WE MUST distinguish a varied significance in the dates which we agree to consider important in this history: starting points and finishing points, sometimes mere sign-posts in the infinite chain of cause and effect. The counter-revolution, which had been taking place in Russia since the illness of Lenin—some would trace it back to the sinister episode at Kronstadt—can be arranged in the chronological order of more or less significant events, all of which are undeniably connected despite their diversity.
Some of these may escape exact precision in time, but they stand out very clear in character. The political defeats of Trotsky in 1923, of Zinoviev in 1925, of their coalition in 1927, of Bukharin in 1929 were landmarks in the rise of Stalin before his "genius" was proclaimed, and strengthened his dictatorship; but these defeats were followed by harsh penal reprisals inflicted on the most resolute opponents, and were essentially the culmination of earlier developments. The inauguration of the first Five Year Plan in 1928, and the universal enforcement of the agrarian collectivisation will be judged of greater consequence from their effects than from their causes. The assassination of Kirov at Leningrad in 1934 was an event of symptomatic significance, despite the insignificance of Kirov himself, who had unblushingly extolled Stalin as "the greatest leader of all times and all nations," and it acquired an increasing interest by reason of its subsequent developments. Finally, the year 1937 will be less held in honour as the twentieth anniversary of October and the conclusion of the second Five Year Plan, than in dishonour as the culminating phase of an autocratic terror unprecedented in human memory.
With the lapse of time the Kirov murder has assumed the significance of an event of the greatest importance. Despite the obscure and persistent reasons for deception by the "genial" Stalin on this violent death, there was little doubt from the outset that the G.P.U. had contrived the crime—the murderer served only as an instrument, and the major responsibility fell on the all-powerful General Secretary. From all evidence, this business was an accident in the internal struggles of high Soviet society, a rivalry between two cliques, one of which had been able to arm or guide the hand of a young and fanatical communist. The 117 executions ordered by the "great and beloved leader" after the crime, the imprisonment of 97 former representatives of the old Bolshevik opposition of Leningrad—which had been dissolved—with Zinoviev and Kamenev at their head, the condemnation of the twelve Stalinist chiefs of the local police, and finally the deportation to Asia of some 100,000 innocent inhabitants of Leningrad could deceive nobody. Stalin did not have the courage to make known the exact circumstances of the murder, or the real motives of the murderer, any more than the charges brought against the so-called instigators or accomplices. (The verdict was only pronounced after proceedings in camera.) Then again, the barbaric measures taken to reduce the population of Leningrad gave clear proof of a determination to root out some inimical trend, to nip in the bud some latent state of feeling after the failure to discover a real culprit. Three years later, Stalin, "the adored," was to astonish the world by proclaiming to all and sundry that the principal assassin was none other than Yagoda, his closest colleague, the Chief of the G.P.U. in person, the man whom he had promoted to be Commissar for the Interior, the "sword-bearer" of the regime.
But during the interval "the greatest man of our planet," as he is pleased to hear himself called, had brought accusations against too many of his own followers hitherto above suspicion, and had piled up indictments of too many contradictory wrongs, too many untenable imputations and demonstrably impossible crimes. His assertions were made through the agency of a prosecutor under his orders and of menial judges: they were confirmed by defendants who were at once too unanimous and too simple-minded to be honest, too eager to blacken rather than to clear their own reputations, and who could only strengthen the general incredulity towards the official version. Under such totalitarian conditions one certainly cannot trust the word of an autocrat so absolute, so lacking in moral sense, so contemptuous of the truth that a single mysterious assassination can serve him for many years as justification for the massacre of his companions in arms. For from the time of the Kirov murder, it is clear that he deliberately—in cold blood and after minute preparation—undertook the annihilation of many generations of Bolsheviks and disclosed his firm determination henceforward to leave nothing to chance. The chronology of the period is very revealing. Owing to the dull daily round of business there is often no time to assess the value of incidents, which pass unnoticed; but they are later thrown into relief, and assume, perhaps, their full significance. Stains of blood become letters of fire, and dark places are illuminated by a sinister glow.
STALIN, as his biography proves, has never been farseeing, except on the vulgar plane of personal relationship when the preservation of his power was at stake. In this respect the comparison of his writings and his speeches, both with one another and with his actions, is conclusive. Even when he exiled Trotsky, he did not in any way envisage his future, when, as an obsessed despot, his constant preoccupation would be to crush the indomitable adversary he himself had placed beyond the power of his clutches. Since Lenin's death he has been compelled to adopt a day-to-day policy by borrowing from right and left. He speculated on the power of a State system at the mercy of his will, by forcing fresh horrors or abrupt changes of front on the people sunk in poverty and Ignorance, terror-stricken, stupefied and apathetic. A so-called soviet system was created by Lenin and Trotsky, in which, under the effective dictatorship of the Communist Party, the soviets had only a nominal existence, and which very rapidly degenerated into the omnimpotence of an oligarchy. This system intercepted, destroyed, and repressed all initiative or complaints from below, through six intermediary bodies interposed between the top and the bottom, and it still permits Stalin to govern without foresight.
The following is the unimpeachable testimony of the American communist worker, Andrew Smith, after his return from Russia disillusioned in Bolshevism: "When Kirov was killed, the workers of the Electrozavod (the factory in which the witness worked in Moscow) beamed with joy. They hoped that Stalin would meet the same fate. And yet they unanimously voted for the Bolshevik resolutions ...." With the power of life and death over Soviet subjects and, furthermore, with the monopoly of the press which he uses to deceive others when he is not deceiving himself, Stalin can easily obtain such results. But the tragedy of Smolny, the first terrorist reply to his policy of terror, gave him food for thought. He felt the warning bullet whistle past and, after burying Kirov, he prepared at one and the same time supplementary precautions, preventive measures and terrible reprisals.
He was sufficiently well informed of the state of public feeling by the svodki (summarised reports) of innumerable police agents, not to cherish illusions as to the sentiments he inspired, even in the most vehement of his professional apologists. He could not in any sense have been the dupe of the adulation and the extravagant praise bestowed upon him by his known enemies, with rage in their hearts, vying with treacherous friends whose fortunes were linked with his, but who were ready to betray him at the first favourable opportunity. He knew that he was hated on all sides, that his downfall was prayed for, that a thousand deaths were wished upon him and he was aware of the current stories which expressed the secret opinion of the masses. The whole terrorised population spoke aloud the opposite of what was in the minds of all, daily glorifying the "country's best son," the "master of wisdom," the "great mechanic of the locomotive of the revolution, Comrade Stalin." He could never reconcile the Bolsheviks of the "Old Guard," nor those of the younger generation, who despised and cursed him while paying him the obligatory daily homage. He had nothing to fear from the communist veterans nor their unworthy successors—the former relegated to honorary posts, the latter to ordinary jobs. His uncompromising adversaries were in prison, in isolation cells or in exile; those who had "given in"—the "capitulators"—were humiliated, outcast, discredited, or had already exhausted themselves in sterile historical exegeses and confessed themselves incapable of conscientious or energetic attack. But it was not without fear that he saw growing up a young, censorious generation, which had still to make a name for itself, but had already asserted itself by the resounding action at Leningrad, despite the numerous pitiless purges carried out by the G.P.U., in the Universities as well as in the factories.
His dictatorial prefect at Leningrad, Zhdanov, Kirov's successor, one day went so far as to let slip a significant admission: "Why should our youth learn about Jeliabov, Ryssakov, Perovskaya, any more than about the heroes who sprang from the Bolshevik Party?" In other words, Kirov's murderer, compared to the legendary narodovoltsy, of glorious memory in the tradition common to all socialist schools, is thus justified by those who identify themselves with oppressors. In the eyes of Stalin, however, the danger began to take concrete form. The widespread information of the police svodki combined to attract his attention, to awaken his uneasiness and to stimulate his vigilance. It was then, no doubt, that two complementary designs were born in his mind and began to assume shape. After careful consideration of the feelings of the country and of the circumstances, he could make use of the classical expedients of throwing out ballast and tightening the screw, thus inaugurating at one and the same time, a vast diversion and an atrocious repression.
The great diversion was to be the "genial project" of the Constitution of the "genial leader," announcing to the peoples of the U.S.S.R. all the desirable liberties—but always in the future: liberty of speech, of the press and of worship, with equal universal suffrage, direct and secret; the right of assembly, of coalition and of demonstration; the inviolability of correspondence and of the home; the security of the person. Thus Stalin discovered in 1935 what has long existed and been more or less carried into effect in Europe and America. This opening of an era of democratic felicity was indeed unique, for apparently no demand had preceded it, since Soviet society was reputed to enjoy perfect democracy and unmixed happiness in the "socialist fatherland." But after the warning of Leningrad and the executions that followed it, Stalin, ever anxious to increase the well-being of his subjects, determined to bestow out of the generosity of his soul, and in spite of everything and everyone, a new Constitution, "the most democratic in the world," which had been the exact definition of the previous Constitution. Thus, says the press under his orders, he replies to Hitler, he strikes "a blow at the heart of fascism," he shows an astonished universe the ideal regime—on paper—in contrast to fascist Italy, and above all, to national-socialist Germany.
Now was not this democracy of the future supposed to exist in its fulness and entirety at that very time? And if it was a question of replying to Hitler, would not the promised democracy owe its origin to him rather than to Stalin? Objections, which no one in the U.S.S.R. was allowed to formulate under pain of death, were of little importance to the "Father of the peoples." Thus Stalin, even before Zhdanov and in emulation of Lenin, who justified the insurrection of Kronstadt by hastening to decree the N.E.P., seemed to justify Kirov's assassination by hastening to decide on constitutional reform. (It should be noted that the sailors of Kronstadt were butchered for having demanded, among other things, respect for the Soviet Constitution.) In January 1935, immediately after the condemnation of the 97 Left Communists known as "Zinovievists," who were charged only, and in camera, with vague moral responsibility for the Kirov murder, Stalin secured in the Central Committee of the Party the adoption of his first draft, which Molotov unexpectedly brought to the Seventh Congress of the Soviets, then in session, to the utter stupefaction of everyone. There followed the inevitable explosion of gratitude and love addressed to "our father" Stalin. At the same Congress, Molotov proclaimed: "The Russia of the N.E.P. has become Socialist Russia." The Stalinist Constitution was to consecrate the advent of the first classless society.
The great repression was undertaken in 1935 by Stalin, the "engineer of souls," as he styles some of his fellows. It went hand in hand with democratic, or to use the fashionable word of the period, "humanist" professions of faith. It was aimed especially at all communists suspected of still taking seriously the least vestige of original Bolshevism. It also included the last survivors of the old socialist and reformist groups of parties still attached to the memory of traditional ideals. It was inaugurated directly after the Kirov murder and it formed an extension of the permanent civil war waged by the G.P.U. on the supposedly intractable population, who were, in reality, perfectly submissive, but had been provoked by insupportable conditions of life and work and tormented by an exacting, incapable and brutal bureaucracy.
The mass deportations from Leningrad corresponded to analogous measures in all the Russias. There was a "clean-up" of the so-called soviet institutions and above all of the communist organisations. In conjunction with the G.P.U., Control Commissions everywhere made ceaseless investigations, tracked down heresy and hunted down heretics. A formal purge of the Party had taken place in 1934, and another followed in 1935, under the pretext of "the verification of political identification papers." This latter purge was barely over, when it was followed by a third in 1936 "at the time of the renewal of the papers." Each one ended in some 300,000 expulsions, about a million in three years, or one third of the total effectives, estimated at almost three million in 1934 (to be precise: 1,872,000 plus 935,000 probationers). A large number of those expelled since 1935 were hounded down by virtue of Article 168 of the Code, for abuse of confidence, and severe punishments were secretly imposed; very often entire families, wholly innocent, suffered the same fate; the latest exiles to Siberia and elsewhere are counted by hundreds of thousands. Thousands of foreign communists who had come from Germany, Austria, Italy, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Poland, to seek refuge in the "socialist fatherland" were in their turn run to earth by the G.P.U., and soon joined the others in the concentration camps and convict prisons. All this did not prevent Stalin from saying to the American journalist, Roy W. Howard: "According to our Constitution, political émigrés have the right to reside in our territory. We grant them the right of asylum, just as the United States grants it to political émigrés." An interpretation of the right of asylum which gives an idea of the prospects to be opened up by the future Constitution.
Over and above the work, great or small, carried out by his multitudinous police on general instructions, the "giant of thought," as his encomiasts call him, settles many special cases and operates himself in this, his own, sphere. Stalin has a special method, already familiar, of ensuring his preservation of power: ceaselessly he alters, one by one, the camarilla which surrounds him, by substituting for worn-out servants new men eager to get on; in order to govern, he tirelessly appoints, replaces and alters his staff. With his frequent purges, his repeated rearrangements of the staff of every rank in the various spheres of public activity, he obviously never ceases to disorganise the personnel and to paralyse work; such confusion causes incalculable loss, especially in the national economy; in the Soviet administration the result is chronic chaos through lack of continuity, responsibility and general competence. But the revolutionaries of yesterday offend the great Conservative of today, and Lenin's party is henceforth a dead weight for him, and often an intolerable obstacle. He first defeated Trotsky in the name of the "Old Guard," depository of sacred principles, of sacrosanct routine. He drew all possible profit from it to maintain himself at the summit of the bureaucratic pyramid, and won for himself a semblance of prestige from a section of the untutored youth. Now he needed men with no political past whom he could teach in his own way and who would constitute a more stable clientele, bound to his personal destiny. As a contemporary Russian writer, who is also a good psychologist, expresses it: "He does not like men with a stainless past"; for the deficiencies of his henchmen give him a hold on their souls. The instruments of his domination over his direct auxiliaries are at once and in turn the rifle and the dossier, the prison cell and the police chit. He holds his Politbureau and his Central Committee not only by the constant threat of the death sentence and a perpetual surveillance, but by his knowledge of the misfortunes, the corruption and the short-comings of their private lives; at need, he invents them; he lays snares for the imprudent by means of his double-crossing agents; he corrupts, demoralises, incites and provokes in order to enrich his filing cabinets and his revolting arsenal. When a henchman hesitates before an impossible task, Stalin can compel him by fear of dishonour or break him without resistance. If he judges it necessary to sacrifice a gifted individual but one too tired or too unmanageable, he supplants him by pushing forward either a "man with no political past" or someone little worthy of commendation, and thereafter no consideration holds him back. It is when we know this, that we can truly appreciate his memorable words, spoken at the height of the terror: "You must reach the understanding that of all the precious assets existing in the world, the most precious and decisive are the cadres."
IN AN atmosphere of tense emotion, still heavy with the prolonged vengeance of Kirov's murder, the concert of dithyrambic praise rose to a crescendo in honour of "our sun" (sic), broken by vague threats addressed to the invisible "enemies of the people." But the enthusiasm to order concealed undecipherable political realities: In February-March 1935, after the sudden death of Kuibyshev,—to all appearance a natural one, for the Vice-President of the Council of Commissars was addicted to drink,—Stalin proceeded to enact one of those administrative shuffles of which he alone has the secret. An official "with no political past," although already fourth secretary of the Central Committee for barely a month, Nicholas Yezhov became President of the Control Commission of the Party in place of L. Kaganovich, appointed Commissar of Transport in which post he succeeded Andreyev, the latter replacing Yezhov at the Secretariat. The rearrangement of personnel interested no one outside the Dictator's immediate circle. But Yenukidze, for 15 years the immovable secretary of the Executive Committee of the Soviets of the U.S.S.R., was liberated from his duties, since the Soviet Executive of Transcaucasia desired to have him as its president. The Attorney-General, Akulov, replaced him, and Vyshinsky, Assistant Attorney, became Attorney-General. Experienced observers were in no doubt; Yenukidze was lost, his so-called liberation preceding his disgrace; in exchanging the post of secretary at Moscow for the title of president at Tiflis, he took the path to the cemetery. In fact, three months later he was dismissed for degeneracy, laxity of morals, and frivolity; some days later he was expelled from the Party, that is to say, he was handed over to the G.P.U. But no one could flatter himself that he had grasped at the time the precise significance of the decrees relating to Yezhov and to Vyshinsky. In these appointments, however, was expressed the premeditation of the wisest of the wise.
At this time Yezhov was a "man with no political past," but not without a career. Little is known of him, except that he was the best incarnation of Stalin's bureaucratic school. A former soldier in the Red Army, promoted Military Commissar, he had climbed all the rungs of the Bolshevik hierarchy; as secretary of committees of increasing importance up to the Central Committee, he had directed for four years one of the essential services of the Party, that of the cadres. Having reached this stage, he knew the personnel, and was thoroughly conversant with his profession of "engineer of souls." Stalin must have noticed him early, inculcated in him his own methods and assured him so rapid a promotion. As president of the Control Commission, a sort of G.P.U. reserved for communists, he was soon to justify his master's confidence.
The Control Commission had ceased to be the commission of former years. In 1934, Stalin "liquidated" the old Commission, a body of 187 members consisting of old militants with a reputable past; at the same time he liquidated also the Workers' and Peasants' Inspection. For these he substituted two smaller commissions, the first of 61 members for the Party, the second of 70 for the Soviets, both for the most part composed of new members. By this reshuffle he rid himself of some 150 undesirable veterans. Not that they would have dared to permit themselves the least opposition, overt or covert; they realised too late the mistake they had made ten years earlier in supporting their future grave-digger in his struggle with an imaginary Trotskyism; but their contempt for Stalin equalled the hatred with which he repaid them. It was against them and their generation that he gave proof of his enmity, at the same time settling a personal account, when he transferred Yenukidze, in order the better to get rid of him. But he did not stop there. In May 1935, he suppressed the Society of Old Bolsheviks, pre-eminently the Old Guard, which silently irritated him. The following month he dissolved the Association of Former Political Prisoners, where a vestige of free speech still existed in the stifled tones of confidential intercourse. In February 1936, he finally liquidated the Communist Academy, also composed of veterans, and for similar reasons. No one guessed then at what goal the man, whom Radek called the great architect of socialism, was aiming.
