Stalin and Yezhov: An Extra-Paradigmatic View - by Philip E. Panaggio
Chapter 16: Yezhov's Patrol
Yezhov was suspected of "going too far" in the purges not only by Western critics but also by his own comrades A. Zhdanov, Molotov, by Stalin himself and by many others in the Party elite at the time. This was especially so when he instituted regional quotas for purges and conviction of entire lists of people who had been arrested and had been liable to verdict by military tribunal. These lists were sometimes signed for approval - convicting everyone on the list at once - by Molotov with Stalin’s approval. Yezhov was determined to completely liquidate what he believed to be a vast underground network of opposition: wreckers, Trotskyists, Zinovievists, German and other foreign spies and saboteurs, et. al. He openly and frankly said he would "get rid of all that scum which the revolution and the Civil War [my emphasis] had sent sloshing into the organs of state security." This statement accords completely with the new archival evidence as well as with the statistical analyses outlined above as to whom Yezhov actually targeted, refuting the fictional view of the totalitarian paradigmists that the targets were Stalin’s personal enemies, Old Bolsheviks, hopelessly uncooperative comrades, et. al.. This open, truthful, and clear statement by Yezhov has been disregarded because it does not fit the dominant paradigm well. In another paradigmatically disregarded statement, Stalin said, "we will destroy such enemies, even if [my emphasis] he is an old Bolshevik." Note the "even if," which takes on a new, clear, and sensible meaning in light of the new evidence. This is an instance in which the application and use of hair-splitting interpretative semantics and sociolinguistics would have been salutary. Kremlinologists have always employed these methods to make up for a painfully felt dearth of hard facts about what was really going on behind the "Iron Curtain." Every word in statements by Soviet leaders - even seemingly insignificant adverbs, conjunctions, and function words, like "even if" - was literally squeezed for every possible nuance in the hope that some hard facts would drip out. Yet, in the case of this statement by Stalin, Kremlinologists were remiss. The "even if" was elided or ignored because accounting for it would generate facts that run counter to the dominant paradigm. The "even if" could lead to the anti-paradigmatic inference that Stalin may have been hesitant to accept evidence against an Old Bolshevik. Read it again with emphasis on the "even if" and see.
The totalitarian paradigm gives a coherent but simple (and again fictional) account as to why Stalin selected Yezhov to head the NKVD, though much of it is very general. Yezhov is said to have been the "perfect puppet," the ideal Stalin-sycophant who was granted his big chance to prove what he had always craved and worked so hard for: recognition for loyalty. Or else Yezhov is caricatured as by Tsitriniak: as a homicidal, pathologically compulsive and fastidious trigger-man, a folklore caricature briefly but vividly acted out in the film Stalin, mentioned on page one of this essay. These are believable personalities, of course, but the new evidence yields a much different, equally coherent, and more detailed picture: Stalin selected Yezhov not for his excellence as a "hit man," but because it was known that during many years of Yezhov’s work in the Party, as Manning puts it, he "tended to heed worker complaints against managers and regard economic troubles as manifestations of wrecking" (op. cit., p. 139). This was so because Yezhov had been a metalworker for eight years, starting at age fourteen. This industry was considered the most radically Bolshevik and Stakhanovite. Complaints from the factory floor had, as historian Robert Thurston puts it, "particular resonance" with Yezhov (Stalinist Terror: New Perspectives, p. 159). Yezhov knew, by experience, what it meant to be a worker - something that cannot be said for most Western theorists discussing the working class.
The Stakhanovites were a Soviet workers’ elite emulating the example set by Aleksey Grigoriyevich Stakhanov, who had broken norms for coal production in a single shift (102 tons mined). But there was much more to Stakhanovism than setting brute production records. Stakhanovites experimented with new ways of using machinery and new methods of expediting production. A Stakhanovite worker might recommend to a manager or foreman that a colored flag or other signaling device be set up at each work station in a factory so that if a worker’s tool broke or he needed other assistance, he could set off an "alarm" that told the manager to report immediately to the worker’s impaired work bench for corrective action. Many managers who had been officers of the White army in the Civil War were affronted at the idea that an "underling" could make them jump and run.
The negative effects of Stakhanovism on other "ordinary" workers due to the supposedly deleterious "tension" it created has been commented upon endlessly by writers who marshal every ounce of imagination to compile negatives about the former Soviet system. But the tensions Stakhanovism actually did create between workers and managers, experienced and well-understood by Yezhov, have been given little attention. Deserving Stakhanovites, based purely on merit, rose to replace numerous inefficient and suspect factory, farm, mine, and industrial managers during this era. In the Harvard émigré interview project commended above for having at least the merit of being empirical, there appeared only one case of a Stakhanovite being arrested for wrecking: he spent funds foolishly.
When these fresh facts are adduced, the totalitarian paradigmists rise up from their usual trough of credulity on a wave of newfound skepticism. This is because the new evidence, impartially examined, begets the belief that Yezhov was the right choice for NKVD head, and was chosen for reasons that conflict with the dominant paradigm. The new evidence seems to point to the idea that the NKVD entered industrial and other economic situations whenever complaints "arose from below," i.e. when protests of wrecking or other trouble were voiced by workers experiencing frustration, opposition, and sabotage by middle managers. The NKVD’s primary role was therefore economic police work, not political police work, which would have been a secondary role. The totalitarian paradigmists have inflated the latter role, eclipsing and excluding the former. This implies that national leaders in the Soviet Union, such as Stalin, Molotov, Kaganovich, Kalinin, Ordzhonikidze, Dzerzhinsky, Yezhov, and others were highly responsive to workers’ interests, demands, and criticisms. (As the Kovalev case previously described shows, local - especially rural - officials often were not, especially, and not surprisingly, if they had been Whites during the Civil War and formerly - or presently - members of the opposition.) This is a coherent and factually supported construction of the "Terror" that the totalitarian paradigmists seek to side step. As mentioned early in this part of the essay, the paradigm that one accepts and views the world through largely determines what one "notices" and does not notice. In this case, it is the NKVD’s previously "unnoticed" original and primary role in industrial and economic situations.
How this alternate construction of the Terror (and of the role of the NKVD in it) leads to conclusions contrary to widely held opinions that lean heavily on the dominant paradigm for support can be illustrated by using the suspicions propagated by Valery Soyfer, Martin Gardner, and others regarding agrobiologist Trofim Lysenko. They charged him with responsibility as villain and virtual executioner for the death during confinement of world-renowned ethnobotanist and geneticist N. Vavilov. Their surmise was that although Lysenko was not a Party member, he was known to have been a loyal Stalinist who hobnobbed with Party elite. The suspicion is that he was a covert NKVD operative or informant. This makes sense in the folklore of the dominant paradigm. But outside the paradigm, in the light of the new evidence, a different speculation makes more sense. It is known that Vavilov was Lysenko’s chief rival for pre-eminence in Soviet agriculture and genetics. Lysenko was an admired and favorite advocate of common peasants and workers, while Vavilov pulled in tow a known entourage of worshipful cosmopolitan intellectuals and petit-bourgeois aspirants for international scientific and scholarly renown. Complaints "from the factory floor" would have flowed more often and more freely to Lysenko than to Vavilov. This would cast Lysenko in a new, legitimate social role unique to its time and place, unfamiliar in the West, as "privy advocate" for many more such complaints than Vavilov could ever have been, rather than starring him as an Stalin-marionette, impostor scientist who, because he had a real and documentable background in botany, was a highly convincing NKVD informant "planted" (no pun intended) high up in prestigious Soviet science organizations. It is now known that, during this period, the NKVD was set to pounce upon such complaints. It is not likely for the NKVD to have ignored grievances reiterated by Lysenko himself, including complaints he received about Vavilov or his students.
Without the dominant paradigm, and in light of the new evidence, reasonable historical construction of these events concerning Lysenko builds upon a different foundation. Speculation still reigns, with or without the dominant paradigm, until concrete facts come to light which can prove who Lysenko really was. It would be easier, as a matter of logical principle, to prove that Lysenko was an NKVD spy (which has yet to be done) than to prove that he was not, because the former could be accomplished by producing a single piece of hard, written evidence (if it existed and could be found). It would be much more difficult or impossible, on the other hand, to prove the negative, i.e. that Lysenko was not a spy. For example, what kind of document could there be which would "certify" that a particular Soviet citizen was not a covert NKVD operative? (Lysenko and his scientific work will be discussed in detail in Part II of this essay. For comments on the Lysenko-as- NKVD-agent theory, accompanied by much of the available incriminating evidence and documentable facts in brief, along with copious references, see Incriminating Circumstantial ‘Evidence’ Cited by Critics that Use This to Discredit the Scientist Lysenko’s Scientific Work by Jantsang [or Jan sang]; see appended Bibliography). It is not likely that Lysenko was both an NKVD spy and a social conduit for complaints "from below," or what might be thought of as a kind of quasi-governmental, grass-roots functionary of a type absent in contemporaneous Western social systems, new in this heyday of Stakhanovism. A spy is not likely to "blow his cover" by simultaneously acting as a combination covert operative, "whistle blower," and "workers’ advocate." If Lysenko really filled the latter two roles, he appears less like a "mole" in the science academies and more like a "proletarian’s Ralph Nader" implicitly backed by the most powerful sanctions of the Soviet government. Keep in mind that powerful interests that wished Ralph Nader would "disappear" when he vigorously and courageously advocated consumer interests did not refer to him as an "advocate" but rather as a "snitch," a common epithet used for Lysenko by his enemies.
The timing of the appointment of Yezhov makes more sense without the dominant paradigm. The assassination of Stalin’s purported "apparent successor," S. M. Kirov, on December 1, 1934 is usually cited as the event which triggered the appointment of Yezhov as NKVD head and the start of the Great Terror, as if an alarm had then gone out that do-or-die assassins and saboteurs were abroad and that "Marshall Yezhov" was needed to hold the line. To repeat, there is almost invariably something trite, melodramatic, and simplistic about the totalitarian paradigm’s explanations, an important reason for their widespread appeal and the ease with which they are retained in memory. (In these respects, they resemble much folklore.) Yezhov, at first enjoying the complete confidence of Stalin, is known to have been appointed at Stalin’s personal request to head a government commission controlling the course of the investigation of Kirov’s murder in the name of the Politburo. However, Yezhov was not appointed to the lofty post of General Commissar of State Security of the USSR (NKVD head) until shortly after September 25, 1936. This is a long interval of about 21 months after Kirov’s death, surely too long to be an "emergency response" to Kirov’s assassination. The more immediate incidents, which explain Yezhov’s appointment at this late date, were two major mine accidents that occurred in the spring and fall of 1936. In the spring accident in May, a mine collapsed, and men of the best Stakhanovite brigade were buried alive. Six managers were convicted of wrecking, and the assistant technical director of the mine was held responsible and was shot. The hunt for wreckers was not only already on before Yezhov’s appointment, but had reached its zenith in the national press at almost the same moment he received his post. A former Stakhanovite like Yezhov was the logical and best choice, not a paranoid triggerman, obsessive super-cop, or malefic Marxist equivalent to a "McCarthyite," which would have been more likely choices if the murder of Kirov had really been the reason for his appointment.
The murder of Kirov would certainly have reminded Stalin and Yezhov of the shootings of Lenin and Uritsky and who had been behind them. But the minds of adherents of the totalitarian paradigm appear to be completely overwhelmed and obscured by more extravagant and publicly discussed events, like Kirov’s assassination, as if that had been an isolated event. The totalitarian paradigm examines facts in isolation with self-serving caprice. As noted repeatedly before, it relies for much of its force and conviction on melodrama and simplicity. Successful paradigms in the physical sciences have their own unique kind of simplicity and "drama," most often perceptible and appreciated only by trained experts and specialists in the field over which the paradigm prevails. "Adepts" trained in these fields refer to these features, not obvious to the untrained, as being "aesthetically pleasing" aspects of a theory. (See, for example, the physicist and Nobel laureate Steven Weinberg’s The First Three Minutes, Chapter I, in which he refers to the aesthetically appealing dominant paradigm in cosmology as the "widely accepted standard model.") On the other hand, the simplicity and drama - or lack of them - inherent in historical paradigms is often immediately apparent to any intelligent layman, who may or may not consider them aesthetically satisfying, depending, as always, on his "taste," which is also relevant for assessing the "beauty" of physical science paradigms.
The mismanagement and sabotage in the aforementioned mine incidents weighed almost as heavily upon Old Bolsheviks and their younger comrades as had the shootings of Lenin and Uritsky. This was so because the mine wreckage - both economic and human - reminded them of an entire chapter of events that historical accounts of the Bolshevik Revolution framed under the totalitarian paradigm consistently omit, gloss over, or minimize. As early as November of 1917, only weeks after the Bolsheviks prevailed, office workers, who had been members of the Tsar’s civil service, boycotted the new regime. They also affirmatively and deliberately altered accounts in order to conceal food. This was an effort to "starve out" the new government, cruelly victimizing women and children as much as Red Army soldiers. These civil servants refused to act on the new regime’s orders. Employees of the Food Ministry refused to recognize the power and authority of the Soviets and the Peoples’ Commissars. They refused to hand over business records and correspondence. This was not sabotage, but boycott, which may be called sabotage in the open.
As the new government and early CheKa gained strength, disarming common looters and arresting the middle-class ("bourgeois") boycotters in the former civil service whose services and expertise the new regime sorely needed, members of the latter group who had already been convicted by Revolutionary Tribunals, or were under suspicion or being held under formal charges, were forced to flee abroad or go underground. In the minds of Stalin and Yezhov, these enemies never really disappeared, as the ignored mine incidents and many other events unknown to - or omitted by - the totalitarian paradigm suggest. Those who escaped arrest abroad opened uninhibited and garishly exaggerated defamation campaigns against officials of the government they left behind. From their newfound safe havens, lavished with foreign patronage and subsidies, they directed their bitter calumnies, exaggerations, and lies against many new leaders in Moscow and St. Petersburg whose rationality and good will were never in doubt for many Russians and foreign observers, even if their goals and methods had been debated - leaders such as Lenin and Dzerzhinsky. The new regime’s enemies who were forced or, on principle, chose to remain behind, went into hiding and became resigned to acting against the new regime covertly and cautiously. Some just bided their time, appearing to cooperate with the Soviets. Some, after bitterly having fought for their overthrow in the Civil War, pretended to surrender at last. The above-mentioned leniency of the early Bolsheviks, noted by Lockhart himself, allowed many of these former enemies to rise to high positions under Stalin, as the case of Kovalev shows.
© Copyright by Philip E. Panaggio P. O. Box 85, Lehigh Acres, FL 33970-0085, USA
