Stalin and Yezhov: An Extra-Paradigmatic View - by Philip E. Panaggio
Chapter 11: The Great Chain of Being Paradigm
The Great Chain of Being, a grandiose paradigm for the cosmos, also known as the scala naturae, originated in the writings of ancient neo-Platonists, who had much common intellectual currency with Christians. It reigned supreme throughout the Middle Ages in Europe as that period’s signature paradigm, and continued its domination right through the European Renaissance and the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries. It is discussed, for example, in the first epistle of Alexander Pope’s An Essay On Man. The publication in 1859 of Charles Darwin’s Origin of the Species threatened to bury this paradigm, to put the idea of natural evolution ahead of it, but it was resurrected and clung to, especially by seminarians in the Twentieth Century after publication in 1936 of Arthur Oncken Lovejoy’s book The Great Chain of Being: A Study of the History of an Idea.
The Great Chain paradigm asserts that all things in the universe are arranged on a ladder or in an hierarchy from lowest to highest, the latter being the ens perfectissimum or perfect existence of God. All things in between have an ordained place and are graded continuously, but all are to a greater or lesser extent still "full of God," just as all spheres of life in Stalinist society are thought by totalitarian paradigmists to be more or less suffused - or under imperative of suffusion by the NKVD - with Stalin’s version of Marxism-Leninism. This suffusion principle, in the Chain paradigm, is called the principle of plenitude. In Stalinist society, it would be called something else, such as "absence of pluralism," but three basic Chain principles of plenitude, gradation, and continuity operate in both paradigms, making the paradigms analogous. When Stalin appears lenient or liberal, for example, the totalitarian paradigm says he is merely practicing a principle parallel to that of the Chain’s principle of plenitude: providing a maximum diversity of existences or spheres of life which are still really all one. It is significant that while many American civic leaders, educators, and publishers have bitterly battled Darwin’s theory of evolution right up to the present day, attempting to block teachers from instructing youth in a paradigm of nature that threatened to bury the Chain idea, the official government publishing houses in the Soviet Union constantly strove to provide bowdlerized versions of Darwin’s theory at streetcorner kiosks in readable magazine form for all laymen, and made the theory a requirement of all elementary educations. The irony is that Western societies, in which the Chain paradigm has held the longest and deepest sway, myopically viewed the Soviet society, which sought to replace the Chain with a paradigm naturally inimical to it, as being run along Chain principles. Kremlinology thus has been an exercise in intense navel-gazing. The Great Chain paradigm - obscure, difficult, and nonsensical though it may be - occurs quite naturally, makes "good sense," and even seems "simple and clear" to a certain kind of man who has dominated European history and its telling. In the case of Stalinist society, the Chain idea was projected onto a barely comprehended society about which little was known.
Lest these points be considered purely abstract, it can be demonstrated that entire societies - including some of those most admired by the West - have in actual fact been run along strict Chain paradigm lines. The most familiar example is the Tudor ideal of government under Queen Elizabeth. In setting her house in order, Elizabeth followed strict Chain rules, placing herself as godhead, with the Privy Council, Parliament, Landed Gentry, and the Poor under her forming a "divinely ordained" descending ladder or hierarchy in which every Englishman of every social status was expected to understand his place. Thus the Elizabethan English could brag that they required no standing army like the volatile French, because they had no potential rebellions to put down: "God’s will" prevailed over all and men obeyed for their own spiritual well-being - not material. If one knew in advance that the Tudors utilized this quintessentially medieval Chain paradigm as a model for society, one could predict that they would oppose capitalists and usurers as factors who tend to upset such an order. The Tudors in fact did so. This model is what Kremlinologists have had in mind all along in discussing Stalinist society, with the dubious "benevolence" of the Tudor system subtracted out - or substituted for - by what Stalin’s critics believe to have been a callous, perverse, and ruthless Marxist idealism.
The sway a paradigm exerts can be so invasive and all-encompassing, even - or perhaps especially - at the unconscious level, that mute artifacts begin to "take on voices" and "speak for themselves" to men who consider themselves paragons of sanity, sobriety, and rationality. A good example of this is Grigory Tsitriniak, author of "Yezhov’s Execution," originally published in Russian in 1992 in Literaturnaia gazeta (no. 7, Feb. 12, p. 15). Tsitriniak was given permission to examine an investigative file on Yezhov that had been declassified for the first time. Under the watchful eye of Viacheslav Nikonov, a newcomer to the Russian state security system after the now famous August putsch, Tsitriniak sat in the Lubyanka examining four flattened bullets used to shoot Kamenev, Zinoviev, and Smirnov in the backs of their heads after their conviction at the Moscow "Show Trials" during the Yezhovshchina. Part of the conversation, as reported by Tsitriniak in this article, went as follows:
Tsitriniak: "And why are there two (bullets) in the paper marked Smirnov?