In liquidating these institutions, considered in his circle as the most venerable, Stalin freed himself of many scruples and visibly cleared the ground for liquidating much else. In any case he renounced a heritage of which he had once asserted that he was the faithful guardian. That he wished to break with Lenin's party was implied in May 1935, in a toast to the Red Army, in which he effaced the customary distinction between the Party and the rest of the world: "To the health of all Bolsheviks, members of the Party and those outside the Party. Yes, those outside the Party. Those who belong to the Party form only a minority. Those outside the Party form the majority. But among those outside the Party, are there not real Bolsheviks?" This was the repudiation of the notion of the Party "above everything," in spite of a somewhat shabby explanation:....They have not joined the Party, either because they have not had the time, or because they hold the Party in such high esteem, they see in it such a sanctuary, that they wish to prepare themselves further before entering it...."Two days later he was not afraid to declare in a speech to the Military Academy: "....We speak too much of the merits of the leaders, of the merits of the directors. To them are attributed all, or almost all, our achievements. That, clearly, is incorrect and false." Such remarks, issuing from such a mouth, do not appear credible. They must be interpreted as a prohibition of the praising of more than one man; we shall see the proof of this later. When all the Russias, under the Stalino-Chekist knout, say the opposite of what they mean, Stalin owes it to himself to practise what he preaches. On the morrow of this invitation to lower the tone of the eulogies of the leaders, this is how Bukharin, partially restored to favour, observed instructions under pain of final disgrace, the equivalent of death: "We all wish to touch him, to feel the force of that powerful mind, of that will which radiates in every direction, of that astonishing and beloved man. Human waves carry him along. What a demonstration of unity! What an unforgettable scene of indestructible union!" But all this was about Stalin. Enough can never be said of the "genial pilot."
The Stalinist iiquidation of the old Bolshevism and the old dignitaries, to which Yezhov, aided by Yagoda, the famous "sword-bearer," especially devoted his attention, did not forestall the evil, but the very relative good, which the U.S.S.R. might still expect from the twilight of a socialist tradition. It was in strict correlation with the abandonment of a cumbersome and inharmonious past, where the best of the now superannuated intentions mingled with the worst of the recent innovations. The martyred country would not have suffered so greatly if the recrudescence of counter-revolutionary terror had not fallen on a population divorced from politics, if the reaction had seemed frank, logical, conscientious, with all its consequences, instead of being carried out by new tactical zigzags, by empirical experiments and implicit, but none the less cynical, disavowals. It would have been too much to expect Stalin openly to dispense with theories condemned by facts and by history. However, among the reforms introduced during this period under the irresistible pressure of circumstances, both in the sphere of economics and in that of social customs, there are some which register decisive failures, in the absence of spiritual and political progress. This is the revenge of natural laws, the protest of the vital forces of every society, against an inhuman and useless "experiment."
In contrast to Lenin, who called an error an error, a defeat a defeat, who always shouldered the responsibility for his actions and was able to revise invalid and worn-out notions, Stalin's system is to lay the blame upon his subordinates, whom he makes his expiatory victims in order to appear infallible. He alternates between violence and promises, in order to conceal his failures, and issues bulletins of victory at each decision to sound a retreat. Under the goad of imperative and changing necessities, and since he lacks the power of comprehensive vision as well as of generalisation, he must have recourse to palliatives, to half-measures, to empirical correctives, sometimes to a complete volte-face in order to rebuild from the ruins, where the day before he claimed he would make a clean sweep. Besides, it is his habit to take away with the left hand, on the first propitious occasion, what he is compelled to grant with the right. One can understand that the people, satisfied with the return to many normal customs, but always oppressed and exploited, are not in the least grateful to him for the slight palliatives of their misery, and regard them merely as inadequate instalments on their just due. But since the great retreat—whether provisional or definitive—is a startling reality extending all along the line, except in the matter of internal policy where the democratic concessions remain purely on the surface, it is Important to follow the stages which promised immediate or future repercussions. Alexander Herzen has said of Tsarist Russia: "The most impossible things are achieved among us with incredible speed; changes, which in their importance are equivalent to revolutions, are carried out without being noticed in Europe." In addition to the terrific agrarian collectivisation which has overthrown the Russian peasantry and the ancestral mode of cultivation, Stalin's counter-revolution verifies the full significance of this reflection three quarters of a century later.
THE year 1935 had begun with the withdrawal of the bread cards, the first step toward the withdrawal of the other food cards in September. This implied the unification of prices and consequently the end of rationing and of unceasing regulation. An impulse was then given to the partial restoration of trade and of free markets. A year later the Torgsin, shops which sold in exchange for the precious metals or for foreign currency, were closed down, and simultaneously the rouble was stabilised, sanctioning officially a devaluation of 77.5 per cent. This marked the end of the fictitious parity of the rouble, of the boasts about "Soviet money, the most stable in the world"; it was the collapse of the theory and practice of State distribution substituted for supply and demand. The Bolsheviks have thus failed, after as before the N.E.P., in their attempts to create an economy without commodities and without money, in which the State plan would regulate the exchange of products, and money would have only a nominal value. The high rate of the new rouble at this period was still artificial, for the real depreciation appeared in the enormous divergence between domestic prices and those in the world market. But there was a clear tendency toward a more healthy fiduciary circulation of the classical type, based upon bullion reserves and better adjusted to the volume of trade. The Bolsheviks, wrote T. G. Masaryk in his Memoires, "sought for and found things which had long existed and were well known"; there is hardly any sphere "in which the alphabet will not be rediscovered." This observation is particularly applicable to Stalin and his discoveries in almost every direction.
In agriculture, the new statute of the kolkhoz confirmed and accentuated in 1935 Stalin's previous retreat if not before the peasants at least in face of the famine. Henceforth the inhabitants of the kolkhoz would have the right, over and above their isba, to a small individual or family holding of half a hectare on an average, sometimes of one hectare, and to the personal possession of livestock: a cow, two young horned animals, two sows and their farrow, ten she-goats or ewes, rabbits, poultry, and twenty beehives. In the pasture lands, two or three cows and ten to twenty-five ewes, and even eight to ten cows and a hundred to a hundred and fifty sheep according to the locality. The reopening of the markets, the permission granted to the collective farmers to sell their surplus there, the remission of the debts owed by the kolkhoz to the State, the definite delimitation of their territory—these various measures, and others of fuller detail, to some extent relieved the population of the countryside. Thanks to them the threatened food-supply was ensured through private initiative. This was the flagrant defeat of the integral collectivisation predicted to the blare of trumpets at the time of Stalin's "dizziness" in 1930, and the failure of collectivisation imposed by the violence of the Party. Meantime, private cultivation developed by sheer force of circumstances.
A stronger reaction still, alternately ridiculous or dishonest, appeared in the changed attitude toward the new prejudices, the external appearance of austerity, the very style of Soviet life. Stalin authorised and decreed pell-mell one after the other, high spirits, obligatory love, family happiness, paternal duty, filial respect, feminine coquetry, masculine elegance, regulated pleasure and gaiety to order, stereotyped laughter, poetry and humanism, rouge and finery, neckties and detachable collars. After providing dear bread that was available at last without cards, he bestowed or conceded games and spectacles, song and dance, crackers and Bengal lights. Daily he "rediscovered the alphabet." After an initial Thermidor, prolonged by interminable serialisation, there followed, like an avalanche, a very banal Directory. There were discussions about what Karl Marx wore round his neck, hidden by his beard, but the sailor-knot of Lenin was the dênouement of the controversy. Fashion magazines, formerly forbidden as subversive, were imported or printed; invitations were extended to Parisian dress-makers; Comrade Molotova interested herself in perfumes, lotions and creams. After Leninism with nitric acid, Stalinism with rosewater and Socialism with eau de Cologne. Manicurists were installed in the factories—the only factories in the world where there existed prisons and guard rooms. The reform of the Civil Code put barriers in the way of divorce, sanctioned paternity investigations, condemned abortion, restored the family to honour. The State encouraged the birth-rate by minute grants, beginning with the ... seventh child! Regular marriages were encouraged, as also conjugal fidelity, love of the fatherland and desire for offspring, thrift, and seven percent interest. Love was no longer a bourgeois conception, nor jealousy a proprietary sentiment. But the parvenu militants deserted their working-class wives, hardened in the struggle, and married young actresses, in the absence of daughters of bourgeois or aristocrat. The capitalists, who were anathema only shortly before, were indiscriminately imitated; people vied with one another in aping the "rotten West," especially its faults, which they copied to excess. At the Kremlin—banquets, receptions and champagne. The Party organised balls, feasts, festivals, and carnivals. They put flowers on the balconies, but they did not put them on the tombs of the millions of victims. One fine day Stalin visited Tiflis and spent a few minutes with his mother, forgotten for years, thus illustrating that very new truth that children must honour their parents. He had himself photographed with his children and with other children. He was the centre of admiration, he was extolled, he was imitated. No one might so much as mention the millions of abandoned orphans. In the midst of this "command performance," a decree extended the application of the death penalty for delinquents and criminals as from the age of twelve.
The mass of the population might stand aloof from such anachronistic and pretentious rejoicings, but a large part of the youth took delight in abandoning themselves to these novelties. The authorities sought for and found "things which had long existed and were well known": for the young who were disillusioned with the machine age, saturated with the black broth of theories, worn out with politics, theses and slogans. They provided sport in all its forms, parachutism, gliding, arctic explorations, expeditions to Central Asia. It goes without saying that everything seemed good to young and old which served as an escape, or outlet, or diversion; everything which took them further from the centres where they were in constant terror of the G.P.U., the Parry and military service. The press gave first place to the heroes of the North Pole, to aeronautical exploits, to every kind of prowess. At the expense of the hard-working country, Stalin distributed dolls to some, to others watches, not to mention roubles, accordions, phonographs—here to clever children, there to deserving workmen, and most often to timeserving officials.
He hastened to register the results of this "offensive on the cultural front," to use the Bolshevik jargon, by declaring: "Life has become better, comrades. Life has become more joyful." As a result, the ten thousand newspapers of the U.S.S.R., through a hundred thousand slavish pens, daily paraphrased the profound speech of the "thrice great master" on the happy life. The millions of members of the Party and the Communist Youth vied with one another in repeating it, conjugating it, declining it. Some days after this pronouncement, Stalin appointed Yagoda, his closest colleague, Commissar-General for National Safety. Who knew what was being prepared? As it was, the year 1935 ended with an apparent miracle: a Christmas Tree, baptised for the occasion, the New Year Tree. Only holly and other accessories were lacking to obtain the full value of the permission, but everyone declared that they would have them ready for next year.
Pursuing his alphabetical discoveries, Stalin succeeded in conceiving an original method for increasing the output of work: it consisted in paying the producers in proportion to their production. Piece-work wages were reintroduced: they were the object of hate under the capitalist regime, yet excellent under the emblem of the hammer and sickle. But the system of maximum payments limited the earnings of the best workmen, who lacked every inducement to apply themselves to their work. There was no personal interest, in the absence of adequate wages and available goods, and no higher, collective stimulus, since social solidarity was non-existent under the yoke of a hateful bureaucracy. Besides, the "norms" or minima of production were very low in comparison with the results obtained in every other country, because of the unskilled labour and the low level of life. In 1935, the withdrawal of the system of cards, rations and reserved shops changed the conditions of supply; remuneration in proportion to work modified the behaviour of the workers. "Norms" that remained too low had to be raised. They sought for and found "things which had long existed and were well known" elsewhere—under the names of Taylorism and the sweating system—but only too well known already in the U.S.S.R. as "socialist emulation" and "shock labour." Once more rationalisation, economy of movement, and division of labour were rediscovered. The result was stakhanovism, so called after the miner, Stakhanov, who first put into practice the new gospel under special conditions. The udarniki (shock volunteers) became stakhanovists, but were paid in proportion to their labour, with the result that wages could now vary from the normal to ten times the normal rate. To accelerate the tempo, to stimulate the champions and break records, all the honours and advantages were conferred on the foreman, thus defrauding his comrades by a strange combination of injustice and imposture. Various methods of deception and quackery were employed, in order to increase the propaganda. Stalin thought he could deceive all Russia and the whole world by trying to make it believe that the work of a gang of ten to twelve men on an average was that of a single record breaker. He has only succeeded in dividing the working class more profoundly against itself, in aggravating the social differentiation by the excessive inequality of wages, in obtaining some intensification of work and the raising of the norms. But a quantitative increase of production was only achieved to the detriment of the quality of the products, at the cost of a disastrous increase in waste, in a heavy wear and tear of machinery, and of a premature exhaustion of man-power. If by this means some thousands of future foremen and managers have sprung from the ranks to become to some degree privileged, the selection could have been accomplished more soundly and beneficially and with less ostentation. The numerous assassinations of stakhanovists by their companions in bondage, the antagonisms in the factories and workshops, which were already reported in the days of the udarniki, testified to a state of mind among the workers quite other than the enthusiasm prescribed by "our great beloved hero," Stalin. In short, stakhanovism served only to introduce into the so-called "socialist fatherland," in an aggravated form, methods in use in capitalist countries where the communists ceaselessly demand their abolition. To attain such an end it was more than useless to cause the shedding of so much blood and the flowing of so many tears.
ONE Of the most remarkable phenomena of the period, the discovery of a Fatherland in the U.S.S.R., some time after the triumph of national-socialism in Germany, was the result of a great miscalculation of Stalin. He hoped at first to come to an agreement with Hitler, as he had formerly done with Mussolini, in spite of the verbal differences in doctrine, and on the basis of the similarity in method between parties of the mailed fist. Since the reception of the Duce at the Soviet Embassy in Rome, on the morrow of the murder of Matteotti, and later, under the pretext of courtesy, the dispatch of congratulations to Mussolini by Rykov after his stay at Sorrento, where Gorky spent most of his time, the relations between the U.S.S.R. and Italy became increasingly intimate and cordial. Mussolini did not conceal a discreet admiration for Lenin, and the reciprocal borrowings increased between the two totalitarian regimes, hand in hand with the progress of their economic relations. In 1933, the year of Hitler's advent to power, an Italo-Soviet commercial agreement was concluded in May, followed in September by a pact of friendship, non-aggression and neutrality. A Soviet squadron anchored in October off Naples, and the following year an Italian military delegation proceeded to Moscow. Russia even placed orders for warships in Italy. Cordial telegrams from Litvinov testify for posterity to this mutual understanding.... Mussolini flattered himself that he had established a model entente with the Bolsheviks, suppressing communism at home whilst negotiating advantageously with the so-called Soviet State. Thus Stalin thought that he would conclude a similar pact with Hitler, on the ruins of the communist movement in Germany. The renewal of the agreement of Rapallo confirmed him in this hope, as did the new credit facilities granted to the U.S.S.R. by German industry. But he had to sing a different tune when the Third Reich assumed an attitude of determined hostility toward the Bolshevism of the Russo-Soviet State as towards export communism. Hitler's intuition finally prevailed over the contrary view; a view fairly widespread both in the Reichswehr and in diplomatic circles, which opposed to a new Drang nach Oesten the Bismarckian conception of an alliance with Russia. In vain the Caucasian, D. Kandelaki, appointed as commercial envoy to Berlin with a secret mission from Stalin, multiplied advances, invitations and soundings. The Fuehrer turned a deaf ear and persevered in his attack on Russia through the Communist International. In the end the disappointed Stalin had no choice but to turn toward France and England, toward the League of Nations, to play a different game, and to awaken in the peoples of the U.S.S.R. the consciousness of patriotic duty and of the fascist danger.
The official theme of patriotism then entered into the daily propaganda. The mechanical insistence with which it was emphasised indicated a rather artificial creation, conceived as a substitute for revolutionary ideology in distress. Pravda even published an editorial entitled Sacred Love of the Fatherland, which bore not the slightest resemblance to the vocabulary of two days before. As usual, the Bolsheviks passed from one extreme to the other, from the most elementary internationalism to the least respectable type of patriotism. There already existed, in contempt of cherished equalitarian principles, a whole series of decorations: the Orders of Lenin, of the Red Star, of the Red Flag, of the Red Flag of Work. Stalin further devised the Order of the Heroes of the Union, and the Badge of Honour. To these were added the distinctions of Artist of Merit, National Artist, and Scholar of Merit. Promotion to honours succeeded each other in long columns in the newspapers. Those decorated benefited by material advantages in money and in kind, which increased the privileges of the new dominant class, the profiteers of the Stalinist manna. In the Army the former hierarchy of ranks and stripes was reestablished, including at the same time the rank of marshal, suppressed under Tsarism after Kutuzov. Voroshilov, Tukhachevsky, Yegorov, Budyonny, and Blücher were promoted marshals, not for their services in war, but for the political support which they brought to Stalin. All that was formerly adored, was burnt; all that was formerly burnt, was adored. Distinctive uniforms and insignia granted to the People's Commissariat of the Interior, which some persist in calling the G.P.U., rewarded leaders and agents, whom some persist in calling Chekists, and assimilated them into the military hierarchy. With the absence of restraint, which characterises them, the Bolsheviks did not fail to carry to excess the reaction against their former sobriety of dress. They flaunted shining insignia, stripes and braid. The most striking revenge of the Imperial past was perhaps the resurrection of the Cossack corps, abolished by the revolution and reestablished by Stalin in several cavalry divisions with all their traditions and their ornamental equipment, not even forgetting the nagaika, so familiar to workers on strike and mujiks in revolt. It seems that in their very renunciation, the Bolsheviks of the decadence experienced a sort of morbid satisfaction which, in spite of themselves, urged them to eloquent demonstration.
