--- Yoshie Furuhashi <critical.montages at gmail.com> wrote:
> In the former Soviet Union and other formerly
> existing socialist
> countries, many of the people who made that leap
> from a fact -- e.g.,
> dangers of plots supported by foreign powers exist
> -- to total
> suspension of skepticism and the conclusion that all
> accusations of
> heinous crimes, however lacking in evidence, must be
> believed were of
> peasant backgrounds.
>
It is also the case that the Terror received a lot of support because cleaning out the middle and upper echelons of the Party provided upward mobility for the lower cadres ("Kill the Trotskyist spy --- and give me his job!!!").
I think that the section of Kara-Murza's book Soviet Civilization: From 1917 to the Great Victory that I translated that I translated evokes the spirit of the 1930s pretty well. I posted it here before in bits, but I cleaned up the translation a bit and post it below:
A very important feature of the "Stalinist repressions" consists in that the actions of the government were met with mass support, which it would have been impossible to either organize or imitate. It would also have been impossible to carry out such repressions if the personnel of the enforcement agencies and the victims themselves had not accepted them as legitimate (although each victim likely considered his particular case to be a mistake). This is obvious not only because there were hardly no attempts made by people to protect themselves from repressions, even by those who had the means. In the repressions against the high military command death sentences were given to victims by their colleagues, who at the next stage would become victims themselves.
When we talk about the repressions, we avoid looking at one obvious, but unpleasant, fact. The repressions of 1937-38 to a great extent were created not by state totalitarianism, but by a profound _democracy_. But not a democracy of civil society of rational individuals, but the archaic one of the peasant commune. This is an enormous dark force, and when it is allowed to carry out its will, innocent heads roll. For it is easy for the peasant commune to believe in plots and the secret power of aliens, of "enemies of the people." When such hatred, possessing the power of an epidemic, rules the peasant commune, every witch will burn. And the Russian peasant commune is not crueler in this, than, for example, that of Western Europe -- it simply occured there earlier than it did among us.
In 2000 the newspaper Duel published excerpts from the very instructive memoirs of the lawyer B.G. Menshagin from Smolensk about how trials against “enemies of the people” took place in their regions in 1937. He simply relates, without embellishments, cases from his practice in which he was appointed as a lawyer in such trials. In one instance, eight people -- leaders in the regional cattle-breeding administration, veterinarians, and the secretary of the raikom -- were accused of sabotage. Three confessed; the others did not. One, a science employee of the Moscow VNII or experimental veterinary science, had been sent to the region to diagnose “brutsellez” (CD – I don’t know this word, I think it’s some kind of disease). Animals that have recently become sick show no external symptoms, and the diagnosis is made on the basis of a reaction of the immune system – upon injection with antiserum, an abscess forms, like that in the case of smallpox inoculation.
This employee and the others were accused of infecting livestock. The witnesses at the trials were milkmaids; in their eyes, these saboteurs had killed the best cows, which they had infected themselves and then sent to the knacker’s yard. One milkmaid said the following at the trial: “She is such a good cow! He stuck her and the next day she fell sick! The abscess is big.” The other milkmaids spoke in the same vein: “Oh, she was such a good cow, I’m so sorry for her. He stuck her and she died. He killed the cow.”
General meetings were called in all the collective farms and sovfarms and the court was presented with a veritable tome of demands. They were all approximately the same: “We ask the proletarian court to kill the bastards!” How was it possible in such circumstances for a lawyer to be asked for his expertise! All eight people were sentenced to be shot. The peasants were genuine in their belief, and the judge and prosecutor were afraid to move against the clearly expressed “will of the people,” which had obtained such an effective strength. The sentence is subject to no appeals! In the given case the wives of the condemned gathered money and sent lawyers to Moscow, where they were received by an assistant of Vyshinsky and quickly received a pardon, but this happened in far from all instance.
