Stalin's Genocides (12 page)

no attention to Khrushchev’s distinctions and began to return home on their own, sometimes even fighting their way back to the northern Caucasus, where they continue to resist Moscow’s control to this day.

The story was very similar for the Crimean Tatars, though in this case there were both better reasons to doubt the Tatars’ loyalty and genuine military-political concerns about the Tatar presence in the strategically vulnerable Crimean peninsula. Once again, the entire nation was deported in a military-style operation in May 1944 to Central Asia and the Urals. The transport was brutal, and the length of the trip to Kirghizia and Tadzhikistan killed many thousands of deportees. The Tatars’ situation in Kirghizia was little better than that of the Chechens and Ingush in Kazakhstan. It is estimated that out of 190,000

Crimean Tatars, 70,000 to 90,000 died in transit or in the first years of exile. Like the Chechens and Ingush—as well as Balkars, Karachevtsy, and Kalmyks—the Crimean Tatars were told that they were exiled “in perpetuity” and

“without the right to return to their previous place of residence.”22 After 1956 the Tatars were also forbidden to return to their homeland in the Crimea but, like the Chechens and Ingush, they did so in any case. Now in Ukraine, the Tatars of the Crimea continue to fight for the right to reclaim their lands, most of which were resettled after their deportation with Russian and Ukrainian peasants.

Stalin’s nationality policy in the 1930s and 1940s was a contradictory mix of high-flown promises of cultural and economic development and state demands for conformity and submission. On the one hand, Soviet authorities con-98

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tinued the processes of
korenizatsiia
—building national allegiance among ethnic groups whose historical identities had been much more fluid and had revolved around de-marcations of clan, religion, region, occupation, and language. On the other hand, some ethnicities were culturally eliminated because they were seen as too small and irra-tional, while others were singled out as “enemies” and sent into exile with the idea that they would disappear through a combination of attrition, permanent removal from their homelands, and assimilation into their new surroundings.

6 The

Great

Terror

In his pioneering work on the purges of 1937–38, Robert Conquest coined the term “the Great Terror,” and it has continued to be used by historians ever since.1 The term captures well the “apocalyptic theater of horrors” of those two years in which every Soviet citizen, with the exception of the
vozhd’
himself—Stalin—could potentially be arrested, tortured, exiled, or executed.2 The fear was pal-pable and, especially for those in any position of responsibility— the nomenklatura of the party, factory bosses, intellectuals, army generals, and newspaper editors—bags were packed in case the knock on the door came at night.

The atmosphere in the major cities and provincial centers was tense; there was a kind of powerlessness about one’s situation that left everyone gasping for air. It would be hard for anyone who did not experience the fear and helplessness, the denunciations and confessions, to understand what it was like to live through that period. “I have seen faces consumed, glimpsed horror under lowered eye-lids, cheeks etched with pain,” wrote Anna Akhmatova in the poem “Requiem,” her moving attempt to describe the 100

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terrible experience of trying to find her arrested son during this period.

Yet, interestingly and instructively, when we try to imagine Soviet life in the Stalinist 1930s, people continued to do what they had always done: entertaining mov-ies were made and watched; theater performances were packed with eager audiences; young men and women participated in mass physical culture demonstrations; and people marveled at the accomplishments of Soviet fliers and polar explorers.3 “Life has become better, comrades,”

Stalin wrote in 1935. “Life has become more joyous.” And this was not simply rhetoric, at least not for some members of the elite. Soviet jazz became wildly popular; swing dancing was all the rage. Comedic musicals dominated the film screens.4

The purges of 1937–38 are hard to classify as genocide because no particular ethnic, social, or political groups were attacked, though alleged political opponents, most of whom ended up being executed, were indeed placed together by their accusers in completely fabricated conspiratorial parties. The major figures of Bolshevism became the chief defendants in three show trials: the Trial of the 16 or the “Trotskyite-Zinovievite Terrorist Center” in August 1936; the Trial of the 17 or the “Anti-Soviet Trotskyite Center” in January–February 1937; and the Trial of the 21 or the “Anti-Soviet Bloc of Rights and Trotskyites”

in March 1938. At the first trial, Zinoviev and Kamenev, among others, confessed to having organized the assassination of Kirov (December 1, 1934) and having conspired with Trotsky to murder Stalin and other leading the great terror 101

members of the party. In the second trial, Piatakov and Radek admitted that they had engaged in widespread wrecking and sabotage, including the undermining of the railway system in connivance with Trotsky and the Japanese. As Wladislaw Hedeler writes: “In memorizing what was dictated to them by their NKVD interrogators, the defendants regurgitated the new version of party history”

that had been rewritten “to comply with Stalin’s megalo-mania and infallibility.”5