This neo-Bolshevik neo-patriotism reverberated with great noise in the educational sphere, where, perhaps more obviously than in others, the bankruptcy of the regime was already complete. All the pedagogic innovations of the revolution were annulled and old ideas restored. The statute of the "Single School of Labour" provided free school materials and a free meal; the suppression of home-work, of text books, of diplomas; the repudiation of the so-called bourgeois survivals; the administration by a "school collective" and a "school soviet"; the substitution of "combinations" (subjects for combined study) in place of classical subjects. Later there was compulsory manual labour, pseudo-polytechnic education and student-brigades. Nothing is left of all this but ruins. The nonsense of Lunacharsky, the dogmatic teachings of Pokrovsky, the laborious efforts of Krupskaya were dismissed as Trotskyism. A series of decrees reestablished the broken traditions and even the routine, the authority of directors and teachers, rules and regulations, classes and time-tables, punishments and rewards, marks and examinations, certificates and diplomas, university grades and titles. The Bolsheviks rediscovered History and Geography, as well as the Alphabet. As usual, they exaggerated the new orientation and even went so far as to bestow a uniform on the pupils of the higher institutions, then on the scholars of all the Russias; only the shortage of cloth delayed the application of this measure. Finally, revising from top to bottom the State ideology prescribed for the whole population, young and old alike, they put on the index the greater part of the historical works they had edited, refused to admit the ideas and interpretations then in force, and, revising the history of Russia as they had before revised all the histories of the Party, they strove to rehabilitate the national glories and then to inculcate in the people a nationalist mentality suited to the occasion.
With the zeal and ardour of converts, they have, since 1935, rediscovered, recognised and acclaimed, one after the other, the great men of the past, authentic or debatable, going back beyond Muscovite Russia to the period of the Teuton and Mongol invasions: Saint Alexander Nevsky, vanquisher of the Sword-Bearers; the Ataman Ermak, conqueror of Siberia; the butcher Minin and Prince Pojorsky, gallant adversaries of the Poles; Field-Marshals Suvorov and Kutuzov. The conversion to Christianity, after baptism, of Russia in the Kiev period, becomes "a positive stage in the history of the Russian people." Not less "positive" is the role of the great Prince Ivan Kalita, who gathered together the Muscovite nation; of Ivan the Great, liberator of the Russian soil; of Ivan the Terrible, that precursor of Stalinist humanism; of Peter the Great, that worthy Bolshevik before the literature of Bolshevism. The late Pokrovsky, appointed head of the chapel of "Marxist historians," and his living disciples are discredited from one day to the next for having belittled, underestimated, and falsified the history of their mother country; not so long ago the authors who broke away so very little from the rut of that coterie were punished as heretics. The roles are reversed; exiled historians return to favour and their subservient persecutors will soon be persecuted in their turn. S. Platonov, cruelly treated, died in exile, but E. Tarlé, recalled from Turkestan, takes the rank of official historian, while the Marxist historians and other red professors are, as a beginning, thrown out of employment; and always in the name of the same idols, Marx and Lenin. This is what is called, in Bolshevik terminology, "taking the offensive on the historical front."
Once a start was made, the Song of the Company of Igor, an epic poem of the 12th century was loudly acclaimed; the anniversary of Lomonossov, Russian writer and universal scholar of his age, was overwhelmingly celebrated; the centenary of Pushkin, true literary ancestor of Stalin, was observed with the greatest ceremony.... When the prosaic bard Demian Biedny, librettist in his spare time, held up to ridicule the bogatyrs, the valiant knights of legend, persuaded that he would thereby enrich the orthodoxy of strict observance, his play earned for him the wrath of the Kremlin, and carried in its wake misfortune and loss of position for the producer, A. Taïrov, founder and director of the Kamerny theatre, who had previously been in high favour. This was the opportunity for the recognised critics to extol the heroes of the old bylins, the marvellous songs or tales of the spoken epic poetry of the Middle Ages: the peasant Ilia Murometz, the merchant Sadko, the giant Sviatogor. Nationalism became the most jingoistic patriotism, with the publication of the new "sterilised" text-books, among others the Short Course of History by Shestakov, drawn up by a brigade controlled by a State Commission, in which figured Bukharin, Radek, Bubnov, Zatonsky, F. Khodjayev, with Stalin as patron. In this nothing can be found save Russian victories throughout the ages.
The hasty resurrection of patriotism corresponded directly to considerations of foreign policy. Stalin then feared a military alliance between Germany and Japan, he sought alliances in Europe and in Asia, he attempted to give Russia spiritual reasons for fighting in case of war; one by one he sacrificed the principles and dogmas to which he owed his power, with the sole object of preserving it. For him everything is a question of the relation of forces. The official Bolshevik vain glory conceals an intrinsic weakness, manifest in every action taken in the international arena.
Stalin and his Party had defined pacifism as a Utopia, as imposture, deception or treason; later he proclaimed himself a pacifist. He had branded the League of Nations as a League of Brigands; he joined it without shame. He had anathematised the Versailles Treaty; he became the champion of the status quo. He had denounced France as the "most aggressive and most militaristic country in the world"; he concluded with France a pact of mutual assistance. He had asserted that fascists and socialists were "twin brothers"; he ordered his foreign mercenaries to come to an understanding with the socialists against the fascists at all costs, while he himself was persecuting the social-democrats in Russia. He had made war on the defenceless Chinese in order to guard the Manchurian railway; he ceded it cheaply to the Japanese as soon as they showed their teeth. When a French Minister of Foreign Affairs, following the example of his English colleague and the first United States Ambassador to the U.S.S.R., paid a visit to Stalin, thus destroying the fiction of the irresponsibility of the General Secretary of the Party for the foreign policy of the State, he hastened to make a declaration of good-will: "M. Stalin fully understands and approves the policy of national defence pursued by France, to maintain its armed forces at the level of security." This was a startling repudiation, insincere as it was, of all the activity of the Communist International since its foundation, and particularly of its French section; but to them he gave orders to suit, and soon his servitors in France, imitating their fellows in Russia, succumbed after many physical turnings and twistings. In the same way as the Chinese Communists, following much the same instructions, made a point of invoking Confucius, so the French Communists rediscovered, recognised and acclaimed Joan of Arc, Rouget de l'Isle, and Napoleon; they appropriated the Marseillaise, and passed straight from the most trivial anti-patriotism to the most bellicose chauvinism. For the interests of the U.S.S.R.—i.e., of Stalin—required a France which was preparing with the union sacrée for war with Germany.
In an interview with an American journalist, Stalin went still further: the League of Nations was no longer an instrument for imperialist war, according to the traditional Bolshevik terminology, but rather "an advantage for the friends of peace," in other words, the states opposed to Germany; "working for world revolution!" he said, "—we never had such plans and intentions"; if a "different impression" had sometimes been given, it was the "result of a misunderstanding"—and not of a tragic misunderstanding: "No. A comic misunderstanding. Or perhaps rather tragi-comic" for "the export of revolution is nonsense." After this, it remains only to tear to bits the works of Lenin, the books and the pamphlets, the collections of newspapers and reviews, all the publications of the Parties, of the International and of the Communist Youth issued before this Supreme denial. Stalin is not ready to say so, but he is the man to do it.
The essentials of this literature are in fact withdrawn from circulation or relegated to the libraries. Apart from some inoffensive scholar or curious person, no one for some length of time will seek to exhume these yellowing sheets and documents, from which, be it said, there emanates a consummate boredom. The publications of the Marx-Engels Institute were proscribed and destroyed, even before the burnings took place in Germany. The works of Lenin still figure prominently, but they are gradually pushed into the background by those of Stalin; but the public takes care not to read them, unless they are positively commanded to do so; and besides, words have lost their meaning. It would be difficult to find in the U.S.S.R. such important documents, for instance, as the decree constituting the Red Army, which is defined as "the support of the approaching socialist revolution in Europe." The only things that matter are the latest writings of Stalin, the most recent speeches of his spokesmen, the newspaper articles setting forth the perishable truth of the day, up-to-the-minute texts which render seditious and obsolete the orthodox publications of the day before, finally the current sources of information such as the Soviet Encyclopaedias, large and small, which must be thrown on the scrap-heap volume airer volume, despite the many expurgations repeated by the many successive censorships, despite the many falsifications introduced in the very course of printing. Every unexpected disgrace, each "turn" implies an automatic censoring and arouses intense panic in the bookshops and libraries. No sooner has an individual high in the Kremlin's favour ceased for mysterious reason to be persona grata, than his unfailing loyalty appears to be the double game of a man with a double face. He is immediately denounced as a "Trotskyist" and an "enemy of the people"; the most flattering credentials are transformed into an indictment or disappear from the dictionary, and there is mortal danger in being in possession of one of his works. Who knows what will be done tomorrow, at the next discovery of another letter of the alphabet? Each thinks only of keeping out of an infernal game of which no one knows the rules, in which traps are everywhere dreaded, and chance meetings shunned. Silence itself is dangerous, for it may be interpreted as a silent censure; each must sing his part in the choir of unanimous thanksgiving daily offered to "our wise leader and master."
When Stalin, speaking of the future Constitution, declared to Roy W. Howard: "... We have constructed the Socialist Society ... not to shackle individual liberty, but that human personality may feel itself really free"; when he predicted "a very keen electoral struggle," for, as he said more precisely, "it is evident that the lists of candidates will be presented not only by the Communist Party but also by social organisations of all sorts outside the Party," everyone knew what to think, but no one knew whither the dictator was bound. The draft Constitution, adopted by the Central Committee in June 1936, provided for elections in the western fashion and a parliament called the Supreme Council; but article 126 reserved the monopoly of politics for the Communist Party alone, and rendered illusory all the promised civil liberties. It was in any case the end of the pretended power of the soviets, even on paper. Twenty years after October, it was the admission of the bankruptcy of the system which the Bolsheviks presented as a superior expression of complete democracy, as a new type of State. Moreover, the new Constitution, formally submitted for the ratification of an extraordinary Congress of the Soviets, consolidated the right of private property within the already established limits and, without limitation, the right of inheritance in direct succession. Once again Stalin has found "things which have long existed and are well known." Nor did he make any innovation when he effaced the last traces of the former soviet Federalism, when he abrogated the rights of nationalities, of which he voluntarily appointed himself protector. The constitutional change consecrated the most extreme form of centralisation, the organs of the so-called federative republics being placed in strict subordination to the central power; this, however, did no more than codify the actual situation and make it more definite. The Transcaucasian Federation, as if creating a precedent, disappeared. Soon the Cyrillic alphabet itself was to he imposed on the national minorities, contrary to the recent respect accorded, in theory, to the regional or national manners and customs. Count can no longer be kept of the recantations and contradictions; they pass almost unnoticed in the collapse of the ideals of October. Under the new Constitution, as under the old, the truth is that above the apparent and fallacious revision of the standard of values, above the expedients and improvisations which take the place of policy and principle, "when all is said and done"—to quote a prophecy even then thirty-five years old—"everything will revolve around a single man who, ex providentia, will unite in himself all power."
So LONG and impressive a series of recantations and repudiations, inflicted by the Bolsheviks upon themselves, so many insincere retractions and cynical denials, could not but arouse bitter reflections in many minds. Moreover, words remain powerless against facts, especially the facts of economics and technology in which Bolshevism has registered bankruptcy after bankruptcy. It may be presumed that in the choking atmosphere of the "happy life" under the terror, doubt among some, despair among others gave way to subtle allusions, to imperceptible implications. It goes without saying that behind the unanimity on the surface, all thinking heads are full of contradictory reservations when so many changes are taking place. But the G.P.U. exists everywhere to collect the smallest scraps, to magnify them, to falsify them, to note, when required, abstentions or absences, sighs or silences. In the offices of Yagoda and Yezhov reports abound, denunciations accumulate. Around Stalin, who exercises his tyranny from on high, and delegates powers to his favourites, the boyars of the bureaucracy are mutually jealous and detest each other; their respective clients lie in wait for every pretext to start unseemly quarrels. The permanent purge takes its course and the rival clans destroy each other; thousands of individuals singled out for persecution by the system of suppression, despite the pledges given by Stalin, succumb in internal intrigues and disappear with their families without leaving a trace. In the assertions of some, the denials of others, and the contradictions of all, the Bolsheviks always remain unanimous.
If one is to believe certain allusions in the Soviet press or the indiscretions of officials, many victims apparently suffer for their former relationship with some nonconformist or other. And in this respect, no one is invulnerable. In truth, the worst pretexts become excellent for the purpose of ruining a rival in the zoological struggle permanently waged for coveted posts between factions and generations, between individuals and shifting groups. Old half-forgotten "affairs" still bear mortal consequences even after a long interval. Such for example is the case of Riutin, once a bitter adversary of Trotsky, who had gone into opposition in his turn and in his own way, author of a "platform" hostile to the policy as well as to the personality of Stalin. With this we may connect, after the event, the case of Syrtsov, president of the Council of Commissars for Russia, who was abruptly dismissed and expelled and is now missing; that of Lominadze, Stalin's confidential man, his agent in China at the time of the Canton insurrection, who went into opposition and into exile, repented and was reinstated; Eismont and Tolmachev, Assistant People's Commissars, disappeared just as mysteriously. There are rumours of madness, suicide, executions. One thing only is certain: Lominadze, following the example of Skrypnik, took his life. In the middle of June 1936, it was learned that Maxim Gorky was dead; this was not unexpected, for the writer was old and ill; his death was followed by the inevitable spectacular funeral. In the middle of July, the secretary of the Party in Armenia, A. Khandjian, one of Stalin's creatures, committed suicide in his turn, and this time the news was, for some incomprehensible reason, divulged. Finally, in the middle of August, while on all sides inexplicable arrests increased in the higher ranks of the unanimous Party, the announcement was suddenly made of a public trial instituted against sixteen communists of a so-called "Trotskyite-Zinovievite Terrorist Centre." Stalin's intentions were revealed, the fruits of his long meditations and premeditations were apparent. And yet his worst enemies did not dare to anticipate the kind of surprise he was preparing.
Involved in this trial were the two closest, and also the most discredited, companions of Lenin, the unfortunate Zinoviev and Kamenev, many times routed and repenting as often, veritable political corpses dragged from the isolation-cell of Vekhnie-Uralsk to serve as puppets before the tribunal; also their followers Yevdokimov, Bakayev, Reingold; several former Trotskyists who had rallied to Stalin, the "capitulators," as Trotsky called them, Ivan Smirnov, Mrachkovsky, Dreitzer, Ter-Vaganian; finally a few confederates of rather shady character. Their record of service would normally have made them directors of the Party and the State, in which, indeed, they had lately held the highest posts. They, too, were found guilty of the murder of Kirov, and of aiming at the assassination of Stalin and his acolytes, Molotov excepted. In spite of the manifest material and psychological impossibilities involved, an attempt was even made to tax them with being under the orders of Trotsky—vanquished, exiled, disarmed, isolated, separated from them in every way. They were accused of treason, of espionage, of terrorist intrigues, of intelligence with the enemy, of collusion with the fascists, of monstrous, unintelligible and impossible crimes. They confessed everything; they accused instead of defending themselves; they denounced each other and ardently vindicated Stalin. A veritable witchcraft trial, as Friedrich Adler justly calls it. The press overwhelmed them, calling them wild beasts, singling out "dog" and "viper," and loaded them with ignominious insults before knowing anything of the facts of the case, and the party machine unloosed a thousand meetings of indignation to order, from which there rose a cheerless, artificial storm of ritual curses. The Public Prosecutor, Vyshinsky, obscured to the best of his ability questions which were meant to elucidate, and insulted in security the victims promised to the executioner. It was now clear why Stalin had ventured on this course. Without awaiting the result, Tomsky, another old companion of Lenin, committed suicide. In four days, the Sixteen were judged without proof, condemned by order, and executed. And from Stalin to Zinoviev, everyone, not forgetting Tomsky, was unanimous.
It was the Dictator who had dictated all these horrors, and it became clear that he had resolved to finish with the men of the past in order the better to finish with the things of the past, to destroy them morally and physically. He must, therefore, have decided at the time of the Kirov murder to make new human sacrifices; but he waited for the death of Gorky before beginning. And he evidently hoped to produce some effect on sceptical opinion by the insensate accumulation of charges, however untenable they were in themselves and incompatible with one another. Three months later at Novosibirsk, a trial, similar to the former but restricted to nine obscure culprits, ended in nine death sentences and six executions. In this instance, the obvious aims of the Chekist machination were to explain the failure of local industry by alleged "Trotskyist" sabotage and malevolence, to involve the Gestapo, a sort of German G.P.U., and finally to implicate various persons in the demonstrative repressions that were to follow. In fact, at the end of January 1937, the trial began of the so-called "Anti-Soviet Trotskyite Centre," or "parallel centre," both labels of police manufacture.
Among the seventeen were old Trotskyists who had long ago repented, "capitulators" who had rallied to Stalin, men like Pyatakov, Radek, Serebriakov, Drobnis, Boguslavsky, and one whose rupture with the opposition was quite recent, Muralov; with them were an old Right-Winger, Sokolnikov, opposed to Trotsky's ideas, and a few very suspicious unknowns. Again, as always, the charge was the wearisome assassination of the eternal Kirov. Once more were served up the delirious ravings about Trotskyism, fascism, terrorism, treason, espionage, Packed up with charges of industrial sabotage and incredible intrigues aiming to provoke a war and the dismemberment of the U.S.S.R. Still there was no proof, no plausible presumption even, no tangible evidence, no witness for the defence, and no possible defence. Those accused of this new witchcraft admitted, as if with pleasure, the worst villainies and the least probable crimes. Their foreheads in the dust, they did not even spare their praises of the most genial Stalin. What passes for press and public opinion played their appointed parts in the funereal chant, keeping perfect time, even before the opening hearing. The usual unanimity was maintained, including both executioners and victims. There were seventeen death sentences, thirteen executions: Radek and Sokolnikov saved their skins by disclosures obliquely aimed at the General Staff of the Red Army.
