Date: Tue, 25 Feb 1997 22:47:50 -0500 (EST)
From: Paul Zarembka <zarembka-AT-acsu.buffalo.edu>
Subject: M-I: CPGB (PCC) on Stalin's terror (LONG)--2



Second section.  P.Z.

*************************************************************************

     The Soviet social formation economised politics and policised
     economics. Terror therefore soon invaded every aspect and layer of life.
     Traitors and spies had to be endlessly unmasked and fed to the never
     satiated gulag. Having exhausted the readily available supply of kulaks,
      bourgeois specialists, tsarists, Mensheviks, and foreign engineers, new
      human material was needed. From outsiders the terror shifted to insiders.
      A new enemy was invented, writes Gabor Rittersporn. It had become
      increasingly "difficult to maintain" the fiction that the hardships
      endured by the people were all the fault of those "alien to the regime"
      (31).

      The Trotskyite myth had to be given a new twist. Supposed Trotskyites
      were to be made responsible for every shortage, every failure. Vyshinsky
      illustrated the desperate reasoning of a regime which made big boasts,
      but had to explain poor results. "In our country, rich in resources of
      all kinds," he said, "there could not have been and cannot be a situation
      in which a shortage of any product should exist ... It is now clear why
      there are interruptions of supplies here and there, why, with our riches
      and abundance of products, there is a shortage first of one thing, then
      of another. It is these traitors who are responsible for it."(32)

      Centre encouraged those below to find fault with those above - excluding
      itself, of course - and to blame every fault on the Trotskyite plot to
      dismember the Soviet Union. Problems multiplied with every forward step
      the system made. Everyone had a grievance and a scapegoat. Workers
      resented managers for the privileges and disruption caused by
      Stakhanovite methods of work. Stakhanovites accused managers and
      technical personnel of "sabotaging" their movement. The press was full of
      such reports. In the midst of a "national hysteria about enemies"
      Stalin's paranoia could only grow (33). Complaints mirrored the rising
      scale of irrationality. Victims therefore grew exponentially.

      The "chronic defects of the Stalinist planning system were simply
      presented as sabotage". In this way the regime made it "impossible to
      discuss true responsibility"(34). Within industry, breakdowns, raw
      material shortages, unfulfilled targets, accidents, lack of bonuses, etc,
      were attributed to the vast Trotskyite plot; which, as diplomatic
      expediency required, was said to be directed in conjunction with the
      German, British, French, Japanese, or Polish intelligence services. Salem
      and its malevolent witch-finder was re-enacted at specially convened
      meetings across the Soviet expanse. At the prompting of Moscow's
      plenipotentiaries, hapless managers were denounced by their subordinates.
      But with or without popular participation the NKVD successively
      liquidated one set of managers after another.

      Each bout of exposures, arrests, and butchery saw 'red' conformists and
      careerists take another step up the ladder. Through 'negative selection'
      hundreds of thousands with little or no technical qualifications entered
      the administrative hierarchy. Not surprisingly, as management became
      progressively less skilled and more fearful, the functioning of the
      economy became less efficient and more chaotic. Production, virtually
      stagnant in 1937 and 1938, "actually went down in 1939"(35). Soviet
      economic difficulties were obviously exacerbated by the terror. Most
      authorities agree on that (36). Nor is it wrong to suggest that "the
      fall-off in Soviet growth rates" was itself a "cause" of the terror (37).

      At every level the system by its very nature bred 'saboteurs and
      wreckers' - that is, irrationality. Target figures were always
      unrealistic. Under Stalin's terror, admitting failure meant certain
      death. Mere self-preservation led bureaucracy-as-management to hide the
      truth with exaggerated figures and non-use values. It was a rational, but
      high-risk strategy. With each success reported, the
      bureaucracy-as-planners in turn calculated higher targets. Higher targets
      forced management into bigger lies. The gap between what was real (use
      values) and what was claimed (target values) grew to the point where it
      could not easily escape the notice of the authorities. Instead of looking
      for the social origins of false data and the production of waste, those
      in command preferred to attribute it to "malevolent human design"(38).
      Hidden Troskyite wreckers and saboteurs were to be blamed for the
      incoherence of the plan, not Stalin. Kaganovich uncovered their
      'counterrevolutionary limit-setting on output' - and duly "organised the
      mass destruction of engineering and technical cadres"(39).