One can imagine that this mass “witch hunt” craze was generated by interfactional contradictions in the Party elite that were made possible by repressions with ritual accusations (sabotage, spying, etc.). But then a separate mass sentiment arose, and it was used by the authorities to solve pressing political tasks. Then, it was necessary to carry out the complicated task of “calming things down” – to pull society out of its passionate mood.
I believe that something similar took place in China with their “Cultural Revolution.” To do battle with the clans that had formed in the nomenklatura, Mao Tse Tung turned to the direct democracy of the young people, calling them to “pogrom in the barracks,” and then this wave obtained its own power and logic, so that there was too much destruction. When such a tragedy on a national scale occurs, I believe, it is necessary to evaluate if the leadership was able to use this destructive pressure to carry out obligatory or highly developed tasks, or whether the chaos remained blind. God save us from having to use such methods, but they’ve already happened once...
In the case of Mao Tse Tung, he was clearly able to do this – a “revolution of the nomenklatura” like our Perestroika was averted, and the ideological and theoretical space was opened up for the renewal of reforms that we observe in China. After all, practically all the cadres carrying out this reform are former Red Guards – the student youth formed by the “Cultural Revolution.” Although no one, of course, approves of that “Cultural Revolution.”
The ideological campaign of Perestroika made thinnking about the repressions more difficult, using an overly simplifoed model of the phenomenon. Thus, much was said about how the trials were "fabricated." But no one [at the time of the repressions] understood the ritual accusations literally, and it is important to understand how they were interpreted. Tukhachevsky was accused of "organizing plots and espionage," but people thought to themselves that he was really being punished because he shot hostages in Tambovskaya Guberniya in 1921 and suggested using chemical weapons against peasants. When L.P. Beria was executed as an "English spy," noone was in amazement and the absurd accusation -- everyone believed that he was really being killed as a bloody-handed butcher who had cut short the lives of many innocent people (here, we are discussing the received wisdom about Beria, and not a reliable assessment of the actual state of affairs).
As is not surprising, theideologues of Perestroika themselves went down the road of mystification, departing from the principles of law: making up unfounded "lists" to be rehabilitated corresponding completely to to unfounded "lists" to be repressed. Here is an example of an absolutely absurd decision: the entire group condemned along with Bukharin was rehabilitated, as the accusation of espionage was fabricated. But nevertheless this was not done with Yagoda. He was, of course, nor a very nice person, but the accusation on the basis of which he was sentenced was just as _fabricated_ as Bukharin's.
As is always the case in a civil war, it was very difficult at the time of the repressions to define the "front line." It was impossible to know who to beat and for what. As, for instance, General Prosecutor of the USSR A.M. Rekunkov said in protest over the case of Bukharin and others, "former employees of the NKVD of the USSR, Yezhov, Frinovsky, Agranov and others, having participated directly in the given case and others, were condemned for illegal arrests and fabrication of evidence. Former Representative of the Narkom of Internal Affairs of the USSR Frinovsky, was condemned on February 3, 1940, for fabrication of criminal cases and mass repressions, in an announcement from..." and so forth.
In other words, the repressions were the result of a complicated, contradictory process in which various groups and currents collided. It was not at all a simple machine acting upon the push of a button in some cabinet. This was a battle, a savage operation in the fading Civil War. After all, the same employee of the NKVD who sent "former employees of the NKVD" to be shot "for making illegal arrests" might the very next day give an order to make an illegal arrest -- knowing full well what will threaten him the day after tomorrow.
In the mass repressions, it is necessary to distinguish between its two sides: a goal-directed one and an irrational one (the latter resembling "mass psychosis," logically inexplicable behavior in otherwise rational people and collectives). Politicians can influence the process on the first side, but on the second only to a certain extent, not completely. It is well known that the repressions of the 1930s took place at a time in which society as a whole was in a state of extremely strong emotional stress created by the turmoils of the 20th century (there are many signs of this). To use religious terminology, it is possible to say that in the first half of the 20th century many of those who had been directly forced into industrialization were in a position of _passion_. (CD -- that last sentence was hard to translate!!)
__________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Tired of spam? Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around http://mail.yahoo.com