One of Stalin’s principles—the theory that the intensity of the class conflict, and hence the necessity of terror, increases as the power of the defeated classes diminishes—was denounced, though in its official form in the Party Program adopted at the XXIInd Congress in 1961, this denunciation was hedged with reservations:
The general trend of class struggle within the socialist countries in conditions of successful socialist construction leads to the consolidation of the position of the socialist forces and weakens the resistance of the remnants of the hostile classes. But this development does not follow a straight line. Changes in the domestic or external situation may cause the class struggle to intensify in specific periods. This calls for constant vigilance….108
The period also saw an evolution in the forms of the enforcement of State power. The Special Board of the MVD was abolished in September 1953.109 The “Terror” Decree of 1 December 1934 was annulled on 19 April 1956.
In December 1958, the new Decree on State Crimes replaced the relevant articles of the Criminal Code dating from Stalin’s time. Certain notorious excesses, such as Article 58 (i.c.), which openly inflicted penalties on the families of “traitors” fleeing abroad, even if they were totally unimplicated, were dropped. But the Decree remained Draconian and provided severe punishment for all forms of action, organization, or discussion hostile to the Government. Legal practice, too, received some degree of reform: Vyshinsky was denounced, together with his theory that confessions are the main element in a good case. But confessions were still used, and treated as valid—as in the Powers and the Penkovsky cases, in 1960 and 1963, respectively.
The labor-camp system remained in being, and no information about it was officially available. The general impression is that measures had already been taken to cut the death rate and to make forced labor economically more rational in 1950–1951. After the death of Stalin, camp regulations seem to have been more equitably enforced, partly as the result of mass strikes in the northern camps. The release of a large number of prisoners took place under amnesties and through rehabilitations. We are told, though this was given no publicity, that eventually about 100 commissions—1 for each main camp group—were sent out. Consisting of 3 members, they examined all the files and rehabilitated millions, mostly posthumously; present-day estimates are that about 8 million of the 12 million in the camps in 1952 were released.
The general picture is of some camps being virtually dissolved, some losing many of their inmates, and others remaining about the same. In many areas, prisoners were released into free exile. After rebellions in the camps in 1953 (Norilsk and Vorkuta) and 1954 (Kingur), prisoners seem to have been transferred farther east. Reports at the end of 1956, when the operations to reduce the number of prisoners were virtually at an end, showed little change in the Kolyma–Magadan complex. Repatriated prisoners of war estimated that over 1 million then still remained in the far eastern camps. Avram Tertz (Andrei Sinyavsky) remarked ironically of one camp, in The Trial Begins, that earlier “the amnesty had virtually emptied the camp of its inmates. Only some ten thousand of us, dangerous criminals, were left.”
Discipline remained rigorous. Indeed, a decree of the Supreme Soviet of 5 May 1961 for the first time imposed the death penalty for certain “acts of aggression against the administration,” short of murder, in the camps.
However one looks at it, the penal and police systems were reformed in the Khrushchev period. Equally, however one looks at it, they did not undergo essential change, did not become truly liberal.
The regime owed its legitimacy to its descent from Stalin and was committed to the correctness of Stalin’s line as against both the Left and the Right oppositions of the 1920s and 1930s, and hence to his correctness on basic policy matters. At the XXIInd Party Congress in 1961, Khrushchev was indeed able to say publicly what had been “secret” in 1956, and Stalin’s body was removed from Lenin’s tomb; though even in 1989 it still lay in a fairly honorable position under the Kremlin wall, among the bodies of important “positive” figures of the second rank—and, perhaps significantly, next to that of Felix Dzerzhinsky, founder of the Secret Police.
Many of Stalin’s personal group died in good odor after their patron’s own death—Shkiryatov in 1954, Vyshinsky in 1955. Men like Kaganovich and Malenkov, though publicly accused by the Prosecutor-General of the USSR of “criminal violations of Socialist legality,”110 also remained at liberty. The fall of Beria entailed the trials of a series of police officials of the old regime. In all, thirty-eight Security generals were deprived of their military ranks.111 But others survived, such as Serov, who was Head of Army Intelligence until 1964. General Gorbatov, writing in the early 1960s, speaks quite naturally of his torturer, Stolbunsky—“I don’t know where he is now”—and mentions meeting the despicable Commissar Fominykh, who had organized his removal, in a group of senior officers in 1962.
More basically, there was no serious attempt to deal with the Terror as a whole. The great plot ostensibly headed by Trotsky, backed by the Nazis, involving politicians, generals, engineers, doctors, and ordinary citizens by the thousand, was not explicitly denounced as a fabrication. Statements were made that demolished the authenticity of some of the main public accusations. Several of those named as conspirators in the 1938 Trial were rehabilitated. One major crime of the 1937 accused—the “attempt” on the life of Molotov—was openly described at the XXIInd Party Congress in 1961 as a frame-up. On the centerpiece of the whole Purge story (and the main crime of the 1936 accused in particular), the Kirov murder, we have seen that the official line was already rejected as unsatisfactory by Khrushchev in his Secret Speech of February 1956, and again, publicly, in his report to the 1961 Congress—each time with strong hints that Stalin had been the real organizer of the assassination. So, although the full truth was being extracted with painful slowness, enough had already been said to concede the total falsehood of the original Stalinist version.
We now know that the Tukhachevsky group were legally rehabilitated by the Supreme Court on 31 January 1957, and posthumously restored to Party membership on 27 February 1957. This and similar decisions were not published. It simply became plain from their reappearance in a favorable light in books and articles that they were now cleared of the charges. In this and the other cases, the published formalities were merely a note at the end of the encyclopedia entries: “Illegally repressed. Posthumously rehabilitated.” Similarly, the executed Stalinists—Rudzutak, Chubar, Postyshev, Eikhe, Kossior, and the others—were seen to be in good odor, as were such men as Yenukidze and Karakhan.
One distractive ploy by the forces of obstruction was to give to the rehabilitated death dates differing from the true ones. This was done in part, Nadezhda Mandelshtam tells us, to transfer purge victims to the war period, and thus distance them from the Purges. Marshal Yegorov, Army Commander Fedko, and Vlas Chubar were among those given wartime deaths. And others were spaced out, if not so far; for example, Postyshev’s was for twenty years dated to 1940.
No one was cleared from the Zinoviev or Pyatakov Trials. And in the Bukharin Trial, a fantastic situation persisted for years in which some of the accused were fully rehabilitated, and others not. Ilcramov, Khodzhayev, Krestinsky, Zelensky, and Grinko were now in favor. But to rehabilitate, for example, Krestinsky without rehabilitating Rosengolts was to rehabilitate Burke while leaving Hare accused.
Yugoslav sources said, in the autumn of 1962, that Bukharin would shortly be rehabilitated.112 This did not take place, though at a meeting of an All-Union Conference on Measures to Improve the Training of Scientific-Pedagogical Cadres in the Historical Sciences,113 Pospelov said: “Students ask whether Bukharin and others were spies of foreign States…. I may state that it is sufficient to study the documents of the XXIInd Congress of the C.P.S.U. in order to say that neither Bukharin nor Rykov, of course, were spies or terrorists.” This little-publicized partial exculpation is important in principle. But Bukharin’s and Rykov’s names were not restored to Party favor. Zinoviev, Kamenev, Pyatakov, I. N. Smirnov, Sokolnikov, and Rosengolts—to name some of the other leading figures at the public trials—remained totally unrehabilitated. So did a good many men who had not even come to public trial—for example, Preobrazhensky, Smilga, Uglanov, and Shlyapnikov.