I cannot forget what a highly-placed and saddened Frenchman told me recently in Washington when we were discussing the purge. “Yes,” he said, “it must have been awful, like a madness as you call it. But don’t forget, mon ami, that in Russia they shot the Fifth-Columnist and in France we made them cabinet ministers. You see both results to-day and on the Red War front.”—W. DURANTY
WHEN at the Party Congress of December, 1923, one month before the death of Lenin, Stalin raised the cry for the destruction of “Trotskyism,” it was clear to every observer on the spot that he had made up his mind to settle accounts with Trotsky, to destroy his influence and with it the ideas for which he stood. Not for a moment would I suggest that Stalin had thought out the various stages through which the conflict with Trotsky and his associates would pass, from the first ideological struggle within the Party to Trotsky’s banishment and the reverberations of the execution squads. Stalin has never been a man to shoot first and argue afterwards. In fact, I venture to assert that at no time in the political history of any country has there been so lengthy a warfare of words, and only words, between leading members of a political party; and I would add that no leader with such power in his hands as that possessed by Stalin, ever showed such patience with an opponent. I write as one who was a witness on the spot, and even a not infrequent participant in the long controversy extending from December, 1923, to January, 1929, when Trotsky was banished from the Soviet Union.
When Stalin at this Congress again labelled the views of Trotsky with an “ism,” as Lenin had done before him, he provided the Bolsheviks with a means of canalising every oppositional force within and without the Party. Likewise when on the death of Lenin he labelled Lenin’s teachings as “Leninism” and made himself its leading exponent, he was executing a master-stroke of political warfare.
It would be fruitless to discuss here whether in virtue of Lenin’s Testament, Stalin should have been set aside in favour of Trotsky. A great deal of fuss and many unwarrantable claims have been made for this document. Lenin’s Testament was nothing more than an attempt by means of a post-dated letter to prevent a split in the Bolshevik Party which his presence had hitherto averted. It was written by a sick man and was not the wisest of documents. Its characterisation of the leaders of the Bolsheviks was probably sound enough at the time, although subsequent events proved that he had over-estimated Trotsky and under estimated his “wonderful Georgian.” The circumstances of the letter’s delivery may have been other than he anticipated. It was really a shot in the dark, and it missed its mark almost entirely: instead of uniting his successors, it became the weapon of the very forces he had consistently belaboured and denounced. Yet for all that, it was not difficult for Stalin to turn it aside. When he read it to the Thirteenth Congress of the Party and commented, “Yes, I am rude to those who would destroy Lenin’s party, etc.,” he shifted the issue from one of good manners to the larger battle-ground of the principles, aims and rôle of the Party as the leader of the Revolution. Nevertheless, he was to take to heart Lenin’s homilies on refinement.
So much attention has been focused on the personal aspects of the struggle between the Bolshevik leaders from this time onward, that the issues involved have been more often than not completely obscured. “Stalin destroys the Old Bolsheviks, the Old Guard, the Friends of Lenin”—“Stalin the Dictator murders the most brilliant of the Revolution”—“Stalin creates a yes-man party of mediocrities”—“The Revolution has had its Thermidor and Stalin is the foulest of the Thermidorians”; such were the thunderings that rolled round the world, until one day, after Hitler’s armies had been flung back from the gates of Moscow and the Soviet Union had surprised all mankind with its unity, enthusiasm, and power, it dawned on the world that it would have to think again about the Soviets and Stalin’s leadership. It sighed with relief to find that all the doleful prognostications of weakness and internal collapse were wrong, and was stirred by the majesty of Soviet might and thrilled by the glory of its achievements.
It is easier to discern the meaning of many events when we see them in retrospect. Up to 1924 the disputes between Stalin and Trotsky had appeared to be incidental and unrelated. Neither had set down in comprehensive form a systematic exposition of his views, be it on the Russian Revolution in particular or revolution in general. Both declared themselves the disciples of Marx, but each expounded Marxism in his own way. Their quarrel turned not on what Marx had said, but on the application of Marxism to the environment in which each functioned as a leader.
