The Penguin History of Modern Russia

employment.

Furthermore, the morbid suspiciousness of the Kremlin dictator was internationalized as Stalin turned his attention to the world’s communist parties. The irony was that he did this during a period of improvement of the USSR’s relations with several major foreign states. Formal diplomatic ties had been agreed with the United Kingdom, France and the USA in 1933. Entrance had been effected to the League of Nations in 1934 and treaties signed with France and Czechoslovakia. In the same year the Politburo also overturned its injunction to foreign communist parties to concentrate their hostility upon rival socialists; instead they were to form ‘popular fronts’ with such socialists in a political campaign against fascism. The containment of the European far right had become a goal in Soviet foreign policy. The reorientation was affirmed at the Seventh Congress of the Comintern in August 1935.

While making this adjustment in foreign policy, Stalin demanded vigilance from Europe’s communists, and the Comintern was ordered to rid its ranks of Trotskyist and Bukharinist ‘traitors’. Until 1937 this was a strictly political process because only the All-Union Communist Party in Moscow was a governing communist party with a secret police which could arrest those party members who had been expelled. This meant that while communists were being tortured in the USSR for long-past associations with members of left-of-centre political parties, communists abroad were expelled from their own parties as Trotskyists if they refused to collaborate with other parties on the left.

There was certainly reason for Stalin to worry about the world situation. Germany and Japan signed an Anti-Comintern Pact in November 1936, increasing the menace of a war against the USSR on two fronts. In the same year Hitler had wrecked the Treaty of Versailles in Europe by occupying the Rhineland and offering military support to the fascist forces of General Franco in the Spanish Civil War. The USSR’s call for intervention by the parliamentary democracies of Europe in concert with the Soviet state was ignored. Stalin sent equipment and advisers to Spain all the same. Official Soviet propagandists praised the principled stand being taken by the Kremlin. The USSR was the only state willing to translate its anti-fascist rhetoric into action and Stalin enhanced his prestige among those sections of Western political opinion which bridled at the passivity of the British and French governments.

As Soviet assistance reached Spain in 1937, however, so too did Soviet political practices. The Spanish and foreign volunteers fighting for the Madrid republican government did not consist exclusively of members of parties belonging to the Comintern: there were also liberals, social-democrats, socialists, Trotskyists and anarchists. Stalin, while wanting to preserve the policy of ‘popular fronts’ against fascism, rejected co-operation with rival far-left groupings; and he instructed his emissaries to conduct the same bloody terror against the Trotskyists, anarchists and others that he was applying to them in the USSR. Thousands of anti-fascist fighters were arrested and executed at the behest of the Soviet functionaries.

Stalin wanted to increase the influence of the world-wide communist movement, but only insofar as it in no way damaged the USSR’s interests as he perceived them. In 1938 he took the otherwise incomprehensible decision to wipe out the leading cadre of the Polish Communist Party. The victims were by then resident in Moscow, and the few surviving figures were those lucky enough to be in prison in Warsaw (and one of these, Wladislaw Gomulka, was destined to become the Polish communist leader in 1945). Stalin, knowing that many comrades from Poland had sympathized with leftist communist factions in Moscow in the 1920s, aimed to crush insubordination before it recurred. Moreover, the NKVD infiltrated their agents into groups of political emigres from the Soviet Union. Assassinations were frequent. Trotski, immured in his own armed compound in Coyoacan in Mexico, survived for a while; but even his defences were penetrated on 20 August 1940, when his killer, Ramon Mercader, plunged an ice-pick into the back of his head.

All this time the situation around the USSR’s border became more threatening. While fighting a war against China, the Japanese military command was not averse to provoking trouble with the USSR. Violent clashes occurred in July 1937. Another series of incidents took place between July and August 1938, culminating in the battle of Lake Khasan on the Manchurian border. A truce was arranged, but there was no guarantee that Japan would desist from further aggression. In the same year, Hitler made Germany the most powerful state in Europe by occupying all of Austria and the Sudetenland in Czechoslovakia.

