The Great Terror

But he was even more concerned with the effect on the Party. Many Communists had been severely shaken. Some had committed suicide; others had gone mad. In his view, the worst result of the terror and famine in the country was not so much the sufferings of the peasantry, horrible though these were. It was the “deep changes in the psychological outlook of those Communists who participated in this campaign, and instead of going mad, became professional bureaucrats for whom terror was henceforth a normal method of administration, and obedience to any order from above a high virtue.” He spoke of a “real dehumanization of the people working in the Soviet apparatus.”⁵⁵

He and his friends nevertheless remained silent, awaiting a moment when Stalin, at last realized to be a unsuitable leader of State and Party, would somehow be removed from power. They had misunderstood the nature of this last problem.

1

STALIN PREPARES

Resolv’d to ruin or to rule the state.

Dryden

It was while he was securing his victory in the countryside that Stalin made the first moves toward the new style of terror which was to typify the period of the Great Purge.

While the opposition leaders thrashed about ineffectively in the quicksands of their own preconceptions, lesser figures in the Party were bolder and less confused. Three movements against Stalin came in the period 1930 to 1933. The first, in 1930, was led by men hitherto his followers: Syrtsov, whom he had just raised to be candidate member of the Politburo (in Bauman’s place) and Chairman of the RSFSR Council of People’s Commissars, and Lominadze, also a member of the Central Committee. They had obtained some sort of support from various local Party Secretaries (among them the Komsomol leader Shatskin and Kartvelishvili, First Secretary of the Transcaucasian Party) for an attempt to limit Stalin’s powers.¹ They objected both to authoritarian rule in the Party and State and to the dangerous economic policies. They seem to have circulated a memoir criticizing the regime for economic adventurism, stifling the initiative of the workers, and bullying treatment of the people by the Party. Lominadze had referred to the “lordly feudal attitude to the needs of the peasants.”² Syrtsov had described the new industrial giants, like the Stalingrad Tractor Plant, as so much eyewash.³

Stalin learned of the plans of this group before they could complete their preparations, and they were expelled in December 1930. Lominadze committed suicide in 1935; all the others concerned were to perish in the Purges.

And now we come to a case crucial to the Terror—that of Ryutin. Throughout the ensuing years, this was named as the original conspiracy; all the main oppositionists in turn were accused of participating in the Ryutin “plot,” on the basis of what came to be called the “Ryutin Platform.” Ryutin, with the help of Slepkov and other young Bukharinites, produced a long theoretical and political document, of which, according to Soviet articles as late as 1988, no copy remained in existence. In 1989, it seems to have been rediscovered, and a summary was printed; it consisted of thirteen chapters, four of them attacking Stalin.⁴ It is believed to have run to 200 pages, and according to reports later reaching the West the key sentence was “The Right wing has proved correct in the economic field, and Trotsky in his criticism of the regime in the Party.”⁵ It censured BukharM, Rykov, and Tomsky for their capitulation. It proposed an economic retreat, the reduction of investment in industry, and the liberation of the peasants by freedom to quit the kolkhozes. As a first step in the restoration of democracy in the Party, it urged the immediate readmission of all those expelled, including Trotsky.

It was even more notable for its severe condemnation of Stalin personally. Its fifty pages devoted to this theme called forcefully for his removal from the leadership. It described Stalin as “the evil genius of the Russian Revolution, who, motivated by a personal desire for power and revenge, brought the Revolution to the verge of ruin.”⁶ Ryutin saw, far more clearly than his seniors in the opposition, that there was no possibility of controlling Stalin. It was a question either of submission or of revolt.

Ryutin was expelled from the Party in September 1930, and arrested six weeks later. However, on 17 January 1931 the OGPU Collegium acquitted him of criminal intent, and he was released and later restored to Party membership, with a warning.⁷