We thank thee, Stalin!
Sixteen scoundrels,
Sixteen butchers of the Fatherland
Have been gathered to their ancestors!
Today the sky looks blue,
Thou hast repaid us for the sorrows of many years!
But why only sixteen?
Give us forty,
Give us hundreds,
Thousands;
Make a bridge across the Moscow river,
A bridge without towers or beams,
A bridge of Soviet carrion –
And add thy carcass to the rest!
The above lines were published in the Paris White Guard paper Vozrozhdenye on 29 August 1938, following the announcement of the executions after the first trial. The enemies of October had good reason to rejoice. All the main defendants in the Trials were close associates of Lenin before, during and after the October Revolution. The defendants were originally charged with attempting to restore capitalism in Russia, which was then discarded in the 1936 trial and replaced by “lust for power” and pursuing a terrorist plan to exterminate Stalin and other Soviet leaders.
One of the foulest slanders now aimed at Lenin and Trotsky is that Stalin’s Purges were only the continuation of the Red Terror waged by the Bolsheviks after the Revolution. Apart from the fact that it is impossible to compare the monstrous methods used by Stalin with those employed by the embattled workers’ government defending itself against powerful and ruthless enemies, this argument overlooks the most important question: against whom was the terror waged and for what purpose? In the same hypocritical way, the Pharisees throw up their hands in horror at the Terror of the French Revolution. But unfortunately, all history shows that a ruling class or caste does not normally give up its power and privileges without a fight.
From a revolutionary point of view, it is impossible to consider the question of violence in the abstract. Of course, every sane person abhors violence and will attempt to avoid it. But when one is attacked and in danger of being murdered, most people will fight to defend themselves. The revolutionary Terror, both in France and Russia, was a response to the violence of the reaction. Without the most energetic measures of self-defence, the revolution in both cases would have been smothered in its own blood. How can one seriously condemn such measures of self-defence of the revolution against those who wish to destroy it? The case is completely different with the violence of the counter-revolution. After Thermidor, terrible violence was directed against the Jacobins, but very little is said about this. The Pharisees pass over it in silence, or read us hypocritical morality lessons about the “Revolution devouring its own children” and so on. But the violence of the French Revolution in the period of its ascent was directed against the counter-revolution – aristocrats, priests, speculators and the like. The Thermidorian and Bonapartist terror was directed against the revolutionaries. There is a qualitative difference between the two. Not to see this is to understand nothing.
In 1922 the leaders of the SRs were put on trial charged with acts of terrorism against the leaders of the Soviet state. But there was absolutely nothing in common between this and Stalin’s frame-ups. The first difference is that the SRs were guilty of the crimes they were charged with. They not only admitted them, but proudly proclaimed their actions. That is not surprising. Unlike the Russian Marxists who were always implacably opposed to individual terror, the SRs (both the Right and Left) were the inheritors of the traditions of the Narodnaya Volya party which openly espoused the method of terrorism. There was not the slightest doubt that they were responsible for the assassination of Bolshevik leaders like Uritsky and Volodarsky and the attempted assassination of Lenin. They did not have to be forced to confess, since they regarded their actions as correct and legitimate. In tsarist times, they frequently handed themselves over to the authorities after perpetrating an assassination. There was yet another fundamental difference. Not only were the SR leaders allowed a legal defence, but they were able to employ lawyers from abroad, specifically the Belgian Social-Democratic leader Emile Vandervelde, who was also a prominent lawyer. The crimes were punishable by death, but the sentences were suspended. None of the accused was executed (although some were later to be shot by Stalin). They were not required to renounce their views, let alone slander themselves in court.
In the Purge trials things were different. The accused were compelled to confess to the most monstrous crimes which they did not commit, and before they were delivered to the executioner, forced to pour dirt over their own heads. Only one of the defendants, Krestinsky, attempted to repudiate his confession in court. He was sent back to the GPU torturers and when he returned 24 hours later confessed to everything. Bukharin attempted to fend off the most atrocious accusations, such as the fantastic charge that he had attempted to assassinate Lenin. He was helped by the courageous stand of an SR, Boris Kamkov, who was called as a prosecution witness but refused to substantiate the charge, although he had nothing to lose since he was already a prisoner of the GPU and Bukharin was a political opponent. He undoubtedly paid a terrible price for his defiance. Bukharin left his defence to posterity, making his wife, Anna Larina, learn his last letter by heart to pass on to future generations. She repeated it every day for 20 years “like a prayer” in Stalin’s concentration camps, which she survived by a miracle.
In this letter, Bukharin points out the fundamental difference between the old revolutionary Cheka under Dzerzhinsky and Stalin’s GPU:
To a Future Generation of Party Leaders
I am leaving life. I bow my head, but not before the proletarian scythe, which is properly merciless but also chaste. I am helpless, instead, before an infernal machine that seems to use medieval methods, yet possesses gigantic power, fabricates organised slander, acts boldly and confidently.
Dzerzhinsky [head of the secret police, or Cheka, under Lenin] is no more; the wonderful traditions of the Cheka have gradually receded into the past, those traditions by which the revolutionary idea governed all its actions, justified cruelty toward enemies, safeguarded the state against any counter-revolution. For this reason, the organs of the Cheka won a special trust, a special honour, an authority and respect. At the present time, the so-called organs of the GPU are in the main a degenerate organisation of unprincipled, dissolute, well-kept functionaries who, enjoying the former authority of the Cheka, seeking to satisfy the pathological suspiciousness of Stalin (I fear to say more), pursuing rank and glory, perform their foul deeds without, incidentally, understanding that they are simultaneously destroying themselves: history does not tolerate the witnesses to dirty deeds!
