we saw a suspicious character on the street, we should follow and report him – he might be a spy. The authorities, the Party, our teachers – everybody said the same thing. What else could we think?
After leaving school, in 1937, Bindel found a job in a factory, where the workers regularly cursed the ‘enemies of the people’.
When the factory had a breakdown, they would say: ‘Comrades, there is sabotage and treachery!’ They would look for someone who had a blemish on his record and call him an enemy. They would put him in prison, beat him up until he confessed that he had done it. At his trial they would say: ‘Look at the bastard who was working secretly among us!’98
Many workers believed in the existence of ‘enemies of the people’ and called for their arrest because they associated them with the ‘bosses’ (Party leaders, managers and specialists) whom they already blamed for their economic difficulties. Indeed, this mistrust of the elites helps to explain the broad appeal of the purges among certain sections of the population, which perceived the Great Terror as a ‘quarrel among the masters’ that did not affect them. This perception is neatly illustrated by a joke that circulated widely in the years of the Terror. The NKVD bangs on the door of an apartment in the middle of the night. ‘Who’s there?’ the man inside asks. ‘The NKVD, open up!’ The man is relieved: ‘No, no,’ he tells them, ‘you’ve got the wrong apartment – the Communists live upstairs!’99
The arrest of a close relative was not enough to shake most people from their belief in ‘enemies’. Indeed, in many cases it reinforced it. Ida Slavina, whose father was arrested in 1937, held firm to her Komsomol convictions until 1953:
I didn’t believe that my father was an enemy of the people. Of course I thought that he was innocent. Yet at the same time I believed that there were undoubtedly enemies of the people. I was utterly convinced that it was through their sabotage that good people like my father were being wrongly put in jail. The existence of these enemies was obvious to me… I read about them in the press and hated them as much as anyone. With the Komsomol I went on demonstrations to protest against the enemies of the people. We cried: ‘Death to the enemies of the people!’ The newspapers gave us these slogans. They filled our heads with the show trials. We read the terrible confessions by Bukharin and other Party leaders. We were horrified. If such people were spies, then the enemies were everywhere.100
Roza Novoseltseva, whose parents were arrested in 1937, never thought that they were really ‘enemies’, but she was prepared to believe that senior Party leaders like Bukharin might be, because, as she put it at the time, ‘someone has to be responsible for the tragic circumstances of our family’. Vladimir Ianin, who grew up in a family of Soviet diplomats, believed all the charges against the ‘enemies of the people’ – he thought that Yezhov was a ‘great man’ – even though his father, his older sister, six of his uncles and an aunt were all arrested in the Great Terror. It was only after the arrest of his mother, in 1944, that he began to question his belief. He wrote to Stalin to tell him that his mother was entirely innocent and to warn him that her arrest had proved that the NKVD had been taken over by the ‘enemies of the people’.101
Even Stalin’s victims continued to believe in the existence of ‘enemies of the people’. They blamed them for their own arrest (which they put down to ‘counter-revolutionary sabotage’) or presumed that they themselves had been mistaken for real ‘enemies of the people’. Dmitry Streletsky was the son of a ‘kulak’ family exiled as ‘enemies of the people’. He continued to believe in all the propaganda of the Stalinist regime, becoming an ardent Stalinist until 1953. Looking back on his life, Streletsky believes that ‘it was easier for us [the repressed] to survive our punishments if we continued to believe in Stalin, to think that Stalin was deceived by enemies of the people, rather than to give up hope in him.’
We never thought that Stalin was to blame for our suffering. We only wondered how it was that he did not know that he was being duped… My father himself said: ‘Stalin does not know, which means that sooner or later we are bound to be released [from exile]’… Perhaps it was a form of self-deception, but psychologically it made life much easier to bear, believing in the justice of Stalin. It took away our fear.102
Pavel Vittenburg, the geologist who spent many years in labour camps, supported the Great Terror against ‘enemies of the people’. As he explained in a letter to his wife from an expedition to Severnaia Zemlia in February 1937:
You asked if I heard about the trial of Piatakov on the radio. I heard it all – and now I understand that my own downfall is entirely due to those scoundrels the Trotskyists – they tried to destroy our [Soviet] Union. So many innocent non-party people have been sent into exile as a consequence of their dark ways.103
For those who were less certain about the existence of all these ‘enemies of the people’, it was not so much the show trials that gave rise to doubts (few people questioned the veracity of the prosecution case) as the sudden disappearance of colleagues, friends and neighbours, whose guilt did not seem plausible.
A common way to deal with such troubling thoughts was not to think – to shun all politics and withdraw entirely into private life. Many people managed to live through the Great Terror oblivious to political events, even the political elite, who must have shut their eyes to the disappearances in their circle. Mikhail Isaev was a leading Soviet jurist, a member of the Supreme Court of the Soviet Union, who lived in Moscow in some style with his wife and their four children. Throughout the years of the Great Terror there was never any talk of politics at home, judging from the recollections of his wife Maria, even though the mass arrests affected many friends. Isaev seemed astonishingly unaware of what was going on, even in his own house. In a letter to his daughter, written in December 1937, he complained about the disappearance of the housekeeper, an elderly spinster, who had not come to work for several days. The house was in disorder, and Isaev was obviously annoyed that she had ‘gone away without any warning whatsoever’. He had ‘no idea’ why the housekeeper had disappeared and wondered whether he should fire her. It never crossed his mind that the housekeeper had been arrested – as indeed she had – and that she had nobody to pass a message to her employers.104
Many of the children of these elite families were sheltered from political events. Nina Kaminskaia, the daughter of a lawyer and former Kadet (liberal) activist, never thought about politics – the subject was avoided in her parents’ home. Even when her father lost his job in a Soviet bank, Nina went on living her ‘carefree student life’ at the law school where she had enrolled in 1937. Years later, she discussed this with a friend. Both of them agreed that they had lived quite happily through the Great Terror, without fear or even much awareness of what was going on: ‘We had simply failed to perceive the horror and despair that gripped our parents’ generation.’ Nina’s friend recalled an incident from 1937. She had come home from a party late at night and had lost her key:
There was nothing for it but to ring the bell and wake up her parents. For a long time there was no response, so she rang a second time. Soon she heard footsteps and the door was opened. There stood her father, dressed as though he had not been to bed at all but had just come in or was on the point of going out again. He was wearing a dark suit, a clean shirt, a neatly tied necktie. On seeing his daughter he stared at her in silence and then, still without a word, slapped her across the face.
Nina knew her friend’s father. He was a cultivated man, without any violence in him. His reaction to the late-night knock was obviously sparked by his fear that ‘they’ had come for him. At first her friend was shocked by the assault:
Overcome by self-pity, she burst into tears and reproached her father, but after a while she completely forgot about the incident. Years passed before she recalled her father’s pale face, his silence, and that blow – no doubt the only time in his life he ever hit anyone. She told me this story with great pain, racked by guilt at her own incomprehension and that of our whole generation.105
People dealt with their doubts by suppressing them, or by finding ways to rationalize them so as to preserve the basic structures of their Communist belief. They did not do this consciously and generally only became aware of their behaviour years later. Maia Rodak’s father was denounced as an ‘enemy of the people’ in 1937 because he had inadvertently uttered a phrase once used by Trotsky in a letter to the Soviet authorities. After his arrest, Maia tried, as she now understands, to reconcile her doubts about the Terror with her Communist beliefs.
