Stalin полностью

Mola’s “fifth column” bon mot emerged as the main public justification for the terror offered by representatives of the Soviet regime: a prophylactic action, with inevitable excesses, against potential enemies lying in wait for a foreign aggression. “Is it not clear that as long as capitalist encirclement exists, there will continue to exist among us wreckers, spies, saboteurs, and murderers, sent into our hinterland by the agents of foreign states?” Stalin had asked rhetorically at the February–March 1937 plenum.³¹⁰ He had underlined a similar passage in the draft notes of Molotov’s speech for the plenum, and interrupted Yezhov’s speech with the instruction, about one accused enemy, “And he will save up his strength until the moment of war, when he will really do us a lot of harm.”³¹¹ Mikoyan, a quick learner, mentioned a “fifth column” explicitly in his second speech at the same plenum. Molotov, fifty years later, would explain that Stalin “took no chances. He pitied no one. . . . It was hard to determine the limit where to stop.”³¹²

This way of thinking went beyond Stalin and his henchmen. “I am happy that all this has been uncovered and that our agencies are in a position to expose so much rottenness before the outbreak of war so that we can emerge victorious,” Bukharin, under vicious attack, had stated back at the December 1936 Central Committee plenum, in relation to terror against others, “because had we missed it at the outset and caught it only in the midst of war, that could have led to an extraordinary and terrible defeat for the entire socialist cause.”³¹³ Foreign observers of the Soviet terror also picked up the fifth column rationale.³¹⁴ Many victims, too, linked their annihilation to a pending war (as well as to the “democratic” elections announced with the new constitution).³¹⁵ But Stalin’s butchery was not triggered by the July 1936 military coup and the ensuing civil war in Spain.³¹⁶ Stalin himself almost never used Mola’s piquant “fifth column” phrase. (Bukharin in December 1936 had not actually used the term, either.)

Insiders’ treachery and the “foreign hand” had been core parts of Stalin’s worldview and governing style since his warlord days in Tsaritsyn, his first real exercise of state power, when, in August 1918, he had twenty-one “class enemies” executed for allegedly plotting to assist, from within, the Whites’ capture of the city from without, a bald attempt to galvanize the workers to fight to defend the city. He had explained this technique to the delegation from Mongolia in 1934 and again in 1935. Events in Spain in 1936 provided a dramatic story line, manipulated by him, for the ever greater scale of a domestic offensive against Zinovievites, Trotskyites, and rightists that predated Spain. Stalin acquired an additional way to justify arresting any official in heavy industry and completely unhinging weapons production: actually, he was improving Soviet security, because they wanted to turn the Soviet Union into a second Spain. He could eviscerate Soviet intelligence and diplomacy, but he was making the country more secure. Soviet borders were being penetrated, so he could shoot the border guards to make the country safer.³¹⁷ Stalin could murder anyone on the flimsiest of pretexts, or even without a pretext, and in doing so he could assert that he was fighting tooth and nail to defend socialism and the Soviet state against the kind of rightist military putsch he had been warning about for years, and that Spain concretized.

Spain was convenient but unnecessary for Stalin’s terror. The ideas of capitalist encirclement and the enemy within had been born with the Bolshevik coup itself and become the basis of all Bolshevik propaganda in the 1920s. Stalin had been contemplating the destruction of Bukharin and Tukhachevsky in the precise scenario deployed in 1937 for years. “Is it possible?” he had written to Orjonikidze about interrogation protocols implicating Tukhachevsky in a coup plot with Bukharin, Rykov, and Tomsky. “Of course it is possible.” Stalin had answered his own question: “It seems the rightists are prepared to take the path of military dictatorship if only to escape from the Central Committee, collective and state farms, Bolshevik tempos of industrialization.” Here was the nub of 1937—but the letter had been sent September 24, 1930.³¹⁸

•   •   •