At the moment when the battle opened, the Bolshevik Party and Stalin were forced to make one of those great decisions which have determined the whole course of the Russian Revolution. Since the events of November, 1917, all eyes had been watching for the longed-for extension of the Revolution in Europe. Instead they had seen the short-lived Bolshevik régime in Hungary swept away, the German Revolution diverted into the Weimar Constitution and bogged there. In 1923 the leaders of the Communist International—Zinoviev, Bucharin, and Trotsky—were convinced that a proletarian revolution was imminent in Germany and Radek was sent by the Comintern to advise the leaders of the German Communist Party. He was not a success, and the uprising was defeated. It was then clear to even the most fervent that revolution in Europe was definitely on the ebb, and no one could tell how long it would take for the tide to turn.
Although Stalin had been with Lenin at the formation of the Communist International in March, 1919, and had appeared at the Second Congress in 1920, where I first saw him, he had written little, and spoken little, on international affairs. All his political writings, even his book on the nationalities question, had concentrated on the struggle within the Russian Empire. He had shared Lenin’s internationalist view of the war of 1914-18, but about this too he had written next to nothing. His introduction to international questions was essentially an empirical one. When he went abroad in 1905 to Finland, 1906 to Stockholm, 1907 to London, 1912 to Cracow and Vienna, he was not interested in anything but Party matters. His first real contributions to affairs beyond the frontiers of the Russian Empire began after he had become Lenin’s second-in-command. When the crisis arose concerning the Brest-Litovsk negotiations, he came down heavily on the side of Lenin, favouring the immediate signing of the Treaty. He had no illusions then about the possibility and probability of early revolution in Europe, and when the revolutionaries of Germany failed in 1923 they finally sealed his conviction that the Russian proletariat had to drive full-speed-ahead towards Socialism in the Soviet Union.
That in doing so they would have the friendly support of the workers of other countries he was sure, but not for a long time the aid of another workers’ State. In his judgement the fate of the Russian Revolution turned primarily upon this issue—could the Soviet Union become a powerful Socialist country before the capitalist world again made war on her? This question would permit of no equivocal answer. If Stalin and the Bolshevik Party answered in the affirmative, they were faced with a colossal undertaking which would tax their powers to the uttermost. They did answer in the affirmative, and it was Stalin who took the lead in giving the answer during the period when the New Economic Policy was in operation.
The capitalist world may have looked on this period as the “retreat to capitalism.” The reformists may have looked upon it as the beginning of a liberal period in which the Soviet Union would exhibit an expanding liberalism, turning eventually into Socialism as the N.E.P. men became Christian, and the Bolsheviks left behind them their unpleasant revolutionary methods. Stalin regarded it as a “breathing space” in which the Revolution retreated to “prepared positions” in order to regroup the Bolshevik divisions before storming new heights.
This, of course, is an estimate of the period couched in class-war military terms. But any attempt to appraise Stalin and the course of the Revolution from any other angle does not make sense. We may not like the way the Bolsheviks made history. We may think leaders and led on both sides might have conducted themselves more decorously, but that will not help us to understand what really happened. Stalin held the Bolsheviks’ point of view, was animated by their aims and governed by their principles. Once this is lost sight of, immediately the entire process ceases to have meaning and the tragic story turns into nothing more than a series of outrages, murders, suicides, panic, and an orgy of personal jealousies and frustrated ambitions.
In the final analysis the whole dispute, from the first clash at the formation of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party to the purge of the Red Army in 1938, resolves itself into a prolonged struggle between revolution and counter-revolution, although it is not thought of in those terms until the final stages. At the outset Lenin and Stalin stood together against Trotsky and his colleagues on the question of which class was to lead the Revolution. After the conquest of power Lenin and Stalin stood firmly for the signing of the Brest-Litovsk Peace Treaty: Trotsky vacillated between “No War and No Peace” and a revolutionary war, when the Soviet Government had no arms with which to fight. Stalin demanded that the Red Army be led by leaders who were Bolsheviks: Trotsky handed over the army staff positions to recruited officers of the Czarist Army. Trotsky proposed the militarisation of Labour, with the Trade Unions as compulsory State institutions: Lenin and Stalin stood firmly for the Trade Unions as voluntary organisations and against Labour militarisation. Lenin and Stalin declared that Socialism can be built in one country: Trotsky insisted that the Russian Revolution must fail unless it was immediately supported by a pan-European revolution.
It is impossible to view these issues in sequence without observing that Trotsky’s practical proposals were disastrous and his opinions defeatist. He jumped out of the Menshevik camp into the Bolshevik some three months before the November Revolution—only after it had become certain that the Menshevlks were a waning force. Moreover, it is quite obvious from what followed immediately after the Revolution, that he had not changed fundamentally in his approach to revolutionary problems. He had only changed his vantage-ground.
