Special features inherent in the Soviet system made a mass and participatory terror between 1936 and 1938 possible. The existence of an extensive police apparatus equipped to arrest and sentence in assembly-line fashion was necessary but not sufficient. Still more important was the existence of the shadowy Communist party, which had cells in all of the country’s institutions, making heresy hunting possible, and an ideology, a class-war practice, and a conspiratorial modus operandi that proved readily conducive to mass murder in the name of reasserting the party’s special mission and purity. All of this was buttressed by the adversarial nature of Soviet noncapitalist industrialization and collectivization, which was linked to an increase in the ranks of enemies; the regime’s censorship (strict control over information and assiduous promotion of certain ways of thinking); widespread resentment of the new elite, which under socialism was not supposed to exist; and widespread belief in a grand crusade, building socialism, in whose name the terror was conducted.37 The masses became complicit as a result of party cell, factory, and farm meetings, and especially their written denunciations, informing, and extracted confessions. That said, the slaughter was neither self-generating nor self-sustaining. Soviet state power was enacted by millions of people—not just those within the formal administrative machinery—but guided by a single individual.
Did Stalin have reason to fear for his power? He had built socialism, a feat even his loyalists had thought unlikely. His personal authority was so secure that, as we shall see, in August 1936 he could once again abandon the capital for more than two months, going on holiday to Sochi. There was no repetition of the blistering Ryutin condemnation in a text circulated hand to hand. No one in his inner circle pretended to be on the same level. Nonetheless, it was clear to him that his “unbounded power” remained oddly contingent. He was the supreme leader by virtue of his position as head of the party, reinforced by his acclamation as the “Lenin of our day.”38 But voting politburo members held the right to nominate someone else as the top secretary of the party, a recommendation that would be forwarded for formal ratification to the first plenum of the Central Committee newly chosen by a party congress. Stalin was thus a dictator on conditional contract. His faction had stood by him through thick and thin. But would the voting nine—Molotov, Kaganovich, Voroshilov, Orjonikidze, Kalinin, Andreyev, Kosior, Mikoyan, and Chubar—continue to do so? Even if Stalin remained certain of their obeisance, he was eager, like all dictators, to convert his dictatorship into despotism.39 For the men in his own loyal faction, in which Stalin had long taken evident pride, this meant breaking their will. Herein lay a key motivation for the fantastic terror of 1936–38.
And yet, considerations of personal power alone do not explain Stalin or the terror. Certainly he pursued power with a vengeance—on behalf of the cause, which in his mind was the same thing as his personal rule—but he had taken gambles with his power, also on behalf of the cause, and was sometimes defiant when it would have been more power enhancing to be prudent. At times he could not be sure what would enhance his power. For him, the terror constituted a form of rule, a matter of statecraft.