Stalin and Yezhov: An Extra-Paradigmatic View - by Philip E. Panaggio
Chapter 12: The Fabled Purge of Old Bolsheviks
It was pointed out above that communication between adherents of different major paradigms seems to take place across a nearly unbridgeable gulf. There is not likely to be much agreement between adherents of different paradigms of Soviet society as to the credibility of an Old Bolshevik’s memoirs, say the book Molotov Remembers, nor between a backer of the totalitarian paradigm and an adherent of a Marxist-Leninist paradigm who defends Stalin, so there is little point in arguing paradigms. However, it is not impossible to examine facts outside a paradigm. This is what actually takes place among investigators before a dominant paradigm emerges in a mature science or discipline. If one can attempt this here, what do the "glasnost’ revelations" reveal? What they show is quite embarrassing to the "conventional wisdom" of the totalitarian paradigmists, and looks nearly impossible for them to accommodate. Specific examples of these upsetting revelations now follow, after an example of what the totalitarian paradigm would require "to have been" instead.
It is an "accepted fact" among purveyors of the totalitarian paradigm that Stalin cast Yezhov in his role in the Great Terror primarily to purge "Old Bolsheviks," i.e., to eliminate comrades who came up with Stalin during the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917. As Tim Naftali was quoted above as saying on a CNN "expert panel," Stalin was getting rid of Old Bolsheviks that "he couldn’t work with any more." This view is echoed repeatedly, as in The Great Purges by Deutscher. This book presents an elaborate historical comparison, originating with Trotsky, between the Purges and other attempts by victorious factions to repress political rivals and opponents. According to Deutscher, "at the root of the struggle lies the insecurity of the revolutionary party - its fear of counter-revolutionary contradiction, controversy and opposition. Having crushed all other parties, the new rulers find that they have not yet eliminated contradiction and opposition." Such an unbalanced or mad fanaticism, attributed by Deutscher to other victorious revolutionaries of the past, such as Robespierre, Cromwell, and Luther, is imputed to Stalin.
The original idea, as set forth by Trotsky, is that the Russian Revolution, as early as 1923, entered a conservative phase of "Thermidor." This is a comparison to the stages of the French Revolution, which were deeply studied and discussed by Lenin, Trotsky, Stalin, and other Old Bolsheviks, as well as every intellectual in the Soviet bureaucratic elite. Thermidor corresponded to the month of July in the new calendar instituted during the French Revolution, replacing the Church of Rome’s Gregorian calendar. On 8 Thermidor Year II (July 26, 1794 a. D.), the radical Jacobin clubs, which had risen during the revolution to become the ruling powers, led by Robespierre, Danton, Carnot, and others on the Committee of Public Safety, were overthrown, ending the radical or "revolutionary" phase of the upheaval. This Committee had led the revolution through its most terrible stage, the "Reign of Terror," or "reign of the guillotine," actually taking over the rule of France. During this time, Parisians had become accustomed to the sound of lorries lumbering through their streets each day, carrying scores of the Committee’s enemies to the guillotine. The comparison by Trotsky and Deutscher is that, at first, only the aristocrats were beheaded, such as Marie Antionette, Queen of France. But then the Jacobins carried their arrests to the provinces, arresting and executing members of the more moderate revolutionary factions, such as the Girondists. The Reign of Terror did not stop there, but proceeded further along, next with the Jacobins arresting each other, beginning a struggle for power amongst themselves which Trotsky and Deutscher compare to Stalin’s "faction" using the Great Purges to completely eliminate any factions which might form - or had already formed - around Trotsky, Kirov, Kamenev, Zinoviev, Piatikov, and other Old Bolsheviks who had already been eliminated. In the (supposedly) comparable phase of the French Revolution, Robespierre succeeded in having Danton condemned, believing that France and the Revolution were not safe until all enemies within the country were rooted out. The comparison here is with Yezhov’s efforts to eliminate all "spies and fascists" operating in secret in the Soviet Union and within the Communist Party to undo the Bolshevik Revolution. Like the Great Purges, according to Trotsky and Deutscher, the Reign of Terror in France was not carried out for its own sake, but as an extreme method of political control in which not only rival parties but "contradiction, controversy and opposition" itself (in Deutscher’s words) are rooted out. The French national convention finally turned on Robespierre himself, declaring him an outlaw. When Robespierre struggled during his arrest, half of his jaw was shot away, and in this horrible condition, with his head bleeding and bandaged, he was dragged about for trial and execution. His brilliant, stirring oratorical ability, honed through fine education, a law practice, and an abundance of pre-Revolutionary activity as an enthusiastic exponent of Jean Jacques Rousseau, were useless to him. The parallel to this dramatic climax in the Stalin purges is supposed to be the eventual execution of Yezhov himself, the "repressor repressed."