It was in the middle of the New Economic Policy era, following on the great Party purge, that Stalin set the issue “Leninism versus Trotskyism.” But, having learned from Lenin how to present questions of doctrine in concrete political forms, he directed all theoretical discussion into an examination of “building Socialism in one country.” He asked “How did Trotsky regard this question?” and answered in the words of Trotsky taken from his book The Year 1905:
It was during the interval between January 9th and the General Strike of October 1905 that the views on the character of the revolutionary development of Russia, which came to be known as the theory of the “permanent revolution,” gradually crystallised in the author’s mind. This somewhat complicated term represented a rather simple idea; though the immediate objectives of the Russian Revolution were bourgeois in nature, the revolution, upon achieving its objectives, would not stop there. The revolution would not be able to solve its immediate bourgeois problems except by placing the proletariat in power. And the latter, upon assuming power, would not be able to limit itself to the bourgeois framework of the revolution. On the contrary, precisely in order to secure its victory the proletarian vanguard would be forced in the very early stages of its rule to make deep inroads, not only into feudal property, but into capitalist property as well. In this the proletariat will come into hostile collision not only with the bourgeois groupings which supported the proletariat during the first stages of revolutionary struggle, but also with the broad mass of the peasants, who were instrumental in bringing it to power. The contradictions in the situation of the workers’ Government in a backward country with an overwhelming majority of peasants can be solved only on an international scale, on the arena of the world proletarian revolution.
Then, taking his stand on “Leninism,” Stalin wrote:
Lenin speaks of the alliance of the proletariat and the toiling strata of the peasantry as the foundation of the dictatorship of the proletariat. In Trotsky we find the “hostile collision” of the “proletarian vanguard” with “the broad masses of the peasantry.”
Lenin speaks of the leadership of the toiling and exploited masses by the proletariat. In Trotsky we find “contradictions in the situation of the workers’ Government in a backward country with an overwhelming majority of peasants.”
According to Lenin, the revolution draws its forces chiefly from among the workers and peasants of Russia itself. According to Trotsky, the necessary forces can be found only “on the arena of the world proletarian revolution.”
But what is to happen if the world revolution is fated to arrive with some delay? Is there any ray of hope for our revolution? Comrade Trotsky does not admit any ray of hope, for “the contradictions in the situation of the workers’ Government . . . can be solved only . . . on the arena of the world revolution.” According to this there is but one prospect for our revolution to vegetate in its own contradictions and decay to its roots while waiting for the world revolution.
What is the dictatorship of the proletariat, according to Lenin?
The dictatorship of the proletariat is the power which relies on the alliance between the proletariat and the toiling masses of the peasantry for the “complete overthrow of capital” and “the final establishment and consolidation of Socialism.”
What is the dictatorship of the proletariat according to Trotsky?
The dictatorship of the proletariat is a power which enters “into hostile collision . . . with the broad masses of the peasants” and seeks the solution of its “contradictions” merely “on the arena of world revolution.”
In what respect does this “theory of the permanent revolution” differ from the well-known theory of Menshevism which repudiates the concept dictatorship of the proletariat?
In substance there is no difference.
Thus the ideological battle opened. Stalin was not only a debater of some power, but as an organiser and tactician he left Trotsky standing. Having assisted Lenin to carry through the great purge, now on Lenin’s death he brought into the Party 200,000 recruits inspired by the great idea of service to Lenin’s cause. He put forward no new gospel, but stood before the Party and the masses as Lenin’s banner-bearer and disciple. His enemies angrily refer to this recruitment as the “mobilisation of the mob” into the “Party of yes-men.” In politics, when people in the mass do things of which we disapprove or support someone whom we dislike, they become automatically “the mob,” generally the “hysterical mob.” When the same mass of people do what we approve, we refer to the “voice of the awakened people” or “the dignified expression of democracy at its best.”
At the time this great discussion began, Trotsky, Zinoviev, Bucharin, Radek, Kamenev and Rykov were, along with Stalin, members of the Political Bureau of the Bolshevik Party. All were able men. Zinoviev was a fat, clean-shaven, stocky Jew with a mop of tousled hair. He had a rather shrill, penetrating voice and was an orator of no mean ability. For many years he had been an exile with Lenin in Geneva, Paris, and other places. He it was, along with Kamenev, who had denounced the insurrection of November, 1917, as “adventurism” and made his most powerful speeches when advocating a retreat. He was the first chairman of the Communist International, in which post he was succeeded by Bucharin.
