enough to enlist Soviet citizens who had suffered under his policies. The power of the combination of foreign war and domestic opposition was, after all, the first lesson of Soviet history. Lenin himself had been a German secret weapon in the First World War; the Bolshevik Revolution itself was a side effect of the German foreign policy of 1917. Twenty years later, Stalin had to fear that his opponents within the Soviet Union would use a coming war to overthrow his own regime. Trotsky was in emigration, just as Lenin had been in 1917. During a war Trotsky might come back and rally his supporters, just as Lenin had done twenty years before.28
By 1937 Stalin faced no meaningful political opposition within the Soviet communist party, but this only seemed to convince him that his enemies had learned political invisibility. Just as he had during the height of the famine, he argued again that year that the most dangerous enemies of the state appeared to be harmless and loyal. All enemies, even the invisible ones, would have to be unmasked and eradicated. On 7 November 1937, the twentieth anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution (and the fifth anniversary of his wife’s suicide), Stalin raised a toast: “We will mercilessly destroy anyone who, by his deeds or his thoughts—yes, his thoughts!—threatens the unity of the socialist state. To the complete destruction of all enemies, themselves and their kin!”29
Unlike Hitler, Stalin had at his disposal the tool to effect such a policy: the state police once known as the Cheka and the OGPU, and by this time called the NKVD. The Soviet state police had arisen during the Bolshevik Revolution itself, when it was known as the Cheka. Its mission at the beginning had been more political than legal: the elimination of opponents of the revolution. Once the Soviet Union was established, the Cheka (OGPU, NKVD) became a massive state police force that was charged with the enforcement of Soviet law. In situations regarded as exceptional, such as collectivization in 1930, normal legal procedures were suspended, and OGPU officers (leading troikas) in effect served as judges, juries, and executioners. This was a return to the revolutionary tradition of the Cheka, and was justified by the presence of a revolutionary situation: either an advance toward or a threat to socialism. In order to be in a position to crush the enemies of his choice in the second half of the 1930s, Stalin would need the NKVD to recognize that some sort of crisis was under way, one that required this sort of special measure.30
A dramatic murder gave Stalin the opportunity to assert control over the NKVD. In December 1934 one of Stalin’s closest comrades, Sergei Kirov, was assassinated in Leningrad. Stalin exploited the Kirov assassination much as Hitler had used the Reichstag fire the previous year. He blamed internal political opponents for the murder, and claimed that they planned further terrorist attacks against Soviet leaders. Although the assassin, Leonid Nikolaev, was arrested the day the crime was committed, Stalin would not be satisfied with a simple police action. He forced through a special law allowing for the swift execution of “terrorists.” Emphasizing the threat of terrorism, he declared that his former politburo opponents on the left plotted the murder of the Soviet leadership and the overthrow of Soviet power.31
Stalin’s interpretation of the Leningrad murder was a direct challenge to the Soviet state police. His was not a theory that the NKVD was inclined to accept, not least because there was no evidence. When the NKVD chief Genrikh Yagoda dared to make inquiries of Stalin, he was told that he should beware, lest he be “slapped down.” Stalin found a confederate, Nikolai Yezhov, who was willing to propagate Stalin’s version of events. Yezhov, a diminutive man from the Polish-Lithuanian borderlands, was already known for his view that opposition was simultaneous with terrorism. In February 1935 he took charge of a “control commission” that collected compromising information about members of the central committee for the benefit of the politburo. Stalin and Yezhov seemed to reinforce each other’s beliefs in ubiquitous conspiracies. Stalin came to rely on Yezhov, even going so far, in a rare sign of intimacy, as to express concern about Yezhov’s health. Yezhov first became Yagoda’s deputy, then his replacement. In September 1936 Yezhov become commissar of internal affairs, chief of the NKVD. Yagoda was first appointed to another post, then executed two years later.32