A further likeness is drawn: in the aftermath of the Bolshevik Revolution, a group of moderates (from Trotsky’s point of view) eventually took over, led by Stalin, who, according to Deutscher, Conquest, Naftali, et. al., rather successfully eliminated all opposition. Trotsky believed that Stalin had thereby succeeded in "dissolving" the Bolshevik Revolution, much as Napoleon Bonaparte dissolved the French Revolution after he returned from Egypt to make himself emperor of France and provide it with a stronger central government. It is significant that from the non-Communist West’s point of view, these comparisons originated with Trotsky, who was in exile during the Great Purges and was no more of an eyewitness than Conquest, King, or Deutscher. Many historians have suspected Trotsky himself of having had a "Napoleonic complex."
These historical comparisons have great appeal for students of history, men of letters, and intelligent readers of all sorts. But are they good? One could point out flaws, but protracted logical quibbling eventually runs right back into a conflict of paradigms. The scenario given by Trotsky and Deutscher of the Thermidor phase of the French Revolution is basically correct, though the evil and bloody reputation imputed in typical, paradigmatic "knee-jerk" fashion to Robespierre - which is supposed to cast its malign shadow over Yezhov and Stalin - is undeserved. Just before his own arrest, Robespierre delivered a brilliant address to the French national convention about stopping wholesale executions. The timing is important: it was this speech that seems to have gotten him arrested, because he called for the punishment of several unnamed convention deputies, arousing their fear of him. Also, there would be better historical parallelism if the Girondists (a more moderate faction in the French Revolution than Robespierre’s Jacobins) had carried out the Reign of Terror on the more extreme Jacobins, because it is the point of Trotsky’s comparison that Stalin and his faction had abandoned and betrayed the revolutionary fervor of Trotsky’s own "left wing." More exactitude in comparison would also exist if Napoleon had come along earlier in the French Revolution and had orchestrated the execution of the victims of the Reign of Terror himself, using a "Yezhov/Robespierre puppet." But the problem is not a failure to satisfy close parallelism. Historical comparisons are never really exact, and they are usually made in the first place in order to uphold a favored paradigm. The problem is that these comparisons are empirical failures because they are based on the totalitarian paradigm and not on new factual evidence available since glasnost’ as to who was purged during the Yezhovshchina. It shall be seen in what follows that it was not Old Bolsheviks who were targeted by the Purges at all, as the paradigm and "conventional wisdom" of Kremlinologists requires.
The comparison’s appeal has a lot to do with Trotsky’s popularity among Western intellectuals - and Stalin’s lack of it. Trotsky’s writings - and sometimes his mere book titles - are often described as "eloquent." (Contrast King’s above-mentioned characterization of Stalin’s "gruff monosyllables.") The West’s fascination with Trotsky has a lot to do with its impression of him as a tragic hero, ultimately destroyed by the consequences of steps that he accepts have to be taken in pursuit of ideals or greatness (like Rubashov in Koestler’s Darkness at Noon). Trotsky’s intellectual indecision, both during and after the 1917 revolution, likewise strikes a chord in many literate Westerners as being Hamlet-like. Trotsky remained undecided for many weeks, reluctant to attack the Provisional Government, unlike the dynamic and aggressive Lenin. Again, in 1927, Trotsky bided his time a bit too long when he could have openly attacked his rival Stalin, i.e. when he could have been seeking to form a strong alliance with Zinoviev and Kamenev against Stalin. Stalin is often held up as Trotsky’s nemesis, when actually the greatest personal animosity existed not between Trotsky and Stalin, but between Trotsky and Zinoviev. The animosity with Stalin is sometimes viewed as Trotsky’s "tragic flaw."