Nikonov: "Evidently, they needed two for him."
Tsitriniak: "But how so? It is impossible to miss. They shot people in the back of the head!"
Nikonov: "Evidently, they did miss nevertheless: See? Two. Yezhov was verymeticulous. He would not have added a bullet "belonging" to someone else. Pathology, of course... ."
Tsitriniak considers the mere number and appearance of these bare physical artifacts, once sealed off from all but the most highly privileged NKVD eyes, to be prima facie evidence of Yezhov’s misguided iniquity ("of course..."). To him they speak volumes on Yezhov’s "smug Bolshevik hatred," pathologically punctilious malice, and outright deviltry. But a less preconceived, more objective deconstructionist view would be that these flattened slugs and other such material artifacts by themselves are quite mute or, if eloquent, highly ambiguous - until the totalitarian (or some other) paradigm steps in and toils to fill in the gaps, providing a coherent and structured historical, political, or moral interpretation. The totalitarian paradigm has engulfed Tsitriniak to an extent he does not realize. He refers to it half-consciously as "today’s perspective." His trip to the Lubyanka was wasted. He did not use the opportunity to examine afresh the physical evidence set before him. He looked at it but saw only the shared paradigm, which he could have "viewed" from his armchair.
Tsitriniak’s article contains rants against what he avers were the low to mediocre levels of intelligence and education of Soviet leaders like Yezhov, Stalin, and others they surrounded themselves with. Tsitriniak claims they attempted to "underline" (emphasize) their own false superiority in this manner, but were actually dull-witted, phenomenally ignorant, and impatient with clever people. Yezhov is referred to as a "miserable...semi-literate sadist." But the article does not speak highly for Tsitriniak’s intelligence and education any more than it does for his objectivity. It never occurred to him, for example, that saving spent, skull-deformed slugs would be typical for someone like Yezhov, who had a real and deep "proletarian" background in factory work since his youth. Before recycling became an economic and social imperative, factories commonly had large bins or offset areas in which old damaged tools and aborted product assemblies were "saved" (sometimes just dumped) for... ? Employees and managers did not bring them home, any more than did Yezhov the slugs. He left them in the evidence room of the Lubyanka. If Yezhov had been in the practice of imitating the leaders of many of his remote Tatar-Mongolian cousins, who were members of Tibetan Buddhist cults and practiced drinking from cups made from the skulls of defeated enemies, he would most certainly have to be considered pathological because he was enculturated more like a modern American than a horseman warrior of the Tien Shan. If he had been pathological in this way, he would once again have been most likely to have kept the slugs in his personal possession. In depositing the slugs in the evidence room, however, he seems prima facie to have been acting completely professionally. Whether or not he made the slugs his personal property is indifferent to Tsitriniak, when it should be crucial. It is indifferent to him because the paradigm, which (as usual) can accommodate either state of affairs, has dissolved the priorities of his thinking. Nor did it leave him thoughtful enough to consider that a rather normal kind of persistent factory mentality could account for what he regards as one of Yezhov’s pathological behaviors. There are many, many strokes missing to his superficial "portrait" of Yezhov. If testimony about Yezhov is not grisly, Tsitriniak presents it as dubious or as Yezhov’s "mask." The paradigm has blinded him to how much of what he says about Yezhov and Stalin would not cohere at all were it not for gobs of the paradigm glue. At one point, he falls just short of a real insight related to the factory mentality idea when, in a final round of sarcasm, he mentions a "conveyer," alluding to a printing mill that existed in the Soviet Union at this time which made certificates available to officials with the words "...order that [‘so-and-so’] be shot [my emphasis] was carried out..." already printed on them (unlike a death certificate, on which the cause of death is not pre-printed but left in blank). It occurs to him to mention all of this only for its sardonic grimness.
The totalitarian paradigm can be spotted at work at the unconscious level when historians who otherwise write in the flat and sober style often disparagingly referred to as "Academese" suddenly and briefly switch to writing in a style that is impassioned and vivid, offering colorful impressions on matters to which they were neither privy nor eyewitnesses. This license to switch to gushy rhetoric is felt to be justified because the dominant paradigm (and its accompanying moral baggage) is experienced as their only "real certainty." What is actually going on, however, is pure interpretative structuring according to the dominant paradigm, expressing emotions that completely conform to it.
