Every account of life in a Soviet office or institution, even before the Great Purge, is replete with intrigues. Such, doubtless, would be true of most other countries. But the resources available to a keen intriguer in Soviet conditions made it a far greater menace, since the normal method of getting on was to “compromise” and have expelled from the Party, and as often as not arrested, either one’s rival or, if his position was for the time being too strong, one of his subordinates—through whom he could eventually be undermined. One rough estimate was that every fifth person in the average office was in one way or another an NKVD stool pigeon.18
Weissberg speaks of the foundry industry, with which he had connections through experiments to improve blast furnaces. Following Gvakharia, Ordzhonikidze’s nephew and one of the geniuses of the industrialization drive, all the directors of the big foundries in the Ukraine were arrested:
A few months later their successors were arrested too. It was only the third or fourth batch who managed to keep their seats. In this way the direction of the foundry industry came into the hands of young and inexperienced men. They had not even the normal advantages of youth in their favour, for the choosing had been a very negative one. They were the men who had denounced others on innumerable occasions. They had bowed the knee whenever they had come up against higher authority. They were morally and intellectually crippled.19
And, of course, this applied not only to industry, but to the whole of the new ruling cadre. As a Soviet periodical complained in 1988, it was “the conscious result of negative selection, of the horrible social selection which went on in this country for decades.”20
Right through the Purge, Stalin’s blows were struck at every form of solidarity and comradeship outside of that provided by personal allegiance to himself. In general, the Terror destroyed personal confidence between private citizens everywhere. The heaviest impact of all was, of course, on the institutional and communal loyalties which still existed in the country after eighteen years of one-party rule. The most powerful and important organization drawing loyalty to itself and its ideas rather than to the General Secretary himself was the Party—or rather its pre-Stalinist membership. Then came the Army. Then the intellectual class, rightly seen as the potential bearer of heretical attitudes. These special allegiances attracted particularly violent attention. But in proceeding to attack the entire people on the same basis, Stalin was being perfectly logical. The atomization of society, the destruction of all trust and loyalty except to him and his agents, could only be carried out by such methods.
In fact, the stage was reached which the writer Isaak Babel summed up, “Today a man only talks freely with his wife—at night, with the blankets pulled over his head.”21 Only the very closest of friends could hint to one another of their disbelief of official views (and often not even then). The ordinary citizen had no means of discovering how far the official lies were accepted. He might be one of a scattered and helpless minority, and Stalin might have won his battle to destroy the idea of the truth in the Soviet mind. “Millions led double lives,” as the grandson of the executed Army Commander Yakir was to write later.22 Every man became in one sense what Donne says he is not—“an island.”
Not that everyone blamed Stalin. His skill in remaining in the background deceived even minds like Pasternak and Meyerhold.23 If men—albeit nonpolitical—of this caliber could feel so, it is clear that the idea must have been widespread. The fear and hatred of the population was concentrated on Yezhov, who was thus unconsciously making himself ready to be the scapegoat, the eponym of the “Yezhovshchina.”
MASS TERROR
As “the number of arrests based on charges of counter-revolutionary crimes grew tenfold between 1936 and 1937,”24 the purge extended itself outward from the Party victims to include all their contacts, however slight. For example, in 1932 the Party Secretary of the Urals, Kabakov, had visited some workers’ quarters and chanced to look in at an apartment where he found only the mother at home. She told him that her son had gone on a rest cure after being overworked, but had to do it at his own expense. Kabakov ordered the management of the trust employing the worker to pay the expenses. Five years later, when Kabakov was arrested (see here) someone informed the NKVD that he had visited this worker and given him protection. The worker was himself at once pulled in, and accused of “bootlicking” Kabakov.25
Thirteen accomplices had been found for Nikolayev, who had really acted alone. This became a general principle. “Vigilance” was made the test of a good citizen or employee, as well as of a good Party member. The NKVD everywhere, and all public organizations and economic institutions, were under continual pressure to show their worth in uprooting the enemy. Every man arrested was pressed to denounce accomplices, and in any case all his acquaintances automatically became suspects.
In the show trials themselves, some of the confessions automatically implicated not just individual or groups of political associates, but also wide circles completely outside the Party struggle. For example, in his evidence in the Bukharin Tria1,26 Zelensky pleaded guilty to the fact that 15 percent of the staff of the Central Cooperative Union “consisted of former Mensheviks, Socialist-Revolutionaries, anarchists, Trotskyites, etc. In certain regions the number of alien elements, former members of other parties, Kolchak officers and so on … was considerably higher.” These elements were, he said, assembled to “act as a center of attraction for all kinds of anti-Soviet elements.” The way this would snowball almost automatically, and throughout the country, is obvious.
Yet it was not only this process of association that gave the Purge its increasingly mass character. In the 1930s, there were still hundreds of thousands who had been members of non-Bolshevik parties, the masses who had served in White armies, professional men who had been abroad, nationalist elements in the local intelligentsias, and so on. The increasingly virulent campaign for vigilance against the hidden enemy blanketed the whole country, not merely the Party, in a press and radio campaign. And while the destruction of hostile elements in the Party was going forward, it must have seemed natural to use the occasion to break all remaining elements suspected of not being reconciled to the regime.
For this sizable part of the population was already listed in the files of the NKVD and its local branches under various headings, such as
AS
anti-Soviet element
Ts
active member of the Church
S
member of a religious sect
P
rebel—anyone who in the past was in any way involved in anti-Soviet uprisings
SI
anyone with contacts abroad
Such categories were not in themselves legal grounds for prosecution, but they automatically made those listed natural suspects and almost automatic victims when an NKVD branch was called upon to show its merits by mass arrests.
We have a more detailed division of these suspect categories in the lists of dangerous elements issued on the annexation of Lithuania by the USSR in 1940.27 Since even by January 1941, after half a year’s occupation, there were admittedly only 2,500 Communists in the country,28 few of the worst suspects—real Trotskyites—could be found. And no threat to Stalin’s position as a whole could come from so small a territory. But in the selection of those whose elimination was required to turn the country into a more or less reliable fief, we can see some of the way of thinking which had been applied to Russia itself. The lists itemized all former officials of the State, Army, and judiciary; all former members of non-Communist parties; all active members of student corporations; members of the National Guard; anyone who fought against the Soviets (that is, in 1918 to 1920); refugees; representatives of foreign firms; employees and former employees of foreign legations, firms, and companies; people in contact with foreign countries, including philatelists and Esperantists; all clergy, former noblemen, landlords, merchants, bankers, businessmen, owners of hotels and restaurants, and shopkeepers; and former Red Cross officials. It is estimated that these people covered about 23 percent of the population.29