On January 21, 1924, Lenin, the Party’s leader and founder passed away. The open enemies of the Soviet Union took advantage of Lenin’s illness and then of his death to try to deflect the Party from the path laid out by Lenin and thus pave the way for the restoration of capitalism. Foremost in these attacks was Trotsky (Lev Davidovich Bronstein). Leon Trotsky, while claiming to be a Marxist revolutionary, enjoyed the support of prominent Western banking families. Chiefly through Trotsky and his agents, Wall Street businesses poured money into Russia for the purpose of funding future counter-revolutionary uprisings and encouraging dissidents. The capitalist elites also hoped that Trotsky’s "ultra-Leftism" would so wreck the Soviet Union from within, that capitalism could be easily restored. The biographer of U.S. President Woodrow Wilson, J.C. Wise, wrote: "Historians must never forget that Woodrow Wilson made it possible for Leon Trotsky to enter Russia with an American passport."
Trotsky was never popular with Bolshevik Party members, who saw him as an opportunist. The collapse of the Tsar’s regime in March 1917 found Trotsky in New York City. On his return to Russia, he was detained by Canadian authorities, and only allowed to continue his journey after the intervention of the British Government! Bruce Lockhart, in his memoirs, said the British Intelligence Service believed Trotsky would be more useful to them in Russia. Trotsky, at first, tried to set up a revolutionary group of his own, but realizing Lenin’s Bolshevik Party had strong mass support, Trotsky made a sensational political somersault. After years of opposition to Lenin, Trotsky applied for membership in the Bolshevik Party!
After his exile from Soviet Russia in 1929, a myth was woven by anti-Soviet elements throughout the world around the name and personality of Leon Trotsky. According to this fairy tale, Trotsky was "the outstanding Bolshevik leader of the Russian Revolution" and "Lenin’s inspirer, closest co-worker and logical successor." Now in the 1990s, with the collapse of the Soviet Union, Western establishment historians no longer need to promote this fiction. They now openly admit Trotsky was an opportunist who actually opposed Lenin. We are now told how Trotsky concocted "all kinds of lies and half-truths about his and Stalin’s relationship with Lenin." "His version of events was reinforced by Deutscher’s three-volume adulatory biography of Trotsky which rests on shaky documentary evidence. There are strong indications, however, that, except for the last four months of Lenin’s conscious life, prior to March 1923, when he had the final debilitating stroke and lost the power of speech, Lenin was close to Stalin, relied on his judgement, and entrusted him with ever greater responsibilities. At the same time, there are no indications in the sources that he ever cared personally for Trotsky." (Three Whys of the Russian Revolution by Richard Pipes)
Throughout the 1930s, the Western capitalist countries accelerated their operations, both secret and open, against the Soviet Union. The Great Depression, along with growing mass support for communist and workers’ movements in the nations of Europe, prompted Western governments to back numerous covert attempts to wreak havoc in the Soviet Union. In addition, in this secret war they relied on the networks established by Leon Trotsky, who had been deported from the U.S.S.R. in 1929 for his activities. Setting up his headquarters outside Russia, Trotsky enjoyed the patronage of capitalist governments, agents of several Intelligence Services, as well as all manner of anti-Soviet elements.
Winston Churchill, a spokesman for the Anglo-American ruling circles, immediately realized the value of Trotsky to the worldwide anti-Soviet crusade. Summing up the whole purpose of Trotsky’s actions from the moment he left the Soviet Union, Churchill wrote in Great Contemporaries: "Trotsky strives to rally the underworld of Europe for the overthrow of the Russian Army," a necessary prelude to a Western military attack on the U.S.S.R.
