Stalin by Dmitriĭ Antonovich Volkogonov

Author:Dmitriĭ Antonovich Volkogonov [Volkogonov, Dmitriĭ Antonovich]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Stalin, Joseph, 1879-1953., Heads of state -- Soviet Union -- Biography., Soviet Union -- History.
Publisher: Grove Weidenfeld
Published: 1991-12-03T02:00:00+00:00

Stalin crazy. With characteristic sarcasm and perspicacity, Trotsky pinpointed the phoney nature of the trials:

In this criminal activity the people’s commissars, marshals, ambassadors and secretaries invariably receive their orders from one agency, not their official leader but an exile. Trotsky has only to blink an eye and it is enough for the veterans of the revolution to become agents for Hitler and the Mikado. On Trotsky’s ‘instructions’, issued through the best correspondent of TASS, the leaders of industry, agriculture and transport destroy the country’s productive resources. On the orders of ‘Public Enemy No. i’, whether from Norway or Mexico, the railwaymen destroy military transports in the Far East, while highly respected doctors poison their patients in the Kremlin. This is the amazing picture drawn by Vyshinsky, but here a difficulty arises. Under a totalitarian regime it is the apparatus that implements the dictatorship. But if my hirelings are occupying all the key posts in the apparatus, how is it that Stalin is in the Kremlin and I’m in exile?

Stalin curged Yezhov for his ‘cretinous’ fabrication of the cases and, yet again, wondered whether it was not time to wind up the whole campaign. He decided that, while there were still people who might, even if only mentally, see Trotsky as an alternative, he must go on.

The political trials had yet another aim. With their aid, Stalin wanted to show that all the former oppositionists -Trotskyites, Bukharinites, Zinovievites, Mensheviks, Dashnaks, SRs, Anarchists, Bundists - had been anti-socialists, and that they had infected Soviet citizens who were working abroad, such as diplomats, cultural figures, industrial managers, scientists, even those who were doing their internationalist duty in Spain. Many emigres who had returned home, and foreign Communists working in the Comintern or its organizations in Moscow, were also termed ‘enemies of the people’, along with anyone who had been expelled from the party earlier, or who had a grudge against the regime or had expressed political doubt. The relatives of the repressed were automatically considered ‘enemies’. The NKVD itself constituted a large group of victims, some of them destroyed because they tried to sabotage the criminal fabrications, while others fell into the category of ‘enemies’ through excessive zeal. Its leaders were also an endangered species precisely because they knew too much. Thus, Yagoda, Frinovsky and Berman, among many others, were accused of committing excesses, distortions and ‘wrecking activities in the organs of the NKVD’. Equally, it became dangerous to have known Lenin, or to have fought against tsarism and, therefore, if only instinctively, to know the value of freedom and democracy. And of course there were people who knew more about Iosif Dzhugashvili than was good for them.

Suspicion increased the momentum of violence. V. Zakharov, M. Motsiev and other railway workers at Arzamas can hardly have understood Trotsky’s ideas, yet it was these ideas, combined with the ‘intention to commit terrorist sabotage’, that led to their being sentenced to death on 31 October 1937. As Ulrikh reported to Stalin, ‘all the accused fully confessed their guilt.

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