Stalin and Yezhov: An Extra-Paradigmatic View - by Philip E. Panaggio
Chapter 1: Paradigms and Paranoia
The 1975 edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica states that "during the quarter of a century before his death in 1953, the Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin probably exercised greater political power than any other figure in history." As "Generalissimo Stalin," commander-in-chief of the Soviet Army, Stalin forced the surrender of the German Army, the strongest and most technologically advanced conquering force in recorded history. Under orders from Stalin and his generals, Soviet soldiers could accurately claim credit for about eight of every ten German casualties or captures, leaving doubt about a 1944 American news magazine cover depicting the American General Eisenhower as the "man who defeated Hitler." German Tiger tanks and Russian JS ("Joseph Stalin") heavy tanks engaged in what remain to this day the most colossal armored vehicle battles in history.
At the gates of Moscow, invading Axis forces, specifically Hitler’s Nazi forces, suffered their first major defeat. There, Russian fighters were aided by astonishingly ferocious troops from Siberia and the Urals - soldiers commonly, glibly, and incorrectly referred to in the West as "Cossack" troops. Most Cossacks were anti-Communist and many were Nazi collaborationists who fled when the Red Army won! ("Cossack" - Russian Kazaki - is not related to the name of the Ural-Altaic people called Kazakh.) As it turns out, Napoleon had actually surpassed Hitler in damage inflicted on Moscow. After the defeat of Napoleon’s grand army in its failed effort to conquer Russia in the summer of 1812, Napoleon’s defeated, starving soldiers broke into abandoned Moscow homes for food, causing a spectacular six day conflagration that rivals the Great Fire of London of 1666 and the Great Chicago Fire of 1871. The first major defeat of Hitler’s German forces at fortified Moscow demolished the incipient legends of the invincibility of Hitler’s army and "Aryan superiority." Before his suicide less than four years later, Hitler lost conviction in pseudo-scientific theories then prevalent among many German scientists and intellectuals who had believed in Slavic (East European and Siberian) Unterlegenheit ("inferiority").
Stalin achieved this victory using battle tactics that to this day still shock and outrage Western civilians and military men who learn of them: he had Soviet troops followed across battlefields by the NKVD (his internal security police and intelligence service) which had orders to instantly shoot soldiers about to retreat or fall to enemy capture. Anyone appalled by this measure, however, should attempt to explain to the few living survivors of these battles that it was morally incumbent upon them to submit to conquest, genocide, or to what the Americans provocatively told Stalin was the Third Reich’s aim to loot the Soviet Union’s economic resources and enslave the Slavs, since there appears to have been no other path to avoid defeat.
During this war, Stalin made little or no effort to repatriate prisoners of war - not even to negotiate for the return of his own captured son Yakov. Stalin resettled en masse inhabitants of Soviet territories that had been captured and controlled by the Germans, isolating them in remote parts of the vast Asiatic hinterlands of the Soviet Union. After the war, he often had the families of Soviet soldiers who had fallen into enemy hands apprehended, closing up and sealing off their apartments, a practice the Russians called opechatany. This practice - said to have been directed against foreign spies, "wreckers," and other internal "enemies of the people" - was overseen by Stalin’s loyal NKVD chief Lavrenty Beria.
Beria was the successor of Nikolai Ivanovich Yezhov, who served Stalin as NKVD head only from 1936 until 1938. By l940, Yezhov was himself arrested and shot, the "repressor repressed," as had been Yagoda, who had preceded Yezhov as Stalin’s "top cop." The years that Yezhov was NKVD head are commonly called the Great Terror, Great Purges, or "YEZHOVSHCHINA."
Most of these events are rather well known, though Yezhov himself is less familiar. He resembled the handsome actor Von Flores who plays the character Sandoval on Gene Roddenberry’s posthumous (but recently aired) television series Earth - The Final Conflict, rather than the pudgy, prematurely balding nondescript actor who portrayed Yezhov in the HBO movie Stalin starring Robert Duvall.