Twentieth Century Western intellectuals, especially academic professionals, have shown far more respect for the bookish, bespectacled, dyspeptic, Hamlet-avatar Trotsky than for the abrek Stalin, that is, for a mountain strong-man who had been reared on a diet of mutton and wine, who had been half-plunderer, half-patriot - a kind of Georgian anti-Tsarist Robin Hood in his youth. These intellectuals feel reluctant to trust government to someone who had once robbed the Tsar’s caravans and divided the booty among his countrymen. They do not feel such a man can rise to run a truly rational and just government, especially if his political methods continue to resemble his redoubtable former deeds in any way. Many regard deeds of this kind as justifiable or legitimate only during revolutionary periods, not in an ongoing regime - if they find them justifiable at all. Ultimately, they feel uncomfortable with someone who was not "appointed by God," as the Tsar proclaimed he was. Many would probably never regard any acts of open rebellion against any established government’s rule of law as ever being justified had it not been for the considerable success they believe the United States has attained since its own American Revolution. They recognize that the U.S. has succeeded in partly realizing many desirable democratic ideals during the two centuries that followed what had begun as an illegal rebellion against the King of England by members of a Masonic Lodge. (This involves an "end justifies the means" idea of the kind they usually eschew.) Stalin himself was conscious of the difference between himself and Trotsky, and liked to contrast himself with his fellow revolutionary Yakov Sverdlov, whom he characterized as an "intellectual anarchist," while he saw himself as a "peasant by birth." According to Stalin’s numerous Georgian relatives, he did not believe that someone like Sverdlov (or Trotsky) ever really knew what it was to be a free man who could not tolerate slavery or serfdom. At the law school in St. Petersburg, it is known that the Georgians were among the most radical.
How does the alleged Great Purge of the Old Bolsheviks stand up to empirical evidence? The answer is simple: it falls! Based on newly available archival material, J. Arch Getty, William Chase, Roberta Manning, and other historians performed interpretative statistical analyses of victims of the Yezhovshchina, such as Getty’s and Chase’s analysis of 898 members of the Soviet bureaucratic elite who held positions of power in 1936 (the start of Yezhovshchina), and Manning’s study of the numbers of Party members expelled in the Belyi Raion (Belyi district) of the Soviet Union. Modern scientific statistical methods were used to avoid, or at least minimize, bias and accession to preconceived ideas. In other words, the new wealth of evidence on the Purge’s victims was examined outside a paradigm as much as possible. The statistical methods used were the formation of contingency tables, multicellular analysis, and logit modeling.
This writer worked professionally in statistics, and recalls a disparaging joke that a statistician is someone who can put his right hand in a bucket of ice, his left in a pot of boiling water, and declare, "On the average, I feel quite okay." This is, of course, a misuse of the idea of an (arithmetical) average, since the average or arithmetical mean of the two temperatures in this case has no real physical meaning for what the tortured statistician experiences. But the joke gives voice to a healthy distrust of statistics, which are all too easily abused. Some abuses take greater depth of insight or mathematical knowledge to expose, but, on the whole, a statistical survey carried out by modern methods, such as those used by Getty and Chase, is much to be preferred to the rampant impressionism and citation of protrusive exceptions to the rule that has prevailed in Kremlinology.
Francis Galton (b. 1822), a cousin of Charles Darwin, who practiced in the earliest days of the application of statistics, wrote that "...those who are not accustomed to original inquiry entertain a hatred and a horror of statistics. They cannot endure the idea of submitting their sacred impressions to cold-blooded verification. But it is the triumph of scientific men to rise superior to such superstitions, to devise tests by which the value of beliefs may be ascertained, and to feel sufficiently masters of themselves to discard contemptuously whatever may be found untrue." Why "contemptuously"? Because a scientific character reacts much differently from most others when it encounters error. The scientific individual actually takes umbrage at error and falsehood. This feeling is a ruling passion in him. A good example can be found in The Quark and the Jaguar by the Nobel Prize-winning physicist Murray Gell-Mann. He says therein that when he encounters an error on the first page of a book he has begun reading, he is ready to abandon the book right there, read it no further, wondering whether or not there is anything he can learn from that particular author. Anyone who imagines himself to be a rational and "sober" scholar with a "balanced approach" to intellectual matters who does not react as strongly as Gell-Mann does may really be as "sober" and "balanced" as he believes, but cannot rightly count himself among the truly scientifically spirited.
What "sacred impressions" must now be "discard[ed] contemptuously" after attempts at "cold-blooded verification?" Getty and Chase found that taking the above-mentioned 898 members of the Soviet elite as their sample group, 427 or 47.6% were purged. According to the totalitarian paradigm, the majority (at least 50.1%) of these 427 should have been "Old Bolsheviks," i.e., former revolutionaries who came up through the 1917 Revolution with Lenin, Trotsky, Stalin, etc. al. Here the paradigm is utterly defeated, for neither Getty and Chase’s study, nor Manning’s, showed this. To quote Manning: "Contrary to popular belief, Old Bolsheviks of pre-Revolutionary vintage did not appear to be the main target of the Great Purges... ."