Nicholas Bucharin was a little fellow, who in his early days had been a school-teacher, but became a clever theoretician in the ranks of the professional revolutionaries. He was an artist and penman of ability, and much loved by his colleagues for his boyishness and pleasing personality. He was, however, temperamentally unstable, and liable to become both gushing and hysterical. He secured his place among the leaders of Bolshevism by virtue of his scholastic abilities.
Karl Radek, his close friend, was a brilliant journalist and one of the best informed men in Russia on international affairs. In origin a Polish Jew, by nature he was a wit and in respect of socialism an exceedingly able exponent. Slim, wearing huge spectacles, and a beard which hung round his jaws like a piece of well-worn fur, he was always prominent in any crowd. He too had joined the Bolsheviks while young.
Kamenev, who had long been a member of the Bolshevik Party and had served years of imprisonment and exile, always gave me the impression of a Russian small-business man who had got himself mixed up in strange political circles in which he was never at home, and from which he was always seeking a way of escape without being able to find it.
Rykov, who for some years held the post of Premier, had the appearance of a Russian peasant who had come to town in his “Sunday best” and liked all too frequently to “bend his arm.” He was an able man, but could not stand the pace of the Russian Revolution. He would have been happy enough in a quiet life, but unfortunately he had chosen the wrong age in which to be born, and under the pressure of circumstances, he degenerated.
All these men, who were soon to become part of a “bloc” against Stalin, held other prominent positions. Rykov was Premier. Trotsky was Commissar for War. Zinoviev was Chairman of the Communist International. Bucharin was editor of Pravda and Radek was the editor of Izvestia. At first they were not united with Trotsky. Indeed, they were very much opposed to him, and it was only as the implications of Stalin’s “Leninist” policy began to unfold themselves during the N.E.P. and Industrialisation periods that, each in his own way, they joined the opposition led by Trotsky. That all of them had their own personal loyalties and ambitions is true enough. How far they were afraid of Trotsky on the one hand and Stalin on the other is a problem for the psychologists, but one thing is certain—that Trotsky drove Zinoviev and Kamenev on to the side of Stalin by the publication of his book The Lessons of October. When this appeared both men were infuriated by Trotsky’s references to their opposition to the insurrection of 1917. All that Stalin had to do was to leave them to answer Trotsky, knowing full well how self-revealing they would be in the process.
It was the practical problems arising from the New Economic Policy and Stalin’s drive for industrialisation which brought all the opposition forces together against him and his programme. The economic life of the country revived under the N.E.P., as had been expected, or there would have been no justification for the abandonment of “War Communism.” But the N.E.P. was not an end in itself. It was neither capitalist economy nor Socialist economy, but a compromise under which the nationalised section had to function amid the capitalist market conditions that accompanied the restoration of peasant proprietorship, private trading, and small-scale capitalist industry. That this could not remain the permanent state of affairs is obvious. The Bolshevik Party had to make up its mind whether N.E.P. should be the means of restoring capitalism or advancing Socialism. Stalin was never in doubt on the matter: he was determined to lead the country to Socialism. Trotsky too, was never in doubt: he did not believe it possible to advance to Socialism without a European revolution. There was consistency of principle in both attitudes. But let it be clearly understood that Trotsky’s position, however it might be decorated with revolutionary phrases, meant a return to capitalism.
There was no loyalty to principles in the position of Zinoviev, Kamenev and the others. At one moment they supported Stalin, at another they supported Trotsky. In their weakness of character they became more and more convinced that Socialism in one country was impossible. Now they joined in the chorus of criticism against the “Party bureaucracy” which had not perturbed any of them when power was firmly in their hands. They declined to accept its discipline, and, with Trotsky, began the organisation of a rival party. They held meetings clandestinely, produced a new programme, and at last emerged with street demonstrations. From a group of critics within the Party they had transformed themselves into an anti-Party force. When in 1927 Stalin and the Central Committee of the Bolshevik Party introduced the Five Year Plan, the opposition countered with a rival plan.
