Stalin and Yezhov: An Extra-Paradigmatic View - by Philip E. Panaggio
Chapter 13: A Specific Example of How Conquest Conquered the Facts
Why "otherwise," i.e. who were the non-oppositionist politicians who were purged? "Old Bolsheviks" is the wrong answer. "Stalin’s personal enemies" is the wrong answer. "Expert" Tim Naftali’s answer on CNN was wrong. The right answer is finally available. It controverts the totalitarian paradigm and speaks highly of the Stalin era. A specific example is given by Roberta Manning in Stalinist Terror. This is the case of long-time Belyi Raion (Belyi rural district) Party Secretary T. I. Kovalev, whose case is typical. Moscow officials had received many complaints against him for his abusive treatment of subordinates in the workplace. This treatment was typical behavior of those who had been brought up in Civil War methods of "leadership" (i.e., bully-type management). Kovalev belonged to the above-mentioned group that had the highest incidence among those purged, a group that may be called the "class of 1912 - 1920." He was not an "Old Bolshevik," nor was he one of Stalin’s personal enemies. Less than one year after the Bolshevik Revolution, anti- Communists from the old army, called the "Whites," led by former Tsarist officers, seized control of most of Russia from the Volga River to the Pacific and attempted an assault on Moscow to undo the Revolution. The Civil War had begun. This army had international financial backing and support troops deployed from the U. S., France, Great Britain, and Japan, as previously noted. The leadership of this army became known for its authoritarian and abusive treatment of military underlings, for its tendency to deprive peasants of their land, and for harsh treatment of non-Russian minorities, especially of Jews. Kovalev was a typical "graduate" of this "school," which may be called the "Old Civil War Opponent School" or "Old Whites" who, with other internal opposition allies, became numerically the real targets of the later Yezhovshchina. Once the Whites had been defeated, Kovalev and others of his ilk entered mainstream Soviet political life posturing as Reds, many achieving high Party and economic rank, such as Kovalev did in Belyi. Soviet rural bureaucracies were teeming with such individuals in positions of leadership, who had surrendered to the Reds in word only, masquerading as Reds - Whites with Red faces.
One of the most serious complaints against Kovalev was that he forced subordinates to falsify harvest statistics by threatening them with Party expulsion. He had the support and patronage of high ranking oblast (a larger political region than Raion) Party bosses, so a grass-roots movement by aggrieved subordinates did little to touch him. Complaints against him finally reached the All-Union Party Control Commission, attracting the attention of Lenin’s surviving sister, Mariya Ulyanova. (This took place ca. 1936, during the Stalin era.) She dispatched letters to Kovalev’s superiors who ignored them because, like Kovalev, they were part of a vast network of corruption, rackets, and mutual protection involving numerous former Whites who frustrated any corrective action. Finally, the Party Control Commission sent one Golovashchenko as an emissary to Belyi to investigate by seeking out Kovalev’s critics. This democratically spirited effort by Moscow’s bureaucracy is a far cry from the oft repeated but insupportable claim that Moscow, the Party, and the chiefs of agriculture, like Trofim Lysenko, were only interested in bogus, favorable-looking harvest statistics, which Western writers like David Joravsky state were among the chief concerns of Stalin’s regime, a claim repeated by virtually all Western writers and Soviet reformers throughout the Khrushchev era. When Golovashchenko arrived in Belyi, he organized a frank and freewheeling discussion and debate, which, at long last, resulted in Kovalev’s ouster. (For more details, see Manning, Roberta T., "The Great Purges in a rural district: Belyi Raion revisited," in Stalinist Terror: New Perspectives, pp. 168 - 197. This essay is by a non-Marxist Western historian, who bases it on newly available as well as underexplored archival source material. Note the "unconscious" use of the word "perspectives" in the book title, as if hinting that a new vista has arisen - a new paradigm.)
This account, based on a close review of both old and newly available archival evidence, should be compared directly to Conquest’s brief report on the Kovalev affair in The Great Terror. Conquest, who was familiar at the time with some of the Smolensk archive, which is one of the sources Manning dubbed "underexplored," but none of the post-glasnost’ material, presents a strictly "top down" totalitarian paradigmatic construction of what happened in this provincial area. Omitting and ignoring some facts, lacking access to others, and above all using the paradigm to "shave down" other "uneven" facts, he presents a straightforward, satisfyingly simple, yet vivid (albeit fictional) picture. According to Conquest, Kovalev was a victim of the Great Terror as it swept through remote rural areas, a "hysteria of arrest and accusation" seizing Belyi (Conquest, op. cit., p. 221). "Calls of terror from above [sic]" had now filtered from the top of the pyramid of power in Moscow down to Belyi, inducing "this hysterical lynching mood of what now became a dominant section of the lowest Party organization" (op. cit., pp. 221 - 222). Note Conquest’s clear, categorical, graphic, and even shrill choices of words, such as "hysterical" and "lynching mood." One knows exactly what he is talking about: in Kafkaesque fashion, the grisly, grappling, omnisciently guided, unprincipled arm of the Terror reached deep into Belyi to find, sweep up, and liquidate Kovalev and others.
