The Great Terror

All the same, even avoiding the romanticizing of revolution (a habit to which the British, who do not have to go through revolutions themselves, are perhaps particularly prone), we need not fall into denying any virtue to men some of whose actions may appear to us to be dubious. For this would be to lay down criteria as narrow in their way as those of the Stalinists themselves. Joseph Goebbels was one of the most unpleasant characters in Europe; yet it does not seem amiss to grant him a certain admiration for his courage and clearheadedness in the last days of the Third Reich, particularly in comparison with the cowardly and stupid intrigues of most of his colleagues.

In fact, courage and clearheadedness are admirable in themselves. And if they do not rank high among the moral virtues, we can see in some of the Soviet oppositionists something rather better. It is true that those who did not confess, and were shot secretly, demonstrated not merely a higher courage, but a better sense of values. In them, however touched by the demands of Party and revolutionary loyalty, loyalty to the truth and the idea of a more humane regime prevailed. But even among those who confessed, we can often see the struggle between Party habits and the old impulses to justice which had originally, in many cases at least, been one of the motives for joining the Party.

If the oppositionists were not spotless, it is at least true of their conduct during the Civil War that to have acted was different from planning the cold-blooded Terror shortly to be launched. Even the attempt to save Ryutin by those who had just decimated the Ukraine, absurd though it may appear to logical Stalinist and logical humanist alike, perhaps indicates not merely a wish to preserve privilege, but also a residuum of humane feeling.

right or wrong

Within that furious age

There is, after all, a moral difference between some restraint and none. Although indulgence in terrorist action against any section of the population may corrupt the entire personality, as it clearly had done in the cases of Yezhov and others, the contrary is also true: the preservation of more or less humanist attitudes, even if only in a limited field, may, when the particular motives for terror against others have lapsed, spread out again and rehumanize the rest.

Over the next few years, Stalin was to burn out the last roots of humanism. There was no longer to be a section of the community reserved from the operation of arbitrary rule. And, in itself, this was not unwelcome to the non—Party members. We often find in the prison and concentration-camp literature accounts of ordinary victims being cheered up at the sight of some notorious persecutor from the NKVD or the Party machine appearing in the same cell or barrack.

For the general objection to the Terror is not that it was to strike at the Party members as well as at the population, but that the sufferings of the population itself under it increased immeasurably. The true crux of the Ryutin dispute resides less in preserving the privileged sanctuary of Party membership than in the fact that it was the issue on which Stalin was to fight the battle with his own colleagues to decide if the country was or was not to submit unreservedly to his single will. In an oligarchical system, there is at lowest always the possibility of some members of the ruling elite taking moderate views, or at least acting as a brake on their more repressive fellows. In an autocracy, the question depends entirely on the will of one man. There have been comparatively mild autocrats. But Stalin was not one of them.

In this period when Stalin was the effective binding power of the State, the pressures he met penetrated his personal life as well. On 8 November 1932 his wife, Nadezhda Alliluyeva, committed suicide. But neither personal loss nor public crisis broke his will. And this was widely understood as the decisive factor in the terrible struggle just concluded. He had met wavering and refused it countenance. We are told that “in 1932 Stalin was adamant against the proposal to surrender the positions already gained.”²² An official of the period comments,

Loyalty to Stalin at the time of which I am writing [1932] was based principally on the conviction that there was no one to take his place, that any change of leadership would be extremely dangerous, and that the country must continue in its present course, since to stop now or attempt a retreat would mean the loss of everything.²³

Even a Trotskyite could comment, “If it were not for that so-and-so … everything would have fallen into pieces by now. It is he who keeps everything together….”²⁴