Of course Trotsky had others with him besides Zinoviev and Kamenev and Radek. There were Rakovsky, one-time ambassador to Britain, Piatakov, and a number of other able men. I knew these leaders and many of their supporters personally. I had listened to their arguments in commissions, in conferences, in public and private conversations. I had heard them time and again declare that they were wrong and Stalin right. I had seen Stalin agree to their reinstatement in leading positions, only to witness them renew their attacks on him and his policy. On the Tenth Anniversary of the Revolution I saw and heard Radek, from the balcony of the Bristol hotel, harangue the crowd as it marched to the Red Square. I watched Trotsky attempting the same thing further along Mockavia. And still after four years of public debating nothing more serious had happened to them than expulsion from the ranks of Bolshevism. A few weeks before these incidents Stalin had shown the world how completely they had isolated themselves from membership of the Bolshevik Party. The futility of their efforts on the Tenth Anniversary showed how small had become their influence on the masses. But a change was imminent.
The introduction of the Five Year Plan early in 1928 began the new Socialist offensive. The N.E.P. had brought the country to the point where in both industry and agriculture it had attained the levels of 1913. The debating period had come to an end. Stalin had told the country that it was more than a hundred years behind the nations of the West, and that it must catch up and surpass them within ten years or be defeated when the “breathing space” came to an end. The Bolsheviks set a tremendous pace. Soon it proved too much for Rykov, Bucharin, Tomsky, and others, and they passed into Trotsky’s camp. New leaders came up to the side of Stalin, leaders of a new type: Kaganovitch, Kuibishev, Kirov, all most able organisers and administrators, all passionately convinced that Socialism in one country was possible.
When Stalin faced the Party Congress two years after the Plan had been launched, he was in good form and simply laughed the opposition out of court. He asked:
Do you remember Chekhov’s story The Man in the leather case? The hero, Belikov, you may remember, always went about in galoshes and a wadded coat, with an umbrella, both in hot and cold weather. “Why do you need galoshes and a wadded coat in July, in such hot weather?” Belikov used to be asked. “You never know,” Belikov replied. “Something might happen. There might be a sudden frost; what should I do then?” He feared everything new, everything that went beyond the bounds of the daily rut of humdrum life, as he would the plague. A new restaurant was opened and Belikov was already in alarm: “It might, of course, be a good thing to have a restaurant but look out that nothing happens.” A dramatic circle was organised and a reading-room opened and Belikov was again in panic: “A dramatic circle, a new reading-room—what for? Look out-something may happen.”
We have to say the same about the former leaders of the Right Opposition.
Do you remember the affair of handing over the technical colleges to the Economic People’s Commissariats? We wanted to hand over only two colleges. . . . A small matter, it night seem. Yet we met with the most desperate resistance of the Right Opposition. “Hand over two technical colleges to the E.P.C.? Why? Hadn’t we better wait? Look out, something may happen as a result of this scheme.” And to-day all our technical colleges have been handed over to the economic commissariats. And we are getting on pretty well, nevertheless. . . . It is this fear of something new, this incapacity to approach new questions in a new way, this alarm that “something may happen,” these features of the man in the leather case that prevent the former leaders of the Right Opposition from amalgamating properly with the Party.
. . . If any difficulty or hitch has appeared anywhere, they already fall into a panic, lest something may happen. A cockroach somewhere stirs, without having time even to crawl out of its hole, and they are already starting back in terror, and beginning to shout about a catastrophe, about the ruin of the Soviet Government. . . . And volumes of paper begin to pour in. Bucharin writes theses on the subject and sends them to the Central Committee, asserting that the policy of the C.C. has brought the country to a state of ruin, and that the Soviet Government will certainly perish, if not at once, then in three months’ time. Rykov supports Bucharin’s theses, with the reservation, however, that he has a serious difference with Bucharin, namely, that the Soviet Government will perish, in his opinion, not in a month, but in a month and two days. Tomsky supports Bucharin and Rykov, but protests against the fact that they have not been able to do without theses, have not been able to do without a document which they will have to answer for later on: “How many times have I told you—do what you like, but don’t leave a document behind, don’t leave any traces. . . .
No wonder the Congress roared with laughter. But a more sombre hue began to colour the general situation. As ever, Socialism had to fight its way forward against hostile class elements. The N.E.P. had been favourable to them and had allowed them to speculate and make good. Now they had to get out of the way, and, as hitherto, the private interests did not want to get out of the way. They could not conceive of themselves as survivals from an outdated society; and so the class war began to wage again, this time on the economic front. The State with its weapons of the political police (the G.P.U.) was called into action as the wreckers began to get busy. The Schacti Trial of Wreckers in 1928 was the forerunner of events which soon followed one another in rapid sequence. Who were the wreckers? They were counter-revolutionaries intent on fomenting revolt by creating an impression of “Bolshevik inefficiency” through the derailment of trains and the blowing-up of factories. In 1930 a group of professional engineers known as “The Industrial Party” were put on trial for sabotage of industrial construction. 1931 was noticeable for the Trial of the Mensheviks on charges of counter-revolutionary activity. In 1933 came the famous trial of the Metro-Vickers engineers who had become involved in conspiracies to impede construction.
