Purges -- Stalin\'s Great Blunder

¶ … Purges -- Stalin's Great Blunder

The ghost of Stalin will circle the earth for a long time to come… Almost everyone has renounced his legacy, but many still draw their strength from him. -- Milovan Djilas

Investigation - Decades after the collapse of the Soviet Union, sixty years after the death of Josef Stalin, and seventy-five years after the era of the Great Purges in the U.S.S.R., the question of causality and control within the Stalin regime continues to plague historians. Despite the opening of archival material and greater academic openness for Russian scholars, there is still no definitive agreement on the extent of control that Stalin had over the Communist Party and indeed, how much direct responsibility one can credit the dictator over the period known as the "Great Terror."

Part of this terroristic period was a series of political and pseudo-campaigns known as the Purges, designed ostensibly to rid the Party of any dissent when, in fact were concocted to shore up a paranoid leader and his cadre's ability to govern without dissent. Using a dogmatic legal professor named Andrei Vyshinsky, a large-scale purge of the Communist Party and various governmental officials at all levels, repression and persecution of thousands of unaffiliated citizens, widespread surveillance, suspicion, and the infamous "knock at 3am" contributed to a climate in which half the population was wary of the other half of the population. In fact, this time may be reflected by a remark by Stalin, "There is a person, there is a problem."

Evidence- One of the most recent portrayals of Josef Stalin was eerily reminiscent of gazing into the heart of a true sociopath. This Stalin calmly answered Winston Churchill's query over dinner one evening while discussing Allied responses to Hitler. Churchill remarked that he had always been interested in the rapid modernization that occurred in Russian Agriculture after the Revolution. He asked Stalin how this was accomplished in view of the rich-peasants, the Kulaks. Stalin calmly looked up and between sips of his wine said, "It was simple, we shot them all" (Armstrong, et.al. 2009; Rees, 2010).

While a number of academic subdivisions present cogent arguments, there are two major schools of thought regarding the subject: the "standard" scholarship, deeply imbedded in Cold War ideology and causality that sees Stalin as the evil mastermind and deftly orchestrated terror controlled by him and his henchmen. The revisionist and post-revisionist school, however, looks at fascist regimes and agrees that the consequences were horrific. They are in no way apologists for actions or terror. However, their argument is that Stalin was more a force for moderation -- keeping the country together while necessary modernization occurred. Then, there is the approach that Stalin was in control of setting up a vast bureaucracy, but not of individual decisions -- and as historians have seen in Nazi Germany, a number of excesses were clearly the result of power-hungry middle bureaucrats.

Sources - in order to adequately survey the rich and contentious literature surround the Stalinist debate, it is necessary to begin decades ago, during the Cold War Era, when Uncle Joe was no longer a friend and ally to the United States in the defeat of Hitler and Tojo. Surveying this vast, and continually evolving, literature on Stalin and Stalinism, one is almost immediately struck by a certain periodicity in language, assumptions, and even modality of analysis. In part this seems to reflect the ebb and flow of the Cold War, the fall of the Soviet Union, and the almost uninterrupted re-examination within Russian and Soviet scholarship of Stalin's leadership since Khrushchev's startling revelations before the XX Party Congress in 1956.

The earliest works on Stalinism, for instance, published in the 1930s and 1940s, tended to emphasize the revolutions in administration that Stalin brought to the Soviet Union. These may be categorized into emigre literature, and are critical of both Stalin the man and Stalin the leader. However, these works also have a political agenda, but do provide information to the reader about life under a totalitarian regime, but also tend to blame Stalin for betraying Lenin, which also establishing their own agenda for change. The Orlov (1953) is probably the most valuable of this set, but other examples are Trotsky (1957), Abramovitch (1962), and Amba (1952).

For most of the 1960s through the early 1990s, the focus seemed to shift toward viewing the Stalinist phenomenon as a colossal effort of modernization, driven by a peculiarly xenophobic expression of Great Russian Nationalism dating back to Ivan the Great. While the prose followed the tensions of the Cold War to some extreme, the most prevalent view was Stalin as a monster -- a tyrant totally in control of this monolithic and megalithic machine. This view was epitomized by Robert Conquest in the Great Terror, first published in 1968, and then updated as information and trends changed. The work is valuable, because it reflects the thinking of the Cold War period, and also spurred numerous revisionist approaches to the topic.

