Stalin, Bukharin, and History as Conspiracy
Tucker, Robert C.
The following essay, a detailed examination of the 1938 Moscow Trial at which Nikolai Bukharin was the major defendant, is presented here not only for its intrinsic interest, but as...
...That is, he contrived to make the time of Stalin go down in Russian history as the "time of Yezhov...
...As Bukharin correctly mentioned in his final statement, "the accused in this 12 Norman Cameron: "Paranoid Conditions and Paranoia," in American Handbook of Psychiatry (New York: Basic Books, 1959), p. 519...
...That such an idea would occur to him was all the more likely, in view of a certain tradition in the Russian revolutionary movement before 1917—the tradition of turning trials into antitrials...
...This was to be achieved through breakneck industrialization, emphasiz 8 For an account of the Right Opposition see Robert V. Daniels: The Conscience of the Revolution: Communist Opposition in Soviet Russia (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1960), Chapter 18...
...The 1938 trial of the twenty-one, the transcript of which is presented here in slightly abbreviated form, has good claim to be considered "the great purge trial...
...Then he accepted full responsibility for the mass of counter-revolutionary acts with which the "Bloc" was charged, although in doing so he insisted that this was political responsibility, that as a leader of the alleged conspiracy he was guilty for whatever acts were committed, either by himself or by others in carrying it out...
...Since his death there have been no more show trials in the Soviet Union...
...It is all the more understand 21 The Case of the Anti-Soviet Trotskyite Center (Moscow: People's Commissariat of Justice of the U.S.S.R., 1937), pp...
...To Stalin "socialism in one country" meant a strengthening of the dictatorship and an orientation of the nation's economy towards preparation for total war...
...He could not count—as Lenin before him could not —on automatic acceptance of his policy designs without critical debate and opposition in the inner councils of the Party...
...Stalin had achieved the internal political pur...
...they occurred basically because he relentlessly willed them and was skillful enough to make others do his bidding, just as the "final solution" was perpetrated in Nazi Germany in the last analysis because Hitler fanatically desired to destroy European Jewry and succeeded in imposing his will upon the totalitarian machine of the state...
...Thus the denial of the criminal charges was an organic part of the whole strategy of exposing and convicting Stalin through his own self-accusation...
...The master theme running through it all and giving it a dramatic unity is the great anti-Soviet conspiracy...
...Some criminal acts mentioned in the trial actually occurred...
...We were completely at sea.15 According to Beck and " Godin, two purge victims who lived to write a book about it, the "enemies of the people" were asking the very same questions during their interrogation period and afterwards in the camps: "There was no question that 15 Op...
...First, we have rea son to doubt that the Moscow trials were in fact a means of preparing the country to withstand the test of war...
...He wanted to use them as a means of communicating to Hitler the seriousness of his interest in a collaborative arrangement, and simultaneously as a way of softening the shock that a Stalin-Hitler pact would inevitably cause in Russia and especially in the world Communist movement...
...while the Germans and the West fight it out...
...The other five, four in person and one in absentia, were leading defendants in the Moscow trials...
...This was a way of saying: Stalin and his men have ways of demolish ing a person's resistance by playing upon his innermost feelings, ways that hardly anyone can resist unless he is a Trotsky, that is, unless he is living in Mexico or somewhere else outside the reach of the N.K.V.D...
...Accordingly, we may view the trials as vehicles for the acting out of something similar to a paranoid delusional system complete with central theme (the great conspiracy) and malevolent pseudo-community ("Bloc of Rights and Trotskyites," etc...
...18 And it must be borne in mind that the great majority of these victims were from the Party and non-Party governing strata of Soviet society, including professional people of all kinds and technicians...
...But Western opinion has tended to accept the general idea that Stalin's major concern was to assure a solid internal situation in the face of the threat of German invasion...
...The wrecking activities, aimed both at undermining the economy and at stirring up anti-Soviet feeling which would hamper the defense effort in time of war, included deliberate mismanagement of the ruble and state savings banks by Finance Commissar Grinko, deliberate infecting of pigs with the plague through efforts of Agriculture Commissar Chernov, and the mixing of glass and nails into butter by arrangement of the head of the consumer cooperatives, Zelensky...
...Tucker's analysis will raise a variety of fascinating problems...
...The great counter-revolutionary conspiracy itself represents, as it were, the highly systematized sum total of all these hidden meanings, treated as true...
...imagination could he now identify Stalin's regime with historic Bolshevism or see Stalin himself as other than anti-Bolshevik...
...The lives of others, however, do appear to have been at stake...
...and those effects were easily predictable...
...he is spending this year at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford...
...There is nothing sweeter in the world...
...By the late 1920's he had become the acknowledged supreme leader of the Party and state...
...The great anti-Soviet conspiracy around which the whole case is organized was quite imaginary...
...In short, it was evidence of probable participation in a criminal conspiracy or, at the very least, of an intention to participate in one...
...On the other hand, these real facts and incidents are all falsified in the manner in which they were presented at the trial...
...Rykov was dismissed as Premier and Tomsky was removed from leader...
...cit., p. 234...
...For those of our readers who recall from their own experience the storm of controversy raised by the Moscow Trials, Mr...
...Here I should like simply to point out that Soviet post-Stalin disclosures corroborate earlier reports by N.K.V.D...
...Now it is a "paradox of history," the article goes on, that though the masses are regarded by the fascist ideologues as Untermenschen, the rulers in order to retain control must deceive the people by creating an illusion of being with and for the masses...
...Indeed, the propensity to stage these political dramas in the courtroom is one of the telltale symptoms of that still imperfectly understood phenomenon of the modern age called "totalitarianism...
...Here the court proceedings become literally a dramatic performance in which not only the judge and the prosecutor but also the defendant or defendants play prearranged parts just as actors do on the stage...
...Speaking at a conference of Soviet historians late in 1962, P. N. Pospelov, director of the Institute of MarxismLeninism, declared that "neither Bukharin nor Rykov of course were spies or terrorists...
...21 Similar allusions are made by Bukharin and others in the 1938 trial...
...A press campaign of vilifica tion of the former right-wing leaders ensued, and in early September a meeting was reportedly called in the Central Committee to consider their expulsion from the party...
...And his determination to force through the Great Purge and the trials was dictated by powerful motives that were peculiarly his own and not widely shared in the Soviet ruling elite...
...He is especially well-known for his book, Philosophy and Myth in Karl Marx...
...and the divergence between them reflected a real division of tendencies in the Soviet leadership that was ended only by the Great Purge...
...Here Bukharin is saying between the lines that in one of its aspects this trial is a sort of medieval witchcraft trial, and that we should not take the confession per se seriously, since in such a trial the witch, as a matter of course, has to 32 An important rule to bear in mind in translating Bukharin's Aesopian language in the trial is that a certain spacing is necessarily involved...
...Another widely held belief was that the events of the time were the work of the N.K...
...25 In Stalin's Secret Service, pp...
...chief, Yagoda, who had made a deep study of the history of murder by poisoning and had planned, among other crimes, to murder Yezhov by poisoning the air in his office with mercury dissolved in an acid...
...Nicolaevsky for his permission to reveal this here...
...Now there was no possibility for Bukharin to deliver such an oration in one of Stalin's show trials...
...Consequently, to get a fully free hand for the diplomacy of the Soviet-Nazi alliance, Stalin needed to eliminate or expel thousands of foreign as well as Soviet Communists and to achieve in external as well as internal policy the absolute autocracy that, as we have seen, only the Great Purge brought him...
...Bukharin himself hints at his resistance...
...Earlier that year, it will be recalled, Trotsky had been deported from the country...
...Most Western specialists accept this account as on the whole trustworthy, although there is some dispute about the particulars, e.g., whether the reported meeting was a full plenary session as reported by Avtorkhanov or a more informal meeting of high-ranking persons within the Central Committee...
...In Darkness at Noon, for example, the Stalinist investigator Gletkin appeals to Rubashov-Bukharin to render a final service to the Party by going on trial and thereby helping to consolidate the country behind the Stalin regime in the face of an imminent danger of war, and Rubashov performs this service, although with deepening doubt of the moral validity of the Revolutionary cause to which he had devoted his life and was now sacrificing it...
...We must recognize, to begin with, that Bukharin agreed to participate in the trial only under some kind of duress...
...The medical murders had been committed by well-known Soviet doctors on orders of the N.K.V.D...
...Stalin is seeking by these means to pave the way for an alliance with the German fascists which will precipitate a second world war in which he expects to remain at least temporarily uninvolved while we build cannon and airplanes and assimilate Eastern European territories that we will occupy under the deal...
...Only because our party has at its disposal such great moral-political strength," he says in the secret report, "was it possible to survive the difficult events in 1937 1938 and to educate new cadres...
...others did not...
...Why Bukharin thought Stalin's plan would lead to disaster was explained shortly after in another editorial, which was unsigned but bore indications (for example, the characteristic touch of quoting from Shelley's "Masque of Anarchy") of 27 The Aesopian message was very probably intended for the Western world as well as for Soviet and foreign communist circles...
...But the versions of the theory just mentioned, and others similar to them, encounter certain objections...
...Bukharin rejected the criminal charges not with a view to pleading innocent in the trial but rather with a view to making more clear where his real guilt lay—in the political field...
...The three right-wing leaders publicly renounced their "deviation" in November, and open opposition came to an end...
...Bukharin refers in one place to "my terminology" in order to convey that he is using words in special ways of his own...
...History has witnessed many examples of this misuse of the court in the form of political trials, in which governments exploit the courtroom for such aims as the defamation and defeat of their political opponents...
...Since it would be out of the question to say such things openly in the courtroom, they would have to be conveyed by indirection...
...It has not taken account, or sufficient account, of the role of the dictator and his personality in determining the conduct of the regime, the dynamics of totalitarianism itself, in such truly totalitarian situa 18 For the computations of the estimate of nine million, see Alexander Weissberg The Accused (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1951), pp...
...3 Among some political prisoners in concentration camps this belief took the form of a theory that fascists had wormed their way into positions of power under Stalin...
...If in the one aspect it was a trial of Bukharin, in the other it was obviously, in Bukharin's eyes, a trial of Stalin...
...It was likewise, as I shall argue below, the scene of an encounter between Vyshinsky and the chief defend...
...We wish to thank the publisher for permission to print the essay below...
...Whereas non-Party specialists, socalled "bourgeois remnants," had figured prominently in the earlier show trials, now the cast of the accused contained many of the great names of Bolshevism...
...The crux of the show trial is the confession...
...20 N. Leites and E. Bernaut: Ritual of Liquidation: The Case of the Moscow Trials (Glencoe: The Free Press, 1954), p. 111...
...confess...
...Written, Directed, and Produced by Stalin In reality it was the time of Stalin...
...He says further that "the first thing to be understood" is that he and any others like him ("the enemy") have "a divided, a dual mind...
...This trial was staged in 1928, the year of Stalin's emergence into ascendancy in the post-Lenin regime...
...After the Congress Bukharin became not only editor of Izvestia but also a member of the commission set up in February 1935 to draft a new Soviet constitution, which was to show by its humanistic and democratic features the chasm that separated the Soviet order from fascism...
...Krestinsky, who was Soviet ambassador in Berlin in the 1920's, un doubtedly had conversations with German military men...
...Vyshinsky spoke for the prosecution, but we must understand that he spoke with the voice of Stalin...
...Emerging from the events of 1936-1938 as a personal dictator in what was now a truly totali tarian system of power...
...Fiction Carefully Blended With Falsified Facts What unfolds before us in the trial, then, is a gigantic texture of fantasy into which bits and pieces of falsified real history have been woven along with outright fiction...
...In fact he was the arch-criminal of Bolshevik political history according to the picture of events that unfolded in the course of the three Moscow trials...
...We do not yet have any official Soviet statistics on the total losses resulting from the Great Purge, but it has been credibly estimated that around nine million persons were arrested during it...
...from establishing the best of relations with that country...
...Rubashov, the Old Bolshevik hero of Arthur Koestler's well-known novel about the purge trials, Darkness at Noon, appears to have been drawn, at least in part, upon the model of Bukharin...
...defectors and purge victims who later escaped to the West that torture and extreme pressure, including threats of doing harm to loved ones, were employed...
...For though there were strong resemblances between communism and fascism as institutional structures, the revolutionary intellectuals of the Bol aims and values if not their institutions were fundamentally different from those of the German Nazis...
...The outcome of the whole process was a veritable circulation of the Soviet elite...
...On the contrary, the system would have been better off and far more equipped to meet the coming test of total war had there been no Great Purge, which was, in effect, a great wrecking operation in Soviet society...
...Marshal Tukhachevsky and his fellow officers of the "military conspiratorial group" mentioned in the Bukharin trial are now declared to have been entirely innocent, patriotic Soviet citizens and devoted Party members done to death on trumped-up treason charges...
...Both Trotskyite and Right oppositions had from the start been subversive movements motivated by criminaI anti-Soviet aims rather than genuine oppositionist convictions...
...Nor did it see this conflict as centering in the hostile activities of masked enemies operating inside Soviet society...
...I met Boris Pasternak in Lavrushensky lane...
...the heads of N.K.V.D...
...In the present instance the task would be to demonstrate by indirection that Stalin was committing what in Bukharin's eyes was the supreme political crime—destroying Bolshevism...
...VYSHINSKY: Don't trouble to speak for history, accused Bukharin...
...His speech at the Seventeenth Party Congress early in 1934 was notable not only for his tribute to Stalin's policy and leadership but also for the impassioned warning and outcry against Hitlerism with which he concluded...
...How could he accomplish this...
...Bukharin could hardly have been insensitive to such an approach...
...Christ, speaking to Peter, once said: Feed my sheep( But what do the popes do...
...I have not said a single word in my defense...
...The conspirators also had entered into a secret agreement with Japan under which she would render armed assistance in overthrowing the Soviet government and later be recompensed with the Maritime Region in the Soviet Far East...
...The peasant disturbances were a reaction to forced collectivization, not a product of rightwing plotting, and livestock was lost in great numbers because peasants slaughtered their animals in resistance to collectivization...
...Now this scheme bears a definite and, as I shall suggest been involved in a terrorist plot to further on, understandable resemaccomplish this...
...Next, Stalin, for all his pathological suspiciousness, was shrewd and discerning enough to realize that in a national crisis brought on by a Nazi invasion of Russia, even his worst old Party enemies would rally instantly and unreservedly around the war effort and his personal leadership of it...
...Thus many of the purge victims were staunch Stalinists with no taint of real oppositionism in their records...
...Starting with lavish praise of the "Stalin Constitution" that had by then been drafted and submitted for nation-wide public discussion, Bukharin expounded the theme that "real history" had not proceeded in our time along the routes previously predicted...
...It is notable in this connection that Party members (both Soviet and foreign) who could be suspected of being genuinely anti-fascist Communists were particularly hard hit as a class by the mass repressions of 1936-1938...
...Hugo Dewar describes, for example, as follows the reaction of The Times of London in 1936 and 1937: "The trials, it thought, reflected the triumph of Stalin's 'nationalist' policy over that of the revolutionary diehards...
...World history is a world court of judgement" (my italics...
...Others soon followed: the trial of Professor Ramzin and the "Industrial Party" in 1930, the Menshevik trial in 1931, and the Metro-Vickers case in 1933...
...This charge, repeated later in the trial, carried the significant implication that the anti-Stalin Communist opposition had been standing in the way of developing fruitful diplomatic relations between the Soviet and Nazi governments...
...man villainy," Bukharin was able not only to convict Stalin of putting Bolshevism on trial but to catch him, as it were, red-handed in the act and show him up before the world in the process...
...The show trial, however, is one of the special hallmarks of the Stalin era and of Stalinism...
...Total subservience to Stalin was now established as the first requirement for survival and political advancement...
...A full analysis of them is beyond the scope of this essay, but I will comment on three principal facets of the motivation...
...In the secret report to the Twentieth Congress Khrushchev cites a coded telegram sent out by Stalin to 3 The Moscow trials understandably aroused enormous interest in the West...
...He could not dictate his will to the ruling elite at the level of the Politburo and Central Committee without fear of being contradicted...
...it is the premise on which all of Stalin's most ominous suspicions about what was going on behind his back would have been well founded...
...In any event, it went on: "Stalin is doing a notable service to fascism by mowing down in large armfuls his enemies who have been reduced to impotence...
...Well and good...
...The "Bloc of Rights and Trotskyites" never existed as an organized conspiratorial group seeking to undermine the Soviet state and overthrow the Stalin government...
...He himself tells us this in a brilliant display of Aesopian language in his final statement...
...Only in this event would it be clear that when, as Bukharin put it, "out of certain deviations monstrous conclusions are formed by the logic of the struggle," these monstrous conclusions and the paranoid-like logic that pro duced them were Stalin's...
...It is notable, however, that the criminal conspiracy charges against Bukharin and Rykov have already been dismissed publicly...
...Hitler's unopposed occupation of the Rhineland in March 1936 hardened Stalin's resolve to make a deal with Germany if possible, and this in turn spurred his efforts to proceed with the full-scale internal purge towards which he had long been moving for other reasons...
...So it was vital to Bukharin's whole case in the anti-trial to show that he had been a Bolshevik oppositionist in relation to Stalin and not, as Vyshin sky was trying very hard to show, a criminal element masquerading for long years as a Bolshevik revolutionary...
...13-14...
...Finally, the view that the Great Purge and the trials were preparation for a coming conflict with Hitler collides with evidence that Stalin at this time was not in fact preparing for conflict with Hitler but for collaboration with him...
...In the next breath he said it would be something that would cost him the sacrifice of his revolutionary reputation and pride: "And at such moments, Citizens, Judges, everything personal, all the personal incrustation, all the rancour, pride, and a number of other things, fall away, disappear...
...There were others, such as Yenukidze and Karakhan, who refused to do this and went to their death without public trial...
...Here the series of show trials staged during the Great Purge reached its climax...
...This idea defines the rules of the trial game, or "rules of translation" as they have been called?a A whole table of equivalences was accepted in which, for example, antiStalin = "counter-revolutionary," oppositional activity = "treason," anti criticism and use the awareness of actual insignificant criticisms as the reality basis for their delusions...
...For while the pact of August 1939 came as a shock to the international Communist movement, which, suffered significant defections as a result of the disgust many felt at this turn of events, the shock would have been all the greater and more damaging to the movement and to Stalin had he not, by means of the purge trials, compromised the notion that no Communists, and no Old Bolsheviks in particular, would have friendly dealings with the Nazis...
...17 Such instability, in turn, " is treated as a functional requisite of totalitarianism as a system...
...Furthermore, the theory of the last service in its conventional forms would lead us to expect Bukharin to play his part in the show trial in active cooperation with the prosecutor or at any rate in a spirit of resignation...
...put to survive it...
...Dedijer: Tito, New York: Simon and Schuster, 1953, p. 106...
...Is it not clear, then, that for Bukharin a last service to the Party and the Revolution could consist only of a last denunciation of Stalin for betraying and ruining both...
...Something has been 4 A widely shared opinion sees the Great Purge as an attempt to prepare the Party and the country for the coming test of total war by consolidating the home front in advance...
...Could there be a more eloquent refutation of the purge trials than that amazing gap in the otherwise abundant evidence of Hitler's preparations for the war...
...would work out the legend for his case: " 'You yourself,' said Zakovsky, 'will not need to invent anything...
...we know this from our work with him...
...the Nazis was presented particularly in the 1937 and 1938 trials, as one of the most heinous acts of treason on the part of the accused...
...But this deception must sooner or later come to light: "Its perpetrators have it in mind to gain for themselves an historical respite by sending everything into the yawning abyss of war...
...The fight that he put up against Vyshinsky was entirely dedicated to this purpose, and his tac tics all through the trial were precisely calculated to fit the needs of the anti trial strategy...
...In 1947 the French philosopher M. 11ferleau-Ponty published a small book, Humanisme et Terreur, which was devoted largely to a critique of what the author called Koestler's "Rubashov-Bukharin" and to an interpretation along different lines of Bukharin's decision to confess...
...Professor Tucker's essay forms the Introduction to a volume to be published this spring by Grosset & Dunlap, The Great Purge Trial, edited by himself and Stephen F. Cohen...
...In the initial session Krestinsky publicly retracted his pre-trial confession, intimating that he had confessed under duress...
...According to Deutscher, "His reasoning probably developed along the following lines: they may want to overthrow me in a crisis—I shall charge them with having already made the attempt...
...In actuality, whereas socialism raises the mass, enriches the content of personality, and elevates the intellectual functions, fascism "creates a depersonalized mass, with blind discipline, with a cult of Jesuitical obedience, with suppression of the intellectual functions...
...I shall accuse them of having entered already into a treacherous alliance with Germany (and Japan) and ceded Soviet territory to those states...
...Although he came to loathe Stalin and wished it were possible to unseat him from power, he had not laevsky in Paris in 1936 not for conspiratorial anti-Soviet purposes but in order to negotiate, on behalf of the Communist Party, for purchase of the Marx-Engels archives from the German Social Democratic Party...
...In one of his meetings with Boris Nicolaevsky in Paris in early 1936, Bukharin said that his unsigned editorial articles in Izvestia written after the murder of Kirov had contained various passages in which he had tried to reveal by indirection the substance of issues then under debate behind the scenes in higher Party circles...
...Given this inhibition, which was rooted in his need to see himself as the perfect leader "of genius" (genial'fly the term constantly used of him in Russia in his later lifetime), it followed logically that any opposition, whether open or merely a subtle suggestion of a critical attitude, must be a sign of hidden hostile designs and must stem from an enmity all the more deep and dangerous in that it was often concealed behind an appearance ("mask") of loyalty and friendliness...
...I am indebted to Mr...
...Nor was it a course that the Bolshevik leaders as a group could find politically compelling and psychologically acceptable, as Stalin did...
...As we re-examine the problem of the Moscow show trials, then, it is essential to bear in mind that these were basically one-man shows of which Stalin himself was organizer, chief producer, and stage manager as well as an appreciative spectator from a darkened room at the rear of the Hall of Columns, where the trials were held...
...for readers too young to remember the Trials, this account should be of special value in making them familiar with one of the major events of our time...
...organizations and other officials on January 20, 1939, saying that methods of "physical pressure" in N.K.V.D...
...This military purge itself accounts in considerable measure for the Red Army's poor performance during most of the Finnish 22 Stalin: A Political Biography, pp...
...The Tukhachevsky military group, whose representatives in the Central Committee had supported the pro-Bukharin majority, were arrested and executed in June 1937...
...Did this not impart a strongly anti-fascist coloring to these trials...
...He could look at a man and say: 'Why are your eyes so shifty today' or 'Why are you turning so much today and avoiding to look at me in the eyes?' The sickly suspicion created in him a general distrust even toward eminent party workers whom he had known for years...
...This was an esoterically phrased death sentence and was carried out by the agent of Stalin who assassinated Trotsky in Mexico in wards the end of his life, considered 1940...
...The man whom many believed to be incompletely informed about the Great Purge was in fact running it...
...No one could give me an answer...
...wise...
...Taking up the theme of the puzzlement that Western European and American intellectuals were showing over the Moscow trials and particularly over the confessions, Bukharin stresses that he has retained his "clarity of mind" and he dismisses fanciful hypotheses that would explain the confessions as based on hypnotism or a mysterious "Slavic soul" or a Dostoyevskyan psychology of self-abasement, etc...
...In these terms the trials were saying: If the anti-Stalin Communists were ready and willing to bargain with the Nazis for anti-Soviet purposes of defeating and dismembering the U.S.S.R., what is so bad about striking a bargain with Berlin that will serve Soviet interests by expanding our territorial possessions and keeping us out of war 5 The conduct of Bukharin at his trial has long fascinated the Western mind...
...their tragedies were caused by often quite accidental career associations...
...As a person whose whole life had been bound up with the Party and the Revolution, 29 Orlov: The Secret History of Stalin's Crimes, pp...
...V.D...
...This way of thinking is based upon an image of totalitarianism, in whatever form, as a fundamentally impersonal phenomenon, a system in which virtually all, including the highest functionaries of the state, are essentially cogs in a machine...
...Stalin's speech at the Seventeenth Congress reflected a very different line toward Hitler's Germany...
...The latter informed him that the N.K.V.D...
...But this gesture availed him nothing, for a little later on in the trial, after unknown events transpired behind the scenes, he retracted his retraction and from then on played his part unresisting...
...Stalin, knowing Bukharin well, undoubtedly realized that he would do this...
...Bukharin alone, who all too obviously in his last words fully expected to die, was manly, proud and almost defiant...
...Other opposition movements rose and fell in the Party during the turbulent first years of its rule, and factionalism flourished in spite of the formal prohibition of it in the resolution on Party unity adopted by the Tenth Party Congress in 1921...
...The words 'Why...
...But only in a surface sense was this a defensive move...
...Khrushchev points to this mechanism when he says in the secret report that the category "enemy of the people" was applied to "those who in any way disagreed with Stalin" as well as to "those who were only suspected of hostile intent" or "had bad reputations" (that is, politically...
...He was not a coldblooded cynic who viewed his villainy as villainy and accepted it as such...
...tions as Germany under Hitler and Russia in the time of Stalin...
...He would do this by foregoing a speech of defense and delivering instead a revolutionary oration, a denunciation of his accusers, their motives, their policies, and their social order...
...We have no evidence that physical torture was used in Bukharin's case, or that a deal was struck to spare his life if he cooperated, for he made it rather clear in the trial that he expected no mercy for himself...
...Certain "false prophets" (by subtle allusion Stalin is indicated to have been foremost among them) had failed, for example, to foresee that fascism would emerge as the greatest international problem...
...excited the prisoners so much as that which the reader must already have asked himself time and again...
...If the German Embassy in Moscow followed the 1938 trial closely, it must have noted that the defendant Bessonov, who had been counselor of the Soviet Embassy in Berlin at the start of the Nazi era, pleaded guilty in the very first session to receiving and acting on orders from Deputy Foreign Commissar Krestinsky and also from Trotsky to obstruct a "normalization of relations between the Soviet Union and Germany...
...In 1937-I938, according to data in Khrushchev's secret report, 98 members and candidates of the Central Committee, or 70 per cent of the total, were arrested and shot...
...Why...
...And one must be a Trotsky not to lay down one's arms...
...These two men were executed in 1937 without public trial...
...Others too have contributed to this literature, and no examination of the great purge trial would be complete without an effort to solve the problem of Bukharin's motivation...
...The crucial message is contained in Hegel's dictum on world history as the world's court of justice...
...A telltale sign of the presence of an Aesopian point in a given passage is a certain suggestion of incoherence or lack of full coherence at this place...
...able according to this view that Stalin, as has been reported, played a leading part in devising the legends for the trials...
...In short, it was Lenin's political testament, according to Bukharin's reading, that socialism could and should be built without an intensified class struggle in Soviet society and without such a violent "third revolution" as was plainly implicit in the Stalin program...
...For as Bukharin put it in an Aesopian passage of his final statement, speaking of his confession: "But here we also have the internal demolition of the forces of counter-revolution...
...regime in which Stalin would enjoy unlimited personal power...
...There is reason to believe, moreover, that he was one of the leading drafters of this document...
...ant, Nikolai Bukharin, who endeavored by a technique of indirection to transform his trial into an anti-trial, an indictment and conviction of his accuser, Stalin...
...Ehrenburg probably gives part of the answer when he speaks of their wish to believe other...
...In this regard the verbatim report here presented is a document out of the history of human psychopathology...
...EDITOR BUKHARIN: It must be said for the sake of historical exactitude...
...What for?' 16 " These Russians were asking the real main question, and it is one that scholars need to reopen in the light of the new information and better perspective that we now possess on the events of the time...
...I believe, on the contrary, that their acceptance of the rules of translation was strictly a forced acceptance, and that they did not consider the fables true even in some special sense...
...It is true that Yagoda, a one-time pharmacist, was knowledgeable in the history of murder by poisoning...
...The world of the Great Purge and the purge trials, peopled by multitudes of masked enemies conspiring to destroy Stalin's regime and Stalin himself, was Stalin's own mental world...
...But the whole plan will lead only to disaster...
...The official handbook of the American Psychiatric Association describes paranoia as "characterized by an intricate, complex, and slowly developing paranoid system, often logically elaborated after a false interpretation of an actual occurrence," and adds: "The paranoid system is particularly isolated from much of the normal stream of consciousness, without hallucinations and with relative intactness and preservation of the remainder of the personality, in spite of a chronic and prolonged course" (Mental Disorders: American Psychiatric Association, Washington, D.C.: 1952, p. 28...
...It is evident that he was not fighting in any real sense to defend himself or to save his life, since any small chance of saving his life would only have been erased by the very fact that he put up this fight...
...All this was to say: My tactics in the anti-trial are tactics of self-accusation...
...Stalin knows only vengeance," Bukharin declared...
...Thus Bukharin's opposition to Lenin over Brest-Litovsk harbored no anti-Lenin conspiratorial designs, and nothing in the world was more foreign to his makeup than a desire to harm Lenin...
...32 The trial, he says, has an aspect of confession, but this is not the crux of it: "The confession of the accused is not essential...
...Naturally, Stalin could not have engineered the Great Purge without the zealous and capable assistance of many others, among whom his police chiefs, Yagoda and Yezhov, deserve special mention...
...26 It was not simply that these people, including the great majority of Old Bolshevik leaders, would have found it very hard to stomach a treaty with the Nazis...
...The defendant plays the leading part by confessing in vivid detail to heinous crimes allegedly committed by himself and others as part of a great conspiracy...
...According to Krivitsky, Stalin's inclination to make a deal with Hitler was strengthened by the latter's successful blood purge of Captain Roehm and his group on the night of June 30, 1934, an event that Stalin construed as evidence of the consolidation of Hitler's regime...
...268 Since the Moscow trials a voluminous literature has grown up in the West on the question of why the defendants confessed...
...To have resisted pressure for so long was in itself a remarkable feat...
...In this process much significant information has been brought to light...
...The confession of the accused is a medieval principle of jurisprudence...
...This view that Bukharin was not trying to defend himself may seem to be contradicted by what was said earlier here about his denial of guilt under the specific criminal charges...
...chief prosecutor in these cases...
...political playwrights for acting out by prisoners in trials, then obviously the central super-conspiracy, with which all the lesser conspiratorial centers around the country were alleged to be linked, was similarly a fabrication...
...They could have gone along, if reluctantly, with a simple non-aggression arrangement with Berlin...
...24 If an anti-Hitler diplomacy was implicit in Bukharin's speech, the diplomacy of the 1939 pact was prefigured in Stalin's...
...The problem of the Moscow trials, and of this one in particular, takes on still greater interest at present owing to the post-Stalin Soviet disclosures concerning the Great Purge and the purge trials...
...Lack of objective incriminating facts about an individual was no obstacle to unmasking him, since he could be accused of potential oppositionism...
...But these men as well as their subordinates were essentially Stalin's accomplices and tools, not independent figures acting in their own right...
...The reader will note that a great deal of the discourse between Vyshinsky and the defendants proceeds on the tacit understanding that an imputation of criminal conspiracy may be made on the basis of oppositional acts or attitudes...
...Nor could the Polish Communist Party (which was simply dissolved in the Great Purge) be expected to acquiesce supinely in a new partition of Poland between Russia and Germany...
...This was a reference to something Stalin had said one summer night in 1923 to Kamanev and Dzerzhinsky: "To choose one's victim, to prepare one's plans minutely, to slake an implacable vengeance, and then to go to bed...
...Political trials have taken place throughout the history of Soviet Russia, from Lenin's time to the present...
...There was, as we have seen, a real history of opposition activity, a "Riutin platform," a 1928 anti-Salin talk between Bukharin and Kamenev, and so on...
...He argued carefully and convincingly here that the essence of Lenin's final position was that the building of a socialist system in Russia should be achieved through a long process of "peaceful organization and cultural work" (Lenin's words, italics by Bukharin) and specifically without coercion of the peasantry...
...What I should like to do here is to outline some of the evidence for an interpretation of it that relies in part on what is called "Kremlinology," that is, the analysis of Soviet political processes as reflected in esoteric communication or veiled controversy in published Soviet materials...
...On July 11, 1928, in an interview with Kamenev later published abroad by the Trotskyites, Bukharin said that his group considered Stalin's line fatal to the Revolution...
...Had there been any foundation at all for the charge that the accused collaborated with the Nazis and Japanese, the captured archives of the defeated Axis powers and the memories of their surviving leaders should have furnished evidence of this collaboration...
...And Trotsky, although not physically present in the dock, was being tried in absentia...
...Rendering a Last Service to the Party It is very likely, however, that in the case of Bukharin, as in some others involving former leaders of the Party, Stalin and his men also made use of certain blandishments, including the invitation to play the trial role as a "last service" to the Party and the Revolutionary cause...
...Boris Nicolaevsky has estimated that from five to eight million persons were victims of the Great Purge...
...custody with proposed sentences indicated upon them...
...He pleaded guilty to "the sum total of crimes committed by this counter revolutionary organization," but thereupon suggested that not only did he not take part in but he even lacked knowledge of "any particular act" involved...
...During Vyshinsky's summing-up speech, which preceded his own, he was observed furiously taking notes...
...In its second aspect, Bukharin was saying, this trial is taking place before the bar of history...
...So we must look for the sequence of his argument in a series of separate passages each of which contains some one component of it...
...But not everything falls in this category...
...charges brought against so many thousands of Party members at that time...
...But he evidently decided upon it, in part, because it would be a meaningful political act in terms of all that he had set store by in his previous political life...
...This is not my defense, it is my selfaccusation," he said elsewhere...
...Why...
...ship of the trade unions...
...And insofar as the politics of the purge and the trials were externally oriented, they were, as I shall now try to show, a preparation for the active alliance of the two dictators which was thereby inaugurated...
...This case will be ready in four-five months, or perhaps a half year...
...Secondly, a great lesson to be learned from a study of the events of that time is that our theory of totalitarianism has unduly neglected the personal factor...
...The following essay, a detailed examination of the 1938 Moscow Trial at which Nikolai Bukharin was the major defendant, is presented here not only for its intrinsic interest, but as a contribution to the discussion of totalitarianism which has been conducted recurrently in our pages...
...Why, Then, Did They Confess...
...General Yakir, one of those arrested in 1937 in the Tukhachevsky case, is said to have shouted at the moment he was shot: "Long live the Party, long live Stalin...
...Under his guidance the N.K.V.D., assisted by Vyshinsky and others, was confirming the reality of it and making it appear still more concretely and convincingly real by arresting huge numbers of Soviet citizens, compelling them to confess that they had been masked enemies, and putting on show trials in which leading former oppositionists and others publicly proclaimed themselves guilty of high treason...
...In the Bolshevik political tradition, however, this did not make him an absolute autocrat like the Russian Tsars, for no such position had been institutionalized in Lenin's one-party system...
...A fullscale treatment of the development of the views of the right-wing group in the 1920's will be presented in a forthcoming study by Stephen F. Cohen: Bukharin and the Politics of Right Communism: 1923-1929...
...In his secret report to the Twentieth Party Congress, Khrushchev tells, for example, how Yezhov would send to Stalin for his approval lists of persons in N.K.V.D...
...What enabled Bukharin to accomplish this purpose by this means was his own stature in the Russian Communist movement...
...There is, however, no doubt that our march forward toward socialism and toward the preparation for the country's defense would have been much more successful were it not for the tremendous loss of cadres suffered as a result of the baseless and false mass repressions in 1937-1938...
...A Rationale For Terror But this political purpose was connected with psychological needs...
...The one among them who voiced this feeling most effectively, the intellectual leader of Bolshevik anti-fascism, was Bukharin...
...The StalinHitler Pact It is a mistake to look upon the diplomacy of the pact with Hitler as the only possible course the Soviet government could have followed at the end of the 1930's...
...Although he did not claim personal authorship, Stalin was the chief playwright of the case of the "Anti-Soviet Bloc of Rights and Trotskyites" and the other cases enacted in the show trials...
...gogicheskikh kadrov po istoricheskim naukam (Moscow, 1964), p. 298...
...More than Trotsky, who had always been something of an independent quantity, more than Zinoviev and Kamenev, and unquestionably more than Stalin, who claimed the title, Bukharin had a basis to be considered "Lenin today...
...In 19371938," he says, "383 such lists containing the names of many thousands of Party, Soviet, Komsomol, Army and economic workers were sent to Stalin...
...He was preparing the diplomacy of the Soviet-Nazi pact that was finally concluded, on Stalin's initiative, in August 1939...
...He did make a point of admitting and even underlining the enormity of his guilt...
...Everywhere and in everything he saw 'enemies,' 'twofacers' and 'spies.'" This description of a personality of pronounced paranoid tendency is supported by further testimony from a variety of sources, both Soviet and non-Soviet...
...But a policy of outright imperialistic aggression in collaboration with Nazi Germany would have been extremely repugnant to very many of them, as Stalin knew...
...Meyerhold said: 'They conceal it from Stalin.' One night...
...Unquestionably it cost him great agony to go through the experience of having his whole revolutionary past besmirched and being accused of what to him would be quite inconceivable acts such as conspiring to kill Lenin or to destroy the Soviet order...
...Some addressed anguished appeals to Stalin from N.K.V.D...
...He cautioned the Germans against thinking that the U.S.S.R...
...If Bukharin came off remarkably well in this en counter, despite all the disadvantages of his situation compared with Vyshin sky's, one reason lay in the fact that his contention was true...
...There was an active effort on Bukharin's part to transform the trial into an anti-trial...
...In memoirs published long after Stalin's death the writer Ilya Ehrenburg recalls what went on in the minds of Soviet intellectuals during the Great Purge: "We thought (perhaps we wanted to think) that Stalin knew nothing about the senseless violence committed against the Communists, against the Soviet intelligentsia...
...Meanwhile Stalin, who was at bottom interested only in power, was determined to strangle the opposition...
...According to a sophisticated version of it that has been expounded by Isaac Deutscher in his influential biography of Stalin, the point of the purge trials was to forestall any disruption of the future war effort, and Stalin's leadership of it, by eliminating those leaders with a record of political dissent who might be inclined to unseat him in a crisis...
...Do they not fleece their sheep continually, and cut into their flesh whilst shearing them...
...Why did they confess...
...In passing sentence in the second trial, the court directed that he and his son be arrested and tried if apprehended on Soviet territory...
...Elsewhere we read that the paranoid individual "is constantly looking for hidden meanings in the statements and activities of those about him" (R...
...Stalin has been called, and with a good foundation, a technician of power...
...In this connection we have Bukharin's own word for it that he consciously endeavored to communicate messages to the outside world by the use of veiled language in press articles...
...A crucially important point that emerges from the post-Stalin Soviet revelations about the Great Purge is that Stalin personally conceived, initiated, and directed the entire process, including the planning, preparation, and actual conduct of the purge trials...
...Of course, the Great Purge, once it started, acquired a self-propelling momentum of its own as a result, largely, of the N.K.V.D...
...If the cases of so many thousands of "honest and innocent Communists" were fabricated, if mythical "anti-Soviet centers," "blocs," and "plots" were invented in full detail by expert N.K.V.D...
...been viewed as a necessity or deeplying tendency of totalitarianism as a system...
...Reacting to the Bukharin trial then taking place in Mos cow, the commentary asked whether in view of the catastrophe of Lenin's system, Stalin could secretly have become a fascist...
...M. Dorcus and G. W. Schaffer: Textbook of Abnormal Psychology, Baltimore: Williams and Wilkins, '1950, p. 438...
...derhanded methods, the original Bolshevik or Leninist ideology did not view the international class war as a conflict being waged by essentially conspiratorial means...
...Thus Merleau-Ponty ascribes to Bukharin an acceptance in principle of that peculiar Stalinist algebraic formula according to which any opposing of Stalin = "counterrevolutionary terrorism...
...What he contemplated, as his alliance with Hitler in 1939-1941 showed in retrospect, was a kind of Moscow-Berlin axis, an active collaboration of the two dictatorships for territorial expansion, the division of spheres of influence in Eastern EuNo J. Lederer, (ed): Russian Foreign Policy: Essays in Historical Perspective (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1962...
...Stalin's supporters in the Politburo supported the Yezhov motion in the ensuing dis 11 There was no official announcement of this meeting...
...But the idea that this was his motive at the time he planned and directed those events appears unsound...
...By undergoing the ordeal of defamation to which Stalin and Vyshinsky systematically subjected him all through the trial, by permitting and indeed inviting Vyshinsky to cover him with a torrent of vituperative abuse as "the acme of monstrous hypocrisy, perfidy, jesuitry and inhu...
...Algebra" of Trials Rejects Stalin's Mind What I am arguing, then, is that the "algebra" of the Moscow trials was a reflection of the general way in which their organizer's mind actually worked...
...lo From this 9 Boris Souvarine, Stalin: A Critical Survey of Bolshevism (New York: Alliance Book Corporation, 1939), pp...
...A change of government may weaken Russia's fighting said already about the internal political ends...
...Not the needs of the Soviet system but Stalin's own needs, both political and psychological, underlay the events of 19371938 in Russia...
...Under certain conditions it comes to be employed for ends extraneous and alien to its proper primary purpose, which is to promote justice through the determination of guilt or innocence by the open examining and arguing of evidence...
...But he would do so in his own way, speaking his lines according to the Stalin-Vyshinsky script but at the same time saying between these lines whatever he could say to make his point...
...For this purpose, of course, it was necessary to indicate that he was not guilty of certain things...
...you will have to study it carefully and remember well all the questions and answers which the Court might ask...
...Patients with persecutory ideas are extremely sensitive to and country in the early 1930's, when Stalin began planning the Great Purge, were crawling with traitors...
...The summing-up speech of the prosecutor, Vyshinsky, in the 1938 trial is the classic presentation of the ideology of the Moscow purge trials in its full-blown development, and the trial itself may justly be regarded as the supreme production in the Stalin genre of political show trial...
...Bukharin, moreover, certainly saw them as a means of preparing for the Soviet-Nazi alliance, and it is unimaginable that he could have brought himself to a decision to take part in the show trial in order to help Stalin pave the way for his pact with Hitler...
...It contained some sheer fabrications, such as the allegations about the espionage connections of the accused and their collaboration with Nazi Germany and Japan...
...188-189...
...He contended that the elimination of himself and Rykov was a necessary part of this conspiratorial plan and that what was now being decided, therefore, was not the "Bukharin question" but the fate of the country...
...The trials themselves, with their charges that the accused were plotting to act as a fifth column in a war with the fascist powers, invited such an interpretation...
...Stalin himself must have been aware that the onslaught upon the Soviet managerial elite was not calculated to make the Soviet system and economy better able to withstand the test of war...
...It required, first of all, simply a decision to go on trial something that he in any event was being coerced to do...
...One way, and under the circumstances the only way, was simply to go on public trial and thereby permit Stalin, his accuser, to convict himself symbolically of destroying Bolshevism by committing the judicial murder of him...
...Italics by Bukharin...
...We have testimony from the lips of no less an authority than Khrushchev that the Soviet order, far from requiring the Great Purge, was hard 17 The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1951), p. 376 n. For an elaborated interpretation of the Stalinist purge in terms of postulated functional needs of the Soviet system, see Zbigniew K. Brzezinski: The Permanent Purge: Politics in Soviet Totalitarianism (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1956), esp...
...Nor was it understood by the Soviet public and intelligentsia, who had no access to such sources of information...
...The Soviet regime had admitted this, although unfortunately it has not yet done so in a wholly unambiguous and comprehensive manner...
...Merleau-Ponty, on the other hand, in effect makes out Bukharin to be a man who dialectically arrived on his own at Gletkin's kind of reasoning...
...It may even be that nails and glass had in places turned up in Soviet butter...
...However, this is a game of winner take all in which they will lose everything...
...Before his arrest he had even pictured Stalin as engaged in transforming Soviet communism into a Soviet form of fascism, and he had attempted to warn the Party and the world that Stalin was scheming to make common cause with Hitler in a great and ill-starred political gamble that would bring on World War II and destroy the Soviet Union...
...Stalin meanwhile went on maneuvering...
...It would be unforgivable blindness," it said, "not to see that it is the land of Soviets that attracts the most savage hatred of the unbridled adventurists...
...capacity...
...2 Memoirs: 1921-1941, translated by T. Shebunina in collaboration with Y. Kapp (Cleveland and New York: World Publishing Co., 1963), pp...
...This most audacious and desperate of Bukharin's essays in anti-Stalin Aesopian polemics27 may be translated as follows: Do not take the Stalin Constitution and its democratic phraseology seriously...
...The plot is ascribed to a "paranoid pseudo-community," which is "an imaginary organization, composed of real and imagined persons, whom the patient represents as united for the purpose of carrying out some action upon him...
...Some savings banks were mismanaged, timber-floating operations were disorganized, the supply of school exercise books was in places interrupted, the sowing of vegetables was misplanned, and there were various goods shortages—facts which are men tioned in the trial—and these and like situations did create much popular discontent...
...investigator Zakovsky...
...Moreover, the Germans could not but know that many of the principal trial defendants, above all Bukharin, had been foremost among the anti-fascist Communists, and that a sizable proportion were Jews...
...Picturing Lords Lothian, Londonberry, and others as "fawning on Hitler," it recalled the war dead of 1914-1918 and asked: "How are the sons of England sleeping in Flanders fields...
...318-325...
...How true or false was this conspiratorial view of Soviet history...
...What for?' The question was endlessly argued...
...But there was much political method in this psychopathology...
...An essen tial part of the answer is that he regarded opposition to or criticism of himself—and there had been a great deal of both in the history of the Party—as evidence of profound malevolence and treasonable tendencies...
...Just as the 'monsters' in a dream may represent an 'amoeba' from daily life, so the monster of a paranoid delusion may be a misapprehended real microbe" (The Psychoanalytic Theory of Neurosis, New York: Norton, 1945, p. 428...
...The number of those who were executed at the time has been estimated by a high Yugoslav Communist source at three million (V...
...Otto Fenichel writes that "the hatred is never projected at random but is felt usually in connection with something that has a basis in reality...
...The court, like every human institution, is corruptible...
...He was under arrest for well over a year before the trial, and says in his final statement: "For three months I refused to say anything...
...Nicolaevsky for pointing out to me in this connection that the three principal defendants in the 1938 trial, Bukharin, Rykov, and Krestinsky, all had children with whom they were very close, whereas Yenukidze and Karakhan, both of whom would have been in Stalin's eyes logical candidates for major roles as defendants in this trial, did not...
...First, the Great Purge, as has been remarked above, was in effect a great wrecking operation in Soviet society...
...We must remember his theory of sweet revenge...
...He was the 4 This and all further references to Khrushchev's secret report are based on the text as originally printed in The New York Times for June 5, 1956 and reprinted in The Crimes of the Stalin Era (NewYork: The New Leader, 1956), with annotations by Boris I. Nicolaevsky...
...Bukharin's Last Article— "Thoughts Aloud" That this was his plan must have become clear to Bukharin upon his illfated return to Moscow from Paris in early April 1936, and in his final months of circumscribed freedom he did what he could to resist...
...This smearing of the accused as both fascist in mentality and bent on collaborating with the Nazis was prepa...
...make the requisite deep impression upon the Western mind...
...The basis has, of course, to be extremely exaggerated and distorted in order to be made available for this purpose...
...Ehrenburg recalls in his memoirs: "I realized that people were being accused of crimes which they had not and could not have committed, and I asked myself and others: why, what for...
...But all these were mere curtain-raisers for the series of major show trials during Stalin's Geat Purge of the Communist Party in 1936-1938...
...His own final statement was so little pleasing to Stalin that it was not, like the preceding parts of the verbatim record, printed in full in the next day's Pravda but only briefly summarized...
...Dora Kaplan did make an attempt on Lenin's life, Sergei Kirov was in fact assassinated, and it may be, although this is not definitely confirmed, that Gorky was murdered by poisoning...
...Presenting Stalin's case against them, Yezhov at this meeting moved for the expulsion of Bukharin and Rykov on the ground that they, along with Trotsky, Zinoviev, and Kamenev, had been involved since 1918 in a "monstrous conspiracy" in the course of which they had become agents of the Gestapo and were even now plotting, in concert with the Trotskyites, a coup d'etat...
...I am again indebted to Mr...
...Of course, we are far from enthusiastic about the fascist regime in Germany," he said...
...And further: "Many thousands of honest and innocent Communists have died as a result of this monstrous falsification of such 'cases.'" To illustrate the methods by which N.K.V.D...
...Publication of this interview proved extremely damaging to Bukharin and the Right Opposition...
...43-47...
...These motives may seem implausible in view of the fact that negotiating a deal with 28 To say that the Western world failed to decipher Bukharin's messages and grasp the meaning of developments afoot in Russia at that time would be putting it kindly...
...Bukharin must have been fully aware of the futility of such a course...
...This helps to explain the probably unanticipated extent of the holocaust in Soviet society...
...10 For an account of this meeting see Leonard Schapiro: The Communist Party of the Soviet Union...
...Even in the fateful Central Committee session of March 3-5, 1937, during which Stalin's two speeches were signals for intensification of the Great Purge as it entered the final period, he carefully posed as a force for moderation by cautioning in conclusion against "a heartless attitude toward people" and castigating unnamed Party leaders who were expelling party members with reckless abandon and "think it a mere bagatelle to expel thousands and tens of thousands of people from the Party...
...The "Aesopian" message here was that Stalin, who was pillaging the peasantry and leading the people to starvation with the catastrophic forced collectivization campaign then in progress, had thereby turned against the true heritage of Bolshevism as embodied in Lenin's political testament...
...By what mechanism of thinking did Stalin apprehend "enemies," "twofacers," and "spies" all around him when, as we know, there was no real anti-Soviet conspiracy afoot...
...To purge those Party members who had opposed him in the past was not enough for this purpose...
...In our time totalitarian regimes have adopted and perfected the show trial...
...in another, to that of the anti-trial...
...It will be a totally despotic regime based on police terror and suppression of the Party leadership and the intelligentsia ("intellectual functions...
...It need not be supposed that he believed them altogether literally...
...The men in Berlin well knew that the charges of treasonable dealings with Nazi Germany were baseless...
...in fact, the climax of the Great Purge in 1937-1938 became known in Russia as the Yezhovshchina, or "time of Yezhov...
...Bukharin, their foremost theorist and the soul of the Right Opposition, bore the brunt of the fight...
...cause fascism had come to power in Germany...
...Thus in a Pravda article of March 7, 1930, which was ostensibly a long polemic against the papacy in general and Pope Pius in particular for his newly published encyclical on communism, Bukharin skillfully conveyed that "popes" meant Stalin and his followers, "Jesuit order" the Stalinist N.K...
...Perhaps on this account the theory of the "last service" figures prominently in the Western literature about Bukharin on trial...
...And though he had been tested by Stalin in the postLenin struggles in the Party, his prestige in the eyes of a generation of Party members was very great...
...Given the intricate system of patronage that prevailed at all levels in the Party and state bureaucracy, the purge of a major figure logically entailed the purge of his patronage groups of associates and retainers, many of whom had lesser patronage groups of their own, and so on...
...He approved these lists...
...Stalin's program went into effect during the First Five-Year Plan (19281933) at ghastly cost to the country in strain, dislocation, privation, sacrifice, and suffering...
...After comparing Stalin with Genghis Khan, Bukharin said that conditions were ripening in the Central Committee for dismissing Stalin but were not yet fully ripe...
...cells, protesting their innocence...
...Of special political significance was a passage that he quoted here from a book on Church history, saying: "If they (the popes, N. Bukharin) kill the soul, then why have they a right to call themselves succes sors of Christ...
...At the beginning of 1929 he was still editor of Pravda, and he made a final open attempt to oppose Stalin's course in an article on "Lenin's Political Testament" published in Pravda on January 21, the fifth anniversary of Lenin's death...
...In the first of the great show trials, the Zinoviev-Kamenev trial of August 1936, several defendants named Bukharin, Rykov, and Tomsky (the last-named committed suicide at this time) as co-participants in the criminal activities to which they confessed...
...The man to whom some appealed for justice over the head of the N.K.V.D...
...By no stretch of political 31 Escape to Adventure (Boston: Little, Brown, 1950), p. 74...
...A large part of the answer is that he wanted to achieve an unrestricted personal dictatorship with a totality of power that he did not yet possess in 1934...
...The N.K.V.D...
...For the purge trials had, in the first place, a political symbolic function, which was to provide a rationale for the purge, to make publicly meaningful the campaign of arrests that was going on night after night...
...For they did not occur as elements in a vast anti-Soviet conspiracy...
...We must also take account of the traditional Russian habit of absolving the Tsar of personal responsibility for flagrant injustices, which were thought to be the work of evil ministers who kept the Tsar in ignorance of the people's sufferings...
...And the other aspect...
...Stalin: A Political Biography, New York: Vintage Books, 1960, p. 379 n...
...Quoting the Nazi poet who had said, "Every time I hear the word 'culture' I reach for my Browning," he eloquently portrayed Hitlerism's cult of blood and violence, and foresaw for the Soviet Union an unavoidable collision with this irrational force: "This is what stands before us, and these are the ones whom we shall have to face, comrades, in all those stupendous historical battles that history as laid on our shoulders...
...The duel that rages between the two all through the great purge trial is thus one in which Vyshinsky argues that all Bukharin's purported political acts were really crimes and Bukharin maintains that all his alleged crimes were really political acts...
...He says here that "when the cases of some of these socalled 'spies' and 'saboteurs' were examined, it was found that all their cases were fabricated...
...A sub-category of the political trial is the show trial...
...was in fact directing all its activity...
...The final and finished expresion of this conspiratorial interpretation of contemporary history is to be found in the pages of the trial transcript here presented...
...defectors such as Krivitsky and Orlov has been fully and convincingly confirmed by official Soviet sources of the post-Stalin period...
...By the time of the Seventeenth Party Congress in 1934, however, the situation in the country had eased...
...One of the tendencies in Western writings has been to answer it by reference to postulated functional needs of the Soviet system as a form of "totalitarianism...
...In the discussion that started then and went on for a good many years, two questions were asked most insistently and discussed at greatest length: Were they guilty...
...He would do so, and try to save his family by complying with that basic and irreducible demand...
...Stenografcheskii otchet sian or Jewish by origin, felt that their (Moscow, 1934), pp...
...In the course of it he made a move to secure support from Stalin's old leftwing opponents Zinoviev and Kamenev...
...Who Conceived, Directed The Great Purge...
...He met with Nico- blance to textbook descriptions of a paranoid delusional system...
...26 "We even met prisoners who had been prophesying the Hitler pact since 1938, simply on the basis of categories that had been arrested" (Beck and Godin: op...
...Secondly, it required the pursuit of certain tactics during the trial which I shall comment upon presently...
...V.D., "heresy" the opposition viewpoint, and so on...
...Bukharin thus has a twofold objective in the trial—to comply with Stalin by confessing and at the same time to turn the tables on him...
...Where is the similarity of their institutions...
...Vyshinsky replied at this point: "I know what you mean by algebra, but I must now deal not with algebra but with facts...
...What for?' were to be found scratched with smuggled bits of broken glass on the inside walls of the 'black raven,' and the coaches of the prison trains...
...But a further and crucial part of the explanation is that Stalin contrived to hold himself aloof and in the background so that people would not understand his true role in the events of few, most of whom perished before the end...
...To these men "socialism in one country" meant a program of gradual industrialization without forcible measures to collectivize the Russian peasantry, continual alleviation of the harsher aspects of the dictatorship, and in foreign affairs a tendency to de-emphasize the policy of fomenting revolution in Europe in favor of efforts to cement diplomatic ties with and secure economic credits from the Western democracies .8 Having taken over the slogan of "socialism in one country" from this source and used it with signal success against the Left Opposition, Stalin subsequently gave it an interpretation very different from that of the right-wing leaders, whose position was stigmatized at the end of the 1920's as the "Right Opposition...
...Still more to the point, he repeated several times in the trial that he wished not to defend but to accuse himself...
...It must be said that no evidence has appeared to support this hypothesis...
...Thus deception is the essence of fascism: "An intricate network of decorative deceit (in words and deeds) is the extraordinarily essential characteristic of fascist regimes of all kinds and complexions...
...If any surviving Old Bolshevik had special claim to represent the original Bolshevik heritage and the link with Lenin, who was the founder and moving spirit of Bolshevism, it was Bukharin...
...These writers express here the view that the defendants "accepted" these rules of translation because (1) they shared a contemptuous belief that the masses can only understand a simple and extreme story, and (2) they had come to feel that the fables they agreed to tell were in some special sense true...
...280-281...
...During all this time you will be preparing yourself...
...The Great Purge And Soviet Society A different approach seem to be suggested by all that we now know...
...Stalin went on to indicate clearly that a rapprochement with Berlin was not to be excluded, if Soviet interests would be served thereby and if, within Hitler's government, a pro-Soviet tendency should prevail over an antiSoviet one...
...If we suppose (as seems reasonable) that Bukharin's consent to take part in the trial represented in some sense a deliberate political choice as well as a bowing to coercion, then the idea that he wanted to render a last service to his cause is highly plausible...
...ambassador in Moscow, Joseph Davies, in taking the position (in his wartime book Mission to Moscow) that the treason charges had been factually true...
...was now orienting itself toward France and Poland be shevik Old Guard, most of them Rus- 23 XVII S'ezd vsesoiuznoi kommunisti cheskoi partiu (b...
...He wants to make it two trials in one...
...His activity as stage manager 5 Joseph Stalin: Mastering Bolshevism of these events was carried on behind (New York: New Century Publishers, the scenes and was known only to a 1946), p. 45...
...point on the Right Opposition went down to defeat...
...According to this logic, which is similar to if not actually paranoid logic,t9 the Party 19 Speaking of paranoid delusions, Dr...
...Probably not many informed people followed the former U.S...
...This statement is borne out by testimony from a variety of sources...
...He disclaimed all knowledge of his alleged connections with the German fascists, denied ever having spoken of opening the front in time of war, rejected the charge of plotting the assassination of Lenin, Stalin, and Sverdlov in 1918, failed to recall ever having directed anyone to engage in wrecking activities, categorically denied all connection with foreign intelligence services as well as any complicity in the assassination of Kirov, Gorky, and his son, and so on...
...What he meant by this is indicated by further statements a little later on...
...He denied, as we have seen, that the defendants constituted a conspiratorial group in the sense of the trial indictment...
...That he would have wanted to do this, if he could, is quite clear from evidence already cited in these pages...
...377 378...
...But fascism is beside the point, if only because fascism in Italy, for example, has not kept the U.S.S.R...
...and if they succeed, they may be compelled to sign a truce with Hitler, and perhaps even agree to a cession of territory as we once did at Brest-Litovsk...
...These others, particularly Bukharin and Rykov, have not yet been restored to places of honor in the history of the Party...
...In the "Testament" Lenin himself had said of him: "Bukharin is not only the most valuable and biggest theoretician of the Party, but also may legitimately be considered the favorite of the whole Party...
...An account appears in Ura lov (pseudonym of Abdurakhman Avtork hanov, a Party official and historian then living in the U.S.S.R): The Reign of Stalin (London: Bodley Head, 1953), pp...
...And when Stalin died in March of 1953, he was in the midst of preparations for one more great and macabre show trial in Russia—the trial of a group of Kremlin doctors, most of them Jewish, on charges of conspiracy to commit medical murder of Soviet leaders on instructions from the Anglo-American intelligence services...
...Preparing for the Shock Of the Hitler Alliance The trials had, finally, the function of softening in advance the shock that the treaty of alliance with Hitler would administer to Soviet and world Communist opinion...
...practice, which had been permissible from 1937 on, should continue to be applied "obligatorily" to "known and obstinate enemies of the people as a method both justifiable and appropriate...
...The terrorist acts had included the assassination of the Leningrad Party leader Sergei Kirov in 1934, and the medical murder of two other prominent Party leaders, Kuibyshev and Menzhinsky, and of Maxim Gorky and his son...
...The trials are thus in large part intricate exercises in the ferreting out of sinister terroristic hidden meanings in activi ties of the chief defendants which consisted mostly of critical or oppositional talk, especially about Stalin...
...It seems very likely that the physical liquidation of the overwhelming majority of this highest ruling body in the Soviet system was connected at least in part with the events just recounted...
...De-Stalinization has meant, in no small part, a process of exoneration and rehabilitation—posthumous in very many cases—of purge victims...
...The Political Symbolical Function of the Trials We are here particularly concerned with the purge trials...
...Another and key unfulfilled aim of the conspirators had been the murder of Stalin...
...Now the Old Bolsheviks and other Party members who shared their outlook were revolutionaries, not oldfashioned Russian imperialists...
...Why did so many Russians, including some high-ranking victims of the purge, fail to understand that Stalin was the moving spirit and director of the whole business...
...12 That the conspiratorial master theme in the case of the "Anti-Soviet Bloc of Rights and Trotskyites" was fictional is no longer subject to dispute...
...23 This " part of the speech reportedly made a strong impression upon the assembly...
...5 By such " means Stalin successfully carried out one of the greatest acts of deliberate deception in modern political history...
...And while the deceitful fascist elite allows that its people own the means of production only "spiritually," for its own part it means to own "cannon," "airplanes," and "lands in the east of Europe" not in a .,spiritual" sense only, but materially...
...I, p. 228...
...This was reported by Khrushchev in his secret speech to the Twentieth Party Congress...
...It is true that testimony to the same effect had reached us from other sources much earlier...
...The crux of this maneuver was that a revolutionist on trial for attempting to overthrow the existing order would seek to turn the tables upon his accusers and place them on trial before the court of public opinion and history...
...Nor would the course followed by Krestinsky meet the needs of the anti-trial strategy...
...agents whose function in the trials was to assist the prosecution in special ways by blackening the principal accused...
...Khrushchev's secret report on Stalin to the Twentieth Party Congress in 1956, although not published inside the Soviet Union to this day, was nevertheless the fountainhead of an official Soivet literature about the purges that went on accumulating during the years of Khrushchev's ascendancy and has continued to flow even after his fall from power in October 1964...
...It pictured the erstwhile Left and Right oppositions as two interconnected prongs of a con spiracy of many years standing to destroy the Revolution and the LeninStalin regime...
...History will itself record what will be interesting for history.—FROM THE TRIAL...
...He is the first of the fifty-four men who have faced the court in the last three public treason trials who has not abased himself in the last hours of the trial.30 Fitzroy MacLean, who attend " ed the trial as an official representative of the British Embassy in Moscow and later wrote a vivid account of it, pictures Bukharin, in giving his final 30 The New York Times, March 13, 1988 . statement, as standing there "frail and defiant," admitting in principle the justice of the case against him and then proceeding "to tear it to bits, while Vyshinsky, powerless to intervene, sat uneasily in his place, looking embarrassed and yawning ostentatioUSly.31 " What Was Bukharin Trying to Achieve...
...Meanwhile there was one last episode of opposition to Stalin on the part of Bukharin...
...Periodical blood purges, accompanied by such events as the Moscow show trials, have 16 F. Beck and W. Godin: Russian Purge and the Extraction of Confession (New York: Viking Press, 1951), p. 215...
...The Bolshevik Old Guard In the Prisoner's Dock The three big purge trials staged in Moscow in 1936-1938 and widely known abroad simply as the "Moscow trials" hold a special place in this history...
...3 Documents of the Twenty-second Congress of the CPSU (New York: Crosscurrents Press, 1961), Vol...
...But its leaders, he declared, were Stalin and Yezhov, who were plotting and acting to change the Bolshevik Party regime inherited from Lenin into an N.K.V.D...
...Authorities describe a paranoid system as an intricate, schematized, and logically elaborated structure with a "central delusional theme" involving a hostile plot of which the person concerned is an intended victim...
...Then, after World War II, which brought a respite in this business, show trials were resumed on Stalin's orders and under the direction of Stalin's agents in a number of countries of Eastern Europe which had come under Soviet domination...
...will prepare for you a ready outline for every branch of the center...
...In short, it para doxically tended, if not to establish in advance the political respectability of Stalin's plan for the pact with Hitler, at least to diminish its disreputability...
...Bukharin's personal authorhsip...
...Chapters 5 and 10...
...But the anti-trial was much more than a passive act of self-sacrifice de signed to dramatize by Bukharin's own fate that Stalin was condemning Bol shevism...
...Bukharin and Rykov had long been connected with foreign intelligence services through accomplices, and Krestinsky, Rosengoltz, and Rakovsky had been agents of foreign powers since the early 1920's...
...In any event, the way was now cleared for the trial of Bukharin and Rykov, which opened in March 1938...
...chief, Yezhov...
...And there are indications, as we have seen, that such debate and occasional opposition continued even in the early 1930's...
...To Choose One's Victim . right-wing leaders were opposed in principle to the Stalinist "general line" and fought it as hard and as long as they could...
...As of this writing (December 1964) several of the defendants in the Bukharin trial, including Krestinsky, Grinko, and Ikramov, have been similarly rehabilitated, which of course shatters the entire case, since their testimony interlocks at so many points with that of the other defendants...
...Some peasant outbreaks did occur in the early 1930's and there was great loss of livestock then...
...Bukharin had helped inspire the terrorist attempt on Lenin's life by Dora Kaplan in August 1918...
...in a coming war...
...To understand Stalin's special motive for getting rid of them, we must remember that he visualized the coming pact with Hitler as more than merely a way of securing temporary safety from invasion and buying time for further defense preparation...
...Though the latter became identified with Stalin, it originated with a group of "Right Communists" headed by Bukharin, who had now shifted to a moderate position, Alexei Rykov, and the trade-union leader Mikhail Tomsky...
...ration for Stalin's collaboration with them—in the sense that it undermined the whole idea that communism stood for anti-fascism, and spiked in advance the thought (which certainly would have occurred to many in Russia and the Communist movement) that the Old Bolsheviks, unlike Stalin, would 280 have avoided the Soviet-Nazi pact on anti-fascist principle...
...Hence my tactics of self-accusation are my way of placing my accuser on trial for his crimes against our party...
...The defendants confessed because they were forced to...
...Later in 1929 Bukharin was expelled from the Politburo and dismissed from his positions as editor of Pravda and member of the Executive Committee of the Comintern...
...Since that was prior to Hitler's rise to power, he went on, the group could not possibly have been formed on instruction of fascist intelligence services...
...Accordingly, the question of Stalin's motives is first of all the question of what he wanted to achieve by the purge as a whole...
...A special commission of inquiry appointed by the Party Central Committee to look into the events of 1937-1938 found "nothing tangible" at the bottom of the treason 13 On this...
...Your future will depend on how the trial goes and on its results.' This description, incidentally, accords with the accounts of surviving victims of the purge who found their way to the West and published stories of their experiences...
...Khrushchev states further: "Confessions of guilt of many arrested and charged with enemy activity were gained with the help of cruel and inhuman tortures...
...I suggest, therefore, that his aim in the contest was offensive rather than defensive...
...Stalin, he said, was leading the country to famine, ruin, and a police regime with his program of exacting "tribute" from the peasantry for forced industrialization, and was ideologically justifying this line with an argument of "idiotic illiteracy" to the effect that resistance and therewith internal class conflict must grow as socialism grows...
...But at the same time we have a mass of textual evidence and eyewitness testimony to the effect that there was a play within the play of the show trial, and that the inner play was a real contest between Bukharin and Vyshinsky...
...We have evidence for the view that in engineering the events of 19361938 he really believed himself to be cleansing the Soviet land of treason...
...First, the phenomena in question were not at all functional necessities of the Soviet system...
...First of all, as mentioned earlier, he made a special effort to underline his own great guilt...
...war and its staggering setbacks in 1941-1942...
...For it seems to me that in one of its many aspects the verbatim report is a kind of laboratory for the study of Soviet politics by the Kremlinological method...
...Superficially it did, but let us take a closer look...
...Thus "Trotsky" may, as in an instance mentioned above, mean "counter-revolutionary" in terms of the show trial and "person living abroad" in terms of the anti-trial...
...Significant Departures From Prepared Script During the trial Bukharin, even though he had to speak in broad conformity with a script prepared in advance to suit his accusers, fought constantly...
...On the basis of his pre-trial political past we can see that the crime for which he would have wanted, if possible, to condemn Stalin before the court of history was that of desecrating the memory of Lenin, betraying what the Revolution stood for, and crushing the Party...
...But they have not.13 The non-existence of the great counter-revolutionary conspiracy has been admitted by the Soviet regime since Stalin's death...
...Stalin grouping = "conspiratorial terrorist center," anti-Stalin political orientation = "orientation on terrorism," etc., the general formula being that any opposing or criticizing of Stalin or his policies = "counter-revolutionary terrorism...
...The implication is that the trials served not alone the above-mentioned political symbolic function of rationalizing the Great Purge but, at the same time, the psychological symbolic function of rationalizing Stalin's own paranoid tendency...
...Such spectacles have antecedents going back to the medieval witchcraft trials in which the accused confessed to riding on broomsticks at night and passing through keyholes for their evil purposes...
...Thus he intervened on occasion to impugn by a single question the credibility of a defendant who had testified against him (see, for example, his question to Ivanov in the morning session of March 3), and at one point he directly described two of the defendants, Ivanov and Sharangovich, as police agents ("agents provocateurs...
...pose of the Great Purge...
...But for some time Hitler showed no receptiveness to feelers from the East...
...It began with the Shakhty case, in which a number of Soviet and foreign engineers who had worked in the Donets coal basin confessed to participating in a conspiracy to commit crimes of industrial sabotage, or "wrecking," on orders from abroad...
...But this he did not do...
...New York: Random House, 1959), p. 373...
...Some actual facts have been mentioned in the foregoing summary, and many more appear in the voluminous trial proceedings themselves...
...system of forced denunciation under which each arrested person was coerced not only to admit participating in a non-existent conspiracy but also to name those who had recruited him into the imaginary conspiratorial center and those whom he himself had recruited...
...It is only a decorative facade of political deceit behind which Stalin is moving to create, by means of a huge blood purge, a new Soviet regime of fascist complexion which will be a denial of the Marxist ideals of the Russian Revolution...
...Certain points regarding the motives of Bukharin, who seems to have been something of a special case, will be made below...
...Khrushchev, who related this story at the Twenty-second Party Congress in 1961, explains: "He thought that enemies had infiltrated the organs of the People's Commissariat of Internal Affairs...
...To see more clearly to what extent the Bolshevik Old Guard was on trial, it may be useful to recall that when Lenin to the problem of choosing a successor in a letter that became known in the Party as his "Testament," he mentioned the names of six prominent party figures: Trotsky, Stalin, Zinoviev, Kamenev, Bukharin, and Piatakov...
...Only if the public saw the accused Bukharin as a political man would it see that the accuser Stalin was destroying a political tendency, condemning Old Bolsheviks for their Bolshevism...
...His last signed editorial article appeared in Izvestia on July 6, 1936, under the title "Routes of History" and with a subtitle ("Thoughts Aloud") that alerted the knowing reader, by its very unusualness in the Soviet press, to ex pect something significant...
...Robert Tucker is a Professor of Politics at Princeton University and director of its program in Russian studies...
...That Bukharin was putting up a fight is clear enough, but what was he fighting for...
...rope, the Balkans, and even the Middle East...
...It forms an elaborate unified system in the sense that everything hangs together in a coherent, logical, and internally, self-consistent whole...
...That others in the party shared this view of the events of the time is shown by the clandestine circulation of the so-called "Riutin platform," in which a former follower of Bukharin bitterly assailed Stalin for his policies and called for his removal...
...Nevertheless, he appears to have found and put into practice a method of achieving his purpose...
...On this view Bukharin, though not guilty of the counter-revolutionary crimes with which he was charged, nevertheless sees in his dialectician's mind that he was guilty, since oppositionism in any form was tantamount to treason under the precarious conditions of existence of the Soviet state in the 1930's...
...But if negotiating with the Nazis was not their real crime, was it, in Stalin's eyes, a crime at all...
...This function was served, in particular, by the charges against the Trotskyite and Right Oppositions of negotiating a deal with the Nazis...
...officials "manufactured various fictitious 'anti-Soviet centers' and 'blocs' " and "fabricated 'anti-Soviet plots,' " he cites the case of a survivor, one Rozenblum, who told the commission how, after being subjected to terrible torture, he was brought before the N.K.V.D...
...But the reasons for staging them must be seen in the context of the motives for the total purge, in which thousands were executed or sent to camps by administrative order for every one who was placed on trial in public...
...He had long before begun to view Stalin as a coarse bungling political leader who was ideologically illiterate on crucial points and was leading Lenin's party and the Bolshevik Revolution to ruination out of a monstrous appetite for personal power...
...Do they not lead the Christians, completely pillaged by papal plundering, to starvation...
...Zinoviev and Kamenev headed the lists of sixteen accused in the trial of the "Trotskyite-Zinovievite Terrorist Centre" in August 1936...
...Indeed, it was over the "Bukharin question," as we noted earlier, that Stalin appears to have encountered finally a real if belated attempt in the Party leadership to oppose his plans for the Great Purge, Not Self-Defense But an Anti-Trial Bukharin was thus in a position to dramatize by his own self-immolation in the show trial what Stalin was doing to Bolshevism...
...Stalin's tendency to identify oppositionism with treason was linked with his inability to tolerate the thought that oppositional or simply critical attitudes towards him could have any real basis in imperfections of his mind and character or in flaws in his leadership, and policies...
...He cannot, without being too obvious, present a whole sequence of his own points in any one passage, but must confine himself to saying one thing...
...The shortages, disruptions of supply, and general disorganization in the land were generated by Stalin's convulsive "third revolution" rather than by deliberate "wrecking" activity in connection with a conspiracy...
...14 14 Vsesoiuznoe soveshchanie o rnerakh uluchsheniia podgotovki nauchno-peda...
...But an interpretation of the trials must also take account of their external political purpose, their connection with Stalin's foreign policy...
...I did not want to minimize my guilt, I wanted to aggravate it," he said in one place...
...Bukharin, along with Alexei Rykov, Lenin's successor as Chairman of the Council of People's Commissars, led the list of twenty-one defendants in the trial of the "Anti-Soviet bloc of Rights and Trotskyites" in March 1938...
...Some of it comes from Khrushchev, who says in the secret report: "Stalin was a very distrustful man, sickly suspicious...
...From Open to "Aesopian" Opposition—Then None Though open opposition ceased, Bukharin, an exceedingly adroit thinker and talented writer, continued on occasion to convey criticism of Stalin by a technique of indirection, or double-talk, that was known among the older revolutionaries who had developed it under Tsarist censorship conditions, as "Aesopian language...
...In the mid-1920's the Trotskyite or "Left Opposition," joined in 1926 by Stalin's former allies Zinoviev and Kamenev, vainly opposed its program of rapid industrialization and "permanent revolution" to the platform of "socialism in one country...
...cussion...
...Putting all this together, the fascist leaders could very reasonably infer from the trials that Stalin was seriously getting ready to do business with them...
...He must have realized too that the preparedness and morale of the army would scarcely be furthered by the purging of 35,000 officers (the estimated number of those affected) along with the high command headed by the immensely able Tukhachevsky...
...To a considerable extent the trials fulfilled this devious design...
...Cameron adds that the malevolent pseudo-community may be conceived as a gang of international spies, a secret police force, or a racial or religious group...
...Piatakov, along with Karl Radek, former Secretary of the Communist International, were the leading names in the group of seventeen accused in the case of the "AntiSoviet Trotskyite Centre" in January 1937...
...A further presupposition of his mode of communicating is that symbols have multiple meanings...
...Now the essence of convicting someone of a crime is to demonstrate that he has committed it...
...With Lenin's death the Party's inner conflicts intensified...
...In preparation for functioning as a fifth column and opening the front in time of war, the conspiracy had engaged in espionage, wrecking activities, incitement of peasant risings, and the planning or execution of terrorist acts against Soviet leaders...
...For a detailed and convincing argument that the Soviet leadership until the Great Purge was divided over the main lines of its foreign policy, with Stalin and Bukharin as exponents of the two main opposing positions, see Robert M. Slusser: "The Role of the Foreign Ministry," in in the eyes of the anti-fascist Communists the Litvinov foreign-policy line was a correct political orientation, from Stalin's point of view it had at least the virtue of placing pressure on a reluctant Hitler to respond to his advances...
...ing heavy industry and arms production, and exploitation of peasant labor by means of coercive collectivization...
...Although it still leaves many questions unsolved or incompletely answered, this body of Soviet material provides a basis not only for a fresh look at the trials and purges themselves but also for a critical reexamination of the ideas and assumptions underlying the voluminous Western literature on this subject, most of which was produced in the Stalin era...
...Finally, the murder of Kirov was not organized by the accused but rather, it very strongly appears, by Stalin, who sought thereby both to remove a potential rival and to create a pretext for launching the Great Purge...
...In 19321933, when the futility of further - open opposition activity was clear, they had formed, on instructions of foreign intelligence services, a conspiratorial group called "Bloc of Rights and Trotskyites," on behalf of which Trotsky had negotiated an agreement with Nazi Germany looking to the overthrow of the Soviet government and the defeat and dismemberment of the U.S.S.R...
...Stalin had been pictured as director-general of the purges and trials by high-ranking Soviet police officials with firsthand knowledge of the situation who escaped to the West at the time and published their stories.' However, this view of the matter, with all its profound implications, somehow failed to 1 See in particular W. G. Krivitsky: In Stalin's Secret Service (New York: Harper, 1939) and Alexander Orlov: The Secret History of Stalin's Crimes (New York: Random House, 1953...
...And this is what I believe he was trying to communicate when he said in his final statement that in the face of "the absolutely black vacuity" confronting him, he wanted to die for something...
...The conservative forces, with the overwhelming support of the nation, had now demonstrably gained the day" ("How They Saw the Moscow Trials," Survey, April 1962, p. 94...
...This project may have been Stalin's own undoing, for it seems quite possible that he was put out of the way in order to prevent the doctors' trial—and the new party purge that would have accompanied it-from taking place...
...And he probably assumed that Vyshinsky and Ulrich, with the help of many of the trial defendants who would in effect be prosecution witnesses in the guise of defendants, would together manage to hold Buk harin in check...
...Bending History Into "Conspiracy" The case developed in this trial was an elaboration of the "monstrous conspiracy" charge made against Bukharin and Rykov in the reported secret Party meeting in 1936...
...Bukharin, though demoted from full to candidate membership in the Party Central Committee after the Congress, was appointed editor of Izvestia, a position he held until his arrest early in 1937...
...In Stalinism the Leninist notion of an international class war turns into the notion of a conspiratorial cold war against the Soviet Union...
...Trotsky had entered the service of the German intelligence in 1921...
...Bukharin's denial on this key point has been fully borne out...
...Such prominent former oppositionists as Bukharin, Rykov, Zinoviev, Kamenev, Piatakov, and Radek appeared on the platform to emphasize their approval of the general line and pay tribute to Stalin's leadership in carrying it out...
...But he evidently thought it a tolerable price to pay for the great success of persuading Bukharin to go on trial and confess himself guilty of counter-revolutionary conspiracy...
...The underlying assumption of the Great Purge was that treason was abroad in the land, especially among Party members, and that it had to be cleaned out and exterminated on the massive scale that this treason itself had assumed...
...Opposition Programs And Party Conflicts As we examine it we must bear in mind that the history of Lenin's party from its founding early in the century to the end of the 1920's was characterized by factional struggles and opposition movements supporting programs of Party policy that were at times openly debated...
...In the prisoner's dock were most of the surviving leaders of the Bolshevik Old Guard, former People's Commissars in the Soviet government, former Soviet ambassadors who had served in major world capitals like Berlin and London, and, finally, a few obscure N.K.V.D...
...In the 1937 trial Piatakov alluded to this system of equivalences when, in agreeing that he had given a certain man orders to make connections with German intelligence, he added that he had done this only in a "more algebraical formulation"— by having a talk with the man in an oppositional vein...
...Thus the defendant fvanov pictures himself and Bukharin as having, politically speaking, "arrived directly at fascism," and Vyshinsky, in the summing-up speech, says of Bukharin: "Like a true watchdog of fascism, he barked joyfully expressing his admiration for German fascism...
...Replying in his own defense, Bukharin agreed that a monstrous conspiracy was being carried out against the Party and state in the Soviet Union...
...22 During and after World War II Stalin probably liked to view the events of 1936-1938 in retrospect as part of his preparation of Russia for the coming great conflict with Hitler...
...According to the New York Times correspondent, "Mr...
...But the key causal role was Stalin's...
...That is, the basic conspiracy charge, relating to the alleged dealings of the accused with the Axis governments, was false...
...They certainly believe themselves to be better fitted for the conduct of war, which is absurd...
...For these old Bolshevik leaders, and the Tukhachevsky group, were anti-fascist Communists...
...Two Trials In One...
...In these circumstances Stalin was content to go along with the politics of the anti-fascist Popular Front and the diplomacy of collective security which Foreign Commissar Litvinov pursued vigorously in the middle 1930's2 5 If 24 Ibid., pp...
...What was reportedly used as the chief means of coercing Bukharin into agreement to go on trial was the threat to retaliate against his young wife and little boy if he should refuse...
...In such a situation," Khrushchev goes on, "there is no need for any sanction, for what sort of a sanction could there be when Stalin decided everything...
...By emphasizing in this manner how terribly guilty I, an Old Bolshevik leader, am in Stalin's eyes, I am showing implicitly how guilty he is of murderous attitudes and acts against the people who embody historic Bolshevism...
...And foreign observers present at the trial were profoundly impressed by his fighting demeanor...
...When the vote was taken, the motion was supported by less than a third of the Central Committee members present...
...483-485...
...cit., p. 426...
...29 This was an all but irresistible form of pressure to which Stalin had also resorted in other cases, notably Kamenev's...
...He himself was a symbol...
...426-427...
...point Isaac Deutscher writes: "Among all the documents of the Nuremberg trial of the Nazi leaders not a single one contains as much as a hint of the alleged Nazi fifth column in the Soviet Government and army...
...In one of its meanings a given symbol may belong to the logic of the show trial...
...Thus Yagoda, who had assisted Stalin in preparing the 1936 trial, was then removed (to become a defendant himself in the 1938 trial) and replaced by Yezhov, who in turn was eliminated after serving as Stalin's right-hand man at the height of the reign of terror...
...Shortly following the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, for example, Bukharin, one of the outstanding leaders and theoreticians of the Party, headed a "Left Communist" opposition that favored revolutionary war as against Lenin's policy of accepting the annexationist peace dictated by the German government to Trotsky at Brest-Litovsk...
...Stalin was insisting that he appear as chief defendant in the trial...
...As indi 274 cated earlier, the thesis that the politics of the purge were psychological politics is in no way inconsistent with the view that practical political ends were pursued...
...The major accusatory themes introduced in the earlier purge trials were restated and brought together with new charges, one of them being that Marshal Tukhachevsky and fellow Soviet military leaders who were executed in June 1937 after a secret trial, had headed a "military conspiratorial organization" linked with the larger conspiracy of which Bukharin and others had allegedly been ringleaders...
...It was folly, in other words, to suppose that Hitler could be deflected for long from attacking the U.S.S.R...
...The prime internal political purpose of the Great Purge from Stalin's point of view was to end all this, to eliminate the Bolshevik habits of criticism and opposition as well as the men who personified these habits, and to create for himself an autocracy as absolute as any that ever existed...
...Stalin not only agreed to, but on his own initiative issued, arrest orders...
...In making himself an absolute autocrat at so sickening a price in blood and misery, he thought he was serving the interests of the Party he was purging and the country he was terrorizing...
...In developing these charges in the trials, much was made of the theme that such prominent anti-Stalinist Communists as Trotsky and Bukharin were not only prepared to have dealings with the Nazis but were themselves pro-fascist...
...Bukharin did, as mentioned in his testimony and final statement, have meetings in Paris early in 1936 with the well-known scholar and Menshevik leader Boris Nicolaevsky...
...Bukharin communicates this point by way of observing that Lion Feuchtwanger's Moscow 1937, a little piece of proStalinist apologetics for the trials that had been shown him in prison, did not get to the core of the matter, "when, as a matter of fact, everything is clear...
...Not to defend himself but to convict his accuser was the purpose...
...It was held that in 1918 Bukharin and his group of Left Communists and Trotsky and his group 264 had plotted to frustrate the BrestLitovsk peace, overthrow the Soviet government, arrest and murder Lenin and Stalin, and form a new government...
...In the following month matters came to a head in a stormy session of the Politburo during which the right-wing leaders attacked Stalin for one-man decisions and argued that his collectivization program was leading to what Bukharin called "military-feudal exploitation of the peasants...
...the time...
...Miss Hannah Arendt, whose important writings on totalitarianism have been one of the sources of this image, has suggested, for example, that blood purges such as those of the Stalin era, quite unlike the Party purges in the early years of the Russian Revolution, served as an "instrument of permanent instability...
...128-129...
...One only—Stalin—was ruled out, for Lenin in a postscript to this letter directed the Party leadership to remove him from the post of General Secretary because of grave character defects that could, he said, prove of decisive significance...
...But they must have appeared to him as being true in principle and false, if at all, only in being embellishments on reality itself—embellishments, moreover, in which he could legitimately take a certain artistic pride...
...The editorial also made an emotional appeal to the British ruling circles to take a firm stand against the Nazis...
...Evidence that the trials were so interpreted is to be found in a foreign-affairs commentary printed in the Italian fascist paper Popolo d'Italia on March 5, 1938...
...and this is a salient fact that our interpretation must account for...
...The purge trials are constructed around this paranoid-like logic...
...The picture given earlier in the accounts of N.K.V.D...
...This editorial, entitled "War and Peace," appeared in Izvestia on August 1. Later that month the trial of the six -teen began, and with it the public denunciations of Bukharin2 8 For Stalin the purge trials had a foreign policy motive beyond those just discussed...
...The commentator was Benito Mussolini...
...It would be a mistake, though, to see him as only that...
...It furnishes the motivation and therewith the explanation for hundreds of events and incidents spoken of in the trial, many of which really happened...
...Not only was he, as noted earlier, the prime mover and director of those events...
...dock are not a group" and insofar as the "Bloc" actually existed it did so as a venture in back-stage opposition politics undertaken at the time of his conversation with Kamenev in 1928...
...Deutscher does suggest, however, that Marshal Tukhachevsky and his military associates were planning a coup d'etat against Stalin, entirely on their own...
...The three great Moscow show trials and a num ber of lesser local trials held at this time were designed to dramatize this idea, to show the existence, enormity, and scope of the purported treasonable activity, which had—it was thus made to appear—been organized and directed by men at the pinnacle of the Party and state as well as their counterparts at the provincial level...
...Stalin indicated his acceptance of the adverse decision, and a statement was published in Pravda on September 10 announcing that the case against Bukharin and Rykov was being closed because investigation had not established judicial bases for legal proceedings against them...
...he waved his arms about as he stood between the snowdrifts: 'If only someone would tell Stalin about it.' "2 Many purge victims reasoned similarly...
...4 He tells us further that Stalin rather than Yezhov made all the decisions concerning arrests of high party leaders, many of whom were arrested without the prosecutor's knowledge...
...What were the feelings in question...
...Inside Russia, on the other hand, attention focused upon a different question: Why the trials, and why the Great Purge as a whole...
Vol. 12 • April 1965 • No. 2
