The Great Terror

But this does downgrade Russia’s other option – liberalism or pluralism. As Pasternak put it, in the 1880s came ‘the birth of an enlightened and affluent middle class, open to Occidental influences, progressive, intelligent, artistic’.33 There are many historical and modern examples of this more ‘Western’ style of thought in Russia, deep-set, and though often disenchanted continuing to present a more viable and civilised future. Today’s Russia is not totalitarian. The Terror is not denied. The economy is viable. But one can have ‘reform’ without liberalism – as with Peter the Great and Pyotr Stolypin. Above all we are still far from the rule of law – much more important than ‘democracy'. As elsewhere, the problem seems to be to free the idea of the ‘nation’ from both archaic barbarism and from the more recently bankrupted verbalisms that have partly melded into it. To turn inwards, outwards and upwards?

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Except to that degree I have scarcely covered the specific mindsets, or motivations, behind the terror.

The Western sentimentalisation of the Soviet order was to a large extent overcome in the past half-century, at least as far as the Stalin period is concerned. But it is still maintained that he perverted Bolshevism – not merely that Stalin was worse than Lenin (not in itself much of a humanitarian criterion) but even that Lenin and Leninism are to some extent admirable. Without going deeply into this, one may adduce a few fundamental points.

First, of course, is the basic Marxist theory of history driven by economic class struggle – but in particular Lenin’s version in What is to be Done?, with its addition that the proletariat, in itself lacking the capacity, needed a professional, paid, ideologically trained, full-time leadership. But his most lasting, and worldwide contribution – the principle on which the Party was to be organised – is ‘Democratic Centralism’. For this meant that once a decision on action, or abstract belief, was taken by the leadership, all members had to accept it. With it went Lenin’s clearly stated ruling that any act, however immoral by bourgeois standards, was justifiable if helping the ‘Party’. Taken into the basic rules of his Comintern, it discouraged even the half-open mind. And in non-Soviet Communist parties it meant infiltrating and taking over any independent group. One result was that Ernest Bevin, head of the large and powerful Transport and General Workers Union in Britain, a prime target for fierce CPGB intrigue, was able to complain, when Foreign Secretary in the Labour government, that Molotov was behaving just like a Communist. A similar lesson seems to have been learned by Ronald Reagan from experience in Hollywood.

Utopian activism is nothing new in history. Norman Cohn, in his classic study of apocalyptic movements in medieval and post-medieval Europe, writes of their seeking a future of ‘unanimity’ and that in modern totalitarians ‘the crudeness and narrowness of this thinking strikingly recalls the prophetae of medieval Europe’. He sees these as ‘a true prototype of a modern totalitarian party; a restlessly dynamic and utterly ruthless group which, obsessed by the apocalyptic phantasy and filled with the conviction of its own infallibility, set itself infinitely above the rest of humanity and recognised no claims save that of its own supposed mission’, concerned with ‘bringing history to its preordained consummation’. And ‘for all their exploitation of the most modern technology Communism and Nazism have been inspired by phantasies which are downright archaic’. Indeed, Cohn sees Western misunderstanding of Communism as due to ignoring, or forgetting, our own earlier history.34

Lenin, it should hardly need adding, suppressed all non-Bolshevik parties (and all moderate tendencies with the Bolshevik Party) and, as far as possible, all independent thought. The revolutionary heroine Rosa Luxemburg had always rejected Lenin’s organisational methods as turning the Party into ‘an automation’. After the October Revolution she took issue in 1918 with the Soviet suppression of freedom of discussion as ruinous to socialism, and tending not merely to stupefaction but inevitably bound to cause ‘a brutalisation of public life …’35 Above all in the ruling caste, though also to a great extent with society as a whole, the narrow ideological criteria produced what has long been diagnosed in Moscow as ‘negative selection’.