Peasants had rebelled en masse against the violence of forced collectivization and dekulakization, and even some party officials had protested. But the terror? A group of Kremlin bodyguards had been carrying loaded pistols on Red Square during the 1937 May Day festivities, within shooting distance of Stalin and the entire leadership; within a few months, they went meekly to their deaths, liquidated as an alleged “assassin corps” working for foreign agents.243 This seeming passivity confounds to this day.244 “Isn’t it time we started thinking about what is happening in our country?” Pyotr Smorodin, the second secretary of the Leningrad provincial party committee, stated in company during a group lunch at a day resort for party activists. “We have to act before they take us all one at a time, like chickens from their roost!” Everyone present was stupefied. They began to get up and leave, except for a single old friend and the latter’s stepdaughter.245 Many tried to keep a low profile, hoping it would pass. “We all took the easy way out,” Nadezhda Mandelstam, wife of the poet and a Gulag survivor, would observe, “by keeping silent in the hope that not we but our neighbors would be killed.”246
In fact, many people took an active part, cynically or earnestly.247 A Soviet worker needed to labor for sixty-two hours to purchase a loaf of bread, versus about seventeen minutes for an American—data that Soviet workers did not have, of course, but they all knew their bosses helped themselves to the best supplies and apartments and escaped prosecution for embezzlement or tyrannical comportment. Until now. “You’re a wrecker yourself,” workers jeered at higher-ups during the terror. “Tomorrow they’ll come and arrest you. All you engineers and technicians are wreckers.”248 To be sure, many ordinary people were disgusted by the arrests and executions, and some felt the victims were targeted precisely because they wanted to help workers and peasants. But not a few reasoned that officials, whether or not they were foreign agents, deserved their comeuppance.249 In 1938, the regime decreed a limit on the size of dacha that an official could have, “in light of the fact that . . . a number of arrested conspirators (Rudzutaks, Rosenholz, Antipov, Mezhlauk, Karakhan, Yagoda, and others) built themselves grandiose dacha-palaces with fifteen–twenty rooms or more, where they lived in luxury and spent the people’s money.”250 Fatalism, too, abounded. Iosif Ostrovsky, who, as head of the NKVD administration-organization directorate, supervised construction (hospitals, the Hotel Moskva, the Council of People’s Commissars building), was arrested. “You know I never would have thought that I would be incarcerated in the prison whose construction I directed,” Ostrovsky was said to have mused in Lefortovo (originally erected in 1881 but expanded). “But the prison is very well constructed; you can’t complain.”251 He was shot.
Part of what looks like passivity was ideological. The writer Alexander Afinogenov, expelled from the party and awaiting arrest at his dacha in the privileged Peredelkino writers’ colony in Moscow’s outskirts, his plays now banned, had recorded in his diary (December 25, 1937) that he “turned to the radio, for the latest news, and a strange thing happened: ordinary news about life in our country, our people, their words and aspirations, lifted me up immediately; it was as if I had washed in cold water after a day of exhausting reflections.” He claimed that his sense of profound isolation was broken when he “engaged with the life of the whole country, again felt the grandeur of this life and understood the insignificance of my own minor difficulties.”252 As of 1938, the USSR had 1,838 sanatoriums, 1,270 recreational facilities, and 12,000 pioneer camps for children, and they were all in heavy usage. That year, Afinogenov was reinstated in the party.