Stalin полностью

Yezhov, at the plenum, spelled out a military-fascist conspiracy, a rightist-fascist plot in the NKVD, a Kremlin rightist-fascist group of plotters, an espionage organization of the Polish military, Polish National Democrats in Belorussia, an anti-Soviet rightist-Trotskyite group in the Azov–Black Sea territory and another in Eastern Siberia, a rightist anti-Soviet group in the Urals, an anti-Soviet rightist-fascist group in Western Siberia, a rightist-Trotskyite espionage group in the Soviet Far East, an organization of rightists in Western Siberia united in a partisan-guerrilla uprising, an anti-Soviet Cossack organization in Orenburg, and a wrecking rightist-Trotskyite anti-Soviet group in the agriculture commissariat. “I enumerated only the most important,” he allowed, adding that each was “linked in the closest possible way” and together constituted a “Center of Centers,” which was colluding with “fascist government circles in Germany, Japan, and Poland, on the one hand, and, on the other, with representatives abroad of anti-Soviet parties of Trotskyites, Mensheviks, and SRs.” The shared aim of all these leftist revolutionaries was said to be restoring capitalism in the USSR by way of “a palace coup, an armed uprising supported by foreign interventionists, the preparation of a Soviet defeat in the event of a war with fascist countries, and the coming to power of themselves as a result of political and territorial concessions to the fascists.” Yezhov warned that the scale of the conspiracy emanating from “testimony” indicated that the USSR stood on the verge of civil war.⁴

What attendees said in response remains unknown—Yezhov’s report and the follow-up discussion were not transcribed—but we do know that Trotsky interceded from afar. He sent a telegram from Mexico to the central executive committee of the Soviet, formally the highest organ of the state, declaring that “Stalin’s policies are leading to a crushing defeat, both internally and externally. The only salvation is a turn in the direction of Soviet democracy, beginning with a public review of the last trials. I offer my full support in this endeavor.” This document went to the NKVD, which forwarded it to Stalin. “Mug of a spy!” he wrote on Trotsky’s text. “Brazen spy for Hitler!”⁵

Stalin’s expansion of long-standing party purge practices required a surprisingly small degree of manipulation, and yet his terror was a spectacular feat in its own way. He would manage to annihilate not only nearly the entire upper ranks of the Soviet military and the secret police—in a police-military dictatorship—but much of the industrial managerial class, the regional party machines, and the cultural beau monde.⁶ He also visited ruin upon Soviet military and civilian intelligence, military attachés and diplomats abroad, and foreign Communist parties, prime instruments that any dictatorship would cherish. What was he doing?

The only way into Stalin’s serpentine mind—or, as Arthur Koestler put it in Darkness at Noon, “what went on in No. 1’s brain?”—begins with public and private comments made by him and those he instructed.⁷ Hitler turned out to be a brilliant actor, and the same has been said of Stalin, who dissembled shamelessly and playacted skillfully. But also like Hitler, who incessantly talked of his intentions (most people just did not believe him), Stalin proved extraordinarily voluble as well.⁸ We can never know in the end what Stalin believed. We can, however, come to understand how his mind worked.

Sometimes his terror ruminations were extensive, such as at the June 2, 1937, closed session of the Main Military Council; other times they were brief. They emerged from his long-standing self-conception that those who opposed him were broadcasting disunity and weakness, thereby inviting foreign powers to attack—in other words, objectively supporting the USSR’s enemies—while he, a selfless servant of the cause, under siege from uncomprehending critics, had been placed on this earth to defend the socialist revolution and the Soviet state. Therefore, he was not merely justified, but dutybound, to eradicate oppositionists and anyone taken in by them. The incarceration or physical liquidation of more than a million and a half human beings apparently posed no moral dilemmas for him. On the contrary, to pity class enemies would be to indulge sentiment over the laws of objective historical development. Ignorance of history could be fatal, Stalin argued, and he spent a great deal of time during the terror midwifing an accessible history of the Russian state, from its origins to the present, as a tool of mass civic training.⁹ Stalin was a massacring pedagogue.

A TEACHER AND A PUPIL