But behind the scenes, a secret and ferocious rivalry divided the oligarchs of Stalin's entourage, all the more implacable because it was limited to the closed field of the bureaucratic "summits." Whether because of disagreement between the master and his servants, or because of disputes for priority between rival cliques, Yagoda finally fell into disgrace; he was dismissed from the People's Commissariat of the Interior and from all his police functions. Yezhov succeeded him: an example of Stalin's foresight. Yagoda was relegated to the Commissariat of Posts and Telegraphs, and as in the case of Yenukidze, there could be no possible doubt: the days of the "sword bearer" were numbered, and so were those of his personal clients. Two weeks after the execution of Pyatakov, Assistant Commissar for Industry, but the real head of his department, his immediate superior, Ordjonikidze, nominal Commissar, suddenly died. This time no one believed it to be a natural death. Stalin's old Georgian accomplice had been "liquidated" by the "beloved father"; on the least risky assumption, that he could not survive the man who had been his closest colleague. Six weeks later, amid the discreet jubilation of all, Yagoda, exposed as an "enemy of the people," was thrown into prison, charged with offences against the common law: venality, debauchery, exactions, immorality. He would soon know by experience the painful fate of so many of his victims.
During the month of May 1937, the effects of Yezhov's exorbitant power began to make themselves felt in a recrudescence of terror: mass arrests and wholesale executions made the population live again through the darkest hours of the Civil War. Groups of several dozen "citizens" were shot each week, then each day, without formality, without the least guarantee of justice, or after secret trials, tantamount to pseudo-legal assassination. On the last day of May, Ian Gamarnik, Assistant Commissar for War, and Director of the Political Department of the Army, committed suicide. A heavy uneasiness weighed upon military circles, when several generals in the public eye (Levandovsky, Schmidt, Kuzmichov) were marked down by the G.P.U., imprisoned, perhaps already suppressed; enigmatic changes rearranged the higher cadres. Relentless blows shook the police and the Army, Yagoda's fall opening a new phase. In June reverberated the thunderbolt which decapitated the General Staff and struck terror into the country: under the unheard-of charge of espionage, under the ridiculous pretext of having "violated their military oath, betrayed their country, betrayed the peoples of the U.S.S.R., betrayed the Red Army," Marshal Tukhachevsky, Generals Yakir, Kork, Uborevich, Eideman, Feldman, Primakov and Putna, all well-known "heroes of the Civil War," all several times decorated with the order of the Red Flag, all classed as adversaries of Trotsky and partisans of Stalin, were tried in camera, condemned to death without witnesses or defence, and executed within forty-eight hours.
From all the evidence, it is obvious that the Russia which bears and suffers does not feel itself one with any of its rulers, politicians, bureaucrats, policemen, soldiers, who murder each other in secret in the name of the same ideal; without correct information, it does not understand, no one can understand, what is happening; the official "explanations"—really gross vituperations—inspire nausea even in the least indulgent adversaries of the men who perish in dishonour; the oppressed people are no doubt not sorry to see the disappearance of so many of their oppressors. But thousands of innocent people suffer on the rebound, and there are gloomy forebodings of even greater misfortunes beyond these unjust killings. In fact, the year 1937 will stand out as an indescribable nightmare in the memory of Russians, contemporary with the methodical massacre begun by Stalin under the empire of fear. It seems that Yagoda had exhausted his capacities as proscriber, slavedriver, torturer and executioner; Yezhov took his place to continue with an accelerated rhythm the sinister task prescribed by the "great humanitarian," Stalin. Although the G.P.U. was permitted to massacre without publicity, the local press began to announce capital executions, but in certain cases only, for reasons known to the authorities alone: thus the intention of spreading terror was clear.
It was then proclaimed that the so-called Soviet State was everywhere poisoned with "Trotskyism," and that in reality Trotskyism signifies fascism, espionage, sabotage, and the restoration of capitalism. Now Stalin and his auxiliaries have incessantly asserted with great advertisement, that Trotskyism was non-existent, all the while increasing the rigorous measures to extirpate it. In their accusations against their vanquished antagonists, people recognised from the start the very charges made by the Opposition against the ruling camarilla. The stronger, therefore, abuse their power to kill the weaker, not without trying to discredit them. In stigmatising them no great Imagination was shown: treason, connivance with Polish or Japanese spies, with the Gestapo or the Intelligence Service became current coin (it is curious to note that the Italian Ovra has never been implicated). Thus "nests of Trotskyists," "nests Of spies," "nests of fascism," were discovered in all the Russias, in towns and villages, in the countryside and on the mountains, at the head of all institutions and services. According to the revelations and denunciations of this period, the entire framework of the regime in every field, patiently selected by Stalin for ten years, consisted only of "double-faced" Trotskyists.
Since the unanimous and final vote of the "Stalinist Constitution" at the Eighth extraordinary Congress of the Soviets at the end of 1936—the last—removals, dismissals, and changes have succeeded each other in every layer of the bureaucratic hierarchy; and under such a regime they generally imply irreparable ruin for the fallen. The chief characters of the State, identified as "enemies of the people," presidents of Executive Committees and of Councils of Commissars, secretaries of the Party and People's Commissars, all unanimously elected, disappear, and with them their relations, their colleagues, their friends, and a multitude of subordinates. From Minsk to Vladivostok, from Archangel to Tiflis, the echo of daily executions alone is heard, decimating the "unanimous" Soviet staff. Intellectuals, workers, directors of factories, agronomists, officials, railwaymen, engineers, pedagogues, soldiers, militants, priests, journalists, employees, doctors, veterinary surgeons, peasants, heads of new undertakings, artists, wantonly dubbed "fascist bandits" and "Trotskyist spies," "dogs and vipers," are riddled with bullets and fall by hundreds and thousands into the common graves. No one knows whom to trust, nor in whom to confide. No one any longer dares to estimate the mass deportations. The list of suicides lengthens: Essenin and Mayakovsky, Joffe and Lutovinov set the example; after Nadiejda Alliluyeva, Stalin's own wife, after Skrypnik, Lominadze, Khandjian, Tomsky and Gamarnik, to mention only familiar names, there is Cherviakov, President of the Executive of White Russia; then I. Khodjayev, brother of two People's Commissars in Uzbekistan; then Liubchenko, President of the Council of Commissars of the Ukraine, and doubtless also Doletsky, director of the news agency, and Ustinov, Soviet Minister to Esthonia. With regard to the two latter, there is no absolute certainty; but is there any certainty either with regard to the others, concerning whom there are rumours of assassination by the Chekists? Under a terror of this kind, these are only various methods of extermination, lust as the deportations often signify death after a brief interval. We shall learn later of hundreds, of thousands, more suicides, drowned by songs of "glory to the greatest man of the age."
If Stalin, his Yagodas and his Yezhovs, "engineers of souls," and experts in the art of breaking consciences, were able, by means of inquisitorial tortures, promises and threats, blackmail and bargaining, to stage several witchcraft trials in which complaisant confessions outbid each other, the majority of their victims have nevertheless refused to lend themselves to this, and it has been found necessary to put them to death without such parody of justice or under cover of various pretexts. Hundreds of persons, implicated by name as alleged accomplices, have never appeared before Stalin's "justice." Soldiers were condemned in camera, executed perhaps without trial. In July 1937 at Tiflis, seven former leaders of Soviet Georgia, among them Budu Mdivani, Stalin's childhood friend, and Okudjava, intimate friend of Trotsky, were judged in camera and shot, without consenting, so far as is known, to make lying confessions. At the end of this year of terror, there were eight executions without trial in Moscow, of men who never belonged to any opposition: Yenukidze, comrade of Stalin's youth and adolescence; Karakhan, Assistant Commissar for Foreign Affairs and ambassador; Orakhelashvili, President of the Council of Commissars of Transcaucasia; Sheboldayev, Stalin's creature, Secretary of the Party in northern Caucasia, and three other less important figures. There were no deceptive confessions in this case either. The technique of extorting confessions is painful, difficult, laborious; the results are very hard to reconcile with the verifiable facts—indeed impossible—for after the objective examination abroad of the two published trials nothing whatever remains of the extravagant theses of Stalin and his acolytes, Yagoda, Yezhov and Vyshinsky, the purveyors and the prosecutor. It was therefore necessary patiently to await the witchcraft trial of the so-called "Rightist-Trotskyist Bloc" in March 1938, to hear new false confessions, not less absurd than the former but even more incoherent, ill-conceived and badly planned, equally unconvincing and impossible.
Of twenty-one accused in this strange amalgam, eighteen were condemned and executed: Bukharin and Rykov, two of the closest colleagues of Lenin, among the principal ideologists and heads of the regime, former leaders of the Right, thanks to whose support Stalin was able to defeat Trotsky, who had now become Trotskyists without knowing it; Krestinsky and Rosengoltz, People's Commissars, former Trotskyists who had disowned their faction and rallied to Stalin at the first signs of his strength; Yagoda, the murderer of Trotskyists, charged with Trotskyism; People's Commissars Grinko, Chernov, Sharangovich, F. Khodjayev, Ivanov, all loyal Stalinists; Dr. Levin, physician to the Kremlin, the doctor of Lenin and of Stalin; Kriukov, agent of the G.P.U. and secretary to Gorky; and finally a few very suspicious personages of lesser note. It is not known why Rakovsky, considered the most guilty, benefited by a relative clemency (twenty years imprisonment), as also the supposed poisoner Pletniev (twenty-five years); both punishments were, however, equivalent to death for men who had long passed the age of sixty. To the monstrosities of the other trials was added the novelty of "medical assassination." Yagoda, bringing pressure to bear on the doctors of the Kremlin, and having at his disposal a very special pharmaceutical laboratory, was alleged to have shortened the life of Menzhinsky, his predecessor, of Kuibyshev, of Gorky and of Gorky's son, Peshkov. With that crescendo which is indispensable to these repellent machinations in order to avoid the monotony which would make them inefficacious, the managers went so far as to accuse Bukharin of having attempted to assassinate Lenin in 1918, and to accuse Trotsky of having been in intimate contact with the Intelligence Service since 1926 and with German spies since 1921, the other accused being more or less accomplices. One part of the trial was aimed at retrospectively compromising the memory of Tukhachevsky, Gamarnik, Putna and their colleagues, dead and buried. As a matter of fact, it was a rehabilitation, for they were no longer accused of espionage, the official reason for their execution, but of toying with the idea of a coup d'état, that is to say, simply of secret hostility toward Stalin. Another part aimed at explaining the lamentable condition of "socialist" industry, commerce and agriculture by the conscious sabotage of "enemies of the people," with the sole aim of exonerating Stalin and his satellites, the persons really responsible. This was the most interesting and revealing part of the trial, for it disclosed irrefutable realities as devastating as the trials themselves for the regime and its rulers.
MUSSOLINI had taken a keen interest in this unique counter-revolution, to the point of devoting to it commentaries from his own pen in the Popolo d'Italia. After the sensational execution of the generals, his article entitled Twilight (13th June, 1937) was somewhat severe on Stalin's regime where "massacre is on the order of the day and of the night." But a month later, the Critica Fascista (15th July) considered, in a study of the Fascism of Stalin, that the latter's "fascist" reforms proved the natural force of expansion and the universality of the ideal of the Black Shirts. And during the trial of the twenty-one, Mussolini himself asked (Popolo d'Italia for 5th March, 1938) whether "in view of the catastrophe of Lenin's system, Stalin could secretly have become a fascist," and stated that in any case "Stalin is doing a notable service to fascism by mowing down in large armfuls his enemies who had been reduced to impotence." In large armfuls, indeed, Stalin mowed down not only his enemies, declared or secret, alleged or real, but also his "friends,'' his creatures, his accomplices. Between the last two pseudo-judicial exhibitions, he had mowed down not only the Old Guard of the Party and the flower of the Communist Youth, but, after the General Staff of the Red Army, all the heads of Soviet governmental, of national and local administration. (It almost goes without saying that the former oppositionists, not produced at the trials, such as Smilga, Preobrazhensky, Sosnovsky, Byeloborodov, Uglanov, etc., must have succumbed in the jails of their "socialist fatherland.")
From Stalin's circle there have disappeared in 1938 the majority of his close auxiliaries, well-known Stalinists ready for anything, members of his Politbureau, of his Central Committee, of his Control Commission, of his Council of Commissars of his Executive Committee of the Soviets, of his Council of Labour and Defence: Rudzutak, Postyshev, Petrovsky, Chubar, Akulov, S. Kossior, Eikhe, Antipov, Bubnov, Krylenko, Unschlicht, the brothers Mezhlauk, Yakovlev, Janson, Soltz, Lomov, Sulimov, Miliutin, Kaminsky, Pashukanis, Rukhimovich, Khinchuk, Liubimov, Arbuzov, and how many others, not to mention the assassinations, the suicides, the punishments already stated. Five presidents out of seven of the Executive of the Soviets, and almost all the members or candidates; the People's Commissars in the approximate proportion of nine out of ten. And to disappear under Stalin means to perish suddenly in a cellar or to waste away slowly in an unhealthy climate. Of the directing staff of the Party formed in Lenin's lifetime, there remain, twenty years after October, only Trotsky in Mexico and, in Moscow, Stalin.
There have perished or disappeared without publicity in 1938, almost all the eighty members of the Council of War constituted in November 1934 to assist the Commissar for Defence: besides the nine leaders already inscribed on the roll of death, Generals Alksnis, Kashirin, Bielov, Dybenko, who had pronounced the death sentence on their comrades, followed by Marshals Yegorov and Blücher, Generals Savitsky, Smolin, Velikanov, Ozolin, Gorbachev, Hekker, Sukhorukov, Kuibyshev, Tkachev, Khripin, Pomerantsev, Mezis, Apse, Bokis, Admirals and Vice-Admirals Orlov, Victorov, Sivkov, Muklevich, Ludry, Kireyev, Kojanov, Dushenov, Ivanov, Smirnov-Sverdlovsky, followed and accompanied by thousands of other officers of all ranks. A man with no political past, a former secretary of Stalin who had become Assistant Commissar for War, Mekhlis, in concert with Yezhov, ceaselessly pursues the bloody purge. It is estimated in the U.S.S.R. that there have been more than thirty thousand victims in the "Red" Army and Navy-red with the blood of "his" followers shed by Stalin.
There have perished or disappeared all the chief leaders and deputy leaders of the G.P.U., following their chief: Agranov, Prokofiev, Balitsky, Messing, Pauker, Trilisser, Zakovsky, Slutsky, Deribas, Molchanov, Mironov, Leplevsky, and even former Chekists in retirement, Peters and Latsis; with them the majority of their colleagues, many of their subordinates. There have disappeared, after the two Assistant Commissars of Foreign Affairs, the ambassadors, plenipotentiaries or consuls-general Yurenev, Bogomolov, Arossiev, Davtian, Rosenberg, Antonov-Ovseenko, Tikhmeniev, Jakubovich, Bekzadian, Arens, Brodovsky, Podolsky, Ostrovsky, Asmus. Two have saved their honour with their lives by remaining abroad, A. Barmin and W. Krivitsky, the latter in the service of the Commissariat of War. Raskolnikov, proud Bolshevik who had become a humble Stalinist, must have followed their example without bothering about honour. Another, Butenko, typical example of the young Stalinist generation, openly threw in his lot with fascism.
There have disappeared, by a supreme irony of fate, the large majority of the members of the Commission of "the most democratic Constitution in the world," and those of the Commission for the revision of historical text-books, admirers of Ivan the Terrible.... There have disappeared almost all of those who established the Five Year Plans, theoreticians and experts, industrialisers and collectivisers, policemen and executioners, the directors of the principal industrial and agricultural "giants," and inaugurators of the greatest new undertakings, the Commissars for Industry, heavy and light, and for Collective Agriculture. There have disappeared all the statisticians, Ossinsky, Strumilin, Kraval at their head, whose faked calculations have long served as the basis for Stalin's fictions and deceits.
There have disappeared the last survivors of the Communist International, proscribers of their comrades, self-seeking flatterers of "the glorious pilot of the world October": Helen Stassova, Pyatnitsky, Bela Kun, Eberlein, Remmele, Warsky, Waletsky, Dombal, Borodin, and the majority of the mediocrities who were carving out a career in the Bureau of that corrupt and parasitic institution. They have arrested, imprisoned or deported almost all of the thousands of foreign communists, notably the Germans and the Poles, who had taken refuge in Soviet territory by virtue of Article 129 of the Stalinist Constitution: "The U.S.S.R. grants the right of asylum to foreign citizens persecuted for defending the interests of the workers, or for their scientific activity, or for struggling in favour of national liberation." Numerous among these "outlaws" are those who deplored too late the fact that they did not follow the example of their insubordinate comrades who, knowing how to appreciate the "right of asylum" and the "happy life" in the U.S.S.R., preferred to return to their own countries, there to serve heavy sentences, rather than to enjoy "liberty" under Stalin and a fortiori the penitentiary regime of the Soviets.
