Stalin’s Victims and Their Predator

Review of Vadim Z. Rogovin, 1937: Stalin’s Year of Terror, trans. Frederick S. Choate. Oak Park, MI: Mehring Books, Inc., 1998. ISBN 0929087771 (pb.), 550 pp. $30.17 (including tax).

Vadim Rogovin is a Russian historian who is completing a six-volume history of the opposition to Stalin in the Russian Bolshevik party, from Lenin’s final illness in 1923 to the assassination of Trotsky in 1940, that is based on archival documents that have only recently become available. The present book (the first of Rogovin’s six volumes to be translated into English) is volume four of the history, recounting the horrendous events of 1936-1937, when Russians who were usually in one of two categories—members of the Bolshevik party or high-ranking Red Army officers—were accused of various anti-Bolshevik activities, arrested, often coerced into falsely “confessing” to these activities, and afterwards executed or imprisoned. These were events that in all of their different stages were inspired and organized by Stalin, and that marked the beginning of his political genocide against those who potentially or in fact presented an alternative to his totalitarian regime.

Rogovin divides Stalin’s victims into two

Page 111

groups: those who refused to give false testimony against themselves at public trials and those who gave this testimony on the promise that their lives would be spared. The members of the first group ranged from Stalinists who had been falsely accused, and who refused to accede to these accusations, to anti-Stalinists of varying political opinions—including Trotskyists—who were politically unbroken and not allowed to express their real views in an open court. While many members of this group were executed after being tried behind closed doors they avoided the shame of public “confessions.”

Three prominent members of the second group were the Old Bolsheviks Nicolai Bukharin, Yuri Piatakov, and Karl Radek, who had first politically opposed Stalin, and afterwards capitulated to him and held responsible positions in culture, industry, and diplomacy. Here they repudiated their anti-Stalin pasts by making fulsome public statements of loyalty and admiration for Stalin. Then, during and after the August, 1936, trial, “confessions,” and executions of their former Bolshevik comrades Zinoviev and Kamenev—the first trial in which Stalin had killed Bolsheviks—they savagely denounced the defendants as “people who [had] lost their last human characteristics.” However, over the next two years, under the direction of Stalin, they were arrested and tortured by the secret police (NKVD), so that in two widely publicized trials they confessed to crimes that were largely fictitious, after which Piatakov and Bukharin were sentenced to death, and Radek to imprisonment. (The latter was murdered in 1939 by a criminal who was his cellmate, apparently on NKVD orders).

Stalin’s actions may be explained (at least in part) as being motivated by a combination of feelings of envy towards others and realistic fears that various members of the Bolshevik party were plotting to overthrow him. Early in 1936, Bukharin, on the occasion of his last trip out of Russia, when he met and conversed with a Socialist acquaintance in Paris, described Stalin’s envy as follows:

He is … unhappy because he cannot convince everyone, even himself, that he is greater than everyone else, and this is his misfortune, perhaps his only human trait.… But what is no longer human, but something diabolical is that for his “misfortune,” he cannot help but get revenge over people, and particularly those who are higher in some way, or better than him.

Since Stalin appears to have been regarded as being intellectually narrow and morally inferior, he was envious of those individuals who had these mental qualities, who included, along with Bukharin, Piatakov, and Radek, the politically defeated and exiled Leon Trotsky. He also mistrusted the loyalty of Bukharin and the other Old Bolsheviks who worked for him, regarding their denunciations of Zinoviev and Kamenev as the talk of “double-dealers.”

Rogovin shows that Stalin in 1936, as the General Secretary of the Bolshevik Party, was confronted not only by party members who formed a potential opposition to him, but by other members who were actively in opposition and who appear to have had contracts with the exiled Trotsky. (Rogovin indicates that the evidence for this—largely coming from some references in Trotsky’s correspondence—are fragmentary, and that much more needs to be known about the identities of these individuals and the nature of their activities). Stalin’s response to this opposition was to develop a “grandiose mechanism of state terror,” beginning with the Moscow Trials, followed by trials and executions of Red Army Marshals and generals in June, 1937, going on to a massive purge of the Red Army and to mass persecutions. It was a Terror which Stalin held, in the words of Rogovin, “under his unwavering and effective control.” In carrying out his acts he showed a power for “the most refined calculations,” along with a power for the most sustained assertiveness, that surprised both his supporters and victims.

Beginning with the Moscow Trials, instead of confronting his victims with the need to confess to a simple falsehood, Stalin confronted them with an “amalgam”: what Rogovin has defined as a “maliciously deliberate weaving together” of ten percent of the truth—anti-Stalin political contacts between individuals in Russia and perhaps with Trotsky—and ninety percent falsehoods—accusations that these individuals were terrorists aiming to restore capitalism in Russia, and that, above all, they were agents of the Gestapo. Early in the development of the mechanism of his terror, when he was sitting with members of the Bolshevik Party’s Politbureau (its highest political organization), Stalin wrote out a document sanctioning the use of torture in extorting testimony from arrested people, and had everyone in the Politbureau sign it.

Page 112

Stalin’s Terror led to a double success. He destroyed political opposition that was real or potential; and he exacted what Bukharin had called his “revenge” against those Old Bolsheviks whom he envied—a revenge in which, after debasing and killing the latter, he went on to destroy their writings and pictures, and to vilify their memories in his history of the Bolshevik Party.

However, in the years 1936-1937, when Trotsky was a major defendant in the Moscow Trials, Stalin could not fully exact his revenge because Trotsky lived in exile outside of Russia, first in Norway and then in Mexico. The latter thus became the only Moscow Trials defendant who could freely express his opinions. Rogovin delineates in detail how, during those years, Trotsky commented on the Trials in a succession of articles and books, especially The Case of Leon Trotsky, containing the testimony he gave to the Dewey Commission in 1937. In these writings, while remaining silent about his contacts with political sympathizers in Russia, Trotsky methodically exposed the ninety percent falsehood of the amalgams of the Trials; passionately proclaimed the superiority of his political views, where “the word socialism is not a hollow sound but the content of … moral life,” to the views of Stalin which were “compromising the very idea of socialism”; and predicted that “Stalin’s regime is doomed.”

Stalin carefully studied Trotsky’s writings, and although he knew that because of his censorship these writings were largely unknown in Russia, he was still deeply afraid that their various exposures and ideas would become known and shake his regime. (George Kennan, in his 1960 book, Russia and the West Under Lenin and Stalin, has stated the opinion that in the late 1930s, “Trotsky, and all that Trotsky represented, was Stalin’s real fear,” [whereas] “Hitler was largely his excuse for fear.” Stalin’s fear appears to have reached a new peak near the end of the Year of Terror, when in several public speeches to the Bolshevik Party he denounced the Trotskyists not as political opponents “but as criminals of the lowest order,” and when the NKVD executed Trotsky’s youngest son (who had never been interested in politics) and carried out its first mass execution of Trotskyists who had been prisoners in a concentration camp.

Page 113