Stalin полностью

Stalin, after innumerable interjections, finally delivered his own full address on March 3. “The more we advance, the more successes we have, the more embittered the remnants of the defeated and exploiting classes will become, the more rapidly they will go over to sharper forms of struggle, the more they will inflict damage on the Soviet state, the more they will seize on the most desperate means of struggle as the last resort of the doomed,” he asserted, repeating his long-standing theory.⁸² He chastised party and state officials—like the ones sitting there in the Sverdlov Hall—for “political blindness” on this score. “Some of our leading cadres, both in the center and locally, not only failed to discern the real countenance of these wreckers, diversionists, spies, and murderers,” he stated, “but proved so unconcerned, complacent, and naïve that at times they themselves assisted in promoting the agents of foreign states to one or another responsible post.” To anyone who might object, Stalin mockingly added, “Capitalist encirclement? Rubbish! What significance can some kind of capitalist encirclement have if we fulfill and surpass our economic plans? New forms of wrecking, the struggle with Trotskyism? Trifle! What significance can these trifles have if we fulfill and overfulfill our plan? . . . Our party’s not shabby, the party’s Central Committee is also not bad—what the hell more do we need? Strange people sit there in Moscow, in the Central Committee of the party: they think up all sorts of questions, instigate about some kind of wrecking. They themselves don’t sleep and don’t allow others to.”⁸³

Inside the sarcasm, Stalin had blurted out confirmation of the real driver behind the mass arrests and executions: it was him.

Mekhlis, in Pravda the next day, obediently ripped into the heretofore de rigueur toadying, ridiculing the rituals as “boot-licking therapy” and condemning the “supreme leaderism” of specific local party bosses.⁸⁴ The far-flung operations of Stalin’s regime were riddled with cross-purposes, self-dealing, underfulfillment of economic targets, poor record keeping, reports of faked successes, pervasive misappropriation of state funds, and victimization of the weakest officials as scapegoats. The “system” was an unwieldy amalgam of competing clans and impossible rules, vast webs of relationships and red-tape procedures overlaid with a tableau of powerful myths (including the myth of the system itself). Stalin returned to the dais for a menacing summation (March 5). “People are sometimes selected based not on a political or business principle but on personal acquaintance, personal allegiance, friendships,” he warned, citing the example of Levon Mirzoyan, who was said to have brought thirty people to Kazakhstan from postings in Azerbaijan and the Urals. “What does it mean to drag a whole group of cronies with you? . . . It means you have acquired a certain independence from local organizations and, if you will, a certain independence from the Central Committee.”

Stalin would know: forming a political clan was precisely how he had built his personal dictatorship inside the Bolshevik dictatorship, and gained his own independence. Never mind. “Some comrades among us think that if they are a people’s commissar, then they know everything,” he added. “They believe that rank, in and of itself, affords very great, almost inexhaustible knowledge. Or they think: If I am a Central Committee member, then I am not one by accident, then I must know everything. This is not the case.” He maligned even Orjonikidze, praising the fallen industry commissar as “one of the first and best politburo members among us,” but accusing him of “wasting time and effort” defending enemies.⁸⁵ “Truly a historic plenum!” the Comintern’s Dimitrov noted in his diary.⁸⁶

SELF-SLAUGHTERHOUSE

The decisive question—what, precisely, would be the scope of the high-level arrests—remained unclear. Stalin, in his plenum summation, estimated the number of Trotskyites and Zinovievites, as well as rightists, at 30,000, of whom he said 12,000 had already been arrested. But of course, some officials were being arrested not for an opposition past but for insufficient vigilance against the opposition. And “testimony” never failed to produce more names. Already, large numbers of “rightists” were being subjected to torture at Lubyanka’s internal prison (many declared hunger strikes, and not a few attempted suicide).⁸⁷ Most ominously, Stalin had alluded at the plenum to the inventories compiled by Malenkov: the 1.5 million former party members, expellees whom Stalin now called “grist for the mill of our enemies.”⁸⁸