The Grand Inquisitor's Manual (41 page)

Indeed, a certain complicity between the inquisitors and their victims—and sometimes a glimmer of subtle but defiant wit—can be discerned in the transcripts of the show trials as the players speak the lines that had been prepared for them, sometimes with Stalin’s active participation as a kind of executive producer. The interrogation of Kamenev, an Old Bolshevik and an early rival of Stalin, by Vishinsky, Stalin’s handpicked prosecutor, in the 1936 trial, for example, may have been scripted, but the leading actor in the scene succeeds in injecting a note of irony into his performance:

VISHINSKY
: What appraisal should be given the articles and statements you wrote in 1933, in which you expressed loyalty to the party? Deception?

KAMENEV:
No, worse than deception.

VISHINSKY
: Perfidy?

KAMENEV:
Worse!

VISHINSKY
: Worse than deception; worse than perfidy—find the word. Treason?

KAMENEV:
You have found the word!
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After five days of sputtering rhetoric by the state prosecutor and staged confessions by the defendants in the first of the great show trials in 1936, Vishinsky asked for the death penalty—“I demand that dogs gone mad should be shot, every one of them!”—and the judges dutifully delivered the foreordained verdicts. They adopted yet another inquisitorial flourish when they not only sentenced the defendants to “the supreme penalty” but also decreed that “all property personally belonging to them [is] to be confiscated.” After the public executioners had finished their work, the slugs were dug out of the victims’ skulls, carefully labeled to identify which bullet had killed which Bolshevik, and preserved as relics somewhere in the archives of the NKVD—a final gesture of piety by the Soviet inquisition.
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The Moscow show trials featured only the most famous victims, the ones whose public confession and humiliation Stalin regarded as a useful propaganda tool. Indeed, a curious intimacy existed between the persecutors and the persecuted, many of whom had struggled together in earlier, happier days when they victimized their adversaries rather than one another. Thus, Stalin himself not only decreed in advance that a particular defendant was to be found guilty but also edited the formal verdict before it was announced in court: “It needs stylistic polishing,” he explained to a subordinate about one such document. And some of the defendants were bold (and desperate) enough to scribble personal appeals for mercy to their former comrade-in-arms who now sat in the Kremlin.
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Bukharin, for example, had sought to put himself back in favor by penning a paean titled “A Poem About Stalin in Seven Cantos” and sending it to Stalin. After his conviction in the last of the show trials in 1938, Bukharin begged Stalin to permit him to take his own life with an overdose of morphine rather than take a bullet in the back of the head. Although the plea went unanswered—and Bukharin was shot like a dog, just as Vishinsky demanded—Stalin kept Bukharin’s last note in a desk drawer for the rest of his life: “Koba,” the Old Bolshevik had written, using Stalin’s revolutionary alias, “why do you need my life?”
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By far the greatest number of victims of the Great Terror, however, consisted of obscure party cadres, officers of the Red Army, apparatchiks of the Soviet bureaucracy, and members of the intelligentsia whose loyalty to the Stalinist regime was doubted, if only by Stalin himself. Countless thousands of men and women were arrested and punished in absolute secrecy, whether by summary execution or by long sentences at slave labor in the vast complex of camps and prisons called the Gulag, a Russian acronym for the bureaucracy blandly known as the Main Camp Administration. The Great Terror afforded the ruler of Soviet Russia an opportunity to purge his regime of all its enemies—actual or potential, real or imagined—just as the Inquisition had provided both a theological rationale and a prosecutorial toolkit that allowed the king of France to eliminate the Knights Templar and the king of Spain to eliminate the Jews and the Jewish
conversos.
⁶⁶

