed the growing cities and to export grain to pay for needed western technology. It seemed clear that the only way to force peasants to give up their grain at state-controlled prices was to use pressure - or force. In the long run the only way for the Communist Party to maintain this pressure on the peasantry, Stalin concluded around 1928, was to set up collective farms. The collective farms would serve at least three purposes. First, they would allow large-scale production that would be more productive than existing small peasant farmsteads. Second, the collective farms would be headed by managers - preferably Communist Party members - who would be responsible to see that sufficient grain was sold to the state. Finally the collective farm would destroy old rural elites (the so-called kulaks, or wealthy peasants) whom the communists suspected of hindering recruitment of peasants into the party (less than one rural dweller in 300 was a party member).36
After the grain procurement crisis of 1927-8, when the peasants’ refusal to sell grain at low prices led to bread shortages, Stalin decided to proceed with a crash collectivization program. Initial application of violence in certain regions - the so-called Urals-Siberian Method - had brought in significant amounts of grain without setting off the feared peasant rebellion. But in 1928 still only around 3 percent of farms had been collectivized. In November 1929 Stalin announced the push for mass collectivization and the following month declared that kulaks had to be “liquidated as a class.” In the next three months any relatively wealthy peasant - which could mean a farmer who merely owned a cow or horse - was labeled a kulak, singled out for arrest, confiscation of property, physical violence, and worse. Not only individuals but their entire families were targeted, often forced to leave the village (arrested or not) with barely the clothes on their back. Anyone who openly opposed collectivization or tried to organize resistance was also denounced as a kulak and shared a similar fate.
In the next three months intimidation, arrest, and violence forced many peasants to sign on to the collective farms. The communist authorities also tried to woo poor peasants by offering personal property (clothing, implements) confiscated from kulaks and painting a picture of a promising future of mechanized, prosperous agriculture. Most peasants remained skeptical, but faced with the threat of arrest or violence, gave in. Others simply fled to the cities where labor shortages meant that work was easy to find. Historians have estimated that at least six million peasants were forced to leave their homes in this short period.
On March 2, 1930, Stalin published a key article entitled “Dizzy with Success” in Pravda. Noting that over one-half of peasant households had been collectivized, Stalin approvingly wrote, “a radical turn of the countryside towards socialism may be considered as already achieved.” Most of the article, however, took a far more negative tone, criticizing the use of violence and coercion in Turkestan (and by implication, other isolated areas) as “distortions,” “bureaucratic,” and “unworthy threats.” The article stressed that the goal of collectivization was admirable and well within grasp, but the “voluntary principle” should be followed and “excesses” avoided. To be sure, this was all breathtaking hypocrisy coming from the man who had pressed for rapid “dekulakization,” but it allowed Stalin to blame problems and violence on overzealous underlings. The timing of the article should also be noted: the communists feared that the huge disruptions on the countryside would prevent spring sowing from taking place, causing mass famine. “Dizzy with Success” aimed to reassure peasants so that they would return to agricultural work. It worked. Peasants returned to the fields, but many also dropped out of the collective farm: the collectivized rate by June 1930 was only 24 percent. Now the party turned to more gradual and methodical means of persuasion, with the result that by 1941 98 percent of agricultural land had been collectivized.
Despite promises, collectivization did not improve life for peasants. In 1932-3 a famine swept the grain-producing regions in the south of the USSR, mainly but not exclusively in the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic (SSR), as well as Kazakhstan. This famine was specifically exacerbated by the unrelenting demands on local collective farms to provide grain for the cities and Russian center. Ukrainian historians refer to this famine in which millions starved as the Holodomor, seeing it as a cynical attempt at genocide against the Ukrainian people. Other historians have questioned the specifically Ukrainian nature of the tragedy, noting that other regions such southern Russia and the Urals also suffered severely and that a higher percentage of Kazakhs than Ukrainians perished (see chapter 3, “Nations,” pp. 104-5). No one disputes, however, that Soviet grain procurement policy forced local collective farms to give up their grain for the cities even while locals were starving.37
The first Five-Year Plans (for more detail, see chapter 4, “Modernization,” pp. 132-5) set unrealistic and unattainable goals, but the actual achievements were nonetheless impressive. The production of energy (from coal to electricity) increased, as did mining in nearly all sectors, steel production, and (particularly from 1934 to 1936) the construction of new industrial plant and even entire new cities (of which the steel-producing city Magnitogorsk is only the most famous). Certain sectors of the economy lagged behind or even declined, in particular consumer goods. By the mid-1930s the Soviet economy was humming, but most Soviet workers lived in crowded, unhygienic, depressing dwellings. The rationing of basic foodstuffs such as bread (begun in 1928) was ended in the mid-1930s, prices were high and many goods were simply unavailable. Clothing was expensive and of poor quality. In general the entire economy was geared toward the production of capital goods (i. e., more factories, more heavy industry, and by the late 1930s more weaponry) rather than making life more pleasant for Soviet citizens. However, unemployment disappeared, cities grew, industry developed, and production figures expanded throughout the 1930s.
