Khrushchev’s point is fairly taken, but it is too crudely put. No doubt, in a general way, Stalin favored silencing those who knew his secrets. In fact, during the Zinoviev–Kamenev Trial of 1936, the accused are represented as planning, “after their seizure of power, to put Bakayev in charge of the NKVD with a view to ‘covering up traces’ by killing all officials who might have knowledge of the plot, and also so that the conspiratorial group could destroy its own activists, its own terrorist gunmen.” As the conspiracy was simply an invention of Stalin’s with evidence faked to suit, this shows that he thought it natural to shoot NKVD men and others who knew too much.
But Stalin could scarcely liquidate everyone who knew of, or suspected, his crimes. It was not practical politics to execute Yagoda’s subordinates until there had been time for all sorts of leaks. If it comes to that, several men who were in possession of some of Stalin’s worst secrets—like Shkiryatov, Poskrebyshev, Vyshinsky, Beria, and Mekhlis—survived until 1953 to 1955, while Kaganovich is still alive.
It is true that in 1937 a great purge swept the NKVD in Kolyma. Once it was decided to expose Yagoda’s part in the Kirov murder, and to tell the whole story of the NKVD involvement, it was time to sacrifice all concerned. At the 1938 Trial, Zaporozhets’s role was plainly described, and it was announced that he had not appeared in court because he was being made the “subject of separate proceedings.” This seems to confirm that he was then still alive but that, if such was the case, he would not long remain so.
With the January 1935 trial of the Leningrad NKVD chiefs, the Kirov Case was wound up—for the time being. The old Zinoviev oppositionists were all in prison. Leningrad had been taken from independent hands and put under Stalin’s devoted satrap, Zhdanov. A terror expressed mainly in mass deportations, but partly in mass executions, had struck the city and—to a lesser extent—the country as a whole. Among the victims brought to book in this aftermath, Nikolayev’s wife, Milda Draule, together with Olga Draule (her sister) and another relative, were tried by the Military Collegium and were shot on 10 March 1935.62
The murder of Kirov was indeed the key moment in Stalin’s road to absolute power and extreme terror. Eugenia Ginzburg starts her Journey into the Whirlwind with the sentence “The year 1937 began, to all intents and purposes, at the end of 1934—to be exact, on the first of December.” As a recent Soviet article puts it, “It marked a turning point”: prior to 1 December there was a chance of better things and the scales of history trembled, but “Stalin threw Nikolayev’s smoking gun into the scales.”63 Another, in a more formal analysis, agrees, while adding that of course this does not mean that Stalin’s action was unpremeditated or that he was now to carry out his whole program immediately.64 In fact, much remained to be done to crush his opponents entirely and to overcome the resistance of his less enthusiastic allies. The coup de grace had not been given. And meanwhile hostility to his actions was once again arising in the lower levels of the Party.
In the Komsomol, for example, there was surprisingly frank resistance to Stalinism as late as 1935. The Secret Archive65 from Smolensk province reveals the extent of this feeling. In a Komsomol discussion on the Kirov assassination, one member is quoted as saying, “When Kirov was killed they allowed free trade in bread; when Stalin is killed, all the kolkhozes will be divided up.” A Komsomol school director, serving as a propagandist, declared, “Lenin wrote in his will that Stalin could not serve as leader of the Party.” Another teacher accused Stalin of having transformed the Party into a gendarmerie over the people. A nine-year-old Pioneer was reported to have shouted, “Down with Soviet Power! When I grow up, I am going to kill Stalin.” An eleven-year-old schoolboy was overheard saying, “Under Lenin we lived well, but under Stalin we live badly.” And a sixteen-year-old student was said to have declared, “They killed Kirov; now let them kill Stalin.” There were even occasional expressions of sympathy for the opposition. A worker Komsomol was quoted as saying, “They have slandered Zinoviev enough; he did a great deal for the Revolution.” A Komsomol propagandist in answer to a question denied that Zinoviev had had any hand in the Kirov affair and described him as an “honored leader and cultivated man.” An instructor of a district Komsomol committee “came out in open support of the views of Zinoviev.”
In fact, there was much to do before a situation satisfactory to Stalin could be established.
3
ARCHITECT OF TERROR
A Prince must possess the nature of both beast and man.
Machiavelli
The events of December 1934 and January 1935, so horrible, but above all so extraordinary, lead to the question of the mind behind them. The nature of the whole Purge depends in the last analysis on the personal and political drives of Stalin.
If we have put off any consideration of his personality until after we have seen him in characteristic action, it is because we can recount what he did (and, later, describe the results of the State he brought into being) more easily than we can describe him as an individual. He was not one of those figures whose real intentions were ever openly declared, or whose real motives can readily be deduced. If Stalin’s personal drives were the motive force of the Purge, it is also true that his ability to conceal his real nature was the rock on which all resistance to the Purge foundered. His opponents could not believe that he would either wish to, or be able to, do what he did.
Stalin was now fifty-five. Until the age of thirty-seven he had been a not particularly prominent member of a small revolutionary party whose prospects of coming to power in his lifetime even Lenin had doubted as late as 1916.
When the Revolution came, Stalin appeared to be outshone by many glittering contemporaries. The time since had been spent in ceaseless political maneuver. As a result, he had defeated in turn every rival, and had now been for five years the undisputed head of State and Party; he had lately had his methods put to the severest test in the collectivization campaign and, against all prediction, had won through. This had not proved enough for him. Contrary to all that Marx had thought, we shall find in the Soviet Union of the Stalin epoch a situation in which the economic and social forces were not creating the method of rule. On the contrary, the central factor was ideas in the mind of the ruler impelling him to action very often against the natural trend of such forces. An idealist conception of history was for once correct. For Stalin created a machine capable of taking on the social forces and defeating them, and infused it with his will. Society was reconstructed according to his formulas. It failed to reconstruct him.
As the physicist Alexander Weissberg, himself a victim of the Great Purges, points out, a Marxist view of history—and, one might say, any sociological interpretation of politics—has its validity restricted “to systems which allow of the application of the statistical conception,”1 just as with the other true sciences. When a society is so organized that the will of one man, or.a small group, is the most powerful of the political and social forces, such explanations must give way, at least to a very considerable degree, to a more psychological style.
And so we are driven to an examination of the individual Joseph Stalin. But, as Arthur Koestler remarks:
What went on in No. I’s brain? … What went on in the inflated grey whorls? One knew everything about the far-away spiral nebulae, but about them nothing. That was probably the reason that history was more of an oracle than a science. Perhaps later, much later, it would be taught by means of tables of statistics, supplemented by such anatomical sections. The teacher would draw on the blackboard an algebraic formula representing the conditions of life of the masses of a particular nation at a particular period: ‘Here, citizens, you see the objective factors which conditioned this historical process’. And, pointing with his ruler to a grey foggy landscape between the second and third lobes of No. 1’s brain: ‘Now here you see the subjective reflection of these factors. It was this which in the second quarter of the twentieth century led to the triumph of the totalitarian principle in the East of Europe’. Until this stage was reached, politics would remain bloody dilettantism, mere superstition and black magic…2