History 2084
Russia in War and Revolution
How Can We Explain the Great Terror? The Great Terror, the watershed between Marxist-Leninism and true Stalinism, is usually defined as the period of almost indiscriminate repression spanning from the Moscow show trials of 1936-37 to the end of Yezhovchina in 1939. During the Terror hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of Russian persons were arrested, detained, deported and/or executed on the strength of orders filtered down from above, with Joseph Stalin at the apex signing the executive command. Given the cult of personality, as well as the particular style of administrative bureaucracy, that had been fostered through the decades since the revolution it would not be unreasonable to conclude superficially that Stalin had orchestrated some grand, Machiavellian operation for the inculcation of his position at the head of the Communist hierarchy. However, to do so seems incongruous with the portrait of incompetence painted by his contemporaries (the Ryutin Platform and the general indictment by Lenin[1] springing immediately to mind) and the seemingly ad hoc nature of his policy decisions[2] (specifically, his situational swings between conservatism and radicalism in the 1920's that seemed to consider the ramifications of those policies as a secondary consideration to the quelling of political dissent[3]). While it seems probable that he was apt to consolidate his influence within the Party at any opportunity, the picture of Stalin-as-Cartoon-Villain interpretation tends to dehumanise the figure of Stalin to an extent that then obfuscates the culpability of all else involved (from the uncaring to the “over zealous[4]”). Stalin demonstrated gross personality flaws in his administration[5] and personally perpetrated various crimes against humanity[6], but it is hard to conclude that any of the other contenders for Party superiority would have proved more able to control the wildly veering Line as it struggled to adapt itself against the idiosyncratic and backward nature of Russian society. By the time the Great Purges occurred, Soviet Russia and Marxist ideology had passed well through the haze of fanaticism that had coloured the post-revolutionary days. It had become something much more akin to the Salem witch trials or the Inquisition, in that the subjective guilt of the individual (of being an anti-societal element, i.e., a lawbreaker) had been subsumed by the extrinsically imposed objective guilt of the whole (of being unable to answer adequately for the failures of the system). Staunch, explicit support for the Party was demonstrated as being insufficient to disprove subversive intent regardless of political or social standing during the Show Trials and thanks to the 1937 expansion of Article 58 of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic (RSFSR) Penal Code a mere accusation thereof came to imply sufficient guilt for conviction. A citizen of Stalinist Russia (whether peasant or party member) would have been pressed by an ever increasingly onerous burden to prove their complicity to the doctrine regardless of personal belief. Although that citizen may not have fundamentally believed in the strength of that doctrine, such a matter is trifling when one considers that due to the incriminating implication of second-guessing the intentions of what may well be a devout believer it becomes impossible to accurately assess the stance of any given neighbour. Without the ability to ascertain that information safely, the only solution that remains feasible is that of tactical denunciation; 'proving' to the world in general that one is not a conspirator by process of accusing others. There have been many explanations for the events of the Great Terror[7] and it is likely that there is a measure of accuracy to a number of them. It is the contention of this essay that the rushed and ill-administered nature of the Bolshevik revolution is fundamentally responsible, as it created a severe paranoiac zeitgeist that was geometrically self-propagating, becoming increasingly destructive with each iteration until the mechanisms developed to assist the ideological construct essentially devoured its progenitors. This will be demonstrated through an examination of several major events between the Civil War and the Moscow Show Trials and their effects on the socio-political milieux of the period, including: the formal criminalisation of political opposition to the Bolshevik party in 1921, the introduction in 1927 of the all-encompassing Article 58 of the the R.S.F.S.R. Penal Code and its subsequent expansion after 1934 and the forced Industrialisation and Collectivisation under the first Five Year Plan from 1929 to 1933, not only for the repressed peasants but for the administrative organs responsible for its implementation. The Proliferation of Guilt: Civil War to Collectivisation The transformation of an agrarian oligarchy into an industrial commune was never going to be performed without some measure of repression by the ruling class of the proposed intermediary dictatorship[8]. To the utilitarian, scientific minds of those observing the 'Objective Logic' of history[9] this was simply an undesirable (yet brief) inevitability as the bourgeois remnants of the past clung desperately to whatever vestiges of power they had held illegitimately in the old world[10]. As a corollary bonus, the idea of a struggle against counter-revolutionary elements seemed a viable path through which the strength of Party unity could be galvanised. As the war dragged on, however, it eventually became apparent not only that not only were the deleterious effects of a protracted civil war destroying any capability that Russia may once have had to push itself through further industrialisation, but also suggesting