Stalin and Yezhov: An Extra-Paradigmatic View - by Philip E. Panaggio
Chapter 14: The Yezhovshchina and Crimes Against Underlings
Co-option and suppression of criticism of authority has increasingly become a professionally and artfully pursued goal of all levels of government in the U.S. (such as "spin-doctoring"). The old American labor unions, since the 1950’s, have been re-organized to become more pro-company and pro-government, so that American workers now have few alternatives, when abused by management, to hiring an expensive lawyer; and even if they do, they face challenges, and more expenses. American workers still have no labor rights in "right to work" states such as Florida where they can be fired without cause. There are even "counseling" services available that boast of the number of employee-organized trade unions they have dissolved. Employers that intimidate their employees often call on such services to prevent employees from unionizing. By elimination of job descriptions, these workers can be forced to take on excess work and double as a second or third employee. Many acts that were crimes in the workplace in the USSR during the Stalin era, such as "rudeness to toilers," have never been illegal anywhere in the U.S. Only recently have harassment, racial defamation, and various insult injuries been recognized and established as criminal offenses with a firm history of precedent to guide judges, but few people are aware of these new rights or know how to avail themselves of appropriate legal remedies. It can be expensive to do so because not many attorneys will take such cases on a contingency fee arrangement. Suppression of criticism, which is not the same as infringement of the right of free speech, is not yet on the books as a crime anywhere in the U.S. Traditionally, private U.S. businesses have been left free of government interference, allowing discretion to officers, upper management, and controlling stockholders alone in releasing offending supervisors and lower managers from their employ, though it takes a lot of complaining and proof on the part of employees to induce them to do so, and usually more than one individual has to file a complaint. Needless to say, few employees complain due to fear of losing their jobs and/or a conditioned fear of authority in general. Those offending supervisors or lower managers that are dismissed then seek a similar niche in another company or profession. In the Stalinist system, a trail of abuse of underlings such as this was nipped in the bud - or sought to be: the offender’s sentence was to work for a term when and where he was told - and it might be in a remote gulag. His "freedom" or "personal liberty" to abuse employees, associates, or subordinates - even verbally - was immediately curtailed.
Americans have difficulty understanding the Soviet crime of vreditel’stvo or "wrecking." This was an extraordinary crime for novel circumstances, but paradigmists and propagandists have confused almost everyone by promulgating the misleading idea that wrecking is a fake crime or trump charge used during the Great Purges as an excuse by the NKVD to arrest Stalin’s personal and political enemies. The Soviet system had an entire branch of its court system dedicated to jurisdiction over this and related crimes. "Wrecking" was chronic business mismanagement or economic malpractice, often involving behaviors demoralizing to underlings (of the kind alluded to in the previous paragraph). The crime was accompanied by what Western jurisprudence calls the mens rea or mental state of intention to do it. That someone consciously allowed abuses was a lesser charge. However, in all degrees of this crime, the accused was held to a higher degree of responsibility and care than many Westerners might consider "reasonable." Such "reasonableness" is a cultural artifact, however, and is therefore relative, not "objective," as writers like David Joravsky think. (Compare what were "reasonable working conditions" during the heyday of the American sweatshop to what employees expect as "reasonable" today.)
When a grain supply in the Soviet Union was contaminated with mud and filth, a Soviet official’s desire to investigate to find out if someone was to blame, and to what extent blame could be apportioned, has almost invariably been caricatured in the West as "scapegoating" for an economic and social system that could not work anyway. This requires one to believe that Soviet bureaucrats already expected or suspected immanent failure of their system, as if they did not believe in their own ideals, and were aware of a need to keep a step ahead of impending doom by a kind of dishonest "hedging" and irrational ritualistic exorcism of bogeymen blamed for ruining projects.
Totalitarian paradigmists are reluctant to concede that the Great Terror had any legitimate aims at all, or that it actually carried out any, despite cases like Kovalev’s that have now come to light. If the allegedly painful and repressive means used by Stalin and Yezhov were so obviously and egregiously "immoral," as Western critics assert, that should be immorality enough for plenty of negative propaganda. What need is there, then, to also misrepresent the ends or goals they pursued as irrational or evil? (When those that adhere to a paradigm know [on some level] that they’re wrong, their resistance to counter-evidence that would refute their paradigm is the fiercest.) Why? Because the paradigm is threatened by almost any good intention existing among high-level Soviet bureaucrats. Good deeds and gestures must be presented as anomalies or cynical power ploys. The idea that a provincial Soviet official like Kovalev would find himself in very serious or even mortal trouble with Moscow if he ignored a report of rape in his jurisdiction, for example, and especially if he did so and was carrying a Communist Party card, is the kind of event that new archival evidence and the statistics show to be typical, however. The evidence shows that lax officials and covert saboteurs were specifically targeted by Yezhov, especially if they had been opposition members, such as a White during the post-revolution Civil War, or had joined the Party during or after the Civil War. Such late-joining bogus "Reds" were rightly suspect. Defeated former White leaders needed a hideout and a refuge - those who could not just "disappear" into the bowels of Manchuria, as many did in the Soviet Union’s Far East at the very end of the Civil War in 1923. These stowaways in the Communist Party sought Party jobs and positions in rural areas a thousand miles from Moscow. Only the foolhardy dared to seek employment in that city of watchful eyes or its immediate environs.
American readers may be familiar with the bitter feelings that prevailed in the former Confederate States of America after the defeat of the Confederate Army in the U.S. Civil War. The defeated Southern states, which had seceded from the Union, not only had to surrender - to which many of their citizens, after a great deal of bloodshed, were at long last agreeable - but also had to acquiesce to re-admittance to the Union state by state. Some states were not re-admitted until five years after the war ended, and this only after the Union had established military governments to supervise and reconstruct them according to the plans of the North’s Radical Republicans. These reconstructed state governments were generally run by newly emancipated Black appointees, by carpetbaggers (Northerners who had gone to the South for this purpose), and by scalawags (collaborators with these others). As is well known, a majority of the populace of the South and many of their organizations opposed this system, covertly destabilizing, frustrating, and sabotaging it, like the defeated Whites (not to be confused with the "racial" Whites of the U.S. South) did after the Russian Civil War ended, becoming Yezhov’s chief suspects for the wrecking of collectivization and other Communist programs. The most notorious of these organizations in the U.S. South were the Ku Klux Klan and the Knights of White Camellia. They used any means available to them: fraud, intimidation, covert violence, and the little discussed but highly effective day-to-day thwarting of the Freedmen’s Bureau - most analogous to the wrecking of Soviet economic plans.
During the post-Civil War Reconstruction in the U. S., a bitter issue arose in the U.S. Congress as to the degree of force that should be used to compel the uncooperative defeated States to obey. Terror was avoided. "Thwarting" was not nominated as a crime. President Lincoln demurred on all but the mildest of measures, and has been criticized for it to this day. As a result, the Reconstruction of the South was a failure for the very people whose rights were supposed to have been at stake - the former Black slaves of the South. Within a decade of the end of the war, the Democratic Party, which had been the pro-slavery party of the Old South, was back in power in each of the former Confederate states, having thrown appointed Blacks out of their offices. Things would have been entirely different if someone like Yezhov and an NKVD-like police organization had existed then and there with a free hand to compel obedience to "Force Laws" (as they were called in the U.S. at the time) and to the contemptuously ignored dictates of the Freedmen’s Bureau. While, as pointed out above, historical comparisons are never exact, there was little difference in attitude and behavior between the attitude and actions of a former White army officer in the Soviet Union who joined the Communist Party in 1921 - with his concealed contempt for, disregard of, and opposition to Moscow and the Communists Party’s economic plans - and a Confederate Army lieutenant ordered to obey and show respect for a Black mayor newly appointed by the Freedmen’s Bureau to run the lieutenant’s home town and care for his family.
Many would consider Lincoln’s indulgence, mercy, and leniency praiseworthy, as opposed to Yezhov’s ruthless thoroughness, but the suspicion remains that if the rights of an esteemed or valued European Christian group had been at stake in the U.S. South, instead of the rights of former Black slaves, Lincoln would have supported more vehement action. The obviously troublesome moral issue here is whether or not, and how far, one can compel human obedience, and at what cost. The "cost" is assessed in the currency of what is otherwise valued. The value or esteem enjoyed by groups whose interests would be lost, compromised, or sacrificed by such draconian measures is something Lincoln must have - at least unconsciously - weighed in all of this. This is what opened the door for charges of racism against him. This criticism has focused on Lincoln’s openly avowed greater concern to preserve the Union than to free Blacks or safeguard their human rights. Lincoln is known to have emancipated Blacks primarily as a war measure, i.e. to produce more soldiers for the Union, but this fact is not highly publicized. When Stalin did something similar, on the other hand, it is underlined with the greatest cynicism.
The problems Yezhov encountered in ferreting out former Whites were due in part to Moscow’s great leniency in the early Stalin years toward former opposition members, greater leniency than was shown by the U.S. Congress toward former Confederate leaders. During the early Stalin years, a former White army officer (like Kovalev in the example given above) was allowed to rise to any high position in government or Party apparatuses that his performance merited. This was not so in the post-Civil War U.S. in which, under President Andrew Johnson (who replaced the assassinated Lincoln just after the South’s surrender), the U.S. Congress passed legislation prohibiting former Confederate leaders from holding any offices in Southern states that were said to be under "reconstruction." President Andrew Johnson, who vetoed but was unable to stop such legislation, was regarded, like Lincoln, as an intractable frustrater of the Radical Republicans’ strong measures - the "Force Laws." Johnson was impeached but was acquitted by a margin of only one vote. The same Congress that forbade former Confederate leaders from holding any offices also dismantled Lincoln’s early Reconstruction work, putting the former Confederate states back under military control. The Soviets never went as far as the U.S. Congress in this shameful and little discussed chapter in American history. Perhaps if Lenin and Stalin had been as illiberal and vindictive as this majority of U.S. Congressmen, and had continued this policy, instead of being so permissive toward former White leaders, there would have never been a need for Show Trials, a Great Terror, or a "Yezhov," who was said, using a pun on the meaning of his name in Russian, to hold his writhing enemies in an "Iron Gauntlet" ("Yezhovye rukavitsy" after "derzhat v yezhovykh rukavitsakh").
© Copyright by Philip E. Panaggio P. O. Box 85, Lehigh Acres, FL 33970-0085, USA