Yet it was also in 1937–8 that Stalin chose to liquidate practically the entire high command of his armed forces. Nothing more vividly demonstrates that his was the statesmanship of the madhouse. By late 1938 even Stalin was coming to the conclusion that the scale of state terror had to be reduced. The most obvious sign of this was given on 19 November 1938, when Yezhov unexpectedly resigned from the NKVD after a brief interview with Stalin. He retained a job as People’s Commissar for Water Transport, but began to while away the meetings of Sovnarkom by folding paper aeroplanes and flying them around the room. Acquaintances were puzzled as to whether he had finally gone off his head or was an accomplished actor; but Stalin was not one to leave such things to guesswork: Yezhov was arrested in April 1939 and executed in the following February.⁶⁵

The Iron Hedgehog’s disappearance signalled the closing of the floodgates of the Great Terror. It was not the end of extensive terror; on the contrary, Stalin used it liberally for the rest of his career. But at the end of 1938 he had decided that the arrests should be fewer. He did not explain his changed position; and yet surely even he must have been shaken by the many practical effects of the blood-purge. There is still much uncertainty about the physical volume of industrial output in 1937–8; but certainly the rate of growth was severely curtailed. There may even have been an absolute decrease in production.⁶⁶ The disorganization was extraordinary. Even the purgers of the purgers of the purgers had been arrested in some places. There are hints that Stalin recognized his own proneness to being too suspicious for his own good; he was to mutter in Khrushchev’s presence several years later: ‘I trust nobody, not even myself.’⁶⁷

Yet such comments were rare. On the whole Stalin gave the impression that abuses of power were not large in number and that anyway they were Yezhov’s fault. Consequently no action was taken against people who referred to the Great Terror as the Yezhovshchina.⁶⁸ For this term distracted unpleasant attention from Stalin. And Stalin, having used Yezhov to do his dirty business, emerged as Soviet dictator in all but name.

He had broken the party as an independent, supreme political agency. Five years passed after the Seventeenth Party Congress in 1934 before he would permit another Congress to convene, and he restricted the Central Committee to one plenum in 1939. The Politburo was ceasing to meet on a regular, formal basis: Stalin preferred to hold discussions with whatever group of Politburo members suited his purposes at the time.⁶⁹ The NKVD’s star had risen while the party’s had fallen; and Beria, when replacing Yezhov, entered the small circle of Stalin’s close advisers. The ‘organs’, as the security police were known, were at Stalin’s elbow whenever he needed them. Fearsome as it was, moreover, the NKVD itself operated in dread of Stalin. In consequence of the Great Terror of 1937–8, therefore, Stalin had succeeded in elevating himself above party, people’s commissariats, army, trade unions and police.

He fostered tension among these powerful institutions so as to maintain his towering position. Communists had typically given little mind to the demarcation of functions among state bodies since the October Revolution; they despised such pernicketiness as an obstacle to communist progress. Stalin exploited this attitude to his personal advantage. The NKVD conflicted with the Red Army, the Red Army with various People’s Commissariats, the Commissariats with the Central Council of Trade Unions and the Central Council with the Party Central Committee.

After 1938 these clashes were mainly bureaucratic squabbles; they often involved differing orientations of policy, but they were less frequently accompanied by mass arrests. All public institutions, while abjectly professing loyalty to Stalin, were confirmed in their power over the rest of society. The Soviet state was authoritative as never before. Satisfied that he had brought the party to heel, Stalin restored its prestige and authority somewhat. The salaries of its functionaries were raised. In December 1938 the NKVD was ordered to seek permission from the party apparatus before taking any official of the party into custody; and, at the Eighteenth Party Congress in March 1939, Beria stressed that not all the economic problems of the USSR were attributable to sabotage. It was even admitted that a great many expulsions from the party — which in 1937–8 had typically led to arrests — had been unjustified. Stalin confirmed the fresh attitude by asserting the necessity to ‘value cadres like the gold reserves of the party and state, esteem them, have respect for them’.⁷⁰

The applause which greeted this statement of monumental hypocrisy stemmed from a feeling of relief that the party might again enjoy durable favour. Other institutions were similarly reassured; but the party remained rather special. It incarnated continuity with the October Revolution, with Lenin, with Marxism-Leninism, with the