The Great Purge
Let us just consider the last, Henri Bernard, a former Belgian Secret Service officer, professor emeritus at the Belgian Royal Military College. He published in 1982 a book called Le communisme et l'aveuglement occidental (Communism and Western Blindness). In this work, Bernard mobilizes the sane forces of the West against an imminent Russian invasion. Regarding the history of the USSR, Bernard's opinion about the 1937 purge is interesting on many counts:
`Stalin would use methods that would have appalled Lenin. The Georgian had no trace of human sentiment. Starting with Kirov's assassination (in 1934), the Soviet Union underwent a bloodbath, presenting the spectacle of the Revolution devouring its own sons. Stalin, said Deutscher, offered to the people a régime made of terror and illusions. Hence, the new liberal measures corresponded with the flow of blood of the years 1936--1939. It was the time of those terrible purges, of that `dreadful spasm'. The interminable series of trials started. The `old guard' of heroic times would be annihilated. The main accused of all these trials was Trotsky, who was absent. He continued without fail to lead the struggle against Stalin, unmasking his methods and denouncing his collusion with Hitler.'
Bernard, op. cit. , pp. 50, 52--53.
So, the historian of the Belgian Army likes to quote Trotsky and Trotskyists, he defends the `old Bolshevik guard', and he even has a kind word for Lenin; but under Stalin, the inhuman monster, blind and dreadful terror dominated.
Before describing the conditions that led the Bolsheviks to purge the Party in 1937--1938, let us consider what a bourgeois specialist who respects the facts knows about this period of Soviet history.
Gábor Tamás Rittersporn, born in Budapest, Hungary, published a study of the purges in 1988 (English version, 1991), under the title Stalinist Simplifications and Soviet Complications. He forthrightly states his opposition to communism and states that `we have no intention of denying in any way, much less of justifying, the very real horrors of the age we are about to treat of; we would surely be among the first to bring them to light if that was still necessary'.
Gábor Tamás Rittersporn, Stalinist Simplifications and Soviet Complications: Social Tensions and Political Conflict in the USSR, 1933--1953 (Chur, Switzerland: Harwood Academic Publishers, 1991), p. 23.
However, the official bourgeois version is so grotesque and its untruthfulness so obvious that in the long run it could lead to a complete rejection of the standard Western interpretation of the Soviet Revolution. Rittersporn admirably defined the problems he encountered when trying to correct some of the most grotesque bourgeois lies.
`If ... one tries to publish a tentative analysis of some almost totally unknown material, and to use it to throw new light on the history of the Soviet Union in the 1930s and the part that Stalin played in it, one discovers that opinion tolerates challenges to the received wisdom far less than one would have thought .... The traditional image of the ``Stalin phenomenon'' is in truth so powerful, and the political and ideological value-judgments which underlie it are so deeply emotional, that any attempt to correct it must also inevitably appear to be taking a stand for or against the generally accepted norms that it implies ....
`To claim to show that the traditional representation of the ``Stalin period'' is in many ways quite inaccurate is tantamount to issuing a hopeless challenge to the time-honoured patterns of thought which we are used to applying to political realities in the USSR, indeed against the common patterns of speech itself .... Research of this kind can be justified above all by the extreme inconsistency of the writing devoted to what historical orthodoxy considers to be a major event --- the ``Great Purge'' of 1936--1938.
`Strange as it may seem, there are few periods of Soviet history that have been studied so superficially.'
Ibid. , pp. 1--2.
`There is ... every reason to believe that if the elementary rules of source analysis have tended to be so long ignored in an important area of Soviet studies, it is because the motives of delving in this period of the Soviet past have differed markedly from the usual ones of historical research.
`In fact even the most cursory reading of the ``classic'' works makes it hard to avoid the impression that in many respects these are often more inspired by the state of mind prevailing in some circles in the West, than by the reality of Soviet life under Stalin. The defence of hallowed Western values against all sorts of real or imaginary threats from Russia; the assertion of genuine historical experiences as well as of all sorts of ideological assumptions.'
Ibid. , p. 23.
In other words, Rittersporn is saying: Look, I can prove that most of the current ideas about Stalin are absolutely false. But to say this requires a giant hurdle. If you state, even timidly, certain undeniable truths about the Soviet Union in the thirties, you are immediately labeled `Stalinist'. Bourgeois propaganda has spread a false but very powerful image of Stalin, an image that is almost impossible to correct, since emotions run so high as soon as the subject is broached. The books about the purges written by great Western specialists, such as Conquest, Deutscher, Schapiro and Fainsod, are worthless, superficial, and written with the utmost contempt for the most elementary rules learnt by a first-year history student. In fact, these works are written to give an academic and scientific cover for the anti-Communist policies of the Western leaders. They present under a scientific cover the defence of capitalist interests and values and the ideological preconceptions of the big bourgeoisie.
