The Russian Revolution (28 page)

Communists in high positions were not the only victims of the Purges. The intelligentsia (both the old `bourgeois' intelligentsia and the Communist intelligentsia of the 1920s, especially the activists of Cultural Revolution) was hard hit. So were former `class enemies'-the usual suspects in any Russian revolutionary terror, even when, as in 1937, they were not specifically designated-and anybody else who had ever been put on an official blacklist for any reason. Persons with relatives abroad or foreign connections were particularly at risk. Stalin even issued a special secret order to arrest tens of thousands of `former kulaks and criminals', including recidivists, horsethieves, and religious sectarians with prison records, and shoot them or send them to Gulag; in addition, 10,000 habitual criminals who were currently serving sentences in Gulag were to be shot.33 The total dimensions of the Purges, for many years a matter of speculation in the West, are beginning to emerge more clearly as scholars investigate previously inaccessible Soviet archives. According to NKVD archives, the number of convicts in Gulag labour camps rose by half a million in the two years beginning 1 January 1937, reaching 1.3 million on 1 January 1939. In the latter year, 40 per cent of Gulag prisoners had been convicted of `counter-revolutionary' crimes, 22 per cent were classified as `socially harmful or socially dangerous elements', and most of the rest were ordinary criminals. But many Purge victims were executed in prison, never reaching Gulag. The NKVD recorded more than 68o,ooo such executions in 1937-8.34

What was the point of the Great Purges? Explanations in terms of raison d'etat (rooting out a potential wartime Fifth Column) are unconvincing; explanations in terms of totalitarian imperatives only beg the question of what totalitarian imperatives are. If we view the phenomenon of the Great Purges in the context of revolution, the question becomes less puzzling. Suspicion of enemies-in the pay of foreign powers, often masked, involved in constant conspiracies to destroy the revolution and inflict misery on the people-is a standard feature of revolutionary mentality that Thomas Carlyle captured vividly in the passage on the Jacobin Terror of 1794 quoted at the beginning of this section. In normal circumstances, people reject the idea that it is better that ten innocent men perish than that one guilty man go free; in the abnormal circumstances of revolution, they often accept it. Prominence is no guarantee of security in revolutions; rather the contrary. That the Great Purges uncovered so many `enemies' in the guise of revolutionary leaders should come as no surprise to students of the French Revolution.

It is not hard to trace a revolutionary genesis for the Great Purges. As already noted, Lenin had no scruples about revolutionary terror and was intolerant of opposition, inside the party and out. Nevertheless, in Lenin's time a sharp distinction was drawn between the methods that were permissible for handling opposition outside the party and those that could be used on dissidents within. The Old Bolsheviks held to the principle that internal party disagreements were outside the scope of the secret police, since the Bolsheviks must never follow the Jacobins' example of turning terror on their own comrades. Admirable as that principle was, however, the fact that the Bolshevik leaders needed to affirm it says something about the atmosphere of internal party politics.

In the early 1920s, when organized opposition outside the Bolshevik Party disappeared and internal party factions were formally banned, dissident groups within the party in effect inherited the position of the old opposition parties outside it, and it was hardly surprising if they began to receive similar treatment. At any rate, there was no great outcry within the Communist Party when, in the late 1920s, Stalin used the secret police against the Trotskyites and then (following the model of Lenin's treatment of Cadet and Menshevik leaders in 1922-3) deported Trotsky from the country. During the Cultural Revolution, Communists who had worked closely with disgraced `bourgeois experts' seemed in danger of being charged with something worse than stupidity. Stalin drew back, and even allowed the Rightist leaders to remain in positions of authority. Yet this went against the grain: it was manifestly difficult for Stalinand for many rank-and-file Communists-to tolerate persons who had once been Oppositionists.