Bukharin and Rykov were the major figures of the third show trial (Tomsky had committed suicide in September 1936). These leading figures of the so-called Right Opposition were accused of organizing “wrecking, diversionist, and terrorist activities,” with the goal of provoking an invasion of the Soviet Union for the purpose of dismantling the socialist system and restoring capitalism.6 All three groups put on trial were accused of working for a “central group”

of Trotskyites and rightists that represented the interests of Trotsky and foreign governments in the Soviet Union.

In fact, Trotsky was the major defendant in absentia at the Moscow show trials. His alleged confederates confessed to their crimes, and most were shot right away. An NKVD

agent killed Trotsky in Mexico with a pickax to the head in August 1940. Vyshinsky’s closing speech at the Bukharin trial (March 11, 1938) summed up his satisfaction with the elaborate trial extravaganza that he had directed: The whole country, from the youngest to the oldest, are waiting for and demanding one thing: that the traitors and spies who sold out our motherland to 102

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the enemy be shot like vile dogs. The people demand one thing: that the accursed vermin be squashed!

Time will pass. The hated traitors’ graves will become overgrown with weeds and thistles, covered

with the eternal contempt of honest Soviet people, of the entire Soviet people. While over our happy land, bright and clear as ever, our sun will shine its rays. We, our people, will as before stride along our path now cleansed of the last trace of the scum and vileness of the past, led by our beloved leader and teacher, the great Stalin.7

The trial transcripts, the defendants’ self-abasement and confessions, and the brutality of the prosecutor and the Soviet state toward their “founding fathers” have been known to students of the Soviet Union for decades.

Bukharin’s “confession” has been deconstructed by scholars to demonstrate the fact that he turned the accusations on their head, admitting to all of the self-contradictory, absurd charges as a way to show that none of them could be true. But there is also plenty of evidence to demonstrate that Bukharin was a beaten and thoroughly humiliated man, who confessed so completely because he could not take any more abuse from the party-state he had worked so hard to create. We know a lot about the fearsome brow-beating, torture, and threats to family members that lay behind many of the confessions. That Stalin directed the trials behind the scenes is not a matter of historical dispute. He systematically eliminated his chief political rivals through this process of trials, confession, and execution.

the great terror 103

What is less well known is how long and methodical were the preparations for these events. In some senses, Zinoviev and Kamenev, Radek and Piatakov, and Bukharin, Rykov, and Tomsky were tried by the party in lengthy proceedings long before their arrests and show trials in front of Soviet and world public opinion. The newly available transcripts of the Central Committee plenum and Politburo meetings in the early 1930s demonstrate that Stalin and his close allies—Molotov, Kaganovich, Voroshilov, Mikoyan, and Kuibyshev, not to mention Yagoda and Yezhov—conducted ongoing cross-examinations of these major figures of the Bolshevik past, repeatedly forcing them on the defensive, seeking weaknesses and inconsis-tencies in their rebuttals. Constantly fed with new materials from brutal interrogations of minor party members by the OGPU/NKVD, Stalin’s henchmen were able to out-flank the best arguments of the Old Bolshevik elite.

In these discussions, the Mafia-like quality of the Bolshevik “family” played itself out in brutal and painful confrontations between accused and accusers. The
padrone
, Stalin, sat and watched in the background, interjecting himself into the squabbles at will, often with his typically sarcastic humor. Sometimes his interpellations were force-ful and direct and ended the conversation; sometimes he acted as the dispassionate arbiter, restraining his more aggressive comrades.