The threads of these affairs were leading out of the country into the capitalist centres abroad. The complete eclipse of the opposition inside the Bolshevik Party and the expulsion of its leading elements led them to the formation of secret opposition groups outside the Party, but retaining widespread connections within it and within the Government and Army.
One day in 1934, when Stalin, Kaganovitch, and Voroshilov were in the latter’s headquarters, a secretary called out Kaganovitch and handed him a telegram. It announced that Kirov, a member of the Political Bureau and leader of the Party and Soviet of Leningrad in succession to Zinoviev, had been shot dead. Kirov was one of the ablest of the younger men in the leadership of the Party and a close personal friend of Stalin.
His assassination by one Nikolaev was the first murder of a leading member of the Party in Soviet Russia since Uritsky had been killed in 1918.
The shot that killed Kirov had far-reaching consequences. It set into new motion the “Red Terror” which had been in cold storage since 1921. This time it was operated by the G.P.U., on a broad front and over a long period; for the investigations set on foot by the Kirov murder led to the unravelling of a conspiracy the like of which it would be difficult to find anywhere in history. Nikolaev, a member of the Party, was tried and shot. Zinoviev, Kamenev, and eleven others were brought to trial and accused of forming a counter-revolutionary terrorist organisation for the purpose of disorganising the work of the Soviet Government. They were found guilty of associating with Trotsky and with foreign powers, and were sentenced to varying terms of imprisonment. Later, in 1936, when the investigations had gone further, Zinoviev, Kamenev and fourteen others were charged with treason and organised terrorism under Trotsky’s leadership. All confessed their guilt and were shot. In 1937, seventeen more leaders, among them Piatakov, Radek, and Muralov, were also accused of treason. After a common confession of guilt most of them were shot, the others, who included Radek and Rakovsky, being sentenced to long periods of imprisonment. In June, 1937, Marshal Tukhashevsky and seven other generals of the Red Army were tried by court-martial for conspiracy with a foreign enemy and planning a military coup d’état. They too confessed their guilt and were shot.
These trials and executions were the high lights of a period in which “purges” and terror spread throughout the country. As the industrialisation programme was rushed ahead and industry became able to supply machines for agriculture, collectivisation of the latter led to the “liquidation of the kulaks as a class.” (The “kulak” may be defined as the rich peasant who had become money-lender to poorer peasants and their employer on semi-feudal terms.) They resisted collectivisation bitterly, often fighting with arms in hand. Hundreds of thousands of them and their families were deported to Siberia and other regions in the process of new development. This was class warfare with a vengeance. By the end of it the collective farm system had superseded peasant proprietorship, the State and the co-operative enterprises had superseded private capitalism. Socialist economy had emerged triumphant. The political sequel was the “liquidation” of all political elements and social classes which actively rejected the building of “Socialism in one country.”
Whatever criticism may be made of the mode of operations, of the trials, terror, bureaucracy, fanaticism, and injustices of the period, they must be seen against the background of this fact: that all the trials—Schacti, Menshevik, Industrial Party, Metro-Vickers, Tukashevsky—and the terror against the N.E.P. men and kulaks, represent in common the struggle between revolution and counter-revolution in a country surrounded by hostile governments and beset by perils which would allow no time for pleasantries or refinement of procedure. To ignore this is to distort everything. Civil war is not pleasant. It is waged by masses who are not always discriminating, either in the means they use or in their choice of victims. And the whole period from the Schacti Trial to the final bloody purge of the Red Army was one of civil war.
And in far-away Mexico when all his forces within the Soviet Union had been beaten and destroyed, Trotsky still echoed his theme. Writing in September, 1939, shortly before his death, he said:
The October Revolution was not an accident. It was forecast long in advance. Events confirmed this forecast. The degeneration does not refute the forecast, because Marxists never believed that an isolated workers’ state in Russia could maintain itself indefinitely. . . . Let us suppose that Hitler turns his weapons against the East and invades territory occupied by the Red Army. . . . Partisans of the Fourth International while, arms in hand, they deal death blows to Hitler, will at the same time conduct revolutionary propaganda against Stalin, preparing his overthrow at the next and perhaps very near stage. . . .
