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29.01.2010 http://www.einaudi.cornell.edu/files/workingpaper/01–2005.pdf.

II Discipline

The Great Soviet Paradox: Elections and

Terror in the Unions, 1937–1938*

Wendy Z. Goldman

At the height of “the Great Terror” in the Soviet Union in 1937, leaders of

the Communist Party launched a democracy campaign aimed at involving

ordinary citizens in a revitalization of various governing institutions. The

campaign, which initiated multi-candidate, secret ballot elections in the

soviets, the Party, and the unions, has received little attention from histori-

ans despite a vast literature on the terror. Superficially, these two phenom-

ena—terror and democracy—appear in sharp contradiction. What could

denunciations, spy mania, fear, mass arrests, extra legal trials, and execu-

tions possibly have in common with secret ballots, new elections, official

accountability, and the revitalization of democracy? Historians have placed

so much emphasis on terror during the Stalin era that it is difficult to see a

mass campaign for democracy as anything but a cynical propaganda ploy

from above. Yet the campaign in the unions was a complex movement in

which the interests of many groups—Party leaders, union officials, and

workers—combined, collided, and ignited. It had important intentional and

unintentional consequences and refocused attention, albeit briefly, on

working and living conditions. Most importantly, the democracy campaign

played a critical role in the terror, sparking a power struggle within more

than 160 unions and thousands of factory committees and involving mil-

lions of workers in the repressions.

Historians differ sharply about almost every aspect of the terror: the in-

tent of the state, the targets of repression, the role of foreign and domestic

pressures, the degree of centralized control, the time frame, and the reac-

tion of Soviet citizens. One long-prevailing view holds that the Soviet

regime was from its inception a terror state. Its authorities, intent solely on

——————

* This article is excerpted from material in Wendy Goldman (2005). Stalinist Terror and Democracy: The 1937 Union Campaign.
American Historical Review
, 110, 1427–53; and Wendy Goldman (2007).
Terror and Democracy in the Age of Stalin. The Social Dynamics of
Repression
. New York: Cambridge University Press.

148

W E N D Y Z . G O L D M A N

maintaining power, sent a steady stream of people to their deaths in camps

and prisons. The stream may have widened or narrowed over time, but it

never stopped flowing. The Bolsheviks, committed to an anti-democratic

ideology and thus predisposed to terror, crushed civil society in order to

wield unlimited power.1

In the 1980s, a new interest in social history prompted a revisionist re-

action to this view. Historians began to take a closer look at the fissures

and tensions within the state. They explored a dynamic dialectic between

state policies and social responses in which state action produced unfore-

seen social and economic consequences, which in turn led to increasingly

Draconian measures. They identified specific targets and episodes of re-

pression (Manning 1984; Getty 1985; 1991; 1997; Getty and Naumov

1999; Harris 1999;Rees 2002; Rittersporn 1991; Solomon 1996). A few

historians began to explore popular elements in the terror, discovering that

workers and peasants used its rituals and rhetoric to denounce managers

and officials for abuse. But with a few exceptions, historians did not fully

develop these initial findings.2

In the 1990s, newly released archival materials provided important in-

formation on Stalin’s role and the targets of repression. The documents

provided incontestable proof of Stalin’s close personal involvement in

repression. The archives also yielded new information about victims, sub-

stantially expanding the categories of people marked for repression beyond

the economic managers, Party and military leaders, former oppositionists,

and foreign communists previously identified by historians. “Order 00447”

for “mass operations” in July 1937 set target numbers for the imprison-

ment or execution of criminals, village clergy, religious activists, former

kulaks, and other “hostile elements”. It was followed by additional orders

for the round up of various national groups deemed a threat to national

security in event of war. The discovery of the “mass and national opera-

tions” encouraged some historians to conceptualize the terror more nar-

rowly as “a series of centrally directed punitive actions” launched by

Stalin.3 At the same time, however, others broadened their view by linking

——————

1 Conquest 1990; Courtois et al. 1999; Solzhenitsyn 1973; Jansen et al. 2002; Kuromiya 1998; Khlevniuk 1995a; 1992 is informed by a similar view of the state, but focuses mainly on the period 1936–39.

2 On workers and industry, see Fitzpatrick 1994b; Manning 1993; Thurston 1993; Hoffman 1993; Thurston 1992; 1996. On repression in other institutions, see Chase 2001; Fitzpatrick 1993, 1994a; Siddiqi 2003.

3 Khlevniuk 2004, 140.

T H E G R E A T S O V I E T P A R A D O X

149

the operations to earlier policing practices developed in response to the

great social upheavals of collectivization and industrialization (Hagenloh,

2009; Shearer 2009; Getty 2002; McLoughlin and McDermott 2004).

Scholars working in newly available archives have taught us much

about the role of central authorities and the victims targeted, but the issue

of mass participation in the terror still remains relatively unexplored. His-

torians emphasize that the assassination of Sergei M. Kirov, the head of

the Leningrad Party organization, the rise of fascism, and the threat of war

fueled widespread fears of hidden enemies, wreckers, and spies.4 Yet they

rarely mention that Party leaders presented the murderous abrogation of

civil rights that we presently term “the Terror” as patriotic
anti
-terror measures, which demanded the support and active participation of all loyal citi-

zens. Moreover, Party leaders couched these anti-terror measures in the

language of anti-bureaucratization, socialist renewal, and mass control from

below, appeals with strong popular resonance. In the unions, which en-

compassed almost 22 million members, the slogans of repression were

intimately intertwined with those of elections and democracy. Nowhere is