The Whisperers

for Revolution. Marriage was dismissed as a ‘bourgeois’ convention. ‘It is inadmissable to have thoughts of personal relationships,’ declared a Komsomol activist in the Red Putilov Factory in Leningrad in 1926. ‘Such ideas belong to an era – before the October Revolution – that has long passed.’51 Baitalsky had a long courtship with a Jewish girl called Yeva, the secretary of the local Komsomol cell. But there was little opportunity for romance because Yeva was zealously devoted to her work, and all he could hope for was to hold her hand and steal a kiss when he walked her home from Komsomol meetings. Eventually they married, and Yeva had a son, whom they named Vi, in honour of Lenin (the letters of Lenin’s first two names). In 1927, Baitalsky was expelled as a ‘Trotskyist counter- revolutionary’, following the expulsion of Trotsky from the Party. Yeva put her loyalty to the Party first. Assuming that her husband had been guilty of counter-revolutionary activity, she renounced him and made him leave their home. Baitalsky was arrested in 1929.

Looking back on these events from the perspective of the 1970s, Baitalsky thought that Yeva was a good person, but that her goodness had retreated before a sense of duty to the Party, whose articles of faith had predefined her response to ‘good’ and ‘evil’ in the world. She had subordinated her own personality and powers of reason to the collective and ‘unapproachable authority’ of the Party. There were ‘tens of thousands’ of Yevas among the Bolsheviks, and their unquestioned acceptance of the Party’s judgement persisted even as the Revolution gave way to the Stalinist dictatorship:

These people did not degenerate. On the contrary, they changed too little. Their internal world remained as before, preventing them from seeing what had begun to change in the outside world. Their misfortune was their conservatism (I would call it ‘revolutionary conservatism’), expressed in their unchanging devotion… to the standards and definitions acquired during the first years of the Revolution. It was even possible to convince such people that for the good of the Revolution they needed to confess to being spies. And many were convinced, and they died believing in the revolutionary necessity for doing so.52

3

‘We Communists are people of a special brand,’ Stalin said in 1924. ‘We are made of better stuff… There is nothing higher than the honour of belonging to this army.’ The Bolsheviks saw themselves as the bearers of virtues and responsibilities that distinguished them from the rest of society. In his influential book on Party Ethics (1925), Aron Solts compared the Bolsheviks to the aristocracy in tsarist times. ‘Today,’ he wrote, ‘it is we who form the ruling class… It is according to how we live, dress, value this or that relationship, according to how we behave that customs will be established in our country.’ As a ruling proletarian caste, it was unacceptable for the Bolsheviks to mix closely with people from a different social class. It was ‘bad taste’, for example, argued Solts, for a Bolshevik to take a wife from a class outside the proletariat, and such marriages were to be condemned in the same way as ‘the marriage of a count to a housemaid would have been condemned in the last century’.53

The ethos of the Party rapidly came to dominate every aspect of public life in Soviet Russia, just as the ethos of the aristocracy had dominated public life in tsarist Russia. Lenin himself compared the Bolsheviks to the nobility, and indeed, joining the Party after 1917 was like moving up a class. It brought preferment to bureaucratic posts, an elite status and privileges, and a personal share in the Party-state. By the end of the Civil War, the Bolsheviks had entrenched themselves in all the leading positions of the government, whose bureaucracy ballooned as almost every aspect of life in Soviet Russia was brought under state control. By 1921, the Soviet bureaucracy was ten times bigger than the tsarist state had ever been. There were 2.4 million state officials, more than twice the number of industrial workers in Russia. They formed the main social base of the regime.

