The Great Terror

Vyshinsky was originally only on the fringe of the Purges, like a gangland lawyer. He was despised, and often openly snubbed, by the police and Party operatives. He was to survive them, after a career of unrelieved falsification and slander. He struck the present writer, who spoke with him in the last years of his life when he was Foreign Minister, as both physically and spiritually a creature who gave life to the worn image of a “rat in human form.”

Machiavelli mentions several instances of actual criminals rising to control the State—Agathocles of Syracuse, for example. Georgian Communists used to refer to Stalin as a kinto, the old Tiflis equivalent of the Neapolitian lazzaroni. This tendency in his character is most clearly seen in his selection of followers. In the 1937 Trial, Vyshinsky was to say of the oppositionists, “This gang of murderers, incendiaries and bandits can only be compared with the medieval camorra which united the Italian nobility, vagabonds and brigands.”³⁵ There is a sense in which this analysis is not inappropriate to the victors.

DEFEAT OF THE RIGHT

With the promotion of his own allies into the Politburo, Stalin had a clear potential majority. There remained one further group to defeat: the Rightists Bukharin, Rykov, and Tomsky, with whom he had hitherto allied himself.

The Bolsheviks had taken power in a country which was not, even in their own theory, ready for their “proletarian” and “socialist” rule. For the first few years, it was maintained that though this was true, they had broken capitalist sway in a “weak link” and revolutions would soon follow in the Western world. Meanwhile, the Bolsheviks should maintain their advanced position in the hope, or rather certainty, of support from revolutions in, as Lenin put it, Berlin and London. This view lasted after the end of Lenin’s active political life. As late as 1923, the attempted coup in Germany was expected to regularize the situation.

When this failed, Stalin’s theory of Socialism in One Country was propounded. It had the obvious advantage that the alternative of giving up power, or even sharing power, on theoretical grounds was naturally unattractive to those who now held all the positions of power.

The new idea was, then, to “socialize” the country from above. If this had to be done without international assistance, then the Party must face the problem. Its very raison d’être was to socialize. The alternative was to adjust to the reality of a party ruling a country not suited to its ideas—that is, to face facts, to accept the economic situation and abandon the rigors of dogma. It was clear that the new system could only be achieved by force, and if established could only be kept in existence by the further and constant application of force. Above all, it was clear that the peasantry, the vast majority of the population, had accepted the Communists precisely to the extent that (under the New Economic Policy) they did not socialize the countryside.

Such a compromise was feasible. Feasible, but not possible—in the sense that the Party’s whole raison d’être was “socialism.” Its ideological mind-set was unsuited to reality, but was also prevented from adjusting to it by organizational principle. “Democratic centralism” by now meant that “Party discipline” involved the acceptance of a “Party line” determined by the victors of struggle within the Politburo. Those who counseled a longer patient interim in which the peasantry would be persuaded of the advantages of a socialized agriculture were seen as cowards. Stalin’s problems were to rid himself of such Rightists, but also to win the leading party stratum. It was the latter who, at this time, provided him with effective support.

Zinoviev and Trotsky were no sooner defeated than Stalin turned against the Right. Its most influential leader was Nikolai Bukharin. He had been described by Lenin as “the favorite of the Party.” But Lenin had earlier referred to him as “(1) credulous toward gossip and (2) devilishly unstable in politics.”³⁶ He was much the most intellectual of the Bolsheviks, and had an intense interest in theory (being, in Lenin’s peculiar formulation, “a most valuable and most eminent Party theoretician” who nevertheless did not properly understand Marxism). In 1917 Lenin had thought of Sverdlov and Bukharin as the natural successors if he and Trotsky were killed.³⁷

But in the following year, Bukharin had led the “Left Communists” in opposition to the Brest-Litovsk Treaty, in a struggle that at one time reached the point of tentative plans for Lenin’s overthrow. He had worked with the “Left” tendency until 1921, when he had suddenly become the strongest supporter of the NEP, a line he was to maintain until his fall.