Who was primarily expelled from the Party or purged? Manning’s results show they were "local party members who joined (the Party) during the New Economic Policy (NEP) of 1921 - 1927... ." (The New Economic Policy was the Communist Party’s 1921 withdrawal from its previous policy of doctrinaire centralized socialism, which had been set forth in Lenin’s "21 conditions" at the Third International or Comintern. The NEP permitted freedom of trading, encouragement to foreign capitalists, ownership of private property, and other economic features that had just been abolished by the Revolution, permitting what may be called Lenin’s program of allowable private enterprise or private business under the control of the Proletarian Government.) Manning continues: "But the brunt of the purges fell most heavily on Communists who joined the party during the Civil War." This fact had already been pointed out by Khrushchev decades ago in his much attended to "secret speech" to the Twentieth Party Congress, but has been completely ignored, since it does not conform well to the dominant paradigm. This is a good example of how an entrenched shared paradigm takes precedence over something everyone should have noticed before. According to Getty and Chase, there is "little support for Conquest’s assertion that there was a ‘plan to destroy the Old Bolsheviks,’ or for Armstrong’s claim that the ‘Great Purge almost eliminated from the apparatus the Old Bolsheviks, who entered the Party before the Revolution.’"
Who, then, according to these more scientific analyses of a greater amount of empirical evidence, was at risk to be purged? The statistically arrived at "profile" for a member of the risk group turns out to be someone who was village born, as opposed to urban born; not highly educated, but educated enough to have risen to some bureaucratic position or high rank in a certain field, especially a technical or military field; a Party member, as opposed to a non-Party member (many ardent Bolsheviks and Stalin-supporters, like the agrobiologist Trofim Lysenko, were non-Party); and who participated in the revolution in some way but later joined the opposition. To narrow it further, the most likely to be purged was a peasant who had joined the Party in 1912 - 1920; who was a military specialist and an opposition member. According to Getty and Chase, "the most striking finding (of their study) is that elite members of the intelligentsia working in intellectual/artistic/scientific activities in 1936 were safest [my emphasis] from arrest." This controverts the claim of Roy Medvedev, for example, that the diplomatic profession and especially the Commissariat of Foreign Affairs were "savagely purged." Also controverted by this study are the "histories" written by Roy’s brother Zhores and by Harvard’s indefatigable David Joravsky, both of whom have presented extensive studies on alleged purges of the intelligenty in artistic and scientific fields, such as genetics under Lysenko. Contrary to Zh. Medvedev and Joravsky, a member of this group - a poet, playwright, cosmologist, chemist - was safest from arrest. This fact clashes with the Orwellian version of the totalitarian paradigm for Stalinist society in which all scientific and artistic creation is minutely scrutinized and censored by "Big Brother’s thought police," the NKVD.
There is no doubt that there were many Old Bolsheviks among those purged in Getty’s and Chase’s sampling of members of the Soviet elite. As noted above, of the 898 sampled, 47.6% overall were purged. But only about 31% of all Old Bolsheviks perished. "Statistically, being an Old Bolshevik was not related to one’s vulnerability in the terror" (Getty and Chase, op. cit., p. 237). According to these analysts, "Old Bolsheviks in the present group suffered not because they were Old Bolsheviks, but because they held prominent positions within the Party, economic, and military elite," positions to which they no doubt rose in part because they had been Old Bolsheviks. This is quite different from what the totalitarian paradigmists have been asserting. Getty and Chase go on to say, "Old Bolsheviks were among the victims because of where [my emphasis] they worked rather than because they were Old Bolsheviks." If one wanted to be safe during the Yezhovshchina then, it helped to be "an apolitical urban-born intellectual from the middle or upper class who received a higher education before the revolution and who avoided political or economic administrative work. ... Statistically, it was a purge of politicians - oppositionist or otherwise."
© Copyright by Philip E. Panaggio P. O. Box 85, Lehigh Acres, FL 33970-0085, USA