      In the dungeons of the NKVD the chief director, his deputy, and close
      associates would confess anything. "The only chance of avoiding death was
      to admit to everything ... even this seldom saved a man's life."(40) If
      spared, they would be packed off to do exhausting manual labour and a
      premature end in the camps. Needless to say, the inexperienced
      substitutes had to deploy the same (criminal) exaggerations and methods
      to survive even in the short term. Antoni Ekert rightly points out that
      the system left them "no option"(41).

      As an attempt at displacing popular anger the show trials give us an
      unintended glimpse of the "impossible", but actual, conditions in
      industry. Conquest notes AA Shestov, an NKVD agent, who was made to
      testify during the trial of the so-called 'Siberians', that it was
      Trotskyites rather than government policy which was rendering the
      worker's life intolerable. "Instructions were issued," said Shestov, "to
      worry the life out of the workers. Before a worker reached his place of
      work, he must be made to heap two hundred curses on the heads of the pit
      management. Impossible conditions of work were created. Not only for
      Stakhanovite methods, but even for normal methods."(42)

      Such concoctions might have fooled some of the workers some of the time.
      But they could not fool all of the workers all of the time. Moreover, for
      the system as a whole there was a high price. The new managers were
      supposed to be more obedient and therefore useful to the centre. Or so
      Stalin thought. However, the actual characteristic that was selected, in
      almost Darwinian fashion, was not obedience. It was managerial
      incompetence, combined with a facility for conciliation with the workers,
      and statistical disinformation. The Stalinite environment favoured hacks.
      Hence utilising those below to discipline those above had quickly
      diminishing returns. Witch hunting of managers encouraged
      insubordination. It turned expensively trained specialists and
      technicians into camp labourers and, in next to no time, corpses. It
      compounded economic problems.

      Having to some degree undermined the authority of management, Stalin
      sought a solution in enhancing their dictatorial powers. In 1938 the
      labour book was introduced for all workers. These 'visas' contained the
      supposed reason for leaving previous employment - for example, sacked for
      'sabotage' - and had to be presented to the next employer. In another
      attempt to counter the power workers possessed because of the labour
      shortage, Stalin introduced legislation which in formal terms 'enserfed'
      or 'attached' them to their workplace. As from June 26 1940 it became
      illegal for a worker to unilaterally leave their job unless they were
      physically unfit or about to enter higher education.

      For the Soviet system to smoothly function it needed orders to be
      realistic, correctly handed down, fully understood, and diligently
      carried out. Yet in the absence of democracy, orders ineviably produced
      altogether unintended results. They were subject to universal distortion
      and reinterpretation. Often, because the bureaucracy had no idea of the
      actual conditions on the ground, they were, to begin with, simply
      unfulfillable. Irrationality filled the vacuum between market and plan.
      Terror became ubiquitous in the attempt to bring order. It did not
      succeed. Nor could it succeed. Control over use-values slipped further
      and further out of reach. The system made it necessary to lie -
      academician TD Lysenko did so magnificently. Top biologists were killed
      en masse because their body of work contradicted his pseudo-scientific
      panacea for the ills of Soviet agriculture. What was real and what was
      unreal, in every area, was for the bureaucracy-as-collectivity impossible
      to tell. Untruth became the only certainty. The bureaucracy thereby could
      not master the system it created.

      At a huge cost to society and the bureaucracy itself, terror succeeded in
      eliminating Stalin's real and imagined political opponents. Politics
      ceased and was replaced by intrigue above and ritual below. But to
      eliminate all his real and imagined opponents Stalin had to terrorise the
      entire population - everyone lied; everyone cheated. No wonder Stalin is
      reported to have said that, "Where there's a person there's a problem;
      where there's no person there's no problem." So in unleashing wave after
      wave of terror Stalin was being perfectly logical. Terror atomised the
      population from top to bottom by destroying all organised bonds of social
      solidarity outside "that provided by personal allegiance to himself"(43).
      Soviet citizens became islands. Inwardly they feared. Outwardly they
      feverishly displyed conformist enthusiasm. Even on the most intimate and
      private level trust between people became highly problematic. Children
      denounced parents, wives their husbands, husbands their wives. Such
      extreme atomisation temporarily saved the system by making even the
      discussion of an alternative impossible. But in saving the system the
      institutions of the system were lobotomised.

