Moreover, expectations of political leaders that Stakhanovites’ innovations and production records would raise labour productivity all around were largely unfulfilled. Indeed, in some measure Stakhanovism was dysfunctional, as managers concentrated on supplying workers in the ‘leading’ professions, machinery became overstrained, and inter-shop deliveries broke down. Just three months into the ‘Stakhanovite year’ of 1936, speeches of political leaders and the press began to use words like ‘saboteur’ and ‘wrecker’ to describe managers and engineers who had ostensibly blocked the application of Stakhanovites’ methods or whose enterprises had failed to meet their targets. It was all Ordzhonikidze could do to deflect these charges and prevent the demoralization of industrial cadres in the face of what looked like a revival of cultural revolution specialist-baiting. In fact, something far more lethal was in store not only for enterprise directors, but also for Soviet officials, political functionaries, and military officers.
The Great Purges
The subject of harrowing memoirs and painstakingly researched academic studies, of folk legend and official investigations, the Great Purges continue to fascinate and appall. Emblematic of Stalinism, the ‘repressions’—to employ the term more common in Russian parlance—of 1936—8 seem to have been so arbitrary in victimization, so elusive in motivation as to defy explanation. Access to long-closed archives of the NKVD, while clarifying some issues, has not yet yielded a satisfactory explanation. Indeed, even what hitherto were assumed to be incontrovertible, basic facts are now in question.
According to the once standard version, Stalin initiated the Great Purges by arranging the assassination of the Leningrad Party boss, Sergei Kirov, in December 1934. Stalin’s purpose here was twofold. First, he sought to eliminate a potential rival. Reputedly the leader of a ‘moderate’ faction within the Politburo, Kirov had also received more votes than Stalin himself in the elections to the Politburo at the Seventeenth Party Congress. Second, by claiming that the assassination was the work of ‘Zinovievists’ and ultimately inspired by Zinoviev and Kamenev, Stalin could legitimize the physical annihilation of former leaders of the opposition, their retinues, and eventually anyone else on whom he chose to pin the label ‘enemy of the people’. This grand scheme for mounting a campaign of terror included the verification of party documents in 1935, the three public show trials of former oppositionists (Zinoviev and Kamenev in August 1936; Piatakov and Radek in January 1937; and Bukharin and Rykov in March 1938), the execution of Marshal Tukhachevskii and most of the Red Army general staff in June 1937, the elimination of nearly the entire regional leadership of the party later that year, and the arrest and disappearance of prominent persons from a wide variety of fields. The NKVD and its commissar, N. I. Ezhov, were the ruthless executors of Stalin’s designs, and indeed the entire period is sometimes referred to as the ‘Ezhovshchina’ (the evil epoch of Ezhov).
Treating these events as instances of a single phenomenon, most scholars assumed that Stalin was intent on eliminating any potential source of opposition, beginning with past opponents but eventually including any who might appear to be unreliable in the future. Some have suggested that the Nazis’ assumption of power in Germany and the increasing prospect of international war provided the impetus—or at least pretext—for Stalin’s actions. Other accounts have emphasized the pathological nature of Stalin’s suspiciousness and his psycho-dramatic replay of Ivan the Terrible’s elimination of the boyars. Still others stress an inherent imperative of the totalitarian system: not only to atomize and terrorize society, but to achieve a turnover of cadres. Another interpretation derives the Great Terror from the bureaucratic imperatives associated with the NKVD’s aggrandizement of power and its supervision of the GULAG. Whatever the dynamics, the traditional historiography shared a consensus that the Great Terror and purges represented a unitary process and that they served some rational function.
