The Red Flag: A History of Communism (34 page)

In May 1936, two months before Stalin sent the ‘Secret Letter’ detailing the activities of the ‘enemies of the people’, and thus initiating the bloody purges we call the ‘Great Terror’, Soviet cinema audiences were treated to another political melodrama: Ivan Pyrev’s
Party Card
.
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It tells the story of one of the virtuous but simple ‘children’ of the Stalinist era, the fair-haired Anka, who falls victim to an evil enemy, Pasha Kuganov. But unlike the enemies of the late 1920s – the obviously bourgeois specialists and kulaks – Pasha’s true nature is hidden. He arrives in Moscow from the provinces with a shabby wooden suitcase, the very image of the humble but ambitious Soviet ‘new man’. He is handsome (although, tellingly, rather dark), hard-working, and soon becomes popular in the factory; he then marries Anka, a good proletarian girl, defeating his rival in love, the good (and fair-haired) Communist Iasha. But it soon becomes clear that Pasha is not what he seems. A former lover reveals that his father was a kulak, a detail he has deliberately concealed by elaborately faking Communist virtue. His perfidy is compounded when he steals Anka’s party card and gives it to a foreign spy. When the card is recovered, the party puts Anka on trial for negligence, for as the film makes clear, the card is a ‘symbol of honour, pride and the struggle of each Bolshevik’ and it is the sacred duty of all party members to guard their party cards with their lives. Eventually, though, Pasha’s wicked nature is finally revealed to Anka. The foolish girl, who put romantic
love over her duties to socialism, has been taught a lesson by the party; armed with a pistol, she hands her husband over to the secret police.

For a viewer today the film seems bizarre, with its obsession with the apparently trivial party card – a document lent almost sacred significance in the film. Equally strange is the notion that the USSR was threatened by a phalanx of foreign spies armed with these stolen documents. Even at the time some found the film incredible. The Mosfilm studios, describing it as ‘unsuccessful, false and distorting Soviet reality’, refused to distribute it.
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Only Stalin’s intervention secured its release, and he clearly had a better sense of popular taste.
Party Card
had a real resonance with some of its audience, who expressed disgust at the sentimental and unreliable Anka. The press was full of discussions of the film, and the great film-maker Fridrikh Ermler explained to a friend how much it had affected him, even undermining his trust in his wife: ‘You see, I saw this film and now, more than anything I’m afraid for my party card. What if someone stole it? You won’t believe it, but at night I check under my wife’s pillow to see if maybe it’s there.’
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To understand the politics of the time, and in particular one of the most traumatic, and mysterious, events in Communist history – the ‘Great Terror’ – we could do worse than watch the strange and sinister
Party Card
.

The Terror of 1936–8 still mystifies historians, because it seems so irrational, and profound disagreements amongst scholars over its origins and nature remain.
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That Stalin should have ordered the arrest and executions of hundreds and thousands of party members and ordinary people, many of them perfectly loyal to Soviet power, and, moreover, precisely the educated experts and experienced officers he needed to help him win the approaching war, seems inexplicable.

Clearly, Stalin’s psychological peculiarities played an enormous role. He was deeply suspicious, and seems to have been willing to believe some of the extraordinary conspiracies he charged people with, even as he cynically concocted others. He was the figure who ordered the killings, and his thinking will always remain difficult to fathom. However, many, at all levels of the party and society, participated in the Terror, and these complex events make more sense if we also understand the radical, messianic aspects of Bolshevik culture, and its response to the threat of war. As in the late 1920s, the leadership claimed that the best way to counter the foreign threat was to purify the party, removing ‘enemies’ and ‘waverers’ from it, so it could then ‘remobilize’ a newly
militant society against the foreigner. But the fear of internal enemies was much greater than before, and the Terror was a much more controlled, less ‘inclusive’ campaign than the ‘Great Break’ of the late 1920s. Leaders did try to whip up the ‘masses’ against ‘enemies’, but the Terror was an organized series of arrests and executions, carried out in secret by the police.

The first signs of the search for ‘enemies’ within the party emerged in the aftermath of the murder of the Leningrad party leader, Sergei Kirov, on 1 December 1934. We still do not know for sure whether Stalin was involved, but whoever was responsible, Stalin sent the rising party official Nikolai Ezhov to investigate the murder, with a view to blaming it on the local secret police or his former opponent, Zinoviev. Lev Kamenev and Zinoviev were imprisoned and the case closed. Even so, Ezhov – partly because he had his own ambitions within the NKVD – continued to warn of the continuing dangers from the former oppositions, and by early 1936 Stalin allowed him to reopen the case of the Kirov murder.
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In July 1936 Stalin and the Politburo issued a ‘Secret Letter’ to all party organizations, announcing that a grand conspiracy between Trotsky, Kamenev and Zinoviev had been discovered. It was this letter, and the subsequent show trial in August, that launched the first campaign in the ‘Great Terror’.

We still do not know why Stalin let Ezhov off the leash when he did. It is most likely that he cynically smeared people he wanted to purge, but it is possible he believed in the conspiracies. Certainly the Stalinists commonly argued that any ideological doubts ‘objectively’ aided the enemy, and were therefore tantamount to a real crime. As Stalin declared in November 1937, anyone who ‘with his deeds or his thoughts – yes also with his thoughts – attacks the unity of the socialist state will be mercilessly destroyed by us’.
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But whatever Stalin’s intentions, the search for ‘enemies’ was presented as part of a broader campaign to purify and mobilize the party, and this is how it was understood by party organizations.
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And the leadership was especially concerned that this new party activism should reinvigorate the economy, for with Hitler in power in Germany, war was becoming more likely.

The first sign of serious efforts to galvanize the economy came in August 1935, when Alexei Stakhanov, a miner in the Donbass, dug 102 tons of coal in one shift, fourteen times the average. This kind of stunt had been staged before, but it was Stalin’s response that lent it enormous
significance. Stalin hailed Stakhanov’s achievement as a sign that the age of mobilization had returned. Workers were again capable of heroic feats; they were only being held back by conservative and bureaucratic technicians. Predictably, the ‘Stakhanovite movement’ soon acquired a strongly anti-elitist character. Whilst workers were given incentives to become Stakhanovites, the campaign was unpopular amongst managers and technicians, who had to reallocate resources so that the Stakhanovite brigades could achieve their records, whilst maintaining normal production in the rest of the factory. Naturally, they were the scapegoats when things went wrong, especially now that the party and secret police were again in the ascendant. As Kravchenko, one of those engineers tasked with staging a Stakhanovite event, recorded:

It was therefore no surprise that the search for ‘enemies’ within the party soon led to the economic managers, accused of ‘wrecking’ the economy – especially as some of them had been closely associated with Trotsky in the past. The Shramms condemned by Gladkov in the 1920s were being attacked again. But they were not the only targets. The party was urged to search for anybody who showed signs of ‘bourgeois’ corruption, or who might not be activist and politically enthusiastic enough. It was not sufficient to be a ‘narrow-minded’ and ‘pragmatic’ official ‘blindly and mechanically’ obeying orders from above, as Stalin put it in 1938. Party officials were also, like Anka, blamed for lack of ‘vigilance’.

Given the broad definition of the ‘enemy’, it was very likely that the purge would spread throughout the party. Denunciations proliferated, and virtually any failing could be interpreted as a sign of hostile intent. Expulsion from the party followed, and then, in many cases, arrest by the NKVD, imprisonment and possibly execution.

Responses to the Terror amongst the party faithful varied. Evgenia Ginzburg, an academic, historian and writer, and the wife of a regional party boss in Kazan, Tatarstan, simply could not understand the hysteria. She was damaged by a rather distant association with another historian, Elvov, and was accused of making ‘Trotskyist’ errors in an article on the
1905 revolution. After expulsion from the party she was summoned to the office of a Captain Vevers of the NKVD, who berated her as an enemy. ‘Was he joking?’ she remembered. ‘He couldn’t possibly mean such things. But he did. Working himself up more and more, he shouted across the room, pouring invective on me.’
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The reaction of the playwright Aleksandr Afinogenov, however, was very different. As the historian Jochen Hellbeck has shown, when expelled from the party Afinogenov struggled to understand it, and, despite doubts, saw his expulsion as an opportunity to destroy the negative, bourgeois parts of his personality and transform himself into a virtuous party member. ‘I killed the self inside me – and then a miracle happened… I understood and suddenly saw the beginning of something altogether new, a new “self”, far removed from previous troubles and vanity.’
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Unexpectedly, he escaped the police and arrest, and was restored to the party, convinced of its justice. Afinogenov may not have been typical of party members, but others also believed that the purge was an essential tool to purify the party, even if ‘mistakes’ were made in particular circumstances.

The Terror also made sense to others, lower on the social scale. There was a populist element to it, and the leadership now tried to whip up antagonisms against the elite. For the first time in years, Stalin announced that party committees were to be subjected to multi-candidate elections, in which the rank and file were allowed to criticize their bosses. He doubtless hoped that criticism ‘from below’ would reveal what was really happening in the regional cliques, but would also replace any disobedient officials with loyal enthusiasts. He also probably realized that he could improve the standing of the regime amongst ordinary people, hostile as they were to the privileged officials.

Stalin was returning to the strategies of the late 1920s, and he was stirring up the deep resentments many ordinary people felt for local elites, as John Scott remembered:

However, the leadership was determined that this did not become a reprise of the ‘Great Break’. They resolutely tried to ensure that any ‘self-criticism’ remained under strict control, even if that proved difficult in practice.

In the spring of 1937 the Terror moved into its second phase, and the arrests of the party bosses and their clients began. Stalin may have planned this all along, but the NKVD also responded to evidence, often the result of denunciations, that the ‘little Stalins’ were not fulfilling economic targets.
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In the spring of 1937 Stalin may also have been convinced, possibly by Gestapo disinformation, that Marshal Tukhachevskii and the military high command were conspiring with the Germans. So despite the threat of war, the cream of the officer corps was arrested. And from that summer Stalin sent his close allies from Moscow to the regions to preside over the arrest and replacement of most of the powerful regional party bosses.

The bosses themselves, however, were closely involved in the Terror. Under pressure to find enemies (and desperate to save themselves), they tried to emphasize the threat from ‘class aliens’ and anybody with a ‘spoiled’ past, especially the former kulaks. Moreover, Stalin accepted the regional bosses’ demands for a mass repression of ordinary people with ‘bad’ backgrounds. He was also probably afraid of a ‘fifth column’ of anti-Soviet kulaks who might join the Nazis if they invaded.
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In the summer of 1937 the Terror entered a new, third phase, that of the ‘mass operations’. Stalin and the Politburo, in collaboration with regional bosses, issued secret quotas of arrests and executions, based on class, political and ethnic background. Most of these victims were former kulaks, priests and tsarist officials; they also included vagrants and other ‘undesirable’ groups. ‘Unreliable’ ethnic minorities who were thought to be in danger of allying themselves with enemies across the border – such as Germans, Poles and Koreans – were also persecuted. The mass operations were responsible for by far the largest number of those executed and imprisoned during the period; official figures, almost certainly underestimates, record 681,692 executed and 1,575,259 imprisoned in 1937–8, many, though not all, for political crimes.
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