Elite attitudes took root very quickly in the families of Bolsheviks, and they were passed down to their children. The majority of Soviet schoolchildren took it for granted that Party members had a higher status than other members of society, according to a study using controlled games in various schools in 1925. Left to themselves to decide a dispute between two boys, the other children usually decided in favour of the boy who claimed priority on the grounds that his parents were Bolsheviks. The study suggested that Soviet schools had engineered an important change in children’s values, replacing the old sense of fairness and equality that had once ruled within the working class with a new hierarchical system. The children of Party members had a well-developed sense of entitlement. In one controlled game a group of children were playing trains. The boys wanted the train to go and would not wait for a little girl to get aboard, but the girl said: ‘The train will wait. My husband works in the GPU [the political police] and I do as well.’ She then boarded the train and demanded to be given a free ticket.54

The defining qualification of this self-proclaimed elite was ‘Communist morality’. The Bolshevik Party identified itself as a moral as well as political vanguard, whose messianic sense of leadership demanded that its members prove their worthiness to belong to that elite. As one of the elect, every member was obliged to demonstrate that his private conduct and convictions conformed to the Party’s interests. He had to show himself to be a true believer in Communism; to demonstrate that he possessed a higher moral and political consciousness than the mass of the population; that he was honest, disciplined, hard-working and selflessly devoted to the cause. This was not a moral system in the conventional sense. The Bolsheviks rejected the idea of abstract or Christian morality as a form of ‘bourgeois oppression’. Rather, it was a system in which all moral questions were subordinated to the Revolution’s needs. ‘Morality,’ wrote one Party theorist in 1924, ‘is what helps the proletariat in the class struggle. Immorality is everything that hinders it.’55

Belief was the crucial moral quality of every ‘conscious’ Bolshevik. It distinguished the true Communist from the ‘careerist’ who joined the Party for personal ends. And belief was synonymous with a clear conscience. The Party purges and show trials were conceived as an inquisition into the soul of the accused to expose the truth of his or her beliefs (hence the importance attached to confessions, which were regarded as the revelation of the hidden self). Belief, moreover, was a public matter rather than a private one. Perhaps it was connected with the Orthodox tradition of public confession and penance, which was so different from the private nature of confession in the Christian West. Whatever the case, Communist morality left no room for the Western notion of the conscience as a private dialogue with the inner self. The Russian word for ‘conscience’ in this sense (sovest’) almost disappeared from official use after 1917. It was replaced by the word soznatel’nost’, which carries the idea of consciousness or the capacity to reach a higher moral judgement and understanding of the world. In Bolshevik discourse soznatel’nost’ signified the attainment of a higher moral-revolutionary logic, that is, Marxist-Leninist ideology.56

Not all Bolsheviks were expected to possess a detailed knowledge of the Party’s ideology, of course. Among the rank and file it was enough to be involved in the daily practice of its rituals – its oaths and songs, ceremonies, cults and codes of conduct – just as the believers of an organized religion performed their belief when they attended church. But the Party’s doctrines were to be taken as articles of faith by all its followers. Its collective judgement was to be accepted as Justice. Accused of crimes by the leadership, the Party member was expected to repent, to go down on his knees before the Party and welcome its verdict against him. To defend oneself was to add another crime: dissent from the will of the Party. This explains why so many Bolsheviks surrendered to their fate in the purges, even when they were innocent of the crimes of which they stood accused. Their attitude was revealed in a conversation reported by a friend of the Bolshevik leader Iurii Piatakov not long after Piatakov’s expulsion from the Party as a Trotskyist in 1927. To earn his readmission Piatakov had recanted many of his oldest political beliefs, but this did not make him a coward, as his friend had charged. Rather, as Piatakov explained, it showed that

a true Bolshevik will readily cast out from his mind ideas in which he has believed for years. A true Bolshevik has submerged his personality in the collectivity, ‘the Party’, to such an extent that he can make the necessary effort to break away from his own opinions and convictions… He would be ready to believe that black was white and white was black, if the Party required it.57

Nevertheless, because he had changed his views so radically, Piatakov, like other ‘renegades’, was never fully trusted or believed by Stalin, who ordered his arrest in 1936.

The purges began long before Stalin’s rise to power. They had their origins in the Civil War, when the