Thus Trotsky’s epilogue echoes his prologue and confirms the substance of the confessions of those who were tried by the Bolshevik State. In 1918-21, because the struggle involved the masses on a large scale, the Cheka, led by Dzerzhinsky, and the Red Army, had been the principal weapons of the Soviet Government. In the civil war of 1931 to 1938 only a relatively small portion of the vast community was involved, and the G.P.U., the law courts, and the courts-martial were the principal State weapons. But it remained a civil war.
The struggle shocked the world because the world did not think in terms of civil war, but judged the events from the standpoint of a State’s relations with its citizens in a period of peace. Journalists, frequently working themselves into a state of hysteria, suggested the most sinister means of extracting confessions from the prisoners in the trials—drugs, false promises of leniency, third degree, all manner of threats—and continually saw, behind the screen of the courts, the “cynical, cruel, and cunning” figure of Joseph Stalin waiting for the right moment to dip his pen in blood and sign another death warrant. On the other hand it should not be overlooked that some lawyers, some journalists, some ambassadors, watching the proceedings with more impartial eyes, had no complaints to make of the proceedings of the courts, and while still amazed with the confessions of the prisoners, believed them to be true. Two other things are generally overlooked, one legal, the other psychological and political. The G.P.U. and the Supreme Military Tribunal of the U.S.S.R. are special institutions for dealing with matters relating to the safety of the State. They are not the same as the civil courts, which deal with ordinary social delinquents such as drunkards and thieves.
The G.P.U. is an active political institution, composed of picked men of the Bolshevik Party. Neither it nor the Supreme Military Tribunal operates on the principle that a man is innocent until proved guilty. They see no reason to try the innocent to prove their innocence: a person is arrested because either they possess the evidence of guilt already, or they are pretty sure they can get it. The political trials are therefore of people already known to be guilty, and the aim of the court procedure is not to prove the prisoner innocent but to marshal the evidence before himself and the public with a view to his open acknowledgement of the correctness of the evidence and the justice of the sentence about to be imposed. Hence the unusual thing in such a trial would be the absence of a confession. The idea that only Russians confess in such circumstances is quite erroneous—the British engineers in the Metro-Vickers trial long ago proved that; and the recent Kharkov trial again proved it, in that Germans as well as Russians made confessions of guilt.
The search for mystical and psychological explanations for the confessions should therefore end here. A guilty person face to face with evidence of his guilt, evidence which he knows to be true, will find great difficulty in avoiding confession, especially when he has complete freedom of speech before the public and the press in court. The freedom of the prisoner to defend himself, to call witnesses, to cross-examine, to sum up and state his case or to employ defending counsel, leaves very little authentic scope for observers to criticise the means of securing evidence, to allege third degree, drugging, and the like.
But there still remains the fact that so many of those who appeared in the great trials and confessed went to extraordinary lengths in their self-abasement. Most of them were men of outstanding ability, who had held leading positions in the State and in the Bolshevik Party. That Party had meant much to them. To be expelled from it was to have one’s whole inner life uprooted more thoroughly than by expulsion from any religious order. The very violence of their reactions to their defeat in the struggle with the Party, and to the realisation of the full implications of their counter-revolutionary deeds perpetrated in the name of the Revolution, was a measure of the inner conflict in the minds of men whose whole adult life had been associated with a Cause greater than themselves. The form of the confessions and the intensity of feeling accompanying them varied from prisoner to prisoner according to temperament, degree of culture, and the magnitude and character of the crime. Note Bucharin’s final words. I knew him well, worked with him, joked with him, laughed with him. His whole life from boyhood had been an intimate part of the revolutionary struggle. It is impossible to deny the ring of sincerity, the clarity of utterance, and the anguish of his mind when, standing before his judges and the world at large, he said:
Repentance is often attributed to diverse and absurd things such as Thibetan powders and the like. I must say of myself that in prison, where I was confined for a year, I worked, studied and retained my clarity of mind. This will serve to refute by facts all fables and absurd counter-revolutionary tales.