a fundamental flaw in the apparently sound rationalist theory behind it. After five years of heavy infighting the Bolsheviks were able to prove only that the country was still not ready to relieve the temporary dictatorship; a prospect that necessarily carried with it one of three connotations. Either Marxism itself was flawed, the Russian socio-political sphere was far too immature to carry it through, or there were ever more crafty counter-revolutionary elements subverting the march of progress. The response from the S.R.s and Mensheviks to Lenin's 'strategic retreat' into the N.E.P. gave what appears to have been a suitable answer: the allowance of factional antagonistic political parties was an artefact of the past and evidently detrimental to the revolution. At the Xth Party Congress in 1921 Karl Radek vocalised the ultimatum that either they must be allowed full rights of political influence or be destroyed. By 1922 they had been dissolved completely[11], and the first major step toward totalitarianism had been taken[12]. The twenties progressed and the party was purged multiple times amongst further redefinitions of anti-Bolshevism, exacerbated by intra-party factionalism and denunciations thereof[13]. With a purge comes an intrinsic implication of incompatibility with the party, and members removed as such became susceptible to the repression building against the populace. This was exemplified by the introduction of Article 58 to the RSFSR Penal Code in February 1927. It was enacted as an attempt to codify what was to be defined as counter-revolutionary, as well as the punitive measures to be taken against such activity. Given the nature of the revolutionary struggle, granted to have been against every foreign nation and previously applicable political ideology, the article was in fact so broadly written that very quickly there came to be almost no class of action or inaction that couldn't be punished in accordance with it[14]. Of particular note were the provisions related to 'wrecking' (and with its expansion on June 6 1937, 'sabotage'); where the expulsion of factional Communist parties had proposed to destroy explicit opposition to Bolshevik policy, these particular provisions acted against what could be classed as 'implicit' opposition. The act of 'wrecking' could apply itself to any positive act, even within one's duties as a citizen, that could be implied as being detrimental to the state[15]. It didn't matter if the act was made in good faith, as a testimony of innocence would simply undermine the authority of the investigating organ of state and would by definition have been punishable as 'wrecking'. In light of this methodology of incrimination, it is understandable that any non-party members would have found themselves increasingly wary not only of the apparatus of state, but of the actions they made and the actions of the people around them. A strange feedback loop developed, as the appearance of guilt over the denunciation of a neighbour became evidence of guilt in relation to that neighbour's crime. As more people disappeared into the hands of the NKVD, the accusations of conspiratorial design increased and in turn, so did the number of arrests. Even within the administration and political police themselves, a failure to attain confessions, arrests and denunciations was looked on as evidence of corruption and counter-revolutionary sympathy to the extent that interrogators occasionally admitted to their prisoners the necessity of falsification for the sake of the state[16]. By 1936 belief in an accusation had long since become irrelevant- “if you live with the wolves, you must howl with the wolves.”[17] This moral panic rose from the bottom to find only paralysis and confusion at the top. The rising number of prisoners in the labour camps was not translating to the economic benefits some postulated may have spurred the crackdowns[18], and factional disputes were seething beneath the façade of Party solidarity[19]. While Zinoviev and Kamenev called for the expulsion of Trotsky on the Left, Stalin spoke publicly of moderation between them while privately destroying Trotsky's base of support. When it was possible to remove Trotsky from the War Commissariat, Stalin turned the Right against Zinoviev and Kamenev for the Leningrad Party's opposition to the Moscow Party, claiming that they were conspiring for the destruction of Bukharin and the will of the majority. Their defeat left them to form a Leftist bloc with Trotsky, whose political and economic policies were wildly radical and included the proposal to force a process of collectivisation on the peasants and working class in order to jump start the economic conditions needed for Socialism to proceed. Their expulsion from the Politburo on 1926 foreshadowed their expulsion from the Party in 1927, opening the path for Stalinist ministers to replace them. With the left domesticated, Stalin almost immediately turned his machinations against the Right[20], undermining the positions of Bukharin, Rykov and Tomsky as he began adopting the previously radical economic policies that they opposed (those which eventually led to Collectivisation). When they attempted to resign in late 1928 Stalin made sufficient concessions to keep them where they were, creating a forced unanimity that outwardly resembled Party unity. When Bukharin's protest of this came to light, Right-wing support plummeted amidst accusations of treachery and slander removing Bukharin as Chairman of the Comintern and Tomsky from the trade union leadership. The Right was forced to rescind their previous objections to the adoption of rapid collectivisation and industrialisation at the XVIth Party Conference in April 1929. Very shortly thereafter Vyacheslav Molotov, acting on orders from Stalin, announced