The fevered pace of industrial expansion in the 1930s was matched by a feverish level of political discourse. Newspapers warned of constant threats on the international scene (and, to be sure, the rise of Adolf Hitler to power might well worry any Soviet citizen, communist or otherwise). Soviet citizens were admonished to be constantly wary and on the outlook for “enemies,” “ wreckers,” “spies,” and the like. The young American John Scott, who worked in the USSR in the mid-1930s, recalled seeing a play about a school training spies and terrorists to be used against Soviet interests. The climax of the piece was the revelation that “number 1,” an actor made up to look like Hitler, had a Russian passport with the name Ivan Ivanovich Ivanov (i. e., “John Jones,” the Russian everyman). In such an atmosphere of distrust and fear, mistakes or laziness could easily be labeled “wrecking” or sabotage and severely punished.
The first “show trial” used for propaganda purposes was the Shakhty trial of 1928 in which engineers were accused of plotting with the bourgeoisie and foreign governments to wreck Soviet development. Meanwhile, real or imagined opponents of Stalin were arrested or exiled - such as Trotsky in 1929. In the 1930s the charge of “wrecking,” implying sabotage and malicious destruction of state property, came to be routinely leveled at workers whose incompetence or mistakes caused production breakdowns or wastage. But while arrests for “wrecking” were by no means rare, mass political arrests began later with the show trial of old Bolsheviks Zinoviev and Kamenev (with 14 others) in 1936 and lasted until the outbreak of World War II in 1939. Explaining the background of her own arrest in 1937, Evgeniia Ginzburg wrote, “The year 1937 began, to all intents and purposes, at the end of 1934 - to be exact, on the first of December.” On that day the popular head of the Leningrad party committee, Sergei Kirov, was assassinated - possibly by Stalin’s order - in his office. At the time, Stalin expressed grief and outrage at the murder of an upright communist and friend, and would later accuse his enemies of planning the murder.
Historians have long argued over the supposed link between the assassination of Kirov in December 1934 and the Great Terror that picked up speed some two years later. For one thing, did Stalin order Kirov’s killing? Robert Conquest argued that Stalin had Kirov rubbed out as a feared competitor for the party’s loyalty, but more recently historians have shown that no hard evidence backs up such a view (though many continue to hold it).38 But why the lag of two years between Kirov’s death and the major show trials and mass arrests? One theory is that the purges began in an attempt to root out corruption and inefficiency but in the feverish atmosphere of the 1930s snowballed into mass repressions.39 More recently Paul Hagenloh has argued that the mass repressions of the later 1930s derived from the frustration felt by communists at the continuing existence of “alien elements” (whether slack workers, Trotskyites, or speculators) “endangering” Soviet society.40 Recent studies do not deny the importance of Stalin in the terror, but emphasize also the thousands of “little Stalins” who eagerly participated in repressions out of fervor, to gain professional advancement, or to exact personal revenge.
The accusations levied against old Bolsheviks like Zinoviev, Kamenev, Bukharin, and Trotsky were patently absurd. These were, after all, men who had dedicated their entire lives to the revolutionary cause. How could anyone believe accusations that they had turned into agents of British imperialism, the international bourgeoisie, or (a specific charge against Trotsky) Nazi Germany? It also seems bizarre for Stalin to have mounted such a campaign when his own power was already virtually unchallenged. Historians speculate that he was possibly motivated by a combination of paranoia and thirst for revenge against party members who had once slighted him. In an atmosphere of generalized paranoia the widely publicized trials against these formerly influential party leaders snowballed into a mass purge of party members. Stalin’s repeated calls for “vigilance” were then repeated endlessly by anyone in a position of power - better to arrest ten than to leave any possible “enemy” at large.
High party officials, who were more likely to have had contact with those arrested and were also perhaps more threatening to Stalin, were especially likely be arrested. Of the 1966 delegates to the Seventeenth Party Congress in 1934, over half (1,108) were arrested. Among Central Party committee members, two-thirds were arrested (98 of 139). Similarly a purge of the officer corps led to the arrest of three of five field marshals (a rank only recently revived), 90 percent of Soviet generals, 80 percent of colonels, and thousands of lower-ranking officers.41
During these terrible years millions were arrested and disappeared into the Gulag (forced-labor camp) system, many never to return. Hundreds of thousands were shot as spies, wreckers, and Trotskyites. An anonymous denunciation would frequently lead to arrest, even without any concrete proof - causing thousands of unscrupulous individuals to settle personal scores, denounce neighbors with attractive apartments, accuse their boss (to rise professionally), and the like. There is perhaps some poetic justice in the fact that 20,000 NKVD (secret police) operatives were also swallowed up in the arrest wave, including the head secret policeman in 1936, Genrykh Yagoda (executed in 1938). The arrest and disappearance
World History
