Of the trials in general, Pares concludes, “The plea that Stalin acted first to disrupt a potential fifth column … is by no means unwarranted.” Elsewhere he remarks that “the bulky verbatim reports were in any case impressive”92—perhaps the most fatuous of all comments, and the fine fruit, as Walter Laqueur has said, “of fifty years of study of Russian history, the Russian people, its country, its language.”
As an old authority on Russia, Pares had been opposed to the Soviet Government and revised his attitude in view of the Nazi threat. “Towards the end of 1935,” his son comments, “my father set foot in Russia once more and any remaining doubts vanished at once. He had not left the Moscow railway station before his mind was flooded with the realization that the Bolsheviks were, after all, Russia.”93 This reliance on personal revelation and intuition, inadequately related to the real situation, is surely inappropriate and egocentric—a point worth making when we read similar accounts from more recently totalitarianized lands.
What happened in Russia under Stalin could not be understood or estimated in any commonsensical fashion, if by common sense we mean notions that sound reasonable and natural to the democratic Westerner. Many of the misunderstandings which appeared in Britain and America during the Great Trials were due to prejudice—not necessarily to prejudice in favor of the Soviet regime or of Stalin, but at least prejudice in regard to certain events or interpretations of them as inherently unlikely. The Great Trials were, and it should have been plain at the time, nothing but large-scale frame-ups. But it was extraordinarily difficult for many in the West to credit this, to believe that a State could really perpetrate on a vast scale such a cheap and third-rate system of falsehood. Bernard Shaw typically remarked, “I find it just as hard to believe that [Stalin] is a vulgar gangster as that Trotsky is an assassin.”94 Presumably, he would not have been surprised at some such events in quite highly organized societies like Imperial Rome or Renaissance Florence. But the Soviet State appeared to have a certain impersonality, and not obviously to lend itself to actions determined not so much by political ideas as by the overt personal plotting which had afflicted those earlier regimes.
There was another powerful factor. Both opponents of and sympathizers with the Russian Revolution thought of the Communists as a group of “dedicated” (or “fanatical”) men whose faults or virtues were at any rate incompatible with common crime—something like the Jesuits of the Counter-Reformation. England has had little recent experience of revolutionary movements, and this idea persists. It is the type of general notion which the uninformed are likely to assume simply out of ignorance, and it has not lost its obscuring power to this day.
Men like Stalin, Kaganovich, Voroshilov, Molotov, and Yagoda had been members of the underground Bolshevik Party in the time of its illegal struggle against Tsardom. Whatever their faults, they had thus established at least enough bona fides to exempt them from the suspicion that they did in fact behave as they are now known to have done. Even now, doubtless, there are those in the West who find it hard to swallow the notion of the top leaders of the Soviet Communist Party writing obscene and brutal comments on the appeals for mercy of the men they knew to be totally innocent. The mistake was, in fact, in the idea held in this country about revolutionary movements. In practice, they not only are joined by simon-pure idealists, but also consist of a hodgepodge of members in whom the idealist component is accompanied by all sorts of motivations—vanity, power seeking, and mere freakishness.
Perhaps the commonest reaction was to believe that the case against the accused in the trials was exaggerated, rather than false in every respect. This formula enabled those who subscribed to it to strike what they felt to be a decent commonsensical balance. In fact, it was simply a mediocre compromise between truth and falsehood, between right and wrong.
And the trials were at least directed against rivals of Stalin. The idea that Stalin had himself organized the murder of Kirov, on the face of it his closest ally and supporter—a murder in strictly criminal style—would have been rejected as absurd. When it was suggested by a few ex-oppositionists and defectors, who knew more about the circumstances than most people, it was hardly thought worth discussing.
Such attitudes showed a basic misunderstanding of the range of political possibility in a nondemocratic culture. More particularly, they showed a failure to grasp Soviet circumstances and, above all, a misjudgment about Stalin personally. For Stalin’s political genius consisted precisely in this: he recognized no limitations, either moral or intellectual, in his methods of securing power.
His calculation about the effect abroad was on the whole sound. It is true that the frame-ups were clumsy fabrications. It is also true that Stalin did not in fact silence everyone who knew anything about them. But he did not have to. The notion that things would have been very different if the frame-ups had been seamlessly perfect and if everyone who had known the truth had instantly been shot is a superficial one. Stalin had a clearer idea of the state of the public mind both in Russia and in the West. It is only too plain that he was right. Those who were prepared to believe his story believed it regardless of its peripheral faults, and rejected accounts put out by people who had had access to the correct information.
Thus a State prepared flatly to deny its own malpractices, and to prevent open access to the facts, could successfully persuade many people abroad, even in spite of a large and growing body of first-hand evidence from those who had actually experienced the Terror. This is a lesson that has clearly been learned by similar regimes in other parts of the world, and is still the basic principle of much misinformation that appears in the West.
The trials were overt acts. The other acts of the Purge were never announced. In particular, the size and nature of the labor-camp system only became known in the West through defectors, some of them former inmates. After the Poles in Russia were released in 1941 and 1942, thousands of accounts were available for checking, and dozens of first-hand descriptions were readily available in print. By 1948, as we have said, a very full analysis of the system listing hundreds of camps, together with reproductions of camp documents, was published by David J. Dallin and Boris I. Nicolaevsky.95 The United Kingdom delegation to the United Nations was able to circulate the Corrective Labor Codex of the RSFSR; free trade-union bodies produced their own analyses.
The evidence was as complete and as consistent as it could conceivably be. It was widely rejected. Jean-Paul Sartre even defended the proposition that the evidence about the Soviet forced-labor-camp system should be ignored, even if true, on the grounds that otherwise the French proletariat might be thrown into despair. Why the labor-camp population should be sacrificed to the (rather smaller) membership of the CGT was not clear; nor, indeed, was it ever made plain why the views of the French proletariat, one of the few that has ever come largely under Communist influence, should prevail in world affairs any more than those of the anti-Communist British and American and German proletariats. Nor is it obvious at first sight why falsehood should demand the allegiance even of the intelligentsia. This sort of intellectual and ethical attitude might be treated as a passing aberration, a curiosity of history, and one might have thought that anyone holding it would have forfeited any public standing as a moral arbiter, at least in this sort of sphere. But this does not seem to have been the case, and if only for that reason is worth referring to.