Russia. A History полностью

J. Arch Getty was the first to challenge the prevailing consensus. He noted the heavy reliance on rumour and gossip in memoirs, questioned the existence of a Stalin–Kirov rivalry or a moderate faction in the Politburo, and denied the existence of a master plot concocted by Stalin. Basing his analysis primarily on materials in the Smolensk Party Archive (seized first by the German army in the Second World War, then taken by American forces from the Germans) he argued that the party apparatus was hardly an efficient machine implementing the dictates of its leader, but a ‘petrified bureaucracy’ incapable even of keeping track of its members. According to Getty, the Great Purges actually derived from the failure of two campaigns to renovate the party: a series of operations to purge passive and degenerate members, and the initiatives spearheaded by Andrei Zhdanov to give party cadres a political education and to introduce ‘party democracy’ through contested secret ballot elections. The anti-bureaucratic impulse here struck a responsive chord with lower-ranking party members, but aroused resistance from regional party secretaries. As Ezhov undertook a search for enemies, which had extended from former oppositionists to regional military commanders, such resistance took on a sinister colouring. ‘Anti-bureaucratic populism and police terror’ created a vicious cycle of accusation, denunciations, and arrests that decimated the ranks of the party and certain high profile professions.

When Getty recently revisited the ‘politics of repression’, he concluded that ‘glasnost’ and the collapse of the Communist Party have put the secretive history of Stalinism on a more evidentially sound footing’. He notes that the investigation of a Politburo commission found no evidence of Stalin’s participation in Kirov’s assassination or the prior or subsequent existence of a moderate bloc; he therefore reiterates his scepticism about the planned nature of the terror. ‘Indecision and chaos’, he argues, were more evident in the evolution of repression before mid1937. Thereafter, it is at least as plausible that Ezhov was pursuing his own agenda, which may—or may nothave coincided with Stalin’s. Not that, in Getty’s view, this exonerates Stalin from responsibility; on the contrary, Stalin was an active participant, personally edited lists of defendants and their statements for the 1936 and 1937 show trials, signed tens of thousands of death sentences, and established target figures for executions in each province. But some scholars remain dissatisfied with Getty’s interpretation and even assert that Getty glossed over ‘one of the darkest and most tragic episodes in Soviet history’.

As in the historiographical controversy among Germanists over ‘intentionalist’ vs. ‘function-structuralist’ interpretations of the Holocaust, this debate raises some complex and profound issues: the process of decision-making at the highest levels, the role of Stalin himself, popular attitudes and participation, the actual quantitative scale of the repression, and its immediate and longer-term psychic effects. Neither orthodox nor revisionist, Moshe Lewin suggests that the terror was a function of Stalin’s unwillingness to be bound by the system he himself had built and presided over. This system had brought to the fore new social groups, especially state functionaries, who though powerful, lacked security of office and sought it in greater social stability and ‘socialist legality’. It was just this craving that threatened Stalin’s role as unfettered autocrat. Thus, two models coexisted uneasily and at some point collided. In the long run, the bureaucratic model, relying on the nomenklatura, would prevail; but during 1936–8, the autocratic model, consisting of the cult, the police, and a demonological mentality, was in ascendance.

That mentality was not Stalin’s alone. Gabor Rittersporn has argued that attributing political conflict and the shortcomings of daily life to ‘plots’, ‘wrecking’, and the ‘intensification of the class struggle’ was not simply a matter of scapegoating, but reflected real belief. Subjected to a public discourse that postulated the achievement of socialism and the ubiquity of subversion, many people understood irregularities, shortages, or other deviations from what was supposed to happen in Manichean terms. They knew that they were not enemies or conspirators, but had no way of being sure about their bosses, colleagues, neighbours, even friends and relatives. Bukharin, who believed the accusations against Kamenev, was no different from Lev Kopelev and other ‘true believers’ convinced of the need for unrelenting cruelty to deal with enemies. Those lower down the social hierarchy, including many workers with grievances against their bosses and peasants still angry over collectivization, evidently considered the reprisals against party and state functionaries to be just retribution.