      Conquest traces the main isobars of Stalin's whirlwind as it moved over
      the summits and plains of society: "The heaviest impact of all was, of
      course, on the institutional and communal loyalties which still existed
      in the country after 18 years of one-party rule. The most powerful and
      important organisation drawing loyalty to itself and its ideas, rather
      than to the general secretary himself, was the party - or rather its
      pre-Stalinist membership. Then came the army. Then the intellectual
      class, rightly seen as the potential bearer of heretical attitudes. These
      special allegiances attracted particularly violent attention."(44)

      During the 30s Stalin carried out what Conquest calls "a revolution which
      completely transformed the party and the whole of society"(45). It was a
      counterrevolution. Stalin's position was thus transformed. The central
      committee plenum of February-March 1937 marked the point where oligarchy
      became monocracy. With his victory at this meeting Stalin's political
      battle had effectively been won. Nothing could now stop the total
      annihilation of the old oppositionists. The way was also open to
      undermine and destroy that group among his own followers who had helped
      restrain the terror. Constitutional limitations ceased being relevant.
      Stalin had freed himself from all such constraints. Conquest points out
      that in the autumn of 1936 Stalin had to "argue and exert pressure to
      secure the arrest and trial even of potential rivals"(46). Six months
      later he could arbitrarily order the arrest of his closest colleagues. He
      could strike when, where, and at whom he liked, without let or hindrance.

      In the provinces terror swept away almost everywhere the old 'party-line'
      Stalinites who represented an albeit tenuous continuity with 1917 and the
      civil war. Their place was taken by enthusiasts for terrorism and
      denunciation. At centre, Stalin had already placed his loyalists in key
      positions. Nevertheless Moscow, the central committee and the politburo,
      were ravaged too. With the exception of Trotsky in Mexico and poor old
      Grigori Petrovsky, working on sufferance as a museum administrator, by
      the end of the 1930s there was no such thing as a living ex-member of the
      politburo.

      In being transformed, the party lost any ability to convince and
      effectively mobilise. Not surprisingly the party found itself
      institutionally eclipsed. Whereas "previously the party secretary had
      been the most powerful man in the area, it was now the NKVD chief who
      counted"(47). That mirrored what was happening at centre. The central
      committee and the politburo became mere rubber stamps for Stalin's
      decisions. The NKVD was his personal sword. Initiative within the party
      was no longer possible. Party gatherings became mind-numbingly dull,
      pronouncements became routine and uninspired. No genuine discussion was
      allowed. Votes were unanimous and functioned as acclamation, not as
      decision-making. Membership was seen as a social passport. Diamat
      (dialectical and historical materialism) became a school swot's memory
      test of Stalin's 'contributions' to philosophy, not a tool of scientific
      investigation. The History of the CPSU(B) had about the same relationship
      to reality as the New testament. But it too served to establish a
      confessional dogma not for question. Marxism was thus eliminated as a
      social discourse. Without exception its genuine adherents were
      imprisoned, incorporated, or killed. Terror depoliticised the party and
      turned it into a hierarchy of almost feudal dependence. Every secretary
      would have a chosen band of clone-like retainers. If their man was
      promoted they would be promoted with him. The skill was in spotting the
      astrological signs indicating who was to rise and who was about to fall.
      Getting it wrong during the terror meant the gulag or death.

      Terror reached its hand abroad. Trotsky's sympathisers in a number of
      countries were cowardly targeted. Eventually in August 1940 the great man
      himself ws to fall to a Stalinite assassin. In the Spain the Poum was
      viciously persecuted and its leadership killed. But the brunt of the
      terror against foreigners was borne by those in the USSR itself; most
      notably members of communist parties which were illegal in their own
      countries. Not to be a Soviet citizen was almost all it took to be guilty
      of a heinous crime.

      Communists fleeing Nazism found themselves rounded up by the NKVD.
      Unbelievably they were charged with being enemy agents. Eyewitnesses in
      the camps tell of German communists with body scars from the Gestapo and
      crushed fingernails from the NKVD. And grotesquely after the
      German-Soviet non-aggression pact in 1939 some 570 of these communists,
      those who had managed to survive the gulag, were herded into Moscow
      prisons before being taken to the border of German-occupied Poland, at
      Brest-Litovsk. Once there, the NKVD proceeded to coolly list them off and
      transfer them to awaiting Gestapo men.