Here is how the purge was presented by the Communists who thought that it was necessary to undertake it in 1937--1938. Here is the central thesis developed by Stalin in his March 3, 1937 report, which initiated the purge.
Stalin affirmed that certain Party leaders `proved to be so careless, complacent and naive',
J. V. Stalin, Report and Speech in Reply to Debate at the Plenum of the Central Committee of the C.P.S.U. (3--5 March 1937). Works (London: Red Star Press, 1976), vol. 14, p. 241.
and lacked vigilance with respect to the enemies and the anti-Communists infiltrated in the Party. Stalin spoke of the assassination of Kirov, number two in the Bolshevik Party at the time:
`The foul murder of Comrade Kirov was the first serious warning which showed that the enemies of the people would resort to duplicity, and resorting to duplicity would disguise themselves as Bolsheviks, as Party members, in order to worm their way into our confidence and gain access to our organizations ....
`The trial of the ``Zinovievite--Trotskyite bloc'' (in 1936) broadened the lessons of the preceding trials and strikingly demonstrated that the Zinovievites and Trotskyites had united around themselves all the hostile bourgeois elements, that they had become transformed into an espionage, diversionist and terrorist agency of the German secret police, that duplicity and camouflage are the only means by which the Zinovievites and Trotskyites can penetrate into our organizations, that vigilance and political insight are the surest means of preventing such penetration.'
Ibid. , pp. 242--243.
`(T)he further forward we advance, the greater the successes we achieve, the greater will be the fury of the remnants of the defeated exploiting classes, the more ready will they be to resort to sharper forms of struggle, the more will they seek to harm the Soviet state, and the more will they clutch at the most desperate means of struggle as the last resort of the doomed.'
Ibid. , p. 264.
How did the class enemy problem pose itself?
So, in truth, who were these enemies of the people, infiltrated in the Bolshevik Party? We give four important examples.
Boris Bazhanov
During the Civil War that killed nine million, the bourgeoisie fought the Bolsheviks with arms. Defeated, what could it do? Commit suicide? Drown its sorrow in vodka? Convert to Bolshevism? There were better options. As soon as it became clear that the Bolshevik Revolution was victorious, elements of the bourgeoisie consciously infiltrated the Party, to combat it from within and to prepare the conditions for a bourgeois coup d'état.
Boris Bazhanov wrote a very instructive book about this subject, called Avec Staline dans le Kremlin (With Stalin in the Kremlin). Bazhanov was born in 1900, so he was 17 to 19 years old during the revolution in Ukraine, his native region. In his book, Bazhanov proudly published a photocopy of a document, dated August 9, 1923, naming him assistant to Stalin. The decision of the organization bureau reads: `Comrade Bazhanov is named assistant to Comrade Stalin, Secretary of the CC'. Bazhanov made this comment: `Soldier of the anti-Bolshevik army, I had imposed upon myself the difficult and perilous task of penetrating right into the heart of the enemy headquarters. I had succeeded'.
Boris Bajanov, Avec Staline dans le Kremlin (Paris: Les Éditions de France, 1930), pp. 2--3.
The young Bazhanov, as Stalin's assistant, had become Secretary of the Politburo and had to take notes of the meetings. He was 23 years old. In his book, written in 1930, he explained how his political career started, when he saw the Bolshevik Army arrive in Kiev. He was 19 years old.
`The Bolsheviks seized it in 1919, sowing terror. To spit at them in their face would have only given me 10 bullets. I took another path. To save the élite of my city, I covered myself with the mask of communist ideology.'
Ibid. , p. 7.
`Starting in 1920, the open struggle against the Bolshevik plague ended. To fight against it from outside had become impossible. It had to be mined from within. A Trojan Horse had to be infiltrated into the communist fortress .... All the threads of the dictatorship converged in the single knot of the Politburo. The coup d'état would have to come from there.'
Ibid. , pp. 4--5.During the years 1923--1924, Bazhanov attended all the meetings of the Politburo. He was able to hold on to different positions until his flight in 1928.
Many other bourgeois intellectuals had the genius of this young nineteen-year-old Ukrainian.
The workers and the peasants who made the Revolution by shedding their blood had little culture or education. They could defeat the bourgeoisie with their courage, their heroism, their hatred of oppression. But to organize the new society, culture and education were necessary. Intellectuals from the old society, both young and old, sufficiently able and flexible people, recognized the opportunities. They decided to change arms and battle tactics. They would confront these uncouth brutes by working for them. Boris Bazhanov's path was exemplary.
George Solomon
Consider another testimonial work. The career of its author, George Solomon, is even more interesting. Solomon was a Bolshevik Party cadre, named in July 1919 assistant to the People's Commissar for Commerce and Industry. He was an intimate friend of Krassin, an old Bolshevik, who was simultaneously Commissar of Railroads and Communications and Commissar of Commerce and Industry. In short, we have two members of the `old guard of the heroic times' so dear to Henri Bernard of the Belgian Military Academy.
In December 1919, Solomon returned from Stockholm to Petrograd, where he hurried to see his friend Krassin and ask him about the political situation. According to Solomon, the response was:
`You want a résumé of the situation? ... it is ... the immediate installation of socialism ... an imposed utopia, including the most extreme of stupidities. They have all become crazy, Lenin included! ... forgotten the laws of natural evolution, forgotten our warnings about the danger of trying the socialist experience under the actual conditions .... As for Lenin ... he suffers from permanent delirium .... in fact we are living under a completely autocratic régime.'
George Solomon, Parmi les maîtres rouges, Série Anticommuniste du Centre International de Lutte Active Contre le Communisme (Paris: Éditions Spes, 1930), p. 19.
This analysis in no way differs from that of the Mensheviks: Russia is not ready for socialism, and those who want to introduce it will have to use autocratic methods.
In the beginning of 1918, Solomon and Krassin were together in Stockholm. The Germans had started up the offensive and had occupied Ukraine. Anti-Bolshevik insurrections were more and more frequent. It was not at all clear who was going to rule Russia, the Bolsheviks or the Mensheviks and their industrialist friends. Solomon summarized his conversations with Krassin.
`We had understood that the new régime had introduced a series of absurd measures, by destroying the technical forces, by demoralizing the technical experts and by substituting worker committees for them .... we understood that the line of annihilating the bourgeoisie was no less absurd .... This bourgeoisie was destined to still bring us many positive elements .... this class ... needed to fill its historic and civilizing rôle.'
Ibid. , p 36.
Solomon and Krassin appeared to hesitate as to whether they should join the `real' Marxists, the Mensheviks, with whom they shared concern for the bourgeoisie, which was to bring progress. What could be done without it? Surely not develop the country with `factories run by committees of ignorant workers'?
Ibid. , p. 19.
But Bolshevik power stabilized:
`(A) gradual change ... took place in our assessment of the situation. We asked ourselves if we had the right to remain aloof .... Should we not, in the interests of the people that we wanted to serve, give the Soviets our support and our experience, in order to bring to this task some sane elements? Would we not have a better chance to fight against this policy of general destruction that marked the Bolsheviks' activity We could also oppose the total destruction of the bourgeoisie .... We thought that the restoration of normal diplomatic relations with the West ... would necessarily force our leaders to fall in line with other nations and ... that the tendency towards immediate and direct communism would start to shrink and ultimately disappear forever ....
`Given these new thoughts, we decided, Krassin and myself, to join the Soviets.'
Ibid. , pp. 36--37.
So, according to Solomon, he and Krassin formulated a secret program that they followed by reaching the post of Minister and vice-Minister under Lenin: they opposed all measures of the dictatorship of the proletariat, they protected as much as they could the bourgeoisie and they intended to create links with the imperialist world, all to `progressively and completely erase' the Communist line of the Party! Good Bolshevik, Comrade Solomon.
On August 1, 1923, during a visit to Belgium, he joined the other side. His testimony appeared in 1930, published by the Belgo-French `International Centre for the Active Struggle Against Communism' (CILACC). Solomon the old Bolshevik now had set ideas:
`(T)he Moscow government (is) formed of a small group of men who, with the help of the G.P.U., inflicts slavery and terror on our great and admirable country ....'
Ibid. , p. 348.
`Already the Soviet despots see themselves as surrounded everywhere by anger, the great collective anger. Seized by crazed terror .... They become more and more vicious, shedding rivers of human blood.'
Ibid. , p. 351.
These are the same terms used by the Mensheviks a few years earlier. They would soon be taken up by Trotsky and, fifty years later, the Belgian Army's chief ideologue would say things no better. It is important to note that the terms `crazed terror', `slavery' and `rivers of blood' were used by the `old Bolshevik' Solomon to describe the situation in the Soviet Union under Lenin and during the liberal period of 1924--1929, before collectivization. All the slanders of `terrorist and bloodthirsty régime', hurled by the bourgeoisie against the Soviet régime under Stalin, were hurled, word for word, against Lenin's Soviet Union.
