Lenin's Legacy by Wesson Robert

Author:Wesson, Robert
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Hoover Institution Press
Published: 2017-03-13T16:00:00+00:00

THE GREAT PURGES

By 1934 the Soviet Union was emerging from its time of most traumatic economic and social change; Stalinism rose triumphant as a result of its victory over the peasantry, its socialization of the economy, and its construction of a heavy industrial base. All independent sectors had been destroyed, and the country was ready for the institution of totalitarianism. But the dictator seems only to have been able to continue destroying his rivals or opponents. The stage was set for a time of horrors, of a self-immolation of an elite that was without historical parallel.

The purges were not without antecedents, however. Arbitrary police action for political purposes began a few weeks after Lenin took power and never ceased entirely. The terrorism of the civil war and the reprisals against those who rose against the Soviet state at Kronstadt and in the provinces set precedents for violence. In collectivization the party had become hardened to the exile, imprisonment, enslavement, and murder of millions who could be counted as opponents by the leadership.

The purge trial was also a tradition. In 1922, when the country was at peace, a group of Socialist Revolutionaries were subjected to a political trial and sentenced to death; Lenin became angry when the sentence was commuted under pressure from European leftists. In 1928 Stalin held a show trial of fifty-three mine managers and engineers for alleged sabotage and counterrevolution with foreign involvement. In 1930 an “Industrial Party” of saboteurs was discovered and put on trial, as were sundry other groups in following years, but no protest came from within the party against the obviously false accusations and extracted confessions. The party elite was still secure, although Stalin repressed ordinary folk, including party members, at will. Nadezhda Alliluyeva learned of the horrors of collectivization from fellow students at the Industrial Academy and remonstrated with Stalin, an act that led to her suicide. Stalin arrested those who had ventured to speak the truth to his wife.21

The nonviolent cleansing of the party also helped to set the stage for the blood purges. The rolls had been checked, and large numbers expelled in 1919, 1921, 1929, and 1933. The last of these cleansings decreased the membership by a third and dragged on until the next and still more drastic purge occurred in 1935, preparatory to the massacres of 1936–38. Such checks on membership, with the penalty of expulsion, became increasingly severe as the role of the party became ever more overwhelming. The party leaders selected members for their docility, inculcated in them a fear of the authorities, and accustomed them to the idea of arbitrary action in the name of vigilance and virtue.

These purifications had little effect on the upper echelons of the party, who did not have much to fear as long as they stayed clear of factions (such as those led by Trotsky, Kamenev and Zinoviev, and Bukharin). And there was a tendency toward mutual protection within the company; those who cheerfully watched or shared in the killing of

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