A revolutionary practice that is important in understanding the genesis of the Great Purges is the periodic `cleansing' of membership (chistki, or purges with a small `p') that the party conducted from the early 192os. The frequency of party purges increased from the end of the 192os: they were held in 1929, 1933-4, 1935, and 1936. In a party purge, every party member had to stand up and justify himself before a purge commission, rebutting criticism made openly from the floor or secretly via denunciation. The effect of repeated purges was that old offences were raised time after time and became virtually impossible to slough off. Undesirable relatives, prerevolutionary connections with other political parties, membership of party Oppositions, past scandals and official rebukes, even past bureaucratic mistakes and confusions of identity-all these hung round the neck of party members, getting heavier by the year. The party leaders' suspicion that the party was full of undeserving and unreliable members seemed to be exacerbated rather than mollified by each successive purge.

Moreover, each purge created more potential enemies for the regime, since those expelled from the party were likely to be aggrieved by this blow to their status in society and prospects of advancement. In 1937, one Central Committee member suggested in camera that there were probably more former Communists in the country than current members of the party, and this was clearly a thought that he and others found deeply disturbing.35 For the party already had so many enemies-and so many of them were hidden! There were the old enemies, those who had lost their privileges during the Revolution, priests, and so on. And now there were the new enemies, those who had fallen victim to the recent policies of liquidating kulaks and Nepmen as classes. Whether or not a particular kulak had been a sworn enemy of Soviet power before his dekulakization, he surely became one at that moment. The worst thing about this was that so many of the expropriated kulaks fled to the cities, started new lives, hid their past (as they must, to hold a job), masqueraded as honest workers-became, in short, hidden enemies of the revolution. How many apparently dedicated young Komsomols were out there concealing the fact that their fathers had once been kulaks or priests! No wonder, as Stalin warned, that individual class enemies became even more dangerous once the enemy classes had been destroyed. Of course they did, because that act of destruction had personally injured them; they had been given a real, concrete cause for grievance against the Soviet regime.

The volume of denunciations in the dossiers of all Communist administrators increased steadily year by year. It was one of the populist aspects of Stalin's revolution to encourage ordinary citizens to write in if they had cause to complain against `abuses of power' by local officials; and the investigations that followed often led to the officials' dismissal. But many complaints were motivated as much by malice as by a quest for justice. A generalized sense of grievance, rather than the specific offences cited, seems to have inspired many of the denunciations of kolkhoz chairmen and other rural officials that angry kolkhozniks wrote in great quantity in the 1930s.36

The Great Purges could not have snowballed as they did without popular participation. Self-interested denunciations played a part, as did complaints against bosses that were based on real grievances. Spy-mania flared up, as it had done many times in the past twenty years: a young Pioneer, Lena Petrenko, caught a spy on the train on her way back from summer camp when she heard him speaking German; another vigilant citizen pulled at the beard of a religious mendicant and it came off in his hand, disclosing a spy who had just come over the frontier.37 At `self-criticism' meetings in offices and party cells, fear and suspicion combined to produce scapegoating, hysterical accusations, and bullying.

This was something different from popular terror, however. Like the Jacobin Terror of the French Revolution, it was state terror in which erstwhile revolutionary leaders were the most visible victims. In contrast to earlier episodes of revolutionary terror, spontaneous popular violence played only a minor role. Moreover, the focus of terror had shifted from the original `class enemies' (nobles, priests, and other real opponents of the Revolution) to `enemies of the people' in the Revolution's own ranks.

Yet the differences between the two cases are as intriguing as the similarities. In the French Revolution, Robespierre, the instigator of the Terror, ended up as its victim. In the Great Terror of the Russian Revolution, by contrast, the chief terrorist, Stalin, survived unscathed. Though Stalin eventually sacrificed his obedient instrument (Ezhov, head of the NKVD from September 1936 to December 1938, who was arrested in the spring of 1939 and later shot), there is no indication that he felt events had gone seriously out of control, or that he ever felt himself in danger, or that he got rid of Ezhov for any reason but Machiavellian prudence. 18 The repudiation of `mass purging' and the disclosure of `excesses' of vigilance at the Eighteenth Party Congress in March 1939 was carried out calmly; in his own speech, Stalin paid little attention to the subject, though he did spend a minute refuting comments in the foreign press that the Purges had weakened the Soviet Union.39

Reading the transcripts of the Moscow show trials, and of Stalin's and Molotov's speeches at the February-March plenum, one is struck not just by the drama of proceedings but also by their staginess, the sense of contrivance and calculation, the lack of any raw emotional response on the leaders' part to the news of their colleagues' treachery. This is revolutionary terror with a difference; one feels the hand of a director, if not an auteur.

In The 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, Marx made his famous comment that all great events are played twice, the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce. While the Great Terror of the Russian Revolution was not farce, it had some of the characteristics of a replay, something staged with an earlier model in mind. It is possible, as Stalin's Russian biographer suggests, that the Jacobin Terror actually served Stalin as a model: Certainly the term 'enemies of the people', which Stalin seems to have introduced into Soviet discourse in connection with the Great Purges, had French Revolutionary antecedents. In that light, it becomes easier to understand why the baroque setting of snowballing denunciations and rampant popular suspicion was required to achieve the relatively straightforward purpose of killing political enemies. Indeed, it is tempting to go further and suggest that, in enacting a terror (which must precede Thermidor, according to the classic revolutionary sequence, not follow it), Stalin may even have felt that he was definitively rebutting Trotsky's charge that his rule had led to `a Soviet Thermidor'.40 Who could say that Stalin was a Thermidorian reactionary, a betrayer of revolution, after this demonstration of revolutionary terror that dwarfed even that of the French Revolution?

What was the legacy of the Russian Revolution? Until the end of 1991, the Soviet system itself could be so described. The red flags and the banners proclaiming `Lenin lives! Lenin is with us!' were there right up to the end. The ruling Communist Party was a legacy of the Revolution; so were the collective farms, the Five- and Seven-Year Plans, chronic shortages of consumer goods, cultural isolation, Gulag, the division of the world into `socialist' and 'capitalist' camps, and the assertion that the Soviet Union was `leader of the progressive forces of mankind'. Though the regime and the society were no longer revolutionary, the Revolution remained as the keystone in Soviet national tradition, a focus of patriotism, a subject to be learnt by children in school and celebrated in Soviet public art.

The Russian Revolution also left a complex international legacy. This was the great revolution of the twentieth century, the symbol of socialism, anti-imperialism, and rejection of the old order in Europe. For good or ill, the international socialist and communist movements of the twentieth century lived under its shadow, as did the Third-World liberation movements in the postwar era. The cold war was part of the legacy of the Russian Revolution, as well as a back-handed tribute to its continuing symbolic power. It was the Russian Revolution that represented hope of freedom from oppression to some, and provoked nightmares of a worldwide triumph of atheistic communism in others. It was the Russian Revolution that established a definition of socialism that hinged on the seizure of state power and its use as an instrument of economic and social transformation.

Revolutions have two lives. In the first life, they are considered part of the present, inseparable from contemporary politics. In the second life, they cease to be part of the present and move into history and national legend. Being part of history does not mean total removal from politics, as is shown by the example of the French Revolution, still a touchstone of French political debate two centuries later. But it imposes a distance; and as far as historians are concerned, it permits more latitude and detachment in interpretation. By the 199os, the Russian Revolution was long overdue to be moved out of the present into history, but the expected transfer kept being delayed. In the West, despite the persistence of Cold War hangovers, historians, if not politicians, had more or less decided that the Russian Revolution was history. In the Soviet Union, however, interpretation of the Russian Revolution remained politically charged and linked with contemporary politics right up to the Gorbachev era.

With the collapse of the Soviet Union, the Russian Revolution did not sink gracefully into history. It was flung there-'on to the dustheap of history', to borrow Trotsky's phrase-in a spirit of vehement national rejection. For a few years in the early 199os, Russians seemed to want to forget not only the Revolution but the whole Soviet era. But it is hard to forget one's past, especially those parts of the past that commanded attention, for good or evil, from the rest of the world. Under Putin, a selective recovery of the Soviet legacy began in Russia; and no doubt more is to come. If the French-still quarrelling over the legacy of their Revolution at its bicentenary in 1989-are any guide, the meaning of the Russian Revolution will still be hotly disputed in Russia at its first centenary and beyond.