There have perished for the most part, executed after so-called trials in camera, or have disappeared in the course of this interminable Saint Bartholomew of communists, the rulers of all the pseudo-federated Republics: those of White Russia, Goloded, president of the Council; Diakov, Benek, etc., People's Commissars; in addition to Cherviakov, president of the Executive, and Generals Uborevich and Bielov; those of the Ukraine, Bondarenko, president of the Council; Sukhomlin, vice-president; Zatonsky, Rekis, etc., People's Commissars; in addition to Chubar, Liubchenko, Yakir already mentioned; those of Uzbekistan, Akhun-Balayev, president of the Executive; P. Khodjayev, president of the Council, and his two brothers, etc.; those of Tadjikistan, Chotemor, president of the Executive; Rakhimbayev, president of the Council; Imanov, Kaktyn, Shirinov, etc., vice-president and commissars; those of Turkmenistan, Aitakov, president of the Executive; Atabayev, Sakhatov, president and vice-president of the Council; Atayev, etc., commissars; those of Khirghiz, Isakov, president of the Council, and his principal commissars; those of Karelia, Arkhipov, president of the Executive; Bushuyev, president of the Council, etc.; those of Transcaucasia and Azerbaijan, Mussabekov and Efendiev, presidents of the Executive; Rakhmanov, president of the Council; Safarov, Sultanov, Ibrahimov, Husseinov, etc., commissars; those of Armenia, Ter-Gabryelian, president of the Council; Mamikonian, Kalantarian, Shakhnazarian, etc., commissars; in addition to Khandjian who has been already mentioned.
We must make special mention of Georgia, fatherland of Stalin, Ordjonikidze and Yenukidze, where a "man with no political past," L. Beria, has mown "in large armfuls" for his lord and master. After B. Mdivani, former president of the Council, and Okudjava, Toroshelidze, Chikhladze, Kurulov, Kartsevadze (socialist) and G. Eliava (bacteriologist), who were executed in July of the year of terror, there were Mgalobishvili and Agniashvili, president and vice-president of the Council; Metvereli, Abashidze and about ten of their colleagues, commissars; then Gogoberidze, another former president of the Council; Kirkvelia, Kavtaradze; commissars; S. Eliava, L. Gueguechkori, the socialists S. Davderiani, G. Makharadze; finally Orakhelashvili, former president of the Council of Transcaucasia. In Adjaristan: Lorkipanidze, president of the Executive, G. Ramishvili, E. Megrelidze, G. Laguidze, and half a dozen other commissars. In Ossetia: Togoyev, president of the Executive; Maurer, secretary of the Party, etc. In Abkhazia: Nestor Lakoba, President of the Executive, and his two relations, Michael and Basil, besides a dozen commissars. Nestor Lakoba, accused of homicidal intentions with regard to Stalin, was actually the author of the pamphlet, Stalin and Khashim, in which he celebrates "the greatest man of a whole epoch, such as history gives to humanity only once in one or two hundred years," the "genial leader, unshakable and made of steel, our dear and beloved Stalin."
Everywhere, then, the Commissars of the People were only "enemies of the people." Everywhere the Executives are executed. Everywhere the enemies of the people who were executed had been unanimously elected, as were their successors. And Lenin had as friends, comrades, and allies, according to Stalin, only false friends, fascists, spies, saboteurs, traitors, dogs, in a word, "Trotskyists." For a dismal catalogue might be made way for all the so-called responsible and directing spheres of Soviet life where the Soviets do not exist and where life precedes death by so little. The "good," the "tender," the "gentle" Stalin—expressions consecrated in the U.S.S.R. by those who have yet to receive a bullet in the neck—has spared, doubtless provisionally, only an insignificant number of individuals who have known the past: if he is to find substitutes for those in the front rank, it is not possible for him to kill everyone at the same time. Thus he has proceeded step by step, methodically, passing from the Party to the Army, from the police to the diplomatic corps, from the centre to the periphery, from industry to agriculture, from the press to the statistical bureaux, from commerce to literature.
Everyone knows that Stalin is the protector of letters and the arts, the enlightened lover of all culture: he has had Pilnyak exiled, Pasternak persecuted, and in his devotion has imprisoned even the pseudo-proletarian writers Auerbach, Kirshon, Yermilov, Libedinsky, Bruno Jasensky, Tarassov-Rodionov and their like; he has hunted down the poets Nicholas Kliuyev, Mandelstam, Selvinsky, Tretiakov; he has deported a critic like Voronsky, a philosopher like Ivanov-Razumnik, humourists like Erdman and Krotky, the historians Nevsky, Steklov, Volguin, Friedland, Zeidel, Anishev, Piontkovsky, S. Dalin; the journalists Gronsky, Rojkov, Lukianov, Lapinsky, Tal, almost the whole staff of Pravda and the very official Izvestia, together with the orthodox editorial boards of the leading reviews; the writers Ivan Katayev, P. Vassiliev, I. Makarov, A. Bezymensky, Maznin, Selivanovsky, G. Serebriakova, to mention only a few examples. As a matter of fact, no one would have been able, under a quintuple preliminary censorship, to commit the slightest crime with his pen. Stalin has sterilised the best talents of Russia, driven the real writers to moral suicide after the physical suicide of the greatest poets. He has suppressed the Academia publications, the only ones which did honour to contemporary book-production in the U.S.S.R., and has shot or deported the editors, critics and managers. In the realm of the theatre, he has struck down, without avowed or avowable reason, the directors and managers Liadov, Amaglobeli, Arcadin, Rafalsky, Nathalie Satz and others —even Granovsky as a posthumous insult; he has deprived Meyerhold of work and made his theatre a corpse.
How many people has Stalin butchered who did not kill Kirov? A precise enumeration is impossible when dealing with such a hecatomb. Every personality in the public eye drags in his fall sometimes dozens, sometimes hundreds of subordinates, whose wretched fate is passed over in silence. The executions are in general kept secret, except when express orders are given for publicity. We have been able to collect information from only ten to twenty Soviet newspapers which are received irregularly, according to the prevailing conditions, in the capital where, however, the press under orders abstains from reproducing the news: but there exist about ten thousand local and regional sheets which are inaccessible.
According to the testimony of Liushkov, head of the G.P.U. in Eastern Siberia, who has taken refuge in Japan to avoid the fate of his colleagues, 40,000 persons were executed on the gratuitous suspicion of plotting during the period when "the most democratic constitution in the world" was being adopted and the first "electoral campaign" was being conducted for the Supreme Council. One of his colleagues of the Trans-Siberian, Petrov, computes at five million the number of prisoners in the concentration camps alone, not including the millions of those banished or the inhabitants of the isolation camps and prisons. There has been a singular "progress" since the appearance of the work, Russia's Iron Age, in which W. H. Chamberlin in 1934 reported that 300,000 prisoners were cooped up in the concentration camps of Siberia alone, and that at least two million "citizens" had been deprived of liberty without the pretence of a trial during the five years of the first Five Year Plan. W. Krivitsky, a communist who has stood every test and reached the rank of general in his department, could declare to the Bulletin of the Opposition (December 1937) that the number of political arrests rose to 300,000 in May 1937, for the period of the trials alone, and must have reached 500,000 by the end of the year. A communist communiquê published in the Russian Courrier Socialiste (July 30, 1938) estimates at seven million the number of prisoners in the concentration camps alone. This figure is the nearest to the truth, if we consider the draconian measures adopted since the Leningrad purge after the Kirov murder, the surgical operations performed on the Party and followed by mass deportations of those expelled and their families, the amputations effected in all the cadres of administrative and economic activity, finally and above all if we calculate the need of penal manual labour for Stalin's public works which rival those of Pharaoh.
The Yugoslavian communist, A. Ciliga, a sincere man and an unimpeachable witness, one of the few who has escaped alive from the Soviet convict gangs, has written in his book, Au pays du grand mensonge: "Those who have not lived in the Soviet prisons, concentration camps and places of exile in which are shut up more than five million convicts, those who are not familiar with the greatest jail history has ever seen, where men die like flies, where they are beaten like dogs, where they are made to work like slaves, can have no idea what Soviet Russia is, what Stalin's 'classless society' means." In the absence of scientific exactitude, impossible when such different testimony is compared, there is striking agreement as to the order of magnitude, the hallucinatory proportions. We must also take into account the frightful mortality which decimates the convicts, especially the children, the repeated arrests of the same persons, the migrations from one camp to another, and the change of work places which make the figures fluctuate.
The same author thus reveals the approximate figures collected on the spot, in the isolation-camp at Vekhnie-Uralsk: "At the end of 1932, a Trotskyist who had recently arrived told us that according to an important official of the G.P.U., condemned for a professional error, the number of arrests rose, on the authority of police statistics, to 37 millions in the course of the last five years. Even admitting that in the majority of cases the prisoners had been arrested over and over again, the figure seemed to us incredibly exaggerated. Our own estimates varied from five to fifteen millions.... When I was released and was in exile in Siberia, I was able to verify the correctness of many of the assertions which had seemed exaggerated and fantastic in prison. It was in this way that I was able to verify the rumours of the horrors of the famine of 1932, including cases of cannibalism. After what I saw in Siberia, I consider that the figure of five millions condemned is much too small, and that ten million is nearer to reality." Indeed in 1935, the most staid and prudent observers arrived at this average estimate. In 1937, at the time of the twentieth anniversary of October, if we bear in mind all that we have said, fifteen million condemned in the various categories would probably be the number most in accord with the facts.
At the end of the year of terror (12th December, 1937) the elections to the Supreme Council were held, to the accompaniment of rifles fitted with silencers. There was only a single candidate for each electoral district, chosen in advance, nominated beforehand by the raised hands of the electors on the recommendation of the Party and under the eye of the G.P.U.; the voting papers were printed with the name of the official candidate only who, moreover, benefited by every paper struck out or altered by a mark or stain; abstention was prohibited and was controlled by a scrutiny of passports and electoral rolls. Thus Stalin was not even able to carry into effect his project of staging a semblance of rivalry between "social organisations of all kinds outside the Party"—all of course in reality communist organisations. He had overestimated his technical means, above all his resources in men, and he had to be content with exclusive and obligatory candidatures. It was in these circumstances that his press proclaimed the dazzling triumph of the "bloc of Bolsheviks and of those without the Party," with majorities on the average exceeding 99 per cent. Hitler has in many ways copied Stalin, notably in the concentration camps; in respect for the Constitution, Stalin has had only to imitate Hitler, who took the well-known oath to the Weimar Constitution. During the electoral operations, a certain number of the carefully selected candidates disappeared through the trap-door of the G.P.U.; after the first meeting of the Supreme Council, several deputies, Vice-Presidents of the Assembly, People's Commissars, met the same fate, as if to illustrate Articles 127 and 128 of the Constitution on the inviolability of the person, of the home, and of correspondence. Virtuoso of antiphrasis, the "beloved father and friend of the people" declared in a speech on the eve of the elections: "The world has never seen elections so really free, so truly democratic. Never. History knows no other example of this nature."
CONFRONTED With the massacres ordered by Stalin in cold blood, and with the internecine feuds of the bolsheviks, one is led to draw a parallel with the Russia of the sixteenth century and the reign of Ivan the Terrible. It is not perhaps fortuitous that in Europe this century was that of the massacre of Saint Bartholomew and of the Inquisition, that Ivan IV was in the largest sense the contemporary of Louis XI, of Philip II, of Henry VIII, of Selim the Fierce—of cruel princes and poisoning popes. Nor is it fortuitous that our epoch of social and political change demands comparison in so many ways with the Middle Ages, or rather with the hazy idea we have of them, and that it is haunted by the related phenomena of Bolshevism and Fascism. The great social and national conflicts which have arisen as a result of the world war also suggest frequent comparisons with the wars of religion of this same sixteenth century which was that of Luther and of Loyola, of thinkers who today are curiously regaining their popularity, from Machiavelli to Paracelsus, and besides these, whether by chance or not, of the Utopia of Thomas More and of the true Humanism of Europe. But Ivan the Terrible did not, like Stalin, control electricity, rotary printing presses, radio, railways, tanks, airplanes, oil wells, gold and manganese mines. The combination of Russo-Asiatic mediaeval backwardness with modern technique and inexhaustible natural resources produces confusing effects as much within as outside Russia and obscures the simplest things. Much has been said about the unreliability of historical comparisons, but nothing forbids the attempt to shed a little light upon the uncertainties of the present by a knowledge of the past, if it be only to bring out the differences more clearly, to relate more exactly the known reactions of human nature to the unknown of the fugitive present and the perpetual becoming. It is not useless, therefore, to return to ancient Muscovite history in order to show certain new beginnings of history, which do not in the least exclude fresh departures and definite breaks.
Stalin, in his interview with Emil Ludwig, was pleased to distinguish himself sharply from Peter the Great, but since then, not being subject to contradiction, he has completely revised his views, as is shown among other things by the corrections made on his instruction in the historical text-books and the frequent commentaries of his controlled press. The sycophant writer, Alexis Tolstoy, whose zeal to serve the Bolsheviks is in inverse proportion to his contempt for them, carried out a "social command" transmitted from a very high place, in his novel on Peter the First and the film of the same type which aimed at suggesting constant parallels between the "worker-tsar" and the red tsar. But if these two personages are related, it is by their contempt for human life, sensibility, and dignity, and not in the way intended by Stalin.
All serious historians recognise in Ivan the Terrible the true precursor of the reforms of Peter the Great and the most finished expression of their common mentality. But no one would dream, if he were a free agent, of attributing the epithet "Great" to Stalin, although everyone would grant him that of "Terrible." The use of "barbarian methods," as Lenin said, to force industrialisation is not enough to render "great" an industrialising tsar, when civilised methods exist. The barbarity excusable in Ivan, explicable in Peter, which was characteristic of their time if we take account of the backwardness of Russia, is an enormous anachronism in Stalin, and therefore inexcusable. Moreover, it is in direct opposition to true industrial, economic and technical progress, for no modern industry could prosper under the constant threat of the knout and the revolver. As a matter of fact, very few factories, only about twenty, survived the "worker-tsar," out of the 230 which he left in theory and the hundred odd which were functioning in fact—a result of ill-omen for his imitator.
The comparison with Ivan the Terrible, on the contrary, is a great help in understanding the bloody crises of the Stalinist autocracy. Around the throne, the noble feudal families, the Shuiskys, the Belskys, the Glinskys, and later the Miloslavskys, the Naryshkins, the Dolgorukys, until the Romanovs gave the casting vote, quarrelled among themselves for places of influence, as around Stalin the secretaries and commissars, the clans and the cliques. The quarrels for precedence between the boyars, envenomed to the point of implacable feuds, are analogous to the antagonisms between members of the Central Committee and the Control Commission, between the system of the Party and the system of the Soviets, between the Police and the Army, between the Commissariat of Foreign Affairs and the Communist International, between Lettish coteries and Caucasian tribes. Then also, autocratic oppression paralysed the class struggle and gave free rein to the zoological struggle of castes. The workings of the G.P.U. under Stalin are comparable only to the Oprichnina of Ivan, an unavoidable comparison, just as the machinations of Stalin by means of the G.P.U. make one think irresistibly of the Terrible. The parallel even offers surprising similarities.
When still young, spare of words, distrustful and dissimulating, Ivan acted by surprise when he attacked the boyars and, as an example, threw the most important of them, Shuisky, to his dogs, who tore him to pieces; then he banished several others to distant regions. The boyars seized the first occasion, a fire at Moscow, to accuse the Glinsky family of wrecking and of provoking a massacre. Later, thinking that he had reason to complain of his favourites, Silvester and Adashev, the Tsar wrote: "When the treason of that dog, Alexis Adashev and his accomplices was discovered, we made our anger felt only in a merciful manner; we did not decree capital punishments against the guilty; we merely banished them to various towns.... At first we did not inflict the final penalty on anyone. We ordered those who belonged to the party of Silvester and Adashev to dissociate themselves from them and no longer to look upon them as their leaders; we made them confirm this promise by an oath. Not only did they not dissociate themselves from the traitors, but they aided them in every possible way, and did their best to restore to them their former power and stir up against us the most treacherous conspiracy. Then only, seeing their stubborn wickedness and their unconquerable spirit of rebellion, I inflicted on the guilty the penalty of their crime." In this passage, which relates to a period of relative clemency, one recognises—one might almost mistake it for—the future language of Stalin, though the latter is rather more vulgar. One finds again the dogs, the treason, the wrecking, the "faction," the false repentance, the insincerity of the "capitulators," the alleged conspiracy, the clemency of the despot, in short the very thesis which Stalin was to put in circulation by means of the international press in his pay.
After the departure of Kurbsky, which corresponds mutatis mutandis to the exile of Trotsky, things became worse. Kurbsky addressed to Ivan a vehement message of reproach, rather in the style of the future Trotskyist Bulletin of the Opposition. A polemic raged; the Terrible replied in his turn, and made use of tricks to strike at the exiled Trotsky, that is Kurbsky, through his alleged accomplices: blackmail by threatening dismissal, as it were, which Stalin also was to employ on many occasions, led the boyars to recantation before the Tsar. The latter than carried out a profound administrative reform by creating the Oprichnina whose object was to "sweep out treason," like the G.P.U. of later times. For seven years an unexampled terror decimated the "upper layers" of Muscovite society, executions succeeded tortures, the Zinovievs, Pyatakovs and Bukharins of the period perished with their followers and their families. It is said that some of the boyars, who were tortured to death, mingled a eulogy of Stalin, or rather of the Terrible, with their cries of pain. Every day whole groups of individuals were put to death. It is unknown even today, in spite of the controversies of specialists, what were the crimes of these victims, and perhaps it will never be known what are the secret reasons of Stalin.
