It was ironically enough Trotsky who had publicly denied the existence of Lenin’s Testament. When Stalin attacked Kamenev in 1926 for having sent a telegram of congratulations to the Grand Duke Michael at the time of the February 1917 Revolution, Kamenev pointed out that Lenin had personally signed a denial of this. Stalin retorted quite matter-of-factly that Lenin had, in the interests of the Party, knowingly stated a falsehood.19 At the XIVth Congress in 1925, Krupskaya appealed, as a member of the defeated faction, to objective truth. Bukharin retorted: “N. K. Krupskaya says truth is that which corresponds to reality, each can read and listen, and answer for himself. But what about the Party? Disappeared, as in the magic picture!”20
Also going back to the earliest days of the Party was the tradition that the best method of winning political argument was to smear the opponent by every conceivable means. Lenin once said to Angelica Balabanoff, “Everything that is done in the proletarian cause is honest.” The great Italian Socialist leader Serrati, though sympathetic to the Communists, had tried to prevent their splitting his movement to suit their strategies, and had been attacked in terms to which Balabanoff, at that time Secretary of the Comintern, had objected. After Serrati’s death, it was Zinoviev who explained the Leninist tactics to her: “We have fought and slandered him because of his great merits. It would not have been possible to alienate the masses [from him] without resorting to these means.”21 It was natural, then, that the oppositionists should be required to cast filth on their own motives and ideas.
At the XVth Party Congress in December 1927, Kamenev argued that the denunciation of their own views then required of the opposition would be meaningless. He explained the dilemma. They now had no choice but either to constitute a second party, which would be ruinous for the Revolution and “lead to political degeneration,” or to make “a complete and thorough surrender to the Party.” He and Zinoviev had decided on the latter, taking the view that “nothing could be done outside of and despite the Party.” They would obey, but he pleaded that they should not be obliged to denounce views that they had obviously held just a few weeks earlier. None, he said, had previously made such a demand. (Though, in fact, Zinoviev had made exactly the same demand of Trotsky in 1924!)
Stalin did not accept Zinoviev’s and Kamenev’s recantation. They were trapped. They could hardly go back on what they had already said. Finally, they accepted the terms of the victor, denouncing their own views on 18 December as “wrong and anti-Leninist.” Bukharin told them they were lucky to have made their minds up in time, as this was “the last moment available to them.”
Again denounced, expelled from the Party, and sent into exile in 1932, Zinoviev and Kamenev were readmitted in 1933 on similar but yet more abject self-abasement. Zinoviev wrote to the Central Committee:
I ask you to believe that I am speaking the truth and nothing but the truth. I ask you to restore me to the ranks of the Party and to give me an opportunity of working for the common cause. I give my word as a revolutionary that I will be the most devoted member of the Party, and will do all I possibly can at least to some extent to atone for my guilt before the Party and its Central Committee.22
And soon afterward, he was allowed to publish an article in Pravda condemning the opposition and praising Stalin’s victories.23
In crawling as he did,fn1 Zinoviev was acting logically from the point of view of Party ethics. He believed that any humiliation could be undergone for the purpose of remaining in the Party, where he might, in the future, play a useful role. But such logic was in any case to prove inapplicable. And meanwhile, the long process of deception and apology was corrupting the oppositionists. As a close observer commented:
It must be admitted that from the point of view of political morals, the conduct of the majority of the oppositionists was by no means of high quality. To be sure, the conditions prevailing in the Party are intolerable. To be loyal, to do every single thing that is demanded of us is almost impossible: to do so would mean to become an informer, to run to the Central Control Commission with reports on every utterance of opposition picked up more or less accidentally, and on every oppositionist document one comes across. A party which expects such things from its members cannot be expected to be regarded as a free association of persons of like views, united for a common purpose. We are all obliged to lie: it is impossible to manage otherwise. Nevertheless, there are limits which should not be exceeded even in lying. Unfortunately, the oppositionists, and particularly their leaders, often went beyond these limits.
… To plead for pardon has become a common phenomenon, on the supposition that the party in power being “my party,” the rules which applied in the Tsarist days are no longer valid. One hears this argument everywhere. At the same time, it is considered quite proper to consistently deceive “my party,” since the party does not fight its intellectual opponents by trying to convince them, but by the use of force. This has given rise to a special type of morality, which allows one to accept any condition, to sign any undertakings, with the premeditated intention not to observe them.24
This attitude had a very demoralizing effect. The border between treachery and compromise became very vague. At the same time, Stalinists could point out that it was impossible to believe the opposition precisely because of their idea that telling lies was permissible.
Zinoviev and Kamenev had been expelled for the third time in 1934, on suspicion of politically inspiring Nikolayev in the murder of Kirov. And in January 1935, as we have seen, they had once again declared their political guilt, this time accepting it in a form which was already a partial plea of guilty before the criminal law.
Their successive surrenders had never been voluntary, in the sense that they would have preferred to avoid them. But they had accepted them, under pressure, as unavoidable moves in the political and moral conditions of the one-party system to which they adhered. They had abandoned in turn each of their objections—to falsification, to undemocratic procedures, to insincere retractions, to arrest. They had chosen to do so in order to remain in the Party, or to gain readmission after they had been expelled. The Rightist Slepkov is reported by a Soviet writer as being brought back from a political isolator and supplying the names of over 150 accomplices, on the grounds, “We must disarm! We must go on our knees to the party.”25
A thoughtful Soviet analysis which appeared recently notes that Ryutin (and later Raskolnikov) flatly denied the legitimacy of the Stalin regime, but that most of the victims of the trials were “paralyzed” by feeling themselves to be “within the system personified by Stalin.” Even in his “last letter” (see here), Bukharin merely says that he has not opposed the Party line for eight years, and has no quarrel with Stalin.26 In the case of the prominent Communists accused at the great show trials of 1936, 1937, and 1938, there is no doubt that the rational, or rationalized, component in their motives included this idea of service to the Party. This theme has been most strikingly and persuasively developed in Arthur Koestler’s Darkness at Noon, and is often taken as the explanation of the public confessions—though Koestler himself makes no such claim and, on the contrary, remarks: