The Sources of Political Terror

...More and deeper understanding is required here...

...The crematoria were not able to "process" all the bodies in the course of the night...

...But how many people in the Tsar's guard were killed by that explosion...

...This makes me think of Avel, Varlam's son in the film Repentance, and others as well...

...On the other hand, tsarist prisons were no more humane than the enemies of tsardom...

...Head of Soviet secret police at various points between 1938 and 1953, Executed in 1953...

...There were thousands of petty executioners who beat, tortured, trampled, and finished off prisoners...

...One of the speakers today attempted to demonstrate that Lenin wanted to bring the Tsar's family to Moscow in order to put the Tsar on trial there...

...Ousted by Khrushchev in 1957...

...I repeat: It would be difficult to try these people properly now, and it is not necessary...

...And then there were the atrocities committed by the anarchist-communists...

...We have no gods, and the truth is higher than any authority...

...That was how people thought at the time, and it was also the way that previous generations of Russian revolutionaries had thought...

...I received a letter from Yezhov's* daughter, who now has a different last name...

...Member Politburo 1935-1966...

...Let the children be ashamed of their fathers, let the grandchildren be ashamed of their grandfathers...

...She still loves her father and says that he was a fine and caring person who placed too much trust in Stalin...

...Of course, even as schoolchildren we knew about the repression taking place in the country, but no one grasped either the magnitude or the monstrousness of the crimes...

...Neither Lenin nor Sverdlov ever condemned the party workers of Ekaterinburg who killed the entire royal family...

...But I studied in Leningrad in 1949-1950, that is, just at the time Malenkov was wreaking havoc on the city's intelligentsia and party organization...

...But she can't find a single word to say against Yezhov, and is afraid to tell her own children who their grandfather was...

...When Zheliabov* planted his enormous bomb near the Tsar's dining room, he intended to kill the 320 • DISSENT Glasnost Watch entire royal family, and it was only a matter of chance that he failed—they were a few minutes late for dinner...

...The son writes that Malenkov was a caring father and affectionate husband, that he was friendly with his neighbors at his dacha, friends who included Chechens, Volga Germans...

...Politburo's chief ideologist...

...Grigory Malenkov (1902-1988...

...But we cannot forgive their crimes...

...They want Kaganovich,* who is still alive, put on trial, and they also want to try Stalin, who has been dead for thirty-five years...

...In the case at hand, Lenin was referring both to the Bolshevik party and to himself...

...The fighting groups of the SRs (the Socialist Revolutionary party) stalked the royal family...

...And I also want to know the whole truth about Lenin, without any lies or silences...

...Malenkov's son is an engineer, and I've been told he is a very good person...

...She wasn't happy that I had written about her father but thought it necessary to tell me that she had broken off all relations with him a long time ago...

...There were, of course, a great many informers and executioners...

...Nikolai Yezhov (1895-1939...

...Felix Dzerzhinsky (1877-1926...

...I hate you and all your kin, And with deep joy will look upon Your utter ruin, The death of your children...

...Member of the executive committee of the "Will of the People...

...For example, I said that it was no secret that Lenin was not a model of fair argument when polemicizing with opponents of his party...

...However, the group that was to bring the Tsar to Moscow had also been given secret instructions: If there was any danger of the royal family being seized by the White Guards, the entire family was to be executed...

...There was a decree that no one, not even "enemies of the people," was to be executed during the revolutionary holidays so that the executioners could enjoy the holidays too...

...That sank in deeply and became a part of the consciousness of every generation of Russian revolutionaries...

...A special group was sent to Tobolsk for that purpose, and therefore neither Lenin nor Sverdlov* can be accused of the murder of the royal family...

...Bolshevik, member of original Central Committee...

...Executed in 1939...

...and Hitler loved animals and, as a vegetarian, did not eat meat...

...Necessity and predetermination played no role here, contrary to the opinion of many...

...It's more than the soul and the mind can contain...

...In conclusion, I'd like to quote a statement by Lenin that we all know and often cite but do not always follow: "We need the truth, the whole truth, and the truth should not depend on whom it serves...

...Of course, the editors apologized each time, saying that they had corrected the text in manuscript or in galleys for my own best interests...

...The crimes of Stalin and his executioners grew out of a specific soil...

...We must prevent even the slightest possibility of any repetition of those crimes...

...This is only partially true, at best...

...In the last year of his life, Lenin himself saw that the country and the party had started to go in the wrong direction...

...Many, perhaps even the majority, of Lenin's notes to Dzerzhinsky,* were also kept from appearing in the complete works...

...He told us about one of the cruelest executioners at Solovki, a person who had murdered his own father and who trampled and murdered prisoners...

...We have no need of any extremism here, but only harm can come from empty apologetics and the creation of a personality cult alien to the spirit of Leninism itself...

...Society's ills cannot be healed without that truth...

...At the time, Gorky attempted to impede the trial and Lenin wrote that something had to be done to pacify Gorky, who was being "too active...

...Older than Likhachev, he walks around Moscow with a cane, his chest covered with medals...

...We cannot make the usual comments: "good," "excellent," "interesting...

...He did not torture and kill people with his own hands, though he was not above attending torture sessions in prison cellars...

...They lack many of his letters to Inessa Armand, letters that speak clearly of his love and affection for her and of their attraction to each other...

...So, let's not lump everything together...

...Ousted in 1957...

...That man is still alive...

...I am unable to speak of "Lenin's terror" and equate it with the others mentioned...

...Head of Soviet secret police, 1936-1938...

...And here in Moscow, during the terrible days of the terror of 1937-38, hundreds upon hundreds of people were executed every day in prison cellars...

...That's an incredible amount of time...

...Succeeded Stalin as party leader in 1953, then premier until 1955...

...That editor left all my remarks about Stalin but flatly crossed out everything critical about Lenin, stating, "We will not do anything that harms Vladimir Ilyich...

...Now, after our historical experience, I know that events have not justified either Lenin's terming the revolution "the holiday of the oppressed" or Marx's dictum that the "proletariat needs thirty or fifty years of civil war to rid it of its faults...

...The most fearful place of all was Kolyma, where hundreds of thousands, millions of people died while mining or felling trees...

...Those letters show us not Lenin the furious polemicist and determined revolutionary but a person to whom nothing human was alien...

...They also deleted my quite convincing evidence that the first major trumped-up political trial was not the "Shakty" or "Industrial party" case, but that of the Right SRs in 1922...

...Stalin's secretary...

...But we must write and speak about those people, name names, and not allow them to hide their faces...

...Of course, all this may have been the seeds of Stalin's terror, but there were other possibilities, other alternatives as well...

...rested, as well as many excellent professors, writers, and even dozens of students...

...Academician Likhachev, a former prisoner of Solovki, addressed us here both from the screen and the podium...

...It reveals both the power of hypocrisy and the power of truth...

...Solovki" is common parlance for the Solovetsk Islands in the White Sea, where some of the first camps for political prisoners in the USSR were located...

...Let's examine the events of the past in the context of the times...

...There have been letters from people who not all that long ago were informers and executioners and letters from active, aggressive Stalinists...

...All that elicits our indignation, protest, sorrow...

...Yakov Sverdlov (1885-1919...

...All that's understandable...

...As a historian, I can confirm the fact that the Soviet government did indeed desire to put the Tsar on trial in Moscow and that people were sent to the Urals to take the royal family from a zone where the Bolsheviks were under attack by the Whites...

...I can recognize these people by their style, their special malice, their threats, and also by the fact that none of the letters is signed or has a clear return address...

...But that was a cruel and lawless period, a time of war, and both sides committed great violence...

...Both revolution and civil war are evils engendered by other evils...

...This is a preventive measure that must be taken for the good of our society...

...How Far Back Should We Go...

...Those letters contain neither malice nor threats but are marked by the desire to escape the past, to forget the past, to maintain emotional comfort...

...The poet Marshak wrote on this subject in 1941 or 1942: SUMMER • 1989 • 319 Glasnost Watch I don't need the blood of a ram, I need the blood of a living man...

...We must know the names both of the victims and the executioners...

...In the movie we saw him from the back and the side but were never shown his face...

...In charge of railroads...

...There was no time to build prisons during the Civil War...

...This film is a visual account of the tragedy that our nation endured, a film about the executioners and the victims, about the vileness of some people and the spiritual grandeur of others...

...Any reasonable relationship between ends and means was destroyed, and the slogan "everything is moral that is useful to the revolution" arose before Stalin came to power...

...Our analysis should not halt before any authorities...

...I also receive letters from the children and relatives of well-known executioners, and they of course cannot write anonymously...

...Likhachev says we shouldn't know this man's name, that he has children and grandchildren who would be pained to learn who their grandfather really was...

...I cannot agree with either extreme...

...I cannot agree with that position...

...There's a wide range of opinion on the subject...

...Other people seek justifications for what their relatives did, but if we are too sparing of their filial feelings, their families may well produce new generations of executioners...

...His "favorite" torture was to break the fingers on his victims' left hands by slamming a door shut on them...

...its cult of centralization and discipline was too strong...

...Too much demagogy went into the formation of the party...

...They were carrying out orders, but, as was observed at the Nuremburg trials, the carrying out of criminal orders does not exempt a person from either moral or legal responsibility...

...I've received a letter from the son of Grigory Malenkov,* whose crimes were much discussed at the Twenty-Second Party Congress...

...None of us is...

...Only once have I encountered a woman who broke off all relations with her father when she learned that he was not only a writer and researcher in the Institute of Marxism-Leninism but had also been an NKVD colonel under Yezhov and Beria* and had even tortured his old school friends...

...These people were not arrested in 1937-1938, but in 1926-1927 and, naturally, do not think of Stalin and Stalin's terror as the principal cause of their suffering...

...Goebbels too was a very caring father and affectionate husband...

...However, there is a subject even more problematic than the one raised by Academician Likhachev...

...Malenkov is guilty of the death of hundreds of thousands of people—in Belorussia, Armenia, Leningrad...

...Even now, there are still many who do not wish to believe it...

...He changed my remark that the study of Soviet history should be truthful and honest to: "should display a Leninist sense of truth and honesty...

...It evokes strong and conflicting emotions, and we are all, myself included, still under the sway of those emotions...

...There was also an Executioner-inChief, who did not choose the best of people to aid him but, as Mandelstam wrote, "played his games using half-human assistants...

...There is, however, a difference between the cruelty of war and treacherous murder, mass murder, and torture in peacetime...

...We cannot recklessly submit to fashion and direct our criticism primarily onto Lenin, but we must analyze his plans and programs...

...That happened right after Khrushchev was retired...

...All this occurred in peacetime, secretly...

...Head of secret police under Lenin...

...And didn't we all learn these lines by Pushkin in school...

...When seeing the film on Solovki, one might think these were the limits of horror...

...All this must be not only condemned but understood...

...I have met only five or six people who were able to survive that long in our monstrously cruel camps and prisons...

...We have just heard from the writer Volkov, who was at Solovki and spent a total of twenty-seven years as a prisoner...

...Brilliant organizer, first Soviet president...

...Mikhail Suslov (1902-1982...

...I think this is the first real attempt to depict in film, as comprehensively as possible, the inhumanity of Stalin's camps, Stalin's prisons, Stalin's punitive systern, and to show it all in the context of the times: While people were being killed and tortured in Solovki, Stalin was greeting parades of athletes in Red Square...

...These are anonymous letters written by people who are ready to inform and murder again but who are afraid of glasnost, afraid I might quote from their letters and reveal their names...

...At one time we were allied with both the Left SRs and the anarchists...

...Foreign policy adviser to Khrushchev...

...In charge of consumer goods under Stalin...

...Those letters cause us to like Lenin the man, and it was only Suslov's* sanctimoniousness that caused all these letters, already prepared for print, to be excluded from the new edition of Lenin's works...

...Yes, much of that tragedy was rooted in the past, and Stalin and his entourage do not bear the sole responsibility for the crimes of the thirties...

...For ten years the camps in Kolyma were simply death factories, and death was more agonizing there than in the gas chambers...

...I don't want to justify everything about Lenin, but I continue to have profound respect for him...

...As a historian and philosopher I am used to the language of logic, to generalizations, conclusions, and abstract analysis, and, for that reason, I am not entirely certain that this audience will understand and accept the few remarks I will make...

...But after I had read the proofs, the editors replaced two pages of my article with a text of their own that said exactly the opposite of what I had said—that the Civil War compelled the Bolsheviks to conduct a policy of grain requisition, which is not even true from a purely chronological point of view...

...I want to be honest about all this: I am not ready to discuss such things...

...Instrumental in Khrushchev's ouster...

...Gaulieter Koch, who annihilated millions of Jews and Poles, was also an exemplary family man...

...He, however, simply refuses to censure his father and tries to deny completely the obvious fact that Malenkov was one of the most active and sinister people in Stalin's entourage...

...And now I am criticized for not knowing exactly where Malenkov met his future wife sixty-five years ago—not in Moscow but in Central Asia...

...I published another article in one of the Moscow papers saying that the policy of grain confiscation in May and June 1918 was far from constituting a socialist revolution in the countryside but only hastened the beginning of the Civil War, and at the most inopportune time for the Bolsheviks...

...I have not seen those notes and letters but I believe that they contain many appeals for people to be "spared," "freed," "pardoned," and for "better conditions to be created...

...Translated from the Russian by RICHARD LOURIE 322 • DISSENT...

...His articles and speeches are peppered with gratuitous invective and insults...

...In fact, when the prisoners of Solovki read about the Inquisition, they considered it child's play...

...And the executioners' children and grandchil318 • DISSENT Glasnost Watch dren should know the truth, no matter how painful it may be...

...And our experience, our not very attractive historical experience, remains the highest criterion of truth...

...historical truth is always concrete...

...The cruel execution of the royal family was also mentioned...

...When plundering the estates of landowners, the peasants often murdered all the members of a hated family, but the White armies also killed the majority of the prisoners they took, and not only commissars...

...Unfortunately, a great many of us are still not prepared to perceive Lenin's era soberly and judiciously...

...Some people call for a public trial of the executioners, of those who are still alive and even of those already dead...

...Andrei Zheliabov (1851-1881...

...I have recently begun publishing articles and was surprised to see that the editor—not the censor but the editor—would cross out even the most modest of my criticisms of Lenin...

...Anastas Mikoyan (1895-1978...

...There is no reason to conceal this, because we must have guarantees that there will be no repetition of the tragedy of Solovki and everything that came after...

...There's no need to dig them up from their graves—it would mean digging up half the graves in the country...

...If we didn't put Kaganovich on trial thirty years ago, if we didn't try the butcher of Solovki thirty or forty years ago, it's too late to start now...

...It is very difficult to address an audience after a film like the one we have just seen in this large theater, especially since this screening was attended by the few surviving former prisoners of Solovki, who have spoken to us, both from the screen and from this podium...

...All war is evil, and when our pilots performed a night bombing raid on an enemy city or a village in Central Asia, they had to be aware that not only the enemy but innocent women and children would also die...

...In our university alone, six of the twelve deans were ar* Names Cited in This Article Lavrenty Beria (1899-1953...

...Neither moral nor political barriers were erected to prevent the triumph of totalitarianism, and, with that in mind, we SUMMER • 1989 • 321 almost Watch should scrutinize all of Lenin's ideas about building the party and the state...

...His daughter came to see me...

...I've been receiving a lot of mail lately...

...we're simply unable to bear a burden like that...

...War and revolution entail a great many atrocities— why should only the revolutionaries bear responsibility and not those who made the revolution inevitable...

...If you don't talk," he'd warn them, "I'll do the same thing to your right hand...

...Executed after his assassination of Tsar Alexander II in 1881...

...The same is true of the letters from Mikoyan's* family and those from Stalin's distant relatives...

...Time will be needed to sort through all we have just seen and felt and for each of us to come to some understanding of these unforgettable facts and images...

...And because I once mixed up Malenkov's address, saying he lived on Frunze Embankment, not on Frunze Street, the son concludes that I know nothing about Malenkov...

...Ens...

...However, the events of the Civil War and revolution do not greatly illuminate the tragedy that occurred thereafter...

...Volkov spoke directly about "Lenin's terror," not Stalin's, and thinks we ought to reexamine everything that happened before Stalin as well...

...But, after the holidays, people had to be executed a thousand or more at a time...

...Lazar Kaganovich (1893– ). Close associate of Stalin...

...Looking at the Lenin Era Specialists know that the "complete" works of Lenin are not entirely complete...

...But later on there were camps much more horrible than Solovki, camps where people were not executed thirty or three hundred at a time, but in batches of thirty thousand...