The Great Terror

The top Rightists had refused to have anything to do with Smirnov’s plans. And even in the published Resolution on this group, it is only alleged that Rykov, Tomsky, and V. V. Shmidt had “stood aside from the struggle with anti-Party elements and even maintained relations with Smirnov and Eismont, thus in fact encouraging them in their anti-Party activities.”

At the plenum, Bukharin, not implicated even to this extent, made a speech typical of the extravagant and insincere tone which was now conventional in exoppositionist statements, demanding “the severe punishment of A. P. Smirnov’s grouping”; and he spoke of his own earlier “Right-opportunist, absolutely wrong general political line,” of his “guilt before the Party, its leadership, before the Central Committee of the Party, before the working class and the country,” mentioning Tomsky and Rykov as his “former companions in the leadership of the Right opposition.”²¹

Eismont and Tolmachev were expelled from the Party, and A. P. Smirnov from the Central Committee.

The views of A. P. Smirnov and his followers mark an important crux. For we find veteran senior officials who had never been associated with any opposition speaking not merely of a policy change, but specifically of Stalin’s removal, and it was soon to be apparent that such an idea was widely held.

Neither the Ryutin group nor the A. P. Smimov group had any serious chance of success. The significance of the cases was, rather, in the opposition offered to Stalin by his own supporters in the Politburo on the issue of executing the conspirators. The revulsion of Kirov, Ordzhonikidze, and the others against the proposal was clearly quite genuine. The extraordinary strength of the idea of Party solidarity is nowhere better shown.

It is here that the true dvoeverye—double

belief—of the Party “moderates” lay. It explains, as nothing else can, the horrified resistance of many who had cheerfully massacred the Whites, and at least uncomplainingly starved and slaughtered the peasantry, to the execution of prominent Party members, to “shedding the blood of Bolsheviks.” It reflects a double standard of morality comparable to the attitude of sensitive and intelligent men in the ancient world to slaves or of the French nobility of the eighteenth century to the lower classes. Non-Party people were hardly more taken into account, even by the better Old Bolsheviks, than slaves were by Plato. They were, in effect, non-men. One is reminded of a famous scene in Salammbii when Hamilcar discovers, but is not quite able to grasp, that a slave is capable of sorrow at the proposed death of his son. For it is not, indeed, wholly impossible to maintain humanist virtues within a limited circle and at the same time to treat outsiders with indifference or brutality.

A view of the Purges which requires us to sympathize with the loyal Party victim while withholding our sympathy from such men as those who suffered in the Shakhty Case is unlikely to be accepted very widely. It is, indeed, defensible, but only from a narrow and rigorist Party viewpoint. It may perhaps be argued, from the opposite viewpoint, that those at least of the Party victims who had themselves committed or connived at similar repressions against non-Party figures are entitled not to a greater, but to a considerably smaller, meed of sympathy for their own later sufferings.

All the apparatus of oppression under which they themselves were to suffer was already in existence. They had raised no objection to its employment so long as the animus of the State was directed against men and women they too believed to be enemies of the Party. If Bukharin in the Politburo had spoken up against the Shakhty Trial, if Trotsky in exile had denounced the Menshevik Trial—if they had even objected not to the injustice as such, but merely to the blemish on the reputation of the Party and State—the oppositionists would have been on solider ground.

We are perhaps in danger of romanticizing the better actions of some of these men. When Isaac Deutscher—or even Arthur Koestler—puts the fate of the oppositionists in a tragic light, we should nevertheless recall that they themselves in their time had thought nothing, as Bukharin himself said at his trial, of killing political opponents on a large scale and for no other reason but to establish the power of their own Party against popular resistance. They had, moreover, at least not effectively protested against the trials in which non-Party people were convicted on patently falsified evidence. Few of them had stood for anything resembling democracy even within the Party (and it is notable that those few, men like Sapronov, never came to public trial).