As previously stated, much of what the paradigm produces is simple, dramatic, and memorable. Conquest naturally does not refer to Golovashchenko by name, but he vaguely refers to "Moscow’s envoys," whose purpose in coming to Belyi, he says, was to find "denouncers" and "give them ‘evidence’ against those they wished to destroy" (op. cit., p. 222). The amount of factual, documentable, or primary source evidence for the latter statement by Conquest as to the role and modus operandi of these so-called "envoys" of the Terror equals zero. It is pure paradigm and pure fiction. Ignoring certain facts, remolding others, and making further deductions from the paradigm alone, Conquest has it that it was easy for these ruthless missionaries from Moscow to terrorize peasants and others into making ridiculous and unsupportable accusations against Kovalev, such as that he was a "Trotskyite." Conquest makes no mention of the real, documentable, muzzled accusations that had been made against Kovalev for years, complaints of abuse of power (such as threatening to revoke the privilege of having a Communist Party card from underlings who did not toe the line), falsifying production reports, etc. Yet Conquest goes out of his way to mention wild and difficult-to-support accusations, which were predictably also made by peasants who learned to hate him for "leaning on them" for so long or worse, such as accusations that he was a "Trotskyite" or a deserter from the Red Army. So strongly and strictly does Conquest work from the paradigm alone, shaving and "evening out" the few facts about the affair with which he was familiar, that he finds it astonishing that "one of Kovalev’s more sophisticated accusers claimed that he had been silent because Kovalev had, for four years, forbidden him to speak!" (op. cit., p 222). The explanation point inside the final quotation mark of the last sentence is Conquest’s own, expressing his supposed amazement at the ludicrousness of this claim.
The "black box" in all of this is Kovalev’s character, his own past deeds during the Civil War and its aftermath, and his documentable abuses as a Stalin era Party leader in Belyi. Conquest makes no mention of the all-important role of Lenin’s sister in the final purging of Kovalev. His use of the paradigm to "smooth out" the facts amounts to a Jekyll-and-Hyde transformation of Kovalev from a cruel, offensive, abusive gangster and determined thwarter ("wrecker") of government programs into a helpless, wretched victim of a whirlwind of paranoid ideologues. Is this the writing of history or fiction or pure propaganda? Or is it a deceptive mixture of all three? Is this Gibbon or Robert Louis Stevenson? How much respect and credibility should be accorded to the English-speaking world’s most widely read and highly regarded scholar of the Stalin era if his "historical" methods can transform a Mr. Hyde - evil and barely human - into a Dr. Jekyll - a paragon of rationality and humanity? A close reading of Conquest’s account of the Kovalev affair by itself should have aroused suspicion about its veracity. After such a reading, one might legitimately wonder, "What was Kovalev the man really like?" Conquest provides absolutely no information here. This would ordinarily appear as a glaring omission to a critical, thoroughness-demanding reader, except that the totalitarian paradigm is assumed and invoked to fill this "gap": Kovalev "was" a cardboard cutout "victim." He "was" any victim you know, any dehumanized "mark" of unjust accusation and undeserved punishment, anyone martyred by evil thugs and tyrants. The very abstract formulaicness of this kind of "historical presentation" and writing is often a telltale sign that some ruling paradigm has trampled over real facts and information.
Far from seeking to uncover Old Bolsheviks that Stalin "could not work with anymore," the Great Purges conducted by Yezhov involved noble and daunting efforts such as these attempts, as Manning puts it, to "allow more citizen involvement in the Soviet political system, clean up official corruption, combat alcoholism, encourage citizen complaints against government, and improve operation of the Soviet economy." Most contemporary Americans would agree these are admirable goals, but a great many American government officials tremble at the idea of a serious pursuit of such reforms, though not as much as Stalin and Yezhov taught people like Kovalev and his fellow conspirators to.
© Copyright by Philip E. Panaggio P. O. Box 85, Lehigh Acres, FL 33970-0085, USA