In the 1980s, however, newer scholarship tended to adopt a more balanced approach, breaking down Stalin's thirty-year rule into constituent "sub-periods," and studying each not as an unchanging system, but as a response to a specific set of political, economic, and social circumstances. The newer scholars were rethinking the entire philosophical basis of Stalinism and asking if the Robert Conquest paradigm of an all-powerful and omniscient tyrant was indeed even viable. These scholars often looked outside the Moscow-Leningrad connection to establish trend in bureaucratic behavior, the movement of goods and services, and the real substance of internal State power. J. Arch Getty, now at UCLA, epitomized this approach -- not by denying Stalinism or the tyrant Stalin, but by asking us to imagine a country in which it was even potentially possible for one person to manage that kind of terrorist system. Instead, the value of this source, and similar sources, is to realize that while the "tone" may be set from the top, the actions are carried out by tactitions (Getty, 1985).

Once new archival materials were opened, scholars had a field day. One might have thought that this would settle the argument but, in fact, it has made it far more complex in nature: interpretation, chronology, and place are even more important as are source materials and perspectives. Once the Soviet structure collapsed even the most ardent Sovietologists found that the country was in far worse shape than even the most pessimistic predicted. The economy was in total shambles, the impact of totalitarian indoctrination deep into society was, at best, superficial, the power of national sentiment among ethnic minorities and nationalism were more powerful and surprising than perceived by the West, and finally, whatever the cause, it was now possible for historians to look back at the entire era; Leninist preparation from the late 1890s, the issues with retaining power in 1917, the death of Lenin in 1924, and what it would take to move such a dinosaruic system to a never reached goal of self-sufficiency and the exporting of world revolution. This valuable and more balance approach, along with a number of more primary sources may be found in books like the Rise and Fall of the Soviet Union (McCauley, 2007).

Analysis - Much of what actually occurred during the years of Stalinism was not that difficult to understand when looking at it in retrospect. and, we find that many of the political and social policies were not even that unique: state-sponsored rapid modernization was the rule, not the exception, in the 20th century. and, one can find plenty of examples of monolithic economies that did not tolerate multi-party systems, outlawed democracy, and had dictators -- military or otherwise. One feature, though, certainly that leads us to our next section, is the level of violence that Stalinism inflicted upon the population -- especially through the secret police and GULAG system of incarceration. In fact, in the 20th century, if one counts the Purges, the GULAGs, lesser prisons, deportation, wiping out of the kulaks, forced starvation, and the toll from World War II due to government factors, one certainly can see Stalinism as one of the bloodiest regimes ever conceived (Kotkin in Hoffman, 2002).

Stalin, however, needed a legal mouthpiece to purge the best and the brightest, the intelligentsia, from the rank and file who might see through his tyranny and lack of adherence to either Leninism or true Marxism. His choice, lawyer Andrei Vyshinsky - a minor bureaucrat thrust into the limelight. Vyshinsky certainly had a great impact on the justification and legal paradigm of the terror -- so much so that the Trials themselves almost form a template of the terror. Although Vyshinsky became a "non-person" after Stalin's death, the accomplishment of a unified Soviet legal theory and procedure remained in place ( Rittersporn, 1992). This seems to have been Vyshinsky's goal from the very beginning. In his the Law of the Soviet State, Vyshinsky set down his conception of the "Fundamental Principles Underlying the Organization of the Soviet Prosecutor's Office." He concluded that "the prosecutor's office must be centralized and completely independent of the local organs of authority." This conclusion, quite naturally, was buttressed with the appropriate reference to the guiding hand of the revolution's leader: "From the principle that there is a single legality obtaining throughout the Republic "and the entire federation" (Lenin) and from the obligation of the public prosecutor to see to it that no single decision of local authority deviated from the law, Lenin deduced all the most important principles for the organization of the prosecutor's office..." (Vyshinsky, Law, 525). Contrast this with Vyshinsky's admonition of a witness, "Don't pay attention to the laws, just listen to me" (Huskey, "Vyshinsky, Krylenko," 427).