In the main, professional scholars, historians, and literary men in the West have tendered only three or four different theories for the causes of the alleged "excess of deaths" and cruelty in the Great Purges of the l930’s and for Stalin’s frightful but effective war tactics. The explanation most often heard finds the source of the arrests, brutality, and carnage in the mind of a deranged dictator (Stalin), a paranoid but otherwise mediocre - if not slow-witted - brute whose evil was rather like that which has been attributed to the Nazi official Adolf Eichmann due to the writings of Hannah Arendt: evil that is ordinary, boring, merely of this world - utterly, banally human.
Another theory says that the NKVD got out of hand, especially under Yezhov. This explanation is closely tied to Stalin’s personality too because of his involvement in, command of, and ultimate responsibility for NKVD operations. Ilya Ehrenburg, author of The Ninth Wave and winner of two Stalin Prizes, said Yezhov was commonly referred to as "the Stalinist Commissar" (quoted in Conquest, R., The Great Terror: A Reassessment, p. 63). Boris Pasternak, Nobel Prize-wining author of Doctor Zhivago, believed that Yezhov concealed the extent of the Great Purges from Stalin, making Yezhov guilty of a kind of "NKVD malpractice." This is a more complex form of the "loose cannon" theory, which usually refers to Yezhov simply as "Stalin’s creation" and even "Stalin’s puppet."
A more nebulous yet subtle theory, represented primarily by the Nobel prize-winning Russian novelist and historian Aleksandr Isayevich Solzhenitsyn (b. Dec. 11, l918), finds the explanation for the "Great Terror" in the Soviet governmental system itself, which is said to have taken on a cruel and insidious life of its own, like the nightmarish judicial system portrayed by Franz Kafka in his novel Der Prozess (The Trial). In this imaginative anticipation of totalitarianism, a vast, faceless, impersonal bureaucratic organization eerily acts as a sentient entity and spectral second protagonist in its own right, ensnaring and strangling the principal protagonist of the novel, the accused Joseph K., until finally, in the end, he accepts his own guilt and execution without protest. Solzhenitsyn-type theories are therefore more loosely tied to Stalin’s personality and responsibility than are the "deranged dictator" and the NKVD (or Yezhov) "loose cannon" theories.
Another theory arises from a deep knowledge of Marxist politics during the early days of Soviet power. It asserts that the Great Purges were a natural corollary of the nature of Leninism. Unlike the Mensheviks, who formed the non-Leninist wing of the Russian Social-Democratic Workers’ Party, the Bolsheviks believed in the need for an elite core of leadership of "professional revolutionaries" in fighting capitalism and building socialist societies. Lenin proposed the need for this relatively small cadre of intellectuals and revolutionaries - a protected and rather conspiratorial inner party nucleus - to command and influence the large working masses of societies, as well as numerous non-party sympathizers, supporters, and other fringe types, in order to pull them forward on its periphery. This idea was carried forward by Stalin, and in this manner becomes integrated into theories and explanations of the Yezhovshchina that rely on Stalin’s thinking and beliefs.
That the repressors were themselves repressed, i.e. that NKVD chiefs Yagoda, Yezhov, and Beria were arrested and shot in turn, is often considered evidence of Stalin’s paranoia. Beria was arrested and shot under Khrushchev, but before this became clear, Stalin was rumored to have become "dissatisfied" with Beria and "must have" purged him. Sometimes Stalin’s fears are credited with having some rational and objective basis by recognizing the reality of Germany’s and Japan’s joint pincer of belligerence and expansionism, crunching the Soviet Union along an east-west axis during the Stalin era. Limited validity is also sometimes recognized in Soviet leaders’ "persecution complexes" due to the verity of the rather well known intervention of Japanese and Western troops - including U.S. troops - in the Russian Civil War. During this war, which immediately followed the Bolshevik Revolution, these foreign armies attempted to assist a counter-revolutionary "White" (anti-Red or anti-Communist) Tsarist army that closed in on the Revolution’s new capital of Moscow from Siberia, Poland, the Ukraine, and Estonia. This was a bloody, costly, and failed effort to overthrow the new proletarian Bolshevik government.