radical amendments to these policies intended to see a much swifter achievement of their ends. With no functional political opposition remaining, the Central Committee issued a decision in January 1930 decreeing an increase from the targeted collectivisation of the private sector of agriculture from twenty per cent by 1933 to one hundred per cent by 1932 at the latest. Mutually Assured Economic Destruction: Collectivisation and Dekulakisation From an outside perspective, the first Five Year Plan for collectivisation was an astonishing success. By March 1930, more than fifty per cent was taken from the peasants within six months[21] and over ninety per cent was completed by the end of 1932. From the perspective of agricultural production, economic repercussion and public support, it was completely catastrophic. From the beginning the majority of peasants had objected to the forced removal of their land and property, a great number protesting via the destruction of anything they could not immediately use simply to avoid it falling into the hands of the government[22]. The plan to export confiscated grain to fund the promotion of industrial agricultural technology and methods was a fairy tale, the tractors promised to the poorly administered collective farms often simply failing to materialise. In December 1929 Stalin declared the 'liquidation of the kulaks as a class'[23], partially as a response to the protests mounting against forced crash collectivisation (although partially in line with the Communist Party's classic distaste for what they observed as the petite bourgeois nature of a peasant that was not dependant on the state). With no further classification of exactly what was a 'kulak' other than 'a rich peasant', this created yet another scapegoat to add to the mounting pile- interestingly, for once one that actually was acting in opposition to the desired Communist policy. Naturally, the systematic persecution of the kulaks (an event that actually far out performed the Great Terror in terms of deaths, arrests, deportations and gross human rights violations[24]) came at the worst possible time: the harvests of the early thirties were performed under terrible drought conditions, yet no concession was made to prevent the consequential famine that shook the country. Very quickly it was determined that the kulaks were responsible for the massive grain shortages, having hoarded it away to vex the process and frustrate the Communists. These claims, of course, had very little grounding in reality. The practical process of determining exactly which peasants were richer than the rest became little more than another farcical method of repression, this time squeezing down on the vast majority of the Russian population. Even the administrative organs responsible for the enforcement and requisition aiming to please their masters through over-productivity weren't safe: after seeing the effect of the Plan on the countryside even Stalin baulked, issuing an announcement in March 1930 in which he blamed the drastic social ramifications of the slaughter and theft in the countryside on “over-zealous” Party members, influenced by and complicit with dangerous anti-Leninist agents[25]. The stage was set for the Great Terror- literally the entire country lived in constant fear of the Sword of Damocles of arbitrary repression, the elite that may have resisted Stalin's irrational whims had been bullied and confused into passivity, even those loyal to the core were functionally treated as counter-revolutionary saboteurs. All that was left was for Stalin to follow his paranoid delusion to its logical extreme in having a popular political ally assassinated in the wake of a scathing indictment of his character by a relative nobody. Conclusion As a policy of negativity, the introduction of a new class of political criminals has two interesting effects that should be addressed. The first is that the uncertain ruling party (and by extension their public support) attempts to further define who or what they are; a style of fumbling in the dark, wherein they are able to create an aggregate image of themselves by the association of their enemies. If one is unable to point to what a Bolshevik is, then one should at least be able to point to what a Bolshevik isn't. However, in deciding that a class of people is inherently incompatible with the ruling party ethos there comes a broad expansion of the penumbra of guilt surrounding the apparently solid core of the Party. Because the policy itself secondarily highlights the unsubstantiality of that core, faith in the Party solidifies temporarily but inevitably collapses further when the problems intended to be addressed by the expansion are not solved. The process repeats itself until there is only a single grain of what is definite, surrounded by the vast shadow of what is definitely not. The ever expanding field of guilt that eventually came to singularity with the Great Terror can be simply explained as an attempt by those that believed in the looming ghost of Communism to retain its presence, for society to take on the guilt of the ideology's failures to save it from shattering in the face of its own insubstantiality[26]. In essence, the Great Terror was Russia's attempt to avoid admitting that it was unable to ever achieve Realsocialisme.

Bibliography Primary Sources
Lenin, V.I., “First Congress of the Communist International”, Collected Works, Vol 28 (Lenin Internet Archive (marxists.org), 2000) accessed May 28, 2011, http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1919/mar/comintern.htm
Lenin, V.I., “The State and Revolution”, Collected Works, Vol 25 (Lenin Internet Archive (marxists.org), 1993), accessed May 28, 2011, http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1917/staterev/ch02.htm#s3.