Hypnotism is, suggested. But I conducted my own defence in court from the legal standpoint too, orientated myself on the spot, argued with the State prosecutor: and anybody, even a man who has little experience in this branch of medicine, must admit that hypnotism of this kind is altogether impossible.
This repentance is often attributed to the Dostoyevsky mind, to the specific properties of the soul, and this can be said of types like Alyosha Karamazov, the heroes of the “Idiot” and other Dostoyevsky characters who are prepared to stand up in the public square and cry: “Beat me, Orthodox Christians, I am a villain.”
But that is not the case here at all. . . .
I shall now speak of myself, of the reasons for my repentance. Of course, it must be admitted that incriminating evidence plays a very important part. For three months I refused to say anything. Then I began to testify. Why? Because while in prison I made a revaluation of my entire past. For when you ask yourself: “If you must die, what are you dying for?”—an absolutely black vacuity suddenly rises before you with startling vividness. There was nothing to die for, if one wanted to die unrepentant. And, on the contrary, everything that glistens in the Soviet Union acquires new dimensions in a man’s mind. This in the end disarmed me completely and led me to bend my knees before the Party and the country. And when you ask yourself: “Very well, suppose you do not die; suppose by some miracle you remain alive, again what for? Isolated from everybody, an enemy of the people, in an inhuman position, completely isolated from everything that constitutes the essence of life. . . .” And at once the same reply arises. At such moments, Citizens, judges, everything personal, all the personal incrustation, all the rancour, pride, and a number of other things, fall away, disappear. And, in addition, when the reverberations of the broad international reach your ear, all this in its entirety does its work, and the result is the complete internal moral victory of the U.S.S.R. over its kneeling opponents. . . .
The point, of course, is not this repentance, or my personal repentance in particular. The Court can pass its verdict without it. The confession of the accused is not essential. The confession of the accused is a medieval principle of jurisprudence. But here we also have the internal demolition of the forces of counter-revolution. And one must be a Trotsky not to lay down one’s arms. . . .
(p. 777 Verbatim Report of Trial).
Inevitably there were some who, when confronted with the evidence of their crimes, refused to confess. For them there was therefore no public trial—but they were shot nevertheless.
No less part of the civil war than the trials and purges was the liquidation of the N.E.P. men and kulaks. The G.P.U., let loose by Stalin, swept up the kulaks by the hundred thousand, drafted them with their families into the building of new towns and cities, the digging of great canals, and the development of Siberia with new industrial enterprises. The struggle was elemental, brutal, ruthless, harsh in its discipline, severe in its conditions—and yet constructive. From the vast concourse of forcibly-removed people emerged new men and women—engineers, builders, architects, leaders of industry and administration, convinced Soviet workers who discovered they were the creators of a new civilisation.
But in the summer of 1938 there came a day when Voroshilov returned from an extensive review of the Red Army. He was worried. Speaking to Kaganovitch, who had just returned from the Urals, he talked of the effect of the purge in the Army. He said, “The foundations of discipline and comradeship are crumbling. No one dares to trust his fellow, either superior or subordinate.”
Stalin at this time was taking a summer rest in the Caucasus, near to the home of his boyhood. Beria, another member of the Political Bureau and the Party Secretary of the Caucasian Federation, had just called on him and told him that the purge had gone too far, when he received a telegram from Kaganovitch and Voroshilov saying the same thing. The next day these two arrived by aeroplane; and from the meeting that ensued dates the cessation of the second civil war. It had chased the N.E.P. men out of the cities and the towns. It had swept the kulaks from the countryside as with a mighty broom. It had cleaned the administration of those who set themselves to obstruct the building of “socialism in one country,” and all departments, including the Red Army, of the Quislings who were working to overthrow the Stalin régime when the hordes of Nazi Germany should have created the crisis conditions necessary to a counter-revolutionary coup d’état. Unavoidably, in accomplishing this stupendous task, there had been mistakes, excesses, exaggerations, and casualties along the road. Stalin denies none of them.
From outside the Soviet Union came protests, much slander, much misunderstanding, and little sympathy for or appreciation of the immense purpose that was being achieved. For much as these events preoccupied the press of the outside world, the fact remains that all the elements of the counter-revolution—Trotsky’s supporters, N.E.P. men, and kulaks—together formed a comparatively small proportion of the vast population of the Soviet Union. During this same period the greater proportion was being led by Stalin into colossal constructive efforts for which the peoples of the Allied countries see reason to-day to be more than grateful.
Next: XIV. Building a New Civilisation