When Ivan wanted to justify himself to the Poles, he wrote to them: "Many among you say that I am cruel; it is true that I am cruel and irascible, I do not deny it. But toward whom, I pray, am I cruel? I am cruel toward him who is cruel toward me." And he accuses his enemies of having poisoned his first wife. Stalin, having read the famous passage of Lenin's Testament: "Stalin is too rude, etc....," in the same way declared to the Central Committee in 1927: "Yes, comrades, I am rude to those who break their word rudely and treacherously, who split and demoralise the Party. I have never hidden it and I do not hide it." One could continue these instructive comparisons: the analogy is obvious in deed and in word. Stalin accuses his adversaries of having poisoned not his wife, who committed suicide, but Gorky and others: a tiny difference and, if we examine it, not to the advantage of Stalin. "We must not think that Ivan's enemies were better than he: they were as cruel toward their inferiors as Ivan could be toward them," observes A. Rambaud, and if we transfer the observation it remains valid, at least for those who head the lists of Stalin's victims.
To assure to the tyrant the maintenance of his tyranny in all its fullness both for the present and for the future: such in both cases appears to be the raison d'etre of so many crimes, the essential reason among many secondary considerations. Of course the tyrant always claims an impersonal ideal, varying from the divine will through national interest to the safety of the revolution; but it is always a question, in prosaic terms, of the oligarchic domination imposed by violence and incarnate in an alleged superman. Amid the general dissatisfaction due to material misery, spiritual poverty and political oppression, the tyranny maintains itself only by a constant see-saw supported on the social pillars, on which its favour confers a transitory authority, and which in the long run seem dangerous to it: and from this arises the necessity of destroying them lest, in continuing too long, they assume too great an importance. Whether the privileged caste be the feudal nobility or the feudal bureaucracy, it suspects treason everywhere and constantly fears for its privileges.
We have seen how Stalin at first got rid successively of all the political factions which were capable of eliminating him, how he defeated each by a coalition with the others, dividing the spoils, namely the places, in advance. Freed of any immediate worry in the system of the pseudo-Party, he imagined he found some resistance, though it was in point of fact more the difficulties of application, in the system of the pseudo-Soviets where, in particular, the G.P.U. had ended by becoming a sort of State within the State. It is possible that in time these difficulties became a mute but conscious resistance in the Police and in the Army. Around every director of every institution, from the General Headquarters down to the least commissariat, in Moscow and in the sub-capitals, there arose a sort of clientele which little by little accumulated certain common interests and a common esprit de corps. Stalin, a man of prudence, made it a principle to have each of his chiefs watched over by an associate or assistant, who in turn was surrounded by his own set and was ready to supplant the chief. These indefinable groupings among officials, formed by circumstances for the solution of urgent problems according to various criteria of docility, aptitude or chance, were not in the least homogeneous: side by side with careerists, conscientious persons well-qualified in their speciality rubbed shoulders with informers and parasites. Individual or collective purges frequently overhauled these unstable formations and modified their external features. These left as a residue carefully selected fixed groups, with their routine, their professional habits, sometimes also the last scraps of the competence necessary to the functioning of the state machine, particularly indispensable in the key positions of the economic and military administration. But the purges inspired by the narrow conservative views of the central power-safeguarding of the new privileges, fear of the least initiative, suspicious distrust of each and all—lower to a minimum the level of the men and of their work. In brief, power and knowledge contradict one another in insoluble antagonism.
Degrading struggles between the highly selected sections of the bureaucracy result from this lengthy course of action, struggles in which Stalin, in the name of his intangible preponderance, is the arbiter. There is also another result: that bestiality of the strong, that humility of the weak, the real abuses of the one, the false confessions of the other, in the absence of all normal expression of political thought and individual needs, of all respect for human personality and for any moral rule. At his ease in this milieu, in these surroundings, which are his natural element, Stalin incites and provokes his auxiliaries, stirs up rival passions, exploits rancour and hatred in order to guarantee in his own way the continuance of his despotism and the unique position of the supreme arbiter. He cuts short differences, separates the protagonists, and profits from the situation to impose new men. Not knowing in whom to trust and seeing traitors on all sides, he keeps changing his favourites without changing his methods, and always with identical results. From disappointment to miscalculation, from set-backs to deceptions, in the blind alley where the great, new technical and industrial enterprise marks time and often retreats, he interprets every natural weakness as ill-will, every unlucky chance as obstruction, every banal mishap as wrecking and sabotage. He must have culprits to punish in order to preserve the dogma of infallibility from on high, as well as his personal prestige.
He treats all slavish courtiers as "double-faced," or at least accuses them of lack of vigilance; he is constantly creating supplementary departments of the police bureaucracy, such as the "military councils" and the commissars in the Army following the "political sections" in the kolkhoz, in order to reinforce the spying system. In his eyes, all evil being treason, all good is merely a question of police and repression. The different bureaucratic sections in the various ranks of Party and State, united against their inferiors but divided before their superiors, seem to him at best as less and less apt to realise the impossible tasks assigned them by the plans, the false calculations, the badly worked out projects. They denounce and devour each other, and are sacrificed one after the other according to the necessities of a vulgar hand-to-mouth policy. At length Stalin replaces them with "men with no political past," that greedy new generation, impatient and brutal, on which he depends. In the economic blind alley in which the U.S.S.R. found itself before the twentieth anniversary of October, a mass slaughter was needed to speed things up. The Kirov murder furnished the pretext.
These "men with no political past," who have, moreover, no culture, no experience and too often no scruples, men lacking in science as in conscience, provide Stalin with sad surprises, as is shown, among other examples of the same kind, by the defection of the Soviet diplomat Th. Butenko who went straight over to fascism. It is true that the transition from Bolshevism to fascism has for a long time been easy to make. This man was not an exceptional case, his defection was merely the result of accidental causes. He was in truth a characteristic product of the neo-Bolshevism: there are many other examples. In order to be sent abroad, he must have passed through many sieves, and undergone many controls. Stalin and Yezhov answered for him still, over the signature of Litvinov, while he was en route for Rome. Nevertheless, he declared himself their enemy of long standing, and called passionately for their fall and that of their regime. Those who agree with him, and who work inside Russia, work against them in another way, by making a career; they are worth no more in the economy and the administration than in diplomacy and politics. If the renegade in question does not represent the whole of "soviet youth," which has been the theme of an abundant, but vain and deceptive literature, he belongs nevertheless to that cynical generation fashioned by the G.P.U. and formed in the school of Stalin.
At the Congress of Soviets in 1936, it was said that 43 per cent of the population had been born since the revolution, and consequently had only theoretical notions of the past. Thus Stalin draws on an inexhaustible reserve, and is visibly obsessed by this prolific increase which authorises him, as he thinks, to do as he pleases as far as human material is concerned; for it accords well with his inclination to "mow down in large armfuls" the old and the adult generations, as is shown, among other signs, by this phrase of his: "At the present time, there is with us each year a net increase of the population of nearly three million. This means that each year, we increase to the extent of the whole of Finland." It means in addition, to the misfortune of Russia, that Stalin estimates human life at the very lowest price; as if, apart from ethical arguments, social beings were interchangeable in work and production without regard to their culture.
If T. G. Masaryk could justly remark that "Bolshevik half-culture is worse than the absence of all culture," the suppression of this half-culture by Stalin has not brought Russia any nearer to the happiness of the ordinary people: instead of clearing the ground, it has allowed the studious youth to become imbued with schematic idiocies, primitive sophisms, notions so utterly false, and condemned by all experience, that the Bolsheviks themselves have had to repudiate them one by one and "rediscover the alphabet" every day. The lack of rudimentary culture of the new men does not correspond to the industrial civilisation, whose carcass has been imported at great expense and implanted with many disappointments, and still less to the high moral level without which a society with socialist tendencies is inconceivable. But in the new generation it is possible to distinguish, amid the still amorphous and passive mass, two contradictory currents. The so-called "soviet" youth, conformist, poured into the mould of the Bolshevik organisation, uncultured, egotistical, devoted to sport, parrot-like, boastful, profiteering, eager for gain, grossly practical, doubtful of nothing, its head filled with orthodox pamphlets, is however sterile, in spite of its privileges. The pseudo-soviet youth, non-conformist, impossible to define in its silence, restless, enquiring, thoughtful, dissatisfied, retains its critical spirit, learns its trade, avoids politics, hides its opinions, reads the poets and philosophers, and escapes from official influence while keeping up appearances. Neither the one nor the other, for different reasons, can fulfill the hopes of Stalin.
THE scale of the extermination carried out between and after the trials for treason and terrorism has somewhat lessened their importance, but their significance nevertheless extends to the whole course of action. For the future history of Russia, its revolutions and counter-revolutions, it is not a matter of indifference to know whether these trials concealed some morsel of truth under the mass of obvious deceptions. Practically every one of the lies of the accusation and of the confessions, like the lies of the witnesses and of the speeches for the prosecution, collapsed under the flagrant contradictions between one trial and the next. The statements with regard to the two parts which were verifiable abroad were all shown to be false, without a single exception. The opinions foisted upon the accused were diametrically opposed to those which they were always known to have held. Their own declarations before the tribunal, about the ideas which inspired the opposition and the alleged plots, are contradicted from end to end by all the existing documents not specially prepared for the needs of the case. Finally—a proof of the "totalitarian" imposture which is really superfluous—a comparison with earlier trials, notably that of the "industrialists" and that of the "Mensheviks," establishes a remarkable identity of structure which leaves no doubt as to the technique and the police machination: the only difference is that in the earlier trials France takes the place of Germany; the only novelty is the addition of terrorism.
The general thesis of the accusation was summed up in March 1937 by Stalin in these words: "...From the political tendency, which it showed six or seven years earlier, Trotskyism has become a mad and unprincipled gang of saboteurs, of agents of diversion, of assassins acting on the orders of the espionage services of foreign States." The complete falseness of this need no longer be demonstrated, since it was immediately obvious on the publication of the reports of the trials and by an examination of facts, the comparison of texts, the absence of proofs, the contradictions in which the terms annul one another, the unexplained disappearance of several hundred accused and of thousands of witnesses and the material impossibilities which discredit the remainder. Moreover, certain inexplicable gaps, unjustifiable obscurities, indisputable lies, the incredible unanimity, the absolute isolation of the prisoners, the abnormal conditions of their imprisonment, the complete secrecy of the preliminary examination, the absence of any defence and of all material evidence, the obvious role of Chekists and agents provocateurs, the fact that similar or related trials were held in camera, the mechanical orgy of all too excessive insults—all this hardly adds weight to the theses. The implication as Trotskyists of men well known as mortal enemies of Trotsky refutes them; the presence of Rykov and Bukharin, and even Yagoda among the accused discredits them. Stalin himself imprudently contradicted them a year later by making Trotsky and Krestinsky belong to the German espionage service already in 1921, Rakovsky to the Intelligence Service in 1924, etc.—that is, long before the "six or seven years earlier," and at a period when the close collaboration of these persons with himself is incontestable. By the zeal of this same Stalin, Trotsky had, moreover, been abundantly accused as an agent of France, before being branded an agent of Germany—assertions more or less incompatible. In the case of the military leaders, the "espionage" of 1937 became in 1938 vague, confused and misty intentions of a political coup d'état. All the charges of the indictments have the same force. There is not even the very least valid juridical presumption of guilt.
Does this mean that no doubt exists, in the nature of things, after these objective statements, which are rendered difficult of belief by the resemblance of so many accused to their accusers? Doubts still exist about too many historical enigmas, and not only in Russia, to hope that this will be fully clarified before the death of Stalin. As for terrorism—the classic reply from below to the terror from above—no definite act or concrete plan was revealed in the trials. But the assassination of Kirov by Nikolayev, the only real fact, together with various other indications, proves, in spite of the active participation of the G.P.U., the existence of an exasperated and desperate state of mind among a part of the younger communist generation: terrorism derives from this inevitably. Stalin had nothing to fear, in this connection, from his former opponents, who were astute but crushed; he has everything to fear from the simple minded, from believers, from anonymous men. Not one of the "capitulators" dreamed of killing him; each one hoped perhaps that some unknown person would do it, only to profit by his gesture and to see the tyrannicide sent to what serves as a scaffold, leaving posterity to weave him garlands. Stalin could not limit himself to sacrificing a series of Nikolayevs without reputation, in order to intimidate once again a tired, bored and hardened public opinion. He sacrificed celebrated heads, chosen for secondary reasons: old counts to settle, the thirst for vengeance to be slaked, those who were too well informed to be silenced. In addition, with the unprecedented police precautions with which he surrounds himself—an unheard of technique of protection, extending even to the minute search of his intimate friends—he never risks his life in the Kremlin except by a chance meeting with some individual very close to him and of the same type, an Ordjonikidze, for example, able for once to deceive the vigilance of the guards making the search or to seize on the wing a suddenly propitious opportunity. In public, where he appears very rarely and unexpectedly in order to avoid prepared attacks, he is surrounded by an unbelievable number of unarmed "comrades," selected with a fine-toothed comb, and by an incalculable number of janissaries. The preventive terror, and the fear of reprisals directed against their families, complete the system. The chances are thus reduced to zero in practice.
Ordjonikidze, as a matter of fact, an old accomplice of Stalin, one of those responsible for his rise, well versed in the tricks and scheming of his master and compatriot, was the son of man to take the initiative when once he had scented his disgrace. But as it turned out, his own too opportune death was immediately suspect to the inhabitants of Moscow, a suspicion which increased after the Yagoda affair and its horrifying revelations. Stalin alone could profit by the crime. The discovery of the unusual laboratory of the G.P.U. does not allow the suggestion to be brushed aside. Since Stalin has felt the need of getting rid of the doctors of the Kremlin, the mystery of the "medical assassinations" will not be the easier to elucidate. The chapter of poisons already held a certain place in the history of Russia, next to the chapter of tortures; but in the most modern times, "socialism in a single country," the avowed end which justifies unavowable means, was required to prolong it further by some sinister pages.
Yagoda, Stalin's henchman, was quite capable of committing, under the cover of his "patron," the crimes of which he accused himself; one could not be surprised if he had also acted on his own account. It may be voiced as a conjecture that he might have got rid of Menzhinsky in order to take his place, and of Peshkov in order to take his wife. As for Kuibyshev, the affair is inexplicable, unless Stalin gave the order to "liquidate" him as a disturbing witness or a cumbersome mediocrity, in order to have at his disposal various posts to bestow. Finally, in the case of Gorky Stalin was also the only person who had both the power and the interest to hasten his death. In recent years he had refused him permission to return to Sorrento, foreseeing his departure for good and all, and for the same reason had forbidden in '935 his participation in an international congress of "anti-fascist writers" in France. (Would not Gorky at liberty exercise abroad, in certain cases, an undesirable moral pressure on Moscow, would he not leave behind him, under new influences, writings which would damage Stalin's prestige?) After an episodic phase of friendship which was self-interested on both sides, each judging the other necessary for his glory, for different reasons and in different ways, their relations became cold on account of certain humanitarian overtures made by Gorky who intervened to limit abuses; they went from bad to worse after the secret trial of Kamenev, which scandalised and alarmed the last remaining friends of Lenin. The "genial leader" and the "genial artist" had nothing left to say to each other, nothing further to expect from each other. It may well be that the first put an end to the second to leave his hands freer for the great purge he had secretly resolved upon. But no one can honestly give credence to the police version attributing the devilish initiative to Trotsky, who morally even more than physically is as it were removed to another planet; a version charging the "terrorists" with subtle manoeuvres to contaminate with influenza an old man of nearly seventy, already undermined by incurable diseases, and to administer overdoses of the remedies. On the other hand, one of Stalin's distinctive characteristics, which has been outstanding throughout his career, is systematically to throw his own misdeeds and crimes, as well as his political errors and governmental mistakes, on the shoulders of those whose discredit and ruin he is plotting.
Moreover, terrorism has no meaning or reason unless it has a personal or collective signature; by its very definition, it aims at inspiring by violence a feeling of terror of some person or thing; properly speaking, it is unthinkable for it to be anonymous or silent. Terrorism without indication of its origin fails in its object, terrorises nobody; for that reason, the death of Gorky, like that of Kuibyshev and others, spread not the slightest terror. On the other hand, any normal mind can understand that it is always Stalin who profits by the crime—if we allow for a moment the supposition of a crime. The statement of the unfortunate Dr. Levin, "Yagoda was threatening to destroy my family," as an explanation of his alleged complicity, bears out what is known of the terrorist methods of the G.P.U. under Yezhov as under Yagoda, but above all characterises the whole terrorist regime of Stalin. The mother of the "wisest man of our time," just before dying, said of him in Izvestia: "An exemplary son. I wish everybody one like him." The whole of Russia expresses itself in opposite terms.
A disturbing series of questions then arises, after the Yagoda trial, especially if we remember that, according to the gossip in the U.S.S.R. which is inevitable in a country without a free press, several murders of well-known people have been represented as suicides; that Budyonny could kill his wife with impunity in order to marry another, and that mysterious disappearances follow one another under the regime of the "happy life." What did Stalin's secretary, Tovstukha, die of? Why did Alliluyeva, Stalin's wife, commit suicide? Natural deaths occur in Russia, as elsewhere; that of Stalin's mother, Catherine Djugashvili, in 1937 is probably one of them; that of Lunacharsky (1933), that of Chicherin (1936), that of Anna Elizarova (1935) and of Marie Ulianova (1937), Lenin's sisters, do not appear suspicious. But was the strange laboratory of Dr. Kazakov used in only two or three cases? (And as the crowning inconsistency in the official version, the "terrorist" doctors are supposed to have restricted themselves to administering doses of digitalin and other substances which by no means require a special laboratory.) If we are to be referred back as far as the death of Menzhinsky (1934), why not cite that of Krassin, that of Dzerzhinsky, that of Lenin? Krassin, as a member together with Lenin and Bogdanov of the troîka which directed terrorist action in Russia after the 1905 Revolution, knew a great deal about Stalin, and did not take him for an eagle, exactly. Dzerzhinsky's name was often mentioned as a possible General Secretary of the Party, a man as firm but more loyal than Stalin. If Dzerzhinsky's successor at the G.P.U., Menzhinsky, was killed by his own successor, Yagoda, who in his turn was in effect suppressed by his successor, Yezhov, his sudden death can also be questioned. Moreover, there is the disturbing case of Frunze, Commissar for War, who died in 1925 of a surgical operation, carried out against the advice of the doctors but on the express orders of Stalin. The unjustified arrest and deportation of Pilnyak, the author of a short story on the drama, does nothing to dissipate suspicion in this respect.
