The Great Terror полностью

Twice in the next two years the same scene was to be repeated, always to the bafflement of commentators, friendly or hostile. The impression of unanimous surrender was not, indeed, entirely a correct one. Two of the 1936 accused (Smirnov and Holtzman) hedged considerably in their admissions, but this was hardly noticed among the self-abasement of so many others, including the two major figures, Zinoviev and Kamenev.

And similarly, the minor hitches and qualifications of later trials passed barely noticed. Krestinsky withdrew his confession on the first day of the 1938 Trial, and only reaffirmed it after a night in the hands of the investigators. Bukharin refused to confess to some of the major charges, such as that of having planned to kill Lenin. Radek, admitting that he was a treacherous liar, took occasion to point out that the case rested entirely on his evidence.

But such points were on the whole lost in the picture as it appeared in gross: everyone had confessed; the Old Bolsheviks had publicly avowed disgraceful plans and actions. The whole business almost passed belief. Were the confessions true? How had they been obtained? What did it all signify? We are told that the confessions were as little believed in Russia as abroad, “or even less,” but that the average Soviet citizen who had not been in jail found them as puzzling as foreigners did.¹

It was curiously argued, not only by Vyshinsky, but also in the West, that the accused confessed owing to the weight of evidence against them, that they had “no choice.” Apart from the fact that there was no evidence against them except their confessions and those of others, this does not accord with common experience. People, especially on capital charges, plead not guilty even if there is a great deal of evidence against them. In the past, Communists had frequently denied facts. But in any case, it was not only confession which was so strange, but also repentance—the acceptance of the prosecution’s view that the acts confessed to were appalling crimes. If Zinoviev and Kamenev had really concluded that the way out of Russia’s difficulties was the assassination of Stalin, this would be to say that experienced politicians had made a definite political decision suited, as they thought, to the circumstances. It would not be a decision they felt guilty about. Their natural line of reasoning—as with the terrorists of the People’s Will—would have been, if the facts were admitted, to defend their plans and actions. The complete acceptance of the opinion of their accusers was the real and crowning implausibility of the whole affair.

THE PARTY MIND

The problem of these confessions is really a double one. We have to consider the technical means, the physical and psychological pressures by which false public confessions could be secured. And this is a question that applies to non-Party as well as to Party victims.

But in the surrender and self-abasement of at least some of the revolutionaries, a further element enters. Their surrender was not a single and exceptional act in their careers, but the culmination of a whole series of submissions to the Party made in terms they knew to be “objectively” false. And this attitude is a key to Stalin’s victory going far beyond the trials themselves, largely accounting as it does for the extraordinary and disastrous failure of the successive Party elements who objected to his rule to take any effective action to block him.

In Soviet circumstances, where all factions had long been united in imposing the principle of the one-party State and the practice of crushing all alternative and independent political enterprise by police methods, the responsibility for saving the country and the people from Stalin rested squarely on his leading opponents within the Party.

They had abdicated that responsibility. The Party mystique led them to submission to the Party leadership, however packed the Congresses and Committees which produced it. They could see no political possibilities outside the Party. Even when they had been expelled, they thought of nothing but a return at any price.

The leading oppositionists—with the exception of Trotsky himself—had made a basic tactical error. Their constant avowals of political sin, their admissions that Stalin was, after all, right, were based on the idea that it was correct to “crawl in the dust,” suffer any humiliation, to remain in or return to the Party. In this way, they thought, when Stalin’s policies came to grief, they themselves would be there, available as the alternative leadership which the Party must then seek.