Miller, A.V., trans., Hegel's Science of Logic, (George Allen & Unwin, 1969), accessed May 28, 2011, http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/hegel/works/hl/hlnotion.htm#HL3_577b
Stalin, J.V., “Dizzy with Success”, Pravda, No. 60, (March 2, 1930), (Marxists Internet Archive (marxists.org), 2008), accessed May 28, 2011, http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/stalin/works/1930/03/02.htm
Stalin, J.V.,“Concerning Questions of Agrarian Policy in the U.S.S.R.”, Pravda, No. 309 (Marxists Internet Archive (marxists.org), 2008), accessed May 28, 2011, http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/stalin/works/1929/12/27.htm Secondary Sources
Applebaum, Anne, Gulag: A History (London: The Penguin Press, 2003)
Birt, Raymond “Personality and Foreign Policy: The Case of Stalin”, Political Psychology, Vol. 14, No. 4 (Dec., 1993)
Carmichael, Joel, Stalin's Masterpiece, (London: Morrison & Gibb Ltd, 1976)
Conquest, Robert, The Great Terror (London: Macmillan and Co Ltd., 1968)
Davies, Sarah, Harris, James, Stalin: A New History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1964)
Figes, Orlando, A People's Tragedy (London: Penguin, 1997)
Getty, J.A., Ritterspoon, G.T., Zemskov, V.N., “Victims of the Soviet Penal System in the Pre-war Years”, American Historical Review, Vol. 98, No. 4 (October 1993)
Hochschild, Adam The Unquiet Ghost: Russians Remember Stalin, (New York: Penguin Books USA Inc., 1994)
Solzhenitsyn, Aleksandr, The Gulag Archipelago (New York: Harper & Row)
Zizek, Slavoj, Chapter 2, “Why is Woman a Symptom of Man?”, Enjoy Your Symptom! (New York: Routledge Classics, 2008)
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[1] Robert Conquest, The Great Terror (London: Macmillan and Co Ltd., 1968) pp. 536-7
[2] Sarah Davies, James Harris, Stalin: A New History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1964), pp.4-5.
[3] Ibid., pp. 8-13.
[4] J.V. Stalin, “Dizzy with Success”, Pravda, No. 60, (March 2, 1930), (Marxists Internet Archive (marxists.org), 2008), accessed May 28, 2011, http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/stalin/works/1930/03/02.htm
[5] Raymond Birt “Personality and Foreign Policy: The Case of Stalin”, Political Psychology, Vol. 14, No. 4 (Dec., 1993), pp. 622-3.
[6] Anne Applebaum, Gulag; A History (London: The Penguin Press, 2003) pp. 94-6
[7] Joel Carmichael, Stalin's Masterpiece, (London: Morrison & Gibb Ltd, 1976), pp. 190-200.
[8] V.I. Lenin, “The State and Revolution”, Collected Works, Vol 25 (Lenin Internet Archive (marxists.org), 1993), accessed May 28, 2011, http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1917/staterev/ch02.htm#s3.
[9] A.V. Miller, trans., Hegel's Science of Logic, (George Allen & Unwin, 1969), accessed May 28, 2011, http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/hegel/works/hl/hlnotion.htm#HL3_577b
[10] V.I. Lenin, “First Congress of the Communist International”, Collected Works, Vol 28 (Lenin Internet Archive (marxists.org), 2000) accessed May 28, 2011, http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1919/mar/comintern.htm
[11] Robert Conquest, The Great Terror (London: Macmillan and Co Ltd., 1968) pp.5-6.
[12] Orlando Figes, A People's Tragedy (London: Penguin, 1997), pp. 630, 649.
[13] Joel Carmichael, Stalin's Masterpiece, (London: Morrison & Gibb Ltd, 1976), pp.5-6.
[14] Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago (New York: Harper & Row), p.60.
[15] Anne Applebaum, Gulag: A History (London: The Penguin Press, 2003), pp. 122-45
[16] Anne Applebaum, Chapter 7, “Arrest”, Gulag: A History, (London: The Penguin Press, 2003), p.140.
[17] Adam Hochschild, The Unquiet Ghost: Russians Remember Stalin, (New York: Penguin Books USA Inc., 1994), p.9.
[18] Joel Carmichael, Stalin's Masterpiece, (London: Morrison & Gibb Ltd, 1976), p.192.
[19] Robert Conquest, The Great Terror (London: Macmillan and Co Ltd., 1968) pp.8-13
[20] Robert Conquest, The Great Terror (London: Macmillan and Co Ltd., 1968) pp.18-20.
[21] Ibid., p.21.
[22] Ibid.
[23] J.V. Stalin, “Concerning Questions of Agrarian Policy in the U.S.S.R.”, Pravda, No. 309 (Marxists Internet Archive (marxists.org), 2008), accessed May 28, 2011, http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/stalin/works/1929/12/27.htm
[24] J.A. Getty, G.T. Ritterspoon, V.N. Zemskov, “Victims of the Soviet Penal System in the Pre-war Years”, American Historical Review, Vol. 98, No. 4 (October 1993), pp.1019-23
[25] J.V. Stalin, “Dizzy with Success”, Pravda, No. 60, (March 2, 1930), (Marxists Internet Archive (marxists.org), 2008), accessed May 28, 2011, http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/stalin/works/1930/03/02.htm
[26] Slavoj Zizek, Chapter 2, “Why is Woman a Symptom of Man?”, Enjoy Your Symptom! (New York: Routledge Classics, 2008), pp.33-70.