The “defendants” were in an extremely difficult position in these Central Committee and Politburo confronta-tions, as they tried to use reasoned argument and honest denial (and, in Tomsky’s case, humor and jokes) to stave 104

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off threats to remove them from their positions in the Central Committee and in the government. As the attacks intensified, the veteran Bolsheviks became increasingly aware that much more was at stake than their jobs and reputations; they had to fight for their lives and those of their families as the accusations spread to those of wrecking and treason.

Despite months, even years, of this kind of political assault, things could also change drastically from one day to the next. The case of Yagoda was typical. First, while Yagoda was increasingly maligned by his comrades in the Central Committee, Yezhov was moved into an important position in the NKVD to keep an eye on him and assume some of his powers. Then Yezhov replaced him as chief of the NKVD and Yagoda was appointed head of the People’s Commissariat of Communications. Finally, Stalin sent the order (March 31, 1937) to have Yagoda arrested: “The Politburo . . . thinks it necessary to exclude him from Politburo and TsK. The Politburo . . . would like to inform the members of the TsK VKP, that in view of the danger of leaving Yagoda in freedom for even one more day, it considers it necessary to give the order to immediately arrest Yagoda. The Politburo . . . requests the members of the Central Committee to sanction the exclusion of Yagoda from the party and the TsK and his arrest.”8

Before directly attacking the old Bolshevik icons, Stalin and his lieutenants would go after smaller fry, as a way to tarnish the reputations and motives of their more senior protectors in the hierarchy. In the joint session of the Politburo and the Presidium of the Central Party Control Com-the great terror 105

mission of November 27, 1932, the “Group of Smirnov, Eismont, and Tolmachev” was excoriated for loose and drunken talk about problems of the party leadership during the collectivization campaign. But even more central to the goals of exposing the “affair” was Stalin’s ongoing attack on the “rightists” Rykov and especially the popular Tomsky and their prestige and party base. At this point, Rykov and Tomsky were only reprimanded, while the others were expelled from the Central Committee.9 But the accusations that came up in these internal party cross-examinations were used later during NKVD interrogations and forced confessions.

The attacks on Rykov and Tomsky were sustained and vicious; those on Bukharin had a particularly poignant quality since he had been the “darling of the party” and a favorite of Lenin’s. As the assaults mounted, Bukharin increasingly could feel the ground beneath him turn to quicksand. The “confessions” of Zinoviev and then of Radek made Bukharin’s position in the party—once seem-ingly unassailable—all the more difficult. He was pushed, bullied, and heckled by his Central Committee comrades, yet he continued to try to take the high road, though with little success. When he was finally arrested on January 27, 1937, he denied the charges of treason, terrorism, and planning the overthrow of the Soviet government.

To the end, he protested his love of Stalin and the party leadership.

That Bukharin and others were accused of participating in conspiracies involving completely incompatible political opposites was no chance occurrence. Tactically, from 106

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the point of view of the authorities, this gave the groups greater ability to harm the state, while Stalin’s drive to eliminate all of them, the supposed Left and Right, was all the greater. As Robert Tucker has written, Stalin was not just a paranoid who believed that individuals were out to get him. He suffered from a “paranoid delusional system,” meaning that his opponents were joined together in interconnected groups, manipulated from abroad by Trotsky and his son Lev Sedov, as well as by foreign governments. Tucker writes: “Authorities describe a paranoid system as an intricate, schematized, and logically elaborated structure with a ‘central delusional theme’ involving a hostile plot of which the person concerned is an intended victim.”10 In essence, an entire mythological structure of traitors and spies was constructed to satisfy the boss’s fantasies. The more unlikely the members of the same groups, the more Stalin and the NKVD could convince themselves and their associates that everyone was potentially dangerous. Paradoxically, the less likely the conspiracies, the more ubiquitous they became.

There can be no question that Stalin was in charge of this insane witch hunt for enemies and traitors. Across the board, Stalin was a micromanager of Soviet international and domestic affairs, and most particularly in those cases when state security was involved. Especially in those periods when the OGPU/NKVD were involved in purges, trials, terror, and executions, Stalin met with his security chiefs frequently, sometimes more than once a day.11 Yagoda’s OGPU had been condemned as insufficiently vigilant, unable to grasp the extent of the treachery, indeed even the great terror 107