Solomon presented an interesting case of an `old Bolshevik' who was fundamentally opposed to Lenin's project, but who chose to disrupt and `distort' it from the inside. Already in 1918, some Bolsheviks had, in front of Lenin, accused Solomon of being a bourgeois, a speculator and a German spy. Solomon denied everything in a self-righteous manner. But it is interesting to note that as soon as he left the Soviet Union, he publicly declared himself to be an avowed anti-Communist.
Frunze
Bazhanov's book, mentioned above, contains another particularly interesting passage. He spoke of the contacts that he had with superior officers in the Red Army:
`(Frunze) was perhaps the only man among the communist leaders who wished the liquidation of the régime and Russia's return to a more human existence.
`At the beginning of the revolution, Frunze was Bolshevik. But he entered the army, fell under the influence of old officers and generals, acquired their traditions and became, to the core, a soldier. As his passion for the army grew, so did his hatred for communism. But he knew how to shut up and hide his thoughts ....
`(H)e felt that his ambition was to replay in the future the rôle of Napoleon ....
`Frunze had a well defined plan. He sought most of all to eliminate the Party's power within the Red Army. To start with, he succeeded in abolishing the commissars who, as representatives of the Party, were above the commanders .... Then, energetically following his plans for a Bonapartist coup d'état, Frunze carefully chose for the various commander positions real military men in whom he could place his trust .... so that the army could succeed in its coup d'état, an exceptional situation was required, a situation that war, for example, might have brought ....
`His ability to give a Communist flavor to each of his acts was remarkable. Nevertheless, Stalin found him out.'
Bajanov, op. cit. , pp. 105--109.
It is difficult to ascertain whether Bazhanov's judgment of Frunze was correct. But his text clearly showed that in 1926, people were already speculating about militarist and Bonapartist tendencies within the army to put an end to the Soviet régime. Tokaev would write in 1935, `the Frunze Central Military Aerodrome (was) one of the centres of (Stalin's) irreconcilable enemies'.
G. A. Tokaev, Comrade X (London: The Harvill Press, 1956), p. 33.
When Tukhachevsky was arrested and shot in 1937, he was accused of exactly the same intentions that were imputed to Frunze by Bazhanov in 1930.
Alexander Zinoviev
In 1939, Alexander Zinoviev, a brilliant student, was seventeen years old. `I could see the differences between the reality and the ideals of communism, I made Stalin responsible for this difference'.
Zinoviev, op. cit. , p. 105.
This sentence perfectly describes petit-bourgeois idealism, which is quite willing to accept Communist ideals, but abstracts itself from social and economic reality, as well as from the international context under which the working class built socialism. Petit-bourgeois idealists reject Communist ideals when they must face the bitterness of class struggle and the material difficulties they meet when building socialism. `I was already a confirmed anti-Stalinist at the age of seventeen', claimed Zinoviev.
Ibid. , p. 104.
`I considered myself a neo-anarchist'.
Ibid. , p. 126.
He passionately read Bakunin and Kropotkin's works, then those of Zheliabov and the populists.
Ibid. , pp. 110, 118.
The October Revolution was made in fact `so that apparatchiks ... could have their state car for personal use, live in sumptuous apartments and dachas;' it aimed at `setting up a centralized and bureaucratic State'.
Ibid. , pp. 111, 113.
`The idea of the dictatorship of the proletariat was nonsense'.
Ibid. , p. 115.
Zinoviev continued:
`The idea of killing Stalin filled my thoughts and feelings .... I already had a penchant for terrorism .... We studied the ``technical'' possibilities of an attack ...: during the parade in Red Square ... we would provoke a diversion that would allow me, armed with a pistol and grenades, to attack the leaders.'
Ibid. , pp. 118, 120.
Soon after, with his friend Alexey, he prepared a new attack `programmed for November 7, 1939'.
Ibid. , p. 122.
Zinoviev entered a philosophy department in an élite school.
`Upon entry ... I understood that sooner or later I would have to join the CP .... I had no intention of openly expressing my convictions: I would only get myself in trouble ....
`I had already chosen my course. I wanted to be a revolutionary struggling for a new society .... I therefore decided to hide myself for a time and to hide my real nature from my entourage, except for a few intimate friends.'
Ibid. , p. 116.
These four cases give us an idea of the great difficulty that the Soviet leadership had to face against relentless enemies, hidden and acting in secret, enemies that did everything they possibly could to undermine and destroy the Party and Soviet power from within.
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