Beginning in August 1936, Yezhov charged Stalin’s former political opponents with fantastic offenses in public show trials. The confessions of these famous men drew the attention of the world. Lev Kamenev and Grigory Zinoviev, once Trotsky’s allies and Stalin’s opponents, were tried between 19 and 24 August. They confessed to participation in a terrorist plot to murder Stalin and, along with fourteen other men, were sentenced to death and executed. These old Bolsheviks had been intimidated and beaten, and were doing little more than uttering lines from a script. But their confessions, which were widely believed, provided a kind of alternative history of the Soviet Union, one in which Stalin had always been right. In the show trials to come, Stalin even followed the rhythm of the late 1920s: having dealt with his one-time opponents from the left, Kamenev and Zinoviev, he turned against his one-time opponent from
For many Europeans and Americans, the show trials were simply trials, and confessions were reliable evidence of guilt. Some observers who were sympathetic to the Soviet Union saw them as a positive development: the British socialist Beatrice Webb, for example, was pleased that Stalin had “cut out the dead wood.” Other Soviet sympathizers no doubt suppressed their suspicions, on the logic that the USSR was the enemy of Nazi Germany and thus the hope of civilization. European public opinion was so polarized by 1936 that it was indeed difficult to criticize the Soviet regime without seeming to endorse fascism and Hitler. This, of course, was the shared binary logic of National Socialism and the Popular Front: Hitler called his enemies “Marxists,” and Stalin called his “fascists.”34 They agreed that there was no middle ground.
Stalin appointed Yezhov just as he decided to intervene in Spain; the show trials and the Popular Front were, from his perspective, the same policy. The Popular Front allowed for the definition of friends and enemies, subject of course to the changing line from Moscow. Like any opening to noncommunist political forces, it demanded great vigilance, both at home and abroad. For Stalin, the Spanish Civil War was simultaneously a battle against armed fascism in Spain and its foreign supporters, and a struggle against left-wing and internal enemies. He believed that the Spanish government was weak because it was unable to find and kill enough spies and traitors. The Soviet Union was both a state and a vision, both a domestic political system and an internationalist ideology. Its foreign policy was always domestic policy, and its domestic policy was always foreign policy. That was its strength and its weakness.35
As Orwell perceived, the public Soviet story of a clash with European fascism coincided with the blood purge of past or potential opponents at home. Soviet
Within the Soviet Union, the confessions of the show trials seemed to create evidence of organized conspiracies, which Yezhov called “centers,” backed by foreign intelligence agencies. In late June 1937 in Moscow, Yezhov informed the central committee of the party of the conclusions that he had drawn. There was, Yezhov announced to the party elite, one master conspiracy, a “Center of Centers,” that embraced all of the political opponents, the armed forces, and even the NKVD. Its aim was nothing less than the destruction of the Soviet Union and the restoration of capitalism on its territories. The agents of the “Center of Centers” would stop at nothing, including the castration of prize sheep—an act of sabotage Yezhov specifically mentioned. All of this justified purges within the party, the army, and the NKVD. Eight high commanders of the armed forces were show-tried that same month; about half of the generals of the Red Army would be executed in the months to come. Of the 139 members of the central committee who took part in the party congress of 1934 (the Congress of Victors), some 98 were shot. All in all, the purification of the armed forces, state institutions, and the communist party led to about fifty thousand executions.37
During these same years, 1934–1937, Hitler was also using violence to assert his control over the institutions of power: the party, the police, and the military. Like Stalin, he revisited his own rise to power, and visited death upon some of the people who had aided him. Although the scale of the murder was far smaller, Hitler’s purges clarified that the rule of law in Germany was subject to the whims of the Leader. Unlike Stalin, who had to subordinate the NKVD to his own authority, Hitler ordered terror as a way to develop his own favored paramilitary, the SS, and assert its superiority over the various German state police forces. Whereas Stalin used his purges to intimidate the Soviet armed forces, Hitler actually drew the German generals closer to his person by