It was inevitable that the execution of the generals should concentrate attention on the hypothesis of a military plot, even though this was not "juridically" proved; an hypothesis according to which the chief guilty parties would be those about whose confessions—assumed to bear, the biggest doubt of all, on the accusation of "espionage"—nothing whatever is known. Now, repression in the Army began with the disappearance of such generals as Levandovsky, Schmidt, Kuzmichov, etc., who were never heard of afterwards; it preceded the trial of the Sixteen, and continued with the arrest of Putna, mentioned in the trial of the Seventeen where the name of Tukhachevsky was thrown into the arena; it was marked next by the "suicide" of Gamarnik, followed by the eight most sensational executions; then came an uninterrupted series of arrests and executions in which were implicated Marshals Yegorov and Blücher, practically the whole of the General Staff, military and naval, nearly half the cadres of both the Army and Navy, and even half the Council of War which had condemned the Eight. Under the politico-police conditions in Soviet Russia, merely to pose the question of a plot involving such countless numbers and fomented in the face of such an indescribable terror, is to solve it.
Neither between officers, nor between soldiers, nor between officers and soldiers, does there exist in the U.S.S.R. the possibility of such a concerted plot, even if it involved incomparably fewer people. The plan to attack the Kremlin with the aim of a "palace revolution," revealed in the trial of the Twenty-one, could only be conceived, moreover, to break the resistance of the garrison and, if necessary, of the special troops of the G.P.U. But this repression has struck at the leaders of the garrison and of the G.P.U. just as much as the Army. Thus Stalin's last version is of a plot embracing all active forces and thus leaving nobody to attack, a plot which would never have been put into action. Such a version is about as likely as his more recent one which he has used as a motive for the bloody purge in the Navy: the "young school" in the Navy, in considering that light units (submarines, torpedo-boats, hydroplanes) were preferable to large, costly and vulnerable cruisers and dreadnoughts, were serving the "enemies of the people" by depriving the U.S.S.R. of a fleet of the line; but "the glorious officials of the People's Commissariat of the Interior cut off the head of these reptiles."
Under the Stalin regime of universal informing and systematic preventive amputation, if any embryo of a plot ever got as far as being uttered, Stalin alone was in a position to take the initiative in it and to hold its strings. This is not only the opinion of Liushkov, a specialist on the subject, but also the lesson taught by all political experience in Soviet Russia since the death of Lenin. The only thing that is certain in these gloomy tales is the major responsibility, the general and particular guilt of Stalin. Not to neglect any hypothesis, we cannot even exclude the possibility that Stalin was not only responsible for Kirov's assassination, as has been verified, but directly guilty of being the secret instigator. In this case, knowing beforehand of terrorist inclinations, he would have given orders to let them continue, perhaps to turn the murderous attempt in the direction of Kirov, in order later to feign indignation and undertake reprisals. The horrifying picture of carnage itself would prove that he recognised the complicity of the whole active population, communists included, in the alleged plot. In such circumstances, a "plot" has another name in all languages. It is a question of latent popular hatred, silent collective hostility toward Stalin, and an inexorable preventive struggle led by him, by his personal clients, his ruling oligarchy, his pretorian guard, all armed to the teeth, in the name of a new privileged class against an unarmed people.
Before deciding, all at once or gradually, on the vast purges in which the trials culminated, Stalin must have weighed the pros and cons, the advantages and disadvantages. The only disadvantages he could see were the loss of capable men, whom he did not believe irreplaceable, and the probable bad effect abroad, which in fact he considered negligible. As for the advantages, he saw many. He had already got rid of rivals; he now destroyed possible successors. With the same thought in the back of his mind he forbade too marked public acknowledgment of those in his immediate circle. He had once said: "To choose the victim, to prepare the blow with care, to sate an implacable vengeance, and then to go to bed.... There is nothing sweeter in the world!" At last he was sating his vengeance. He forces his adversaries to bestow on him diplomas of genius, under the threat of death, torture and reprisals, he compels them to dishonour themselves to deprive them of a martyr's halo, and to be sure of their future silence, sends them to their death all the same. He uses his ex-opponents for various ends, hoping to turn public execration momentarily from himself by presenting them as drunken slaves, and by attributing the economic collapse to wrecking and sabotage, thus placing on his subordinates his own complete responsibility. He lengthens the proscriptions to destroy suspects and to exile those of whom he is doubtful, and at the same time to make up the penal labour forces necessary for the huge public works. In his own way he carries out, in the interests of his personal dictatorship if not of economy and culture, the renewal of the cadres. He also gets rid of the people who know too much about him, about his past, his present, his imperfections, his crimes.
He is haunted by anxiety about his biography. His oldest comrades, Mdivani, Yenukidze, Ordjonikidze, have without a doubt paid with their lives for too long standing a friendship. Neither they, nor Gorky and Yagoda, who were nearest to him in their last years, nor Zinoviev and Kamenev, who knew him too well at the time of their close collaboration and who were nearest also to Lenin, will write any memoirs. If there are papers hidden anywhere, it is doubtful if those who know of them will be able to use them for a long time to come. Yenukidze, Krupskaya, Gorky have modified or falsified the memoirs they had written, in the new editions, to please the despot. Khandjian, after his suicide, was accused by his successor of having allowed works to be published in which "the role of Comrade Stalin as creator of the Bolshevik organisations in Transcaucasia and Armenia is ignored." Another, A. K. Karayev, has had to answer for the crime of having "concealed," in a book which appeared in 1926, Stalin's part in the workers' movement at Baku in former times. Such examples abound, and reveal in Stalin, side by side with megalomania and a mania for persecution, an inferiority complex which torments him. His tamest historians are mercilessly chastised when they are unable to attribute new merits to him, to fashion for him out of whole cloth a past role fitting to his future stature. The "Histories of the Party" published up to 1937, although bearing the official stamp—even those of Bubnov and Yaroslavsky, Popov and Knorin—are declared false or void. In 1938, a new Short History of the Party was published anonymously, under strict and salutary instructions, which superseded the works of all previous historians and became the definitive edition. Stalin requires that in every circumstance he shall be the leading light. He destroys the last witnesses capable of one day producing a true testimony about him. He avenges himself now on these for not having known how to speak, now on those for not having known how to keep silent. And he shows the measure of his courage, as of his "humanism," when, secure from all risk, he insults the defeated, stamps upon his prisoners, and rages over their dead bodies.
In the same way, Stalin never has enough of grandiloquent and artificial praise, of compliments more or less sincere. The majority of his victims hoped in vain to disarm him by celebrating his virtues, his talents, his genius, rivalling each other in unspeakable servility. To quote, after the work of N. Lakoba, but one extract from this anthology of fawning humility, it is enough to dip at hazard into Bukharin: "... The iron hand of the workers' most remarkable guide, the commander-in-chief of millions of men, whose name is the symbol of grandiose Five Year Plans, of gigantic struggles and victories, Stalin." The editorials of Pravda, and of the ten thousand other papers, are in the same vein: "Millions of adoring eyes are fixed on Stalin. His name is repeated by the workers of the entire world with profound emotion. He is the hope of all the oppressed. He is the father of all who struggle for happiness and humanity." Every time the Bolshevik Fuehrer utters a few trite words, Pravda sees in his speech a "new stage in universal history," and loses no opportunity of declaring that "the powerful personality of Stalin epitomises all the grandeur of the coming era of humanity," or something else of the sort. The self-confessed enemies of the people, traitors, spies, Trotskyists, double-faced fascists, have all uttered or written similar dithyrambs.
Lenin was sanctified after his death; Stalin is deified while still alive. A certain delegate to a congress speaks on his mandate in these terms: "... At that moment I saw our beloved father, Stalin, and I lost consciousness. The 'hurrahs' resounded for a long time, and it was probably this noise which brought me to myself.... You will excuse me, comrades, if, finding myself in such a state of bewilderment at the sight of Comrade Stalin, I did not salute him." Zealous officials show their conformist zeal by christening localities with Stalin's name, with every imaginable ending. Other philistines organise at Batoum an exhibition of "revolutionary relics" connected with the life of the dictator. Others place his bust on Stalin Peak, the highest point of the Pamir mountains, where Lenin Peak is only second highest; others erect it on the Elburz in the Caucasus, and announce in their artificial exaltation: "On the highest crest in Europe, we have erected the bust of the greatest man of our time." As for the tsars, capital letters are compulsory when printing pronouns and adjectives referring to his redoubtable name. Eastern "poets" are paid large sums to raise the pitch of the panegyrics: "Story tellers no longer know to whom to compare Thee; poets have not enough pearls with which to describe Thee." Other verses in the same vein: "O Thou, mighty one, chief of the peoples, Who callest man to life, Who awaitest the earth to fruitfulness, Who summonest the centuries to youth... O sun, Who art reflected by millions of human hearts." It appears also that Stalin is "more lofty than the high celestial spaces" and "clearer and purer than the clear waters of Baikal"; "his eye is more piercing than the falcon's"; finally, he is "stronger than the valiant lion," and moreover, "a magnificent garden of perfumed fruits," and further, "the most glittering diamond of the Party"; "like the sun, he darts his rays, golden springs of happiness." A hideous iconography abundantly illustrates this rhetoric.
More occidental writers also fall into line, and that without much effort. A certain Prokofiev sums up: "Everything is embraced in this immense name. Everything: the Party, the Fatherland, life, love, immortality, everything!" Another, Avdeyenko by name, with a marvellous imitation of spontaneity, recites a great heroic lay, learnt by heart, with verses in this strain: "I can fly to the moon, voyage in the Arctic, make some great discovery, invent a new machine, for my creative energy is oppressed by nobody—and all thanks to Thee, great educator, Stalin"; and the final verse: "Men of all times and of all nations will call by Thy name all that is beautiful, strong, wise, and marvellous. Thy name is and will be engraved in every factory, on every machine, on every tuft of the earth, in the hearts of all men." The prize must be given to the man who goes one better than a paroxysm. Further to the West, where the Soviet budget (largesse, author's rights, travelling invitations) maintains numerous prostitutes of the pen, there is in France a fairly well-known writer sufficiently venal to publish a biography of Stalin, studded with gross errors of history and geography and with falsifications skilfully reproduced on a groundwork of apologetics as degrading for the author as for the beneficiary. Tukhachevsky and his executed colleagues had greeted in Stalin a great master of strategy. An aviator famous in the U.S.S.R. proclaims: "Where Stalin appears, shadows melt away ...," which proves that it is possible to climb high and sink low, that certain types of heroism and of shamelessness are compatible.
The crew of the Marat wrote to Stalin: "Because they are the object of Your tenderness, animated by Your paternal love and Your solicitude, the men of our magnificent country accomplish miracles such as the world has never seen, and multiply their exploits on land, in the air, on the water and under the water." But Ivanov, the commander of this cruiser, was none the less shot as a double-faced enemy of the people. It is only too clear that these rivalries in frenzied adulation into which irony sometimes slips, mingled with derisive extravagance, betray an intense fear of not satisfying the tyrant's demands, and that the poetic and literary flatteries, works written to order and paid for dearly, have only an appearance of fervour. So many bullets in so many heads, so many convicts and so many forced labour gangs forbid any illusion on this all too revealing subject.
"THE soul of all poetry," it appears that Stalin is also the spirit of all prose: his hired admirers attribute to him the key role in every sphere of human activity, in industry and in agriculture, in the arts and in the sciences, pure and applied. Every result is achieved thanks to his "genial perspicacity," to his constant intervention "in all the details" of all creative work. Be it a question of oil, or cast-iron, or chemistry, or transport, or aviation, or collective farms, or architecture, or town-planning, the "great initiator" has thought of everything, foreseen everything and prescribed everything; he "settles all the chief problems personally," and moreover "looks after all the practical details himself." Even the films are due to his "daily instructions." A new Pico della Mirandola, he knows everything, and more be, sides; every day brings a fresh proof of that. But in 1937, on the twentieth anniversary of October, which almost coincided with the end of the second Five Year Plan, the internal situation in the U.S.S.R. was such that, well-versed as they are in presenting cooked accounts and addicted to pompous and interminable speeches, neither Stalin nor his experts dared to bring out the doctored balance-sheet of their precarious work. A deathly silence enveloped the solemn date, awaited as the most portentous of the regime.
The reason is that the second Five Year Plan, although reduced to more reasonable proportions than those elaborated beforehand in the delirious drafts, could not be better carried out than the first in any respect, and for the same reasons. "Industry is seven times more productive than before the war, and the national income has quadrupled," Stalin summed up at the Congress of the Soviets in 1936. But it is useless to quote figures which have no stable meaning; serious indices of value and quality are lacking, and for good reason. Stalin is more ignorant than anyone of the real economic situation, for he receives only false information, dictated by fear, since sincerity on the part of the commissars, secretaries, heads of trusts and enterprises is interpreted as sabotage and punished by death. The corrective activities of the police svodki banish illusions without correcting the figures. The reports, accounts and statistics do not reflect the real situation. Every verification or inspection reveals a lie, every analysis uncovers a snare. Comparisons in arbitrary and variable roubles teach nothing. Quantitative progress appears fallacious when one knows the corresponding investments, apart from the waste which must be deducted. Craft production, so important in former times in Russia, reached its lowest point in 1937, and does not figure in these flattering comparisons. Estimates of the national income are so much pure fantasy. The rise in cost and selling prices, preeminently negative signs, serve to swell the production figures, printed on the inferior Soviet paper. One must therefore have recourse to other criteria.
It can no longer be denied in 1937, in spite of lying propaganda, that the general balance-sheet is disastrous: the statements made at the trials to clear Stalin at the expense of his underlings prove it beyond all doubt. Railway catastrophes, mine explosions, breakdowns of machinery, waste of material, loss of live-stock, deterioration of goods, useless destruction, unpardonable sacrifices, financial deficits, commercial disorder, accidents and waste —all this chaos characterises, not the conduct of certain commissariats, but the "Soviet" totalitarian economy as a whole. Stalin knows everything, does everything, has his eye on everything, is responsible for everything, declare his apologists at every turn. In accusing Pyatakov and his colleagues, therefore, he is accusing himself in the highest degree and confessing that all is for the worst under the worst of all possible dictatorships. And here is one of the accessory reasons grafted, in the construction of the trials, onto the main considerations: the designation of people to bear the guilt of Stalin the Infallible—it being understood that the main and secondary considerations are now interchangeable, now identical, and that the economic depression and the war peril are considered by Stalin only in so far as they affect the preservation of his power.
Just as the so-called Bolshevik system has never, according to T. G. Masaryk, been anything but a complete absence of system, or in other words, a series of improvisations and an accumulation of compromises, in spite of the vaunted principles, in the same way, the so-called plans are characterised by the absence of any real plan. If there still exists in the U.S.S.R. a more or less directed economy, it is only by an infringement of the plans, by violations and transgressions which are called by the untranslatable slang name of blatt, which expresses the very antithesis of plan, personal combinations substituted for stable rules which make it possible to get around various obstacles. The blatt obviates by personal initiative the impossibilities conceived by the central authority, but it cannot solve, against the police State, all the problems. It puts off the final crisis of this pseudosystem without preventing it; it protracts with its palliatives a fraudulent bankruptcy of which arithmetical fictions, complete or partial, give no account. There are, however, true criteria which provide the key to the enigma.
One has only to compare the average wage in Soviet Russia with that of Tsarist Russia, reducing them both to a common unit of measurement (cf. Yvon, L'U.R.S.S. telle qu'elle est). A wage of 600 kilogrammes of bread per month in 1913 was reduced to 170 kilos in 1935, a decrease of more than two thirds. But it had risen to 800 kilos in 1927, at the time of the tenth anniversary of October, the last year of the N.E.P. In 1937 it corresponded to 260 kilos, that is, less than half the pre-war level; and here the apparent increase was due to the increased advantages of the privileged sections of the community, incorporated in the sum total. (Professor S. Prokopovich cleverly infers from partial Soviet data, which by their artifice are on the whole favourable to Stalin's regime, that the pre-war monthly wage of 24 roubles 30 had dropped to 16 roubles 50 in 1937—from which moreover obligatory deductions varying from 15 to 21 percent must be subtracted.) Expressed in the basic food commodity, black bread, a simple calculation which gets nearer to the truth than the too learned indices of the statisticians, the average working wage at the end of the second five year period is less than half the miserable wage of former times, one of the lowest in Europe, when account is taken of wages in kind (social services) and deductions (fines and subscriptions, voluntary and otherwise). The area of urban housing facilities is under five square metres per person on paper, and in fact it is less than half for the working class. Social insurances stingily redistribute with one hand a minute part of what is taken away with the other. Since the agricultural workers share the unhappy lot of the town workers as far as wages are concerned, it is the whole mass of the population which pays for this peculiarly cruel system of oppression and exploitation of man by man, ravaged by negligence and arbitrary power, venality and lies, bribery and parasitism, nepotism and tyranny, the symbolic knout and the death penalty.
