Stalin and Yezhov: An Extra-Paradigmatic View - by Philip E. Panaggio
Chapter 17: Yezhov's Thesis On the Role of Police
It is possible that Yezhov had a secondary purge agenda of his own - one apart from rooting out the economic wreckers whom he and Stalin believed were still attempting to thwart and "behead the revolution." Such "wreckers" were the Stalin-era equivalents of the above-mentioned former Tsarist civil service employees who had pitilessly attempted to kill the Revolution by starving its subjects. In 1935, Yezhov began work on a large theoretical manuscript which Stalin agreed to review entitled, "From Factionalism to Open Counter-revolution." The thesis contained therein was that political opposition invariably becomes counter-revolutionary terrorism and must therefore be pre-emptively suppressed. Historians who are otherwise parsimonious and empirical in their ready assumptions (which, as explained above, are dictated by the usually unconscious dominant paradigm), such as J. Arch Getty, have leapt to the idea that this manuscript’s contents were "no doubt grisly" without having seen any or all of it (op. cit., p. 59). Getty’s important and valid point, however, is that the possession of a personal purge agenda by Yezhov alongside his role as eliminator of wreckers and other economic saboteurs is not a contradiction. Yezhov is known to have been in possession of one of Trotsky’s personal archives found and confiscated during the arrest of I. M. Trusov, an employee of the Communist Academy. Yezhov’s possession may hint that his interests went beyond "merely" employing the NKVD as an economic patrol. This is more like using the NKVD as a "political police," which better fits the totalitarian paradigm. (As previously noted, the totalitarian paradigm completely ignores what now appears to have been the NKVD’s primary economic function as an economic patrol, and is silent as to whom its targets would actually be if that had been its main function.)
The thesis of Yezhov’s manuscript seems to have been akin to the theory of King and Deutscher mentioned above on the need of victorious revolutionaries to suppress not only all opposition parties, but all opposition and criticism itself. This is clearly different from campaigning for the arrest of factory directors for mismanagement or for failure to fulfill economic plans when they could have done so, or for their injury and abuse of workers. Mistreatment of workers is a category of crimes that are different from crimes of economic negligence. Many Westerners find that worker abuse crimes involve degrees of culpability and care that are too high or otherwise invidious, distasteful, or "unreasonable," especially if the managers charged are political dissidents. The strength of this negative reaction depends on exactly who target critic and dissident groups are suspected of being. But there is a nebulous zone here too, in which wrecking and other cut-and-dry, provable, seemingly non-political economic crimes overlap with acts and abstainments that amount to covert sabotage - or conspiracy to commit it - engaged in as political thrusts by enemies of the state to undermine it indirectly by attacking its economic programs. In modern Western jurisprudence and its actual conduct of criminal trials, different and distinct charges against an accused are laid out and addressed separately. The distinctions between one crime and another, however, no matter how clear they are made at trial, are, in any criminal justice system, always of less significance in the preliminary investigative phase of law that precedes trial. In this earlier stage, a factory director might find that he is apprehended by authorities due to having been negligent with regard to what had been only a single act, but is nonetheless an act which has both economic and political implications. So the act is actually of dual significance, such as a "failure" to discover that arrested project wreckers who worked under him had been purloining valuable ore to finance a cell of Trotskyist conspirators.
The thesis that disagreement gradually and invariably turns into opposition and then into counter-revolutionary terror seems wrong both factually and morally - and this is King’s and Deutscher’s point. King and Deutscher may not be mistaken in thinking this, but, as pointed out previously, they are factually incorrect in thinking that the need to police politics was the main reason for the Great Terror and the Show Trials. It shall now be shown that Yezhov’s thesis was far from unreasonable in the context of the Soviet Union’s history and social system. King and Deutscher (strict totalitarian paradigmists), as well as J. Arch Getty and others who have abandoned - or have held only weakly to - the totalitarian paradigm, are unaware (or are pretending to be unaware) of the fact that some of the most pre-eminent and respected police authorities in the modern world have also believed in Yezhov’s thesis, which they applied using even stronger measures in ostensibly pluralistic, liberal democracies than Yezhov utilized in the Soviet system, e.g. J. Edgar Hoover and his SAC’s (Special Agents in Charge of field offices) of the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation.
© Copyright by Philip E. Panaggio P. O. Box 85, Lehigh Acres, FL 33970-0085, USA