The Great Terror, in fact, can be seen as the Soviet counterpart of the medieval Inquisition in many of its particulars. The Soviet inquisitors, for example, devised their own set of useful codes and tropes to avoid speaking plainly about their atrocities. Arrest was called “isolation,” confinement in a labor camp was “the second category” of punishment, and death was called “the first category.” The victims of the Great Terror were commonly demonized as “enemies of the people,” “counter-revolutionaries,” and “wreckers,” all of which were used as loosely as “heretic” or “witch” had been during the Middle Ages. The purging of such malefactors was described as a process of “ongoing purification” by which the Soviet Union resolved to rid itself of “vermin” and “pollution.”
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Just as a Cathar was called a “traitor to God,” a victim of the Great Terror might be condemned as a “traitor to the fatherland.” Although they were often accused of committing (or conspiring in) acts of terrorism, their real crime was a thought-crime; the twentieth-century heretics of the Soviet Union were “deviationists” who had strayed, whether willfully or inadvertently, from the ever-shifting party line. Like the
conversos
of Spain, whose conversion to Christianity was seen as inauthentic by the Inquisition, the victims of the Great Terror were condemned as insincere Communists who “crawl[ed] stealthily into socialism,” according to Stalin, “even though [they] ‘secretly did not mean it.’”
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No one was safe from the Soviet inquisitors during the Great Terror, an era in which “the Revolution devoured its children”—sometimes figuratively and sometimes quite literally. Children were encouraged to inform on their parents, parents on their children, wives on their husbands, and they were praised when they did so. One aggrieved student denounced his teacher for assigning too much homework and was singled out for admission to an elite school in Moscow. Once a man or woman had been seized by the secret police, his or her relations were at heightened risk of arrest as a “Member of the Family of a Traitor to the Fatherland,” a newly coined status crime that recalls the penalties imposed by the Inquisition on the children and grandchildren of convicted heretics.
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Not even the triggermen and torturers of the Great Terror were beyond the reach of the Soviet inquisition. Thus, the chief of the Soviet secret police, Genrikh Yagoda (1898–1938), was himself arrested and sentenced to die, a moment of rough justice for the man who had directed the work of the agents, jailors, and executioners during the first two years of the Great Terror. “I fall to my knees before the People and the Party,” pleaded Yagoda, who must have known all too well that his words were pointless, “and ask them to pardon me, to save my life.” Yagoda’s plea was unavailing—his life, like those of countless thousands of his victims, ended with a bullet in the back of the head—and he was helpless to protect his wife, parents, siblings, and even more distant relatives, all of whom were arrested by Yagoda’s successor.
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A vast network of spies and snitches—and the fact that some other victim would be tortured into naming names—put every Soviet citizen at risk. A history professor named Konstantin Shteppa, for example, first came to the attention of the secret police when he was overheard to describe Joan of Arc as “nervous and highly strung,” a notion that was held to be at odds with the then-prevailing party line, which regarded the Maid of Orléans as “a heroine of a national resistance movement.” Shteppa was arrested in 1938 and subjected to fifty days of “severe interrogation.” Although he managed to survive, he later recalled the atmosphere of fear and distrust that was the whole point of the Great Terror: “I was naturally sorry for my friends, but I was not only sorry for them,” said Shteppa, “I was afraid of them.”
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The men and women who operated the machinery of persecution in the Soviet Union—just like the rank and file of the Inquisition or, for that matter, the Holocaust—were assured (and reassured themselves) that they were serving the interests of “legal justice.” But only a few victims of the Great Terror were afforded even the parody of due process that constituted a show trial. Most were condemned to prison, slave labor, or death by order of the roving three-man tribunals, known as troikas, that operated across Russia in much the same manner as the flying squads of the medieval Inquisition, passing sentence on their victims in absentia and “without benefit of judge, jury, lawyers, or trial.” On September 30, 1937, by way of example, a troika set up operations in a labor camp in the Karelian Republic and issued 231 sentences in a single day.
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“Assuming a ten-hour workday, with no breaks,” observes Anne Applebaum in
Gulag,
“less than three minutes would have been spent considering the fate of each prisoner.”
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By the end of 1938, after some 750,000 men and women had been put to death, Stalin ordered an abrupt halt to the Great Terror. He was apparently satisfied that the ranks of the party, the armed forces, the bureaucracy, and the intelligentsia had been sufficiently purged of wreckers and deviationists to preserve his absolute authority over the Soviet Union. Or perhaps a better explanation is that Stalin finally awakened to the fact that his counterpart in Berlin was actively preparing for war, and the time had come for him to do the same.

Even if the show trials and summary executions now abated, however, the Soviet secret police and the Gulag continued to operate without pause through Stalin’s death in 1953, and Soviet citizens in the countless millions continued to be arrested and sentenced to hard (and sometimes killing) labor. Although the absolute number of victims is still debated, as many as 18 million men and women may have passed through the Gulag between 1929 and 1953, and Applebaum proposes a total of 28.7 million when all Soviet victims of forced labor are included. The death toll, which surely numbers in the millions, is simply uncountable.

According to such calculations, the Soviet inquisitors were Stakhanovites who outperformed not only their medieval counterparts but also their rivals across the fighting front in Nazi Germany. But the core idea of the Stalinist war on “wreckers” and “deviationists”—as with Nazi Germany’s war against the Jews—had occurred to the popes and grand inquisitors of the Middle Ages seven centuries earlier. In that sense, the Stalinist and Nazi models of the machinery of persecution are unique only in their industrial-scale production capacity and not in their purpose.

Still, we are morally obliged to ask if any distinctions can be drawn between the two great secular inquisitions of the twentieth century, if only to extract some meaning out of these nightmares of history. The question has been even more hotly argued than the Inquisition itself, and the debate forces us to confront the vexing issue of whether we are, as Spanish poet and philosopher George Santayana famously suggested, condemned to repeat the past. To ignore the question renders history itself meaningless.

On the surface, Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia can be seen as a pair of opposites, each the mirror image of the other. Both Hitler and Stalin were dangerous and even deluded visionaries, capable of acting out of true belief even when realpolitik might have suggested a compromise of principles. On a less exalted level of comparison, the Gestapo and the NKVD resorted to the same tools and techniques in service to their masters, including even the use of the medieval “queen of torments,” the reliable old strappado. Indeed, many of the parallels between these two totalitarian states owe something to the fact that the machinery of persecution can be readily repurposed and put to use by any totalitarian regime in the service of any ideology.
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Other similarities between Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia are even more striking because they seem to transcend the purely practical problems that all persecutors are forced to address. Both the Gestapo and the NKVD understood that ordinary men and women can be made to confess to extraordinary acts of wrongdoing if only they are properly tortured, which explains why both resorted to the strappado. But some other explanation must be sought for the fact that both Hitler and Stalin, like Torquemada, singled out Jews for special treatment. Here, too, is a clue to perhaps the single most dangerous component of the inquisitorial project—the willingness to punish anyone whose faith, ethnicity, nationality, sexual orientation, or physical appearance is somehow different from that of those who enjoy the power to decide what is permitted and what is forbidden.

To be sure, Soviet anti-Semitism was deeply rooted in history. Imperial Russia had its own long and ugly tradition of Jew hatred, including official segregation in the so-called Pale of Settlement, state-sponsored mob violence in the form of pogroms, and exclusion of Jews from land ownership, the professions, the universities, and the government. The revolutionary movement in Russia had attracted Jewish participation precisely because it offered an opportunity to overthrow a system that had oppressed the Jewish people for centuries. But the stain of anti-Semitism can be detected in the Stalinist regime no less than in the tsarist one it replaced, and it was no accident that Jewish defendants figured prominently in the Great Terror, a fact that did not escape the attention of Joseph Goebbels.