From 1927 to 1937 hundreds of milliards of roubles were invested in industry and agriculture in order to give them a modern equipment—but the result has been that in fact they are operating at a loss. Even though we know what Soviet milliards are, and what Stalin's milliards are worth, the resources thus sunk in the means of production nevertheless represent a considerable drain on the national income, precisely that brutal lowering of the standard of living expressed in wages. At this exorbitant price, the technical victories appear at their true value. Not one of them was worth the expense, the sacrifice, the suffering inflicted on a great people, whom history has left without means of defence. The example of other nations, and even of Tsarist Russia, shows that it was possible to have done far better, at a lower cost and with more lasting results by more rational and more humane methods.
The industrial structure, organised without forethought under conditions of terror, is showing itself unworkable in practice, unless profound reforms are introduced—as was indeed to be expected: permanent disequilibrium, irremediable disproportions, premature depreciation of material, immobilisation of machinery, dilapidation and flaws in new buildings, frequent damages and multiplicity of accidents, forced interruptions of work, all indicate the vices of the "system" and the imperfections of the regime. The quality of production daily becomes lower and diminishes the quantity that can be used; the proportion of defective or useless articles is as much, and sometimes more than 50 per cent in certain model factories. Transport is going to rack and ruin; stakhanovism is precipitating the breakdown of indispensable and costly machine-tools. The production of consumption goods, in relation to that of capital goods, did not in 1937 come up to pre-war level, and will not do so even in 1942, at the end of the third Five Year Plan (Pravda, August 14, 1937). The productivity of labour in the U.S.S.R. is about one fifth that of the great industrial countries. The cost of production is five times as high, perhaps,—the official figures do not warrant a sure estimate. It is impossible to calculate the losses, the thefts, the depreciation, the deficiencies. Excessive centralisation, the number of intermediary authorities, the abuse of power, bureaucracy, formalism, suspicion and incompetence, in addition to the other wounds in Soviet society, produce sterility in industrial methods and explain to a large extent the mediocre results. It is understandable that Stalin is anxious at all costs to find treacherous saboteurs to answer for his failures, and why, in 1937, he decapitated more than half the enterprises by sending their directors to hard labour or death.
Collective agriculture suffers from the same evils as state industry, and also from evils peculiar to itself. Under the yoke of the new rural bureaucracy, with its police psychology and its red-tape, the kolkhoz show no profit and the giant sovkhoz only exist by means of subsidies, and as experience shows are bound inevitably to be parcelled out. The losses caused by the collectivisation of cattle will not be repaired for a long time, unless it be by private rearing. Cereal production fell from 96.6 million tons in 1913 to 77 million in 1936, a figure which S. Prokopovich establishes from Soviet data. But, said Stalin in December 1935: "...Reaping with the reaping-machine involves enormous losses of grain.... With this system we are losing from 10 to 25 per cent of the harvest." He thus calculated the losses at one milliard poods per year, that is, sixteen million tons, nearly a quarter of the theoretical harvest, and talked boastfully of "raising the annual grain production in the near future to seven and eight milliard poods." In 1937, a year claimed as exceptional, propaganda spoke of a gross harvest of 110 million tons, that is the seven milliard poods required by Stalin, who commands the elements as he commands men, and imposes his will on the soil, the sowings and the weather, but above all on the statistics. But this was a figure on paper, a theoretical figure proclaimed long before the harvest, a record figure from which we must subtract at least a quarter for the losses admitted by Stalin, and further losses due to ordinary administrative incompetence: a sixth of the harvest, left uncut in the fields, rotted under the snow—this in a country where gleaning is punishable by death as "injury to socialist property." Moreover, the losses sustained during transport and storage are not reckoned. The State requisitions, at ruinous prices, about 85 per cent of the produce of agriculture. The general poverty which results is pitiable; only private or family cultivation, side by side with the pseudo-socialist sector, prevents famine. In 1937 collectivisation was almost complete (18.5 million peasant families), and to bring in the last cultivators still outside the kolkhoz (1.4 million families), prohibitive taxes on their horses were decreed in 1938, although the year before Stalin had reminded the Central Committee of "the principle of voluntary membership." These new measures of spoliation will not be the last word, for the Bolsheviks have never finished undoing what was done and redoing what they only knew how to undo.
If industry and agriculture work at a loss and swallow up a good part of the national income, the deficit is seen in the privations inflicted on the working masses: in short, it is made up by millions of hours of unpaid labour and involves the sacrifice of millions of human lives. The test of population, which Stalin keeps concealed, speaks more eloquently than any other. On the basis of the 1926 census there were 147 million inhabitants, and assuming a birth rate of 2.3 per cent per annum, or an annual increase of roughly three million, a figure which Stalin keeps repeating, the second Five Year Plan anticipated a population of 280 millions at the end of 1937. The census taken at the beginning of that year, after a minute preparation and with an army of over a million officials, ended in the arrest of the directors of the statistical bureau and of their close collaborators, the results remaining a mystery. According to W. Krivitsky, whose excellent confidential source of information is the G.P.U.: "Instead of the 171 million inhabitants calculated for 1937, only 145 million were found; thus nearly 30 million people in the U.S.S.R. are missing." Actually, if the Plan calculated 180 million at the end of the year, that would make 177 million at the beginning, or 32 million missing. Instead of increasing each year to the extent of "a whole Finland," as Stalin said, the U.S.S.R. has lost the population equivalent of a whole Poland, or ten Finlands. Far from "reflecting the victories of socialism" as anticipated, the census reflects the defeats of Bolshevism, the disasters of industrialisation and collectivisation, which have often been compared to the effects of several devastating wars. Stalin has ordered a new census for 1939, and this time he will see to it that he obtains the total fixed in advance. But he will not bring the dead back to life, nor compensate so much physical loss and spiritual ruin.
The information, tragic in its harshness and of an inexpressible pathos, collected by W. Krivitsky, is borne out by fragmentary and approximate accounts from other sources. While a correspondent of the Courrier Socialiste was already able to report five million victims of the famine of 1932-33 (Sozialisticheski Vestnik, No. 9, for 10 May 1934), an American socialist, Harry Lang, returning utterly dismayed from a stay in the U.S.S.R., learnt from a high Soviet functionary and published in the New York Forward that at least six million starving people perished in the Ukraine at that period; he reports that 40 per cent of the population disappeared in certain districts of the Ukraine and White Russia; relief organisations count 104,000 dead in 1933 among German peasant colonies alone (Forward, 19 February 1936, etc.). A disillusioned American communist, Adam J. Tawdul, learnt from Skrypnik that at least eight million persons died of hunger in the Ukraine and northern Caucasus; Balitsky, head of the G.P.U. in the Ukraine, estimated eight to nine million victims in the Ukraine alone; Lovin, manager of the tractor works at Cheliabinsk, told him that more than a million died of starvation in the Urals, Trans-Volga and Eastern Siberia (New York American, 18-29 August 1935). If one thinks of the distress of the millions of exiles; of the innumerable ill-treated penal labour squads; of the concentration camps, where a frightful mortality makes hue gaps; of the overflowing isolators and prisons; of the millions of abandoned children, of whom only a minute percentage manages to survive; of the executions and punitive expeditions; in short of the multitudes "mown down in large armfuls" by Stalin, one cannot be astonished at the immense charnel-houses of this gigantic prison which with double irony is called a "socialist fatherland."
Author and abettor of waste of substance, equivalent in a modern State to several great wars lost; responsible more than anyone for a material regression and a moral decline, which drag Russia far behind in spite of her aeroplanes and tanks; Stalin finds himself caught between the fear of a limited war in which the U.S.S.R. would be face to face with a powerful adversary, and the desire for a general war in which she would benefit from powerful alliances. A war thus limited would be his certain downfall; a general war would, in his opinion, be his salvation. This alternative guides his foreign policy, which aims at bringing the U.S.S.R. into any coalition aimed against Germany or Japan and incidentally against their allies. The Russian intervention in Spain (1936) and in China (1937) clearly illustrate his tactics of moderate intervention according to the limited means of the U.S.S.R.; he is thus able to harry and help weaken his enemies at small cost, and so to have a preponderant voice in the conduct of the war and the conclusion of the peace, while preserving intact the main part of his forces for more vital circumstances. The same perspective was willingly adopted in regard to Czechoslovakia (1938), since the principal burden of the struggle against Germany and Italy would fall on France and England. The pretence of an active, warlike patriotism, under cover of democratic or traditionalist formulae, by the Communist Parties subject to Stalin in the West and in the East, has no other motive. A parallel work of intermeddling by various methods of influence is carried out in government parties, now exploiting respectable sentiments, now inadmissible interests, and always hideous sycophancy.
Karl Marx, of whom the Bolsheviks make a use which is apt to come back on them, as long ago as 1864 denounced: "... the immense and unobstructed encroachments of that barbarous power whose head is at St. Petersburg and whose hand is detected in all the cabinets of Europe...." Since then, Russia has only changed for the worse, and as Custine said a century ago, "the nation itself is still nothing but a notice placarded upon Europe, dupe of an imprudent diplomatic fiction." However, by his tortuous diplomacy and thanks to the bankruptcy of contemporary socialism, Stalin has without difficulty achieved partial successes, because of the deep disquiet of the old Europe, now in a state of panic before the totalitarian States, who desire to redraw the map of the world. With monstrous ambiguity he has been able to treat with the pluto-democratic States, who are blind to the antagonism between Slavs and Germans, who are not counsellors of the affinities between left and right wing totalitarianisms, who are not capable of realising the dangers in time to act quickly, and who are resigned in their shortsightedness to accept without conditions any eventual cooperation which will assure their existence in the event of war. But at the same time, by his autocratic policy and his backward economy, Stalin is sapping the power at his disposal, by depriving it of a popular basis, by suppressing the élite, by shaking the armed forces to their foundation, by undermining the State with internal contradictions, and by exciting centrifugal forces within his Empire. It is this which explains Moscow's glacial silence in the most critical hours of European history since the coming of national-socialism in Germany.
Eternal Russia could hold out a long time in a defensive war, but the regime would have to be transformed or to disappear in a war which threatened the country in its vital parts. This contrast between Russia itself and Stalin's regime, has inexorable consequences. A military defeat of the U.S.S.R., or an internal crisis, might be fatal to her unwary allies and turn to disaster. A final common victory won by the arms and resources of her allies, and ending in general exhaustion, would bring into force another fear expressed by Marx. if the continent of Europe persisted in capitalist excesses, the submission of man to the machine, the armaments race, the piling up of public debts, then—as the author of Capital wrote in 1867—"the rejuvenation of Europe by means of the knout and by a compulsory infusion of Kalmuk blood, predicted so gravely by the half-Russian and wholly Muscovite, Herzen,.... would end by becoming inevitable."
BUT young Russia, bled white by Stalin, leaves the field free for Germanic dynamism, and holds itself on the defensive like the old decadent western nations, which at least postpones the apocalyptic end envisaged by Herzen and by Marx, prophets of socialism, who were often opposed in their views. Her internal regime prevents her playing in the history of our time a role in proportion to her importance, and in this respect Stalin shows himself the chief benevolent agent of Germany. This police regime is still evolving in the midst of contradictions, and will go on evolving: until, at the first serious shock, it will undergo a sudden change, announced by every sign, and prepared by invisible ferments. Before it reaches a stable stage of development, its transitory character makes it impossible to define it in a satisfactory formula; but the most striking traits of its outward appearance forbid, in any case, the flattering definitions proposed by Stalin.
Lenin, Trotsky and Bukharin, the three chief thinkers of the regime at the period when it was still permitted to think, could not agree as to its definition; the first preferred State capitalism, the others State socialism. The subsequent evolution under Stalin has both simplified and complicated the problem. The difficulty of choice is doubtless due to the identity of content in the two terms. It is significant that the same hesitation occurs in the case of the state forms of fascism. The old vocabulary is thus ill-adapted to express new historical phenomena. The new terms, Bolshevism and fascism, in themselves empty of political meaning, were necessary to describe hitherto unknown social movements and their empirical ideology. In the final analysis, these movements show so many similarities, and are open to so many mutual plagiarisms, they borrow and exchange so many things from one another, that the same word, "totalitarian," another addition to the modern vocabulary, becomes them both perfectly. Mussolini began by imitating Lenin; Hitler continued by imitating Mussolini and Stalin; the latter, in return, copies his two rivals, especially in their worst features. At long intervals the three dictators, with Stalin as leader, follow one another in the way in which they educate and discipline their subjects by bringing them into line, throwing them into prison and putting them to death. It is hardly possible that so many analogies between Bolshevism and fascism in word and deed, in means and methods, in institutions and types of men, do not reflect some historical relationship, unless one admits the possibility of a complete divorce between the essence and the form.
As for Stalin, he contends that even "the expression State socialism is incorrect." In 1936 he considered that "the complete victory of the socialist system in all spheres of the national economy is now an accomplished fact," and that "socialism, the first stage of communism, is already realised by us in the main." He went so far as to say that stakhanovism "prepares the conditions necessary for passing from socialism to communism." The facts themselves are enough to give him the lie and more than enough to condemn him. Stalin denies "State socialism" in the U.S.S.R. on the ground that the means of production are collective property. But the appropriation of profit has an unquestionably private character, and it is this which matters. Private profit is apparent in the growing social inequality, which is more revolting in its arrant injustice than in the capitalist countries where it is diminishing, more intolerable in the terminology of hypocritical equalitarianism. No society, it is true, has ever existed without a hierarchy, without authority, without natural and artificial privileges. But the socialist dream of founding one has in Russia turned into a nightmare. "The expropriation of the expropriators" has led to a sort of bureaucratic feudalism under which the proletariat and the peasantry, debased by officialdom and the mandarinate, have been reduced to a kind of serfdom. If the methods of production are not exactly capitalist, a term which in any case is indefinable, it is only because, for the majority of the Soviet pariahs, the system deserves rather the name of slavery.
Stalin analyses as follows the "governing strata" of the Party: approximately 3 to 4000 superiors, the "high command"; then 30 to 40,000 middle leaders, "our officer cadres"; lastly 100 to 150,000 subalterns, "our sub-officer cadres." These two hundred thousand individuals dominate the population politically and embrace the bureaucracy, the specialists, the intellectuals, the functionaries who occupy economically privileged positions. According to Trotsky, the most favoured social categories can be estimated at about 10 million people, that is 25 million with their families. If the population is 145 million, W. Krivitsky's figure, these privileges are at the expense of 120 million people; if it were 180 million, the figure of the Plan, they would be at the expense of 155 million. It is a regime of privilege because one of exploitation, a regime of police because one of oppression. Herzen defined the old Tsarist Russia in a striking paradox which is still valid for the U.S.S.R,: "A mixed structure without architecture, without solidity, without roots, without principles, heterogeneous and full of contradictions. A civil camp, a military chancellery, a of state of siege in time of peace, a mixture of reaction and revolution, as likely to endure a long time as to fall into ruins tomorrow."
This mixture of reaction and revolution baffles those who like classical situations, and lends itself ill to the poor resources of sociological language, which, in turn, does not lend itself to the introduction of new words and phrases. Fascism also has this disconcerting mixture; Mussolini calls it revolution, his opponents answer: preventive counter-revolution. Revolution and counter-revolution have very various interpretations, and doubtless it is no chance that in the U.S.S.R., in the quarrels over historical interpretation between the victorious Tarlé school and the Pokrovsky school condemned to silence, the revolutionary role of Bonaparte or the counter-revolutionary role of Napoleon, plays such a large part. Some saw the Russian counter-revolution in Bolshevism itself, despite the inauguration of a new juridical system of collective ownership, others recognise it only after the imposture of Stalin's Constitution. It can also be understood as the period when practice went openly against theory, when the old illusions of belief gave way to the new unbelieving cynicism, when unconscious contradiction between word and act was transformed into conscious lying. In this sense, Lenin represents the revolution in spite of its defeats, Stalin the counter-revolution in spite of its pretended victories.
We must go back a little to trace more precisely the course of this formless counter-revolution, whose effects will for long be less evident than the causes. T. G. Masaryk, more clear-sighted in sociological analysis than in his conceptions as a State builder, has best emphasised the mortal error which Lenin passed on to Stalin: "When one thinks one has reached the definitive culmination of evolution, and that one possesses an infallible knowledge of the whole organisation of society, one ceases to work for its progress and its perfection, and one's principal, and indeed sole anxiety is only to preserve one's position and power." Experience fully confirms his opinion of "this abstract regime deduced from a thesis and put into practice by violence," "the absolutistic dictatorship of a single man and his auxiliaries," a regime of rigid centralism, of inquisition and infallibility: "The Bolshevik dictatorship has its source in an infallibility devoid of all critical judgment, of all scientific spirit; a regime which is afraid of criticism and of the judgment of thinking men is, by this fact alone, impossible."
The force of things and the behaviour of men have contradicted all Lenin's optimistic forecasts, his hopes in a superior democracy as much as his semi-libertarian ideas expressed in the State and Revolution and other writings of the same period, at the dawn of the revolution. Nothing in the individual theses of Trotsky has stood the test any better, in particular his wordy and abstract theory of the "permanent revolution." Lenin died too soon to write the epilogue to the miscarriage of Bolshevism. Trotsky has not availed himself of the leisure afforded by exile to make a true and conscientious examination; even his memoirs do not make the contribution to history which one has the right to expect from such a protagonist; his articles and pamphlets vainly paraphrase a hackneyed argument without throwing light on a single problem. The miscarriage of Bolshevism in Russia is coupled with the irremediable failure of the International, and the lessons of experience go far beyond the sphere of civil war. Democratic socialism in its various forms, in the name of legitimate defence against fascism, is almost everywhere allowing itself to be led, circumvented and compromised by dictatorial communism. The death agony of socialist hope in the world thus opens up an immeasurable ideological crisis. It will be the part of the epigones of a powerless generation to make out the balance-sheet of national Bolshevism, of international communism and of traditional socialism, and to draw from it some useful lessons. And this should logically lead them to examine what is still alive and what is dead in the parent doctrine, Marxism.