These ‘wonder-working’ organs can grind any member of the Central Committee, any member of the Party, into dust, turn him into a traitor-terrorist, saboteur, spy. If Stalin doubted in himself, confirmation would follow in an instant.
Storm clouds hang over the Party. My death alone, guilty of nothing, will implicate thousands more of the innocent. For, after all, an organisation must be created, a ‘Bukharinist organisation,’ that in reality not only does not exist now, when I am in my seventh year without a shadow of disagreement with the Party, but did not exist then, in the years of the Right Opposition. I knew nothing about the secret organisations of Ryutin and Uglanov. Together with Rykov and Tomsky, I expounded my views openly.
Since the age of 18, I have been in the Party, and always the goal of my life has been the struggle for the interests of the working class, for the victory of socialism. These days the newspaper with the hallowed name Pravda prints the most contemptible lie that I, Nikolai Bukharin, wanted to destroy the achievement of October, to restore capitalism. That is an unheard-of obscenity. This is a lie that in its obscenity could only be matched by the story that [Tsar] Nikolai Romanov devoted his whole life to the struggle against capitalism and the monarchy, to the struggle for the realisation of the proletarian revolution. (Quoted in Anna Larina, This I cannot forget, pp. 343-4.)
Let us recall when reading these lines that the man who wrote them was described by Lenin as “the Party’s favourite”, and one of its main theoreticians. True, Bukharin made many mistakes, some of them serious, but he was an honest revolutionary unlike those who murdered him. The main purpose of the Purges was to draw a line of blood between the bureaucracy and the real traditions of Marxism-Leninism. It was necessary to break the knot of history, to destroy utterly the old traditions of workers’ democracy and internationalism, to leave nothing behind that could remind future generations of the real meaning of October. Thus, it was not enough to torture and murder the Old Bolsheviks. They had to be made to cover themselves in filth, to publicly renounce their ‘crimes’, and to sing the praises of Stalin. Zinoviev, Kamenev, Bukharin, Rykov, Radek, Rakovsky and a number of other revolutionaries confessed to being life-long imperialist agents. Their accuser, the chief prosecutor, Vyshinsky was an old Menshevik lawyer who had collaborated with the White counter-revolution.
Practically the entire Bolshevik Old Guard was exterminated. Among the victims was A.V. Shotman, an old Party member who was put in charge of protecting Lenin’s life when he was forced underground after the July days in 1917. In 1918, Lenin wrote: “Shotman is an old Party comrade whom I know quite well. He deserves absolute trust.” Yet he was arrested and died in 1939. A large number of foreign Communists perished. Fritz Platten, the Swiss revolutionary who had collaborated with Lenin and organised the famous sealed train which took him from Switzerland to Russia in 1917, survived tsarist, Swiss, German and Rumanian prisons but died in one of Stalin’s camps. The entire leadership of the Polish Communist Party was liquidated, including I.S. Ganetsky, whom Lenin had personally recommended for membership of the Russian Party.
The Purges effectively liquidated what was left of the Soviet Communist Party. Between 1939 and 1952 there was not a single Party Congress, although even during the most difficult period of the civil war this supreme body had met annually. By the beginning of 1939, out of the 139 members elected at the 17th Party Congress, where Stalin celebrated his victory over the Opposition, 110 had been arrested. Out of the Central Committee of the Bolshevik Party of October 1917, only two survived: Alexandra Kollontai, who was sent away to be ambassador to Sweden, and Joseph Stalin. Among the entire Party membership, only a few of Stalin’s hand-picked protégés and hatchet men were left – the Molotovs, Kaganoviches, Mikoyans and Voroshilovs.
The history of the Party was re-written. The notorious History of the CPSU (Bolsheviks) Short Course, reduced it to a series of lies and legends, designed to glorify the role of Stalin. John Reed’s Ten Days That Shook the World, which Lenin praised as a truthful account of the Revolution, was banned. Not only was the name of Trotsky erased, and his image removed from photographs, but even such figures as Krassin, Nogin, Chicherin and Lunacharsky were blotted out. The transformation of the Party from the vanguard of the revolutionary workers to a lever in the bureaucratic apparatus was at last complete. This is the final answer to all the slanderers of Lenin and Trotsky. Those who try to prove that Bolshevism and Stalinism are one and the same phenomenon have yet to explain how it comes about that, in order to triumph, the bureaucratic totalitarian regime was obliged to annihilate the Bolshevik Party, to uproot every vestige of Leninism, to rewrite history and to bury the old traditions of workers’ democracy and internationalism under a mountain of corpses. Surely, if Leninism and Stalinism were all the same, it ought to have been possible to arrive at a compromise? This would have been not only rational, but infinitely more economical. The enemies of October have no answer to this, other than the usual stale clichés about “Revolutions devouring their children” which explain nothing at all. Yet the answer is clear and undeniable to any genuinely objective observer: Bolshevism and Stalinism are as incompatible as revolution and counter-revolution. To those who are incapable of distinguishing between these things we have really nothing more to say.