Stalin полностью

Kremlinologists of all stripes absorbed every rumor and strained every nerve to decipher the puzzle. “Every bit of testimony at the [March 1938] Bukharin-Rykov trial was the subject of endless discussion in the Embassy,” recalled Charles Bohlen, who attended as an interpreter for the new American ambassador, Joseph Davies. “There was speculation over the reason the purges were started, what they were trying to accomplish, whether Stalin was mad, whether he had some other sinister plan, how much truth there was in the accusations.”²⁷² Few were as naïve as Davies, who accepted the trials at face value (and believed that the Soviet Union was wending its way in the right direction and eager for cooperation with the capitalists). Bohlen, along with George Kennan, thought Marxism-Leninism had exacerbated whatever obscure power politics lay behind the trials. Most other foreign ambassadors—Werner von der Schulenburg (Germany), Robert Coulondre (France), and Viscount Chilston (Britain)—attributed the bizarre episode to power politics alone.²⁷³ Davies’s approach—to accept the accusations and confessions—was found in Soviet society. “Who would have benefited from sentencing and executing such people . . . if they were not guilty?” recalled the Soviet writer Konstantin Simonov of Tukhachevsky and other top officers. “Either they were guilty or what was happening was incomprehensible.”²⁷⁴

Lifelong revolutionaries, who had been beaten by tsarist police for working on behalf of the revolution, were now being beaten with whips, blackjacks, and poles to confess to lifelong conspiracies against the revolution. Inside the party and among party widows, hearsay circulated about Stalin’s special thirst for revenge and his vendetta against the “old Bolsheviks” (those who had joined the party before 1917), because they knew the real story of his past and Lenin’s call for his removal.²⁷⁵ Old Bolsheviks numbered 182,000 in 1934 and would number 125,000 in 1939, a decline of one third, which was roughly the annihilation ratio for all officials.²⁷⁶ Another conjecture involved apparatchik fears of a supposed “transition to democracy,” since the draft constitution had restored the right to vote to former kulaks and called for multicandidate elections.²⁷⁷ Stalin had contemptuously dismissed any concerns, then threw out the multicandidate idea anyway.Probably the most widespread contemporary supposition about the terror involved a belief—or a desire to believe—that Stalin remained unaware. “We thought that Stalin did not know about the insane retribution against Communists, and the Soviet intelligentsia,” the writer Ehrenburg recalled. Meyerhold said, “They hide it from Stalin.” Pasternak said, “If only someone told all this to Stalin!”²⁷⁸

Functionaries inside the police harbored similar delusions. Israel Shreider, who went by Mikhail, a top official in the militia (the regular police), which was subordinated to the NKVD, observed that “at that time, I saw Stalin as a god and blindly believed that he did not know what was going on in the organs of the NKVD.” Arrested himself, he was taken to Moscow’s Butyrka prison, whose cells were crammed with big shots. They were beaten senseless during “interrogations.” None wanted to speak to the others, suspecting that their cell mates were stool pigeons, and each demanded paper so they could write petitions to Stalin to profess their innocence. “Everyone wrote to Stalin,” Shreider explained. “Naturally, in perpetually thinking of Stalin, we frequently saw him in our dreams, spoke with him, proved to him our innocence, complained about the torturer-interrogators.” The next day, Shreider added, they noticed that those who had dreamed of Stalin were summoned to “interrogation” and beaten. “When someone began to report that he had seen Stalin in his dream,” he noted, “the whole cell expressed sympathy.” They noticed that their interrogators would place their petitions to Stalin on the desk during interrogations. “Does Stalin know?” they asked themselves again. “The petitions and complaints are not reaching him!”²⁷⁹

A corollary to the Stalin-did-not-know delusion was the legend of infiltration of the NKVD by enemies aiming to destroy good people. “Everyone more and more talks about the sickness or wrecking by the NKVD leaders,” professor Vladimir Vernadsky (b. 1863), a renowned geochemist and member of the Soviet Academy of Sciences, wrote in his diary (January 25, 1938). “More and more heard about Yezhov’s wrecking. Again unnecessary, infuriating severity all around. Again discussion of deliberate wrecking” (February 20).²⁸⁰ A political commissar in the army in Vyazma, near Smolensk, told a military associate, “It looks like party cadres are being destroyed deliberately.”²⁸¹