The Thinking Reed

Today it is quite clear… that the cases were faked. As in the later… trials, no documentary evidence against the accused was produced apart from their own confessions. Much subsequent testimony has since exposed these methods of physical torture and moral coercion by means of which they were forced to slander themselves.61

And yet, to this day, none of the big ‘wrecking’ trials has been revised. Even after the ‘exposure of the cult of personality’ in 1956 and condemnation of the unlawful repressions carried out in the Stalin era, the Soviet government continues to maintain that the policy of the 1920s in relation to the intellectuals was correct and the arrests justified.62 On the other hand, the thesis of the universal ‘counterrevolutionariness’ of the old intelligentsia has been quietly abandoned. The official textbook on the history of the CPSU acknowledges that ‘the overwhelming mass of the old specialists worked honestly.’63 Dr S. Fedukhin states that the intelligentsia did not approve of the Bolshevik revolution; ‘but’, he goes on judiciously, ‘these intellectuals who did not agree with the new government, and denounced it, did what the republic mainly required of them — they worked.’64

We thus get a curious picture. The thesis according to which 90 per cent of the engineers were counter-revolutionaries was evidently wrong, yet the arrests carried out on the basis of this thesis were right. This same book on the Party’s history approves of the persecution of the engineers in the fabricated Shakhty case. The textbook published under B.N. Ponomarev’s editorship continues to affirm that ‘they were wreckers’.65

Most of the official historians prefer to say nothing about the Shakhty case, but their silence is also interesting because it implies unwillingness to clear the intelligentsia who were persecuted. Thus, reviewing a monograph on the history of the Soviet intelligentsia,66 Voprosy Istorii complained that the book dealt inadequately with ‘the process of re-educating the old intelligentsia’.67 It is quite clear that if this ‘process’ were to be ‘dealt with’ in greater detail it would show a significant picture of mass repressions and ‘re-education’ in the camps. But it is curious that the writer in Voprosy Istorii, a certain V.N. Sheyko, was apparently unable to understand, almost two decades after Stalin’s death, that these intellectuals were not thieves or juvenile delinquents who needed to be re-educated.

On the whole, Stalin’s ‘solution of the problem of the intelligentsia’ had much in common with his solution of the peasant problem and that of the workers. Collectivization and industrialization had as their most important consequence the destruction of firm bonds within all classes of society. The peasantry lost their old social structure and millions of declassed peasants rushed to the towns, eroding the small working class. During the five years of collectivization and industrialization the numbers of industrial workers almost doubled, owing, as Roy Medvedev writes, to ‘the mass exodus of peasants to the cities because of the bad situation in the countryside, and failure to achieve the planned increase in the productivity of labour’.68 In consequence, the old working-class cadres were diluted in the marginal mass of former peasants, who had lost their own traditions, work habits and social ideals. In a country where the whole population had been turned, to a considerable extent, into a declassed mass, the bureaucracy remained the only socially organized force. The terror was to play the same role in relation to the intelligentsia as collectivization played in relation to the peasantry. The more or less united old intelligentsia was replaced by a declassed mass of ‘new specialists’.

Altogether, in spite of everything, the intelligentsia was, it seems, always an object of particular hatred on Stalin’s part. The specific character of intellectual labour presumes, as has been said, a certain degree of independence for every person who participates in it, and this made the intelligentsia particularly dangerous. ‘The fundamental problem’, observed the French socialist historian Gilíes Martinet, in a discussion with Boffa on Stalinism, ‘is to prevent the rise of cadres possessing a measure of autonomy. Hence the need for special attention and particular repressions where the intelligentsia are concerned.’69 This ‘special attention’ accounts for the incredible ferocity of the repression of Party intellectuals, most of whom had by 1937 reconciled themselves to the ruling order. ‘The educated elite found itself’, notes Shatz,