Stalin’s and Yezhov’s fears of covert fascist infiltration of the Communist Party, however, are usually discounted as mostly irrational or exaggerated, despite the fact that there were Nazi "Fifth Columns" in many European countries at the time - as well as in the United States! Discrediting comparisons with McCarthyism are sometimes offered, and Stalin and Yezhov’s fears are ridiculed as "the spy-mania, which set the tone of the Stalin era." But questions as to the existence and extent of German and Japanese espionage and sabotage directed at toppling the Communist regime miss or conceal the real threat - a menace very well known to Stalin, Yezhov, and others! This threat is little known in - and very embarrassing for - the English-speaking world:
In 1918, a master spy named Sidney Reilly, operating through the official British diplomatic channel in Moscow of Robert Bruce Lockhart (an alcoholic who wrestled with his problem all through his long and prestigious professional career in British government), "came within an ace," as Reilly himself put it, of overthrowing the Bolshevik Revolution. Reilly was promoted in the highest echelons of British government by a manic-depressive (congenital or hereditary bipolar mood disorder) who admired him greatly: the future Prime Minister and author Winston Churchill. Churchill referred to his own lifelong mental illness as his "Black Dog." It has been traced in his ancestry though his father, Lord Randolph, whose brain was destroyed in late stages of general paresis, as far back as John Churchill, the first Duke of Marlborough (b. 1650). One of Winston’s biographers, Lord Moran, recorded reminiscences in which Churchill related how he always made sure not to stand at the edge of an express train platform or near the side of a ship because, as Churchill himself put it, "a second’s action would end everything." Even though Churchill complained about them, it was probably not his "low" (depressive) moods that impaired his judgement on Reilly, a messianic anti-Bolshevik fanatic whose judgement and vision were also severely clouded, "whose hobby was collecting Napoleoniana," and who saw himself "as a new Napoleon" (Knightley, The Second Oldest Profession, p. 60). In these low moods, Churchill’s judgement was probably sound, though one could doubt his general outlook on life. Bipolar mood disorder acts in such a way that it was more likely that Churchill’s over-confidence in an unstable and unreliable type like Reilly, and his exuberance for Reilly’s scheme to overthrow the Bolsheviks, were the result of Churchill’s periods of "high" (manic) moods. (See Molecules and Mental Illness by Samuel H. Barondes, Scientific American Library, New York, 1993, pp. 126 - 127 on the Churchills’ mental diseases.) It is significant that the (also hereditary) mental illness of the post-impressionist painter Vincent van Gogh (b. 1853), his fear of persecution and disturbed perceptions due to what is now also suspected of being bipolar mood disorder, is rather well known, but that of the Churchills is not (or it is deliberately not mentioned, downplayed, and/or excused). The main cast of characters behind Reilly’s intrigue to topple the Bolsheviks - namely, the "new Napoleon" Reilly, the depressed and fearful Churchill who stands behind pillars on train platforms lest he throw himself on the rails, and the alcoholic Lockhart - would strain credulity if written in a novel or scripted for a feature film. It might appear to be a "Mel Brooks" comedy were it not for the fact that Winston Churchill was the primary instigator of the English-speaking world’s anti-Communist policies throughout this period. In 1946, Churchill visited the U.S. and made a famous speech in Fulton, Missouri in which he continued to warn the West - in this case the U.S. - of the "expansive policies" of the USSR, favoring a close Anglo-American alliance to oppose it. At this time, he coined the famous, well-worn expression, the "Iron Curtain." (We shall see in what follows that according to former British foreign secretary Sir Anthony Eton, Stalin consistently outwitted Churchill and U.S. President F.D. Roosevelt at the "Big Three" Conference during WWII. Stalin was approaching senescence himself at this time, but his brain-aging appears to have followed a very normal course.)
Reilly’s working plan had been to bribe Latvian mercenaries (ethnic Letts), who were bodyguards of Bolshevik leaders, to induce them to arrest Lenin and Trotsky when the two arrived together in Moscow. Meanwhile, 60,000 White Russian officers and soldiers on the city’s outskirts were to await the signal to mobilize. Lenin and Trotsky were to be paraded in irons through the streets and the Revolution declared over. Simultaneously, Moisei Uritsky, Chairman of the Petrograd CheKa (the Revolution’s earliest intelligence service), was to be arrested in a similar counter-revolutionary uprising in Petrograd. The plan fell through and went out of control, resulting in a fanatical socialist named Fanny Kaplan prematurely shooting Lenin twice at point blank range the day after Uritsky was assassinated in his office. These assassinations had been planned only as contingencies. Lenin survived with one lung punctured, with the second bullet lodged near his main neck artery. He died six years later due to the chronic impairment of health that these wounds caused.
Due to this plot, partly aborted and partly gone awry, English-speaking and British-financed saboteurs and counter-revolutionary agents were under as great - or greater - suspicion than Japanese and German operatives during the much derided "spy-mania." The foiling of this plot - known as "The Conspiracy of Ambassadors" in the Soviet Union and, in the West, as the Lockhart or Lettish conspiracy (as if the Letts were to blame) - was one of the many superlative achievements of Felix Dzerzhinsky as the CheKa’s early organizer. Reilly and his fellow conspirators did not fully appreciate, as Phillip Knightley put it in his book The Second Oldest Profession, the intelligence and resourcefulness of "the Pole [Dzerzhinsky] who founded the modern Soviet intelligence service" whom Reilly and his co-conspirators had been "up against" (Knightley, op. cit., p. 85).
Here there is a major contradiction of the conventional view, which says that Stalinist society and its officials were completely dominated by unreasonable paranoia and xenophobic isolationism. By the time of the Yezhovshchina, many Old Bolsheviks had become high-ranking Soviet officials. They retained the quashing of the Lockhart conspiracy in their living memories. It therefore speaks of their extraordinary courage and complaisance that they and their younger proteges (such as Yezhov) invited any foreign solicitors and lawyers - especially British and American - to attend and audit the Show Trials of the 1930’s at all!
Reilly also had a hand in what Knightley called "the greatest ‘communist scare’ in British political history" (Knightley, op. cit., p. 62). This was the circulation, just prior to Great Britain’s general election of October 29, 1924, of a fraudulent letter purportedly from Zinoviev, who was one of Lenin’s comrades and became - after Lenin’s death - a central figure of leadership in the Communist Party during the 1920’s. The letter called for members of the British Communist Party to intensify their work with sympathizers in Britain’s Labor Party. The forgery successfully swung enough voters away from the Labor Party to defeat Britain’s first Labor government and bring the Conservatives back into power. It poisoned all Anglo-Russian relations and trade treaties for almost three decades. The immediate need for the letter? According to Knightley, "the Labour Party was considering the suspension of SIS [Secret Intelligence Service or "M16"] and opening its files - a proposal which would, if implemented, take effect in 1925. So SIS had every motive to sabotage [sic] Labour’s election chances in order to make certain this did not happen" (ibid., p. 63). This letter "hardened attitudes and marked a definite turning-point in Russia’s view of the West and the West’s view of Russia." It forced "Russia to become more isolationist and more suspicious of Western intentions..." (ibid., pp. 75 - 76). According to Lockhart himself, in the early days of the Revolution, the Bolsheviks were "surprisingly tolerant" (ibid., p. 75). The conspiracy of ambassadors, the attempt on Lenin’s life, other assassinations (as of Uritsky and later Kirov), the Zinoviev letter, and much more (detailed in what follows) poisoned the permissiveness and impartiality of the early Bolsheviks (also detailed in what follows), forcing them to take the more and more extreme measures which have been a favorite the subject of a great amount of anti- Soviet propaganda.
© Copyright by Philip E. Panaggio P. O. Box 85, Lehigh Acres, FL 33970-0085, USA