A good example of this is can be found in Isaac Deutscher’s The Great Purges. Deutscher is sometimes credited with being more objective than other Western historians because he is willing to allow some input into his fact-hoard of events alluded to by Trotsky, which has earned Deutscher the criticism of being a "Trotskyite." This criticism is well-deserved because while Deutscher finds much that Trotsky says about the revolution and the early years of building socialism in the Soviet Union to be credible and reasonable, he completely ignores - or is excessively skeptical about - accounts or declarations of anyone else who was involved, such as Felix Dzerzhinsky, Molotov, Yezhov, Stalin himself, or the multitude of minor figures who wrote about and represented the Soviet Union abroad, such as Glushchenko, a botanist of the Lysenko school, who vigorously and officially campaigned against the racism and genocide practiced in the Third Reich, colonial regimes, and even in the U.S. South. The important exception to this "believe only Trotsky" rule is Khrushchev: Deutscher is no more eager to doubt most of what Khrushchev said than other Kremlinologists have been. One commentator truly observed that "Khrushchev seduced the West." This has led the more skeptical to mockingly disparage Khrushchev’s recollections, when enshrined as a primary source of historical fact, as "The Khrushchev Memory." Western historians and writers revealed the juvenile nature of their egos when, after a long, cold freeze-out by Stalin, Molotov, and others, whose recollections and memoirs of Soviet history would appear to be just as accurate and important as Khrushchev’s, the latter extended what appeared to be an embrace of friendship so eagerly awaited in certain circles in the West that they jumped at it - and everything Khrushchev said - like children finally allowed to join their playmates after being quarantined for weeks.
Without having attended the Show Trials himself, and having no empirical evidence for support, Deutscher wrote of the "somber irrationality" of these trials, of their having the "reality of a nightmare." These impressions are in stark disagreement with those of D. N. Pritt, a British Member of Parliament and the King’s Counsel who actually attended the trials of Zinoviev, Kamenev, and others. Pritt wrote a short essay on this contained in a pamphlet called The Moscow Trial Was Fair mentioned in Deutscher’s book, which contains a reproduction of the cover of Pritt’s original pamphlet. The caption to this reproduction reads, "Right: a pamphlet defending the purges by a British Member of Parliament." But Pritt did not defend the purges in his little tract: he defended only the courtroom procedures used during the trials. These distinctions were lost on Deutscher and David King, who provided the design for the book and may be responsible for this caption. Are Deutscher and King just intellectually clumsy, or are they liars, or both? If none of the foregoing, what is the difference between a liar and someone who eagerly embraces falsehoods which "conform to a paradigm?" If this caption is not just attributable to block-headedness, one must then charge Deutscher and King of at least substantial habitual dishonesty.
It is not an accident that Deutscher and King omitted from the caption that Pritt was an eyewitness to the trial, a position they must have found highly enviable. Mentioning this would enormously boost Pritt’s credibility. His impression of the trial - as eyewitness - was completely at odds with Deutscher’s idea. Far from the trial being pervaded with a "somber irrationality" or having the "reality of a nightmare," Pritt was astonished, as an English lawyer, at the freedom and vivacity with which all prisoners were allowed to converse with co-defendants during the trial without objection from the Court or prosecutor. At times, according to Pritt, "quick and vivid" debates occurred between the prosecutor and up to three prisoners, all talking together, which would have been forbidden by rules of procedure in England and the U. S., which allow only one witness to speak at a time in direct answer to a single question put by counsel or the court. Pritt found this a "striking novelty," and described the Public Prosecutor Vishinsky’s speeches as having "vigor and clarity." Pritt says Vishinsky rarely looked at the public or played "for effect." This is in contrast, once again, to Deutscher’s transparently snide characterization of Vishinsky’s speeches as "chameleon-like." Vishinsky said "strong things," according to Pritt, recommending the defendants be "exterminated." But, Pritt points out - as Deutscher and King could or would not (another omission) - that "in many cases less grave many English prosecuting counsels have used much harder words." It is conceivable that this kind of Russian (and English) courtroom rhetoric is unknown to Deutscher and King, which would be stunningly naive for historians (King is basically a photo-journalist), perhaps evidencing some sort of academic or professional isolation, but nonetheless contributing heavily to their mistaken characterization of Vishinsky’s conduct of the trial as "unfair." But is it conceivable that King and Deutscher are not aware that even in modern American courtrooms, the nouns and rhetoric used by prosecutors in referring to defendants in alimony or traffic violations cases are not the same as that used by prosecution in cases of high treason in time of war, serial sex crimes against women, hate crimes against minorities, etc.? Individuals of ordinary sense would naturally expect the lexicon of apt, permitted prosecutorial epithets to be widely divergent in these different kinds of cases even without having witnessed actual criminal cases of each degree (misdemeanor, felony, and high treason). The best that can be said of King and Deutscher is that they suffer from all-too-typical "paradigm blindness." It is not believable that they could have forgotten that Kamenev and Zinoviev were not on trial for motorcar violations.
© Copyright by Philip E. Panaggio P. O. Box 85, Lehigh Acres, FL 33970-0085, USA