      The Polish party was annihilated, both organisationally and politically,
      by Stalin. Between 1937 and 1939, all 12 members of its central committee
      present in Russia, all Polish members of the Comintern executive and
      control commission, and several hundred others were executed. Losses
      among Hungarian exiles were also particularly heavy. They included Bela
      Kun, the famed leader of the 1919 Hungarian Soviet government. He was
      accused of being an agent of Germany since 1916 and Britain since 1926.
      After being terribly tortured he was shot on August 29 1938. Most Finns
      living in the USSR were likewise liquidated as 'enemies of the people'.
      The Yugoslav party was virtually destroyed, as was the Bulgarian. Of the
      1,400 Bulgarian exiles more than 1,000 found themselves in forced labour
      camps; only about 100 made it back to Bulgaria.

      Cronus ate. But only spewed hypocritical internationalism.

      Stalin did not spare even his own terrorists. Liar, torturer, and killer
      though he was, Yagoda was discarded and replaced by Nikolai Yezhov in
      1937. Under circumstances prevailing in the USSR such a change was
      inevitably carried out with new lies, torture, and killings. Yagoda was
      denounced as a former tsarist police agent, a theif, an embezzler, and
      leading conspirator in the Trotskyite assassination of Kirov. He quickly
      confessed, was tried, and - as so many before him - shot. Yezhov
      proceeded to clear out Yagoda's 'spies' in the NKVD. Arrests took place
      by day and night. Knowing the treatment awaiting them, some preferred
      putting a bullet through their own heads; others jumped from high windows
      to ensure a quick end. Most went passively. Three thousand NKVD officers
      were executed almost immediately. By the end of the purge of Yagoda's
      'spies' and their subordinates 20,000 NKVD men had 'fallen victim'.

      Stalin, an avid reader of Machiavelli, skilfully kept in the background.
      Many would go to their deaths pleading that Stalin be told of the
      atrocities being carried out by his secret police. Some died with the
      cry, 'Long live comrade Stalin,' on their lips. The terror was associated
      in the popular mind not with the general secretary, but the men who
      carried out his orders - Yagoda, Yezhov, and finally Beria. People
      habitually spoke not of Stalin, but of the Yezhovachina - the time of
      Yezhov - when referring to the depths of the terror.

      The terror hit the army over the years 1937-39. It destroyed the most
      talented among the officer corps. Within nine days of the execution of
      the legendary Marshal Tukhachevsky (along with his wife and many members
      of his immediate family) 980 officers had been arrested, including 21
      corps commanders and 37 divisional commanders. Veterans of the Spanish
      civil war were particularly suspect. They were massacred. When Stalin had
      finished, out of the approximately one million party members in the army,
      125,000 were dead; that included 16 out of 16 army political commissars,
      three out of five marshals,13 out of 15 army commanders, 50 out of 57
      corps commanders, and 154 out of 186 divisional commanders (the navy and
      air force suffered on a similar scale).

      Military doctrine was thrown back. In place of Tukhachevsky's
      innovations, such as massed tank formations and coordinated air support,
      there returned Voroshilov's creaking tactics and strategy of mixed
      infantry and cavalry. The country's fighting capabilities were greatly
      weakened. Disaster was only narrowly averted in the brief Soviet-Finnish
      war. Soviet units performed abysmally. Many newly promoted commanders
      proved utterly incompetent. Despite that and repeated warnings concerning
      Hitler's bellicose intentions, the armed forces were in a state of
      complete unreadiness when the Germans invaded in 1941. The airforce was
      destroyed on the ground. Whole armies were surrounded and ignominiously
      captured. The military high command was thrown into complete disarray.
      Stalin could hardly believe that Hitler had broken his word, that in
      spite of the non-aggression pact the Soviet Union had been attacked. For
      days he hid away in the Kremlin. An image which hardly conforms with the
      apologist's idea of a farsighted Stalin in 1931, knowing he had ten years
      before war broke out with imperialism, German or any other. The court
      writer Ilya Ehrenburg later observed how Stalin "suspected his own
      closest comrades, but he trusted Hitler"(48).



     --- from list marxism-international-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu ---