Stalin and Yezhov: An Extra-Paradigmatic View - by Philip E. Panaggio
Chapter 18: Unacknowledged Believers in Yezhov's Ideas
Why would Yezhov think this, i.e. that factionalism becomes counter-revolution? Is this a reasonable idea at all? Once again the dominant paradigm provides its overly simple and dramatic answer: it says that it is not reasonable, and that Yezhov’s belief in it is evidence that he was a paranoid sadist of limited intellect or was, at least, as Getty said, "grisly." This "explanation," however, misses the fact that there is an important difference between the Soviet system in which Yezhov lived and served, and Western capitalist systems. When this difference is not appreciated, only then does Yezhov’s thesis seem excessive and unreasonable. The difference is that in a Soviet-type workers’ state, which is a dictatorship of the worker class or proletariat, the supremely politically empowered workers may lose confidence in certain leaders. When this occurs, the discredited ex-leaders have no separate capitalist (or other) class with any power that can privately employ them or finance them in political careers or campaigns against the new leaders or representatives who have purportedly supplanted them in the proletarians’ favor. Rejected leaders have to submit both politically and professionally to those who replace them in office. There are no professional politicians in such a system, and no politically empowered non-proletarian class or classes to support them. A discredited worker in such a system, on the other hand, who has advocated some defeated cause, can grudgingly work in some minor position given to him as punishment. However, the discredited intellectual or politician has only two recourses besides submission: emigrate, or stay and "work" - fighting in secret. He does not have a "Fourth Estate" (the press) to use as a platform to promote his views. He cannot make six or seven figure profits selling his memoirs. Pat Sloan seems to have been one of the few Western writers to really understand and appreciate the significance of this difference between the two societies, which has as much bearing on Yezhov’s thesis as Sloan realized it had on the Show Trials. One can say that were no "safety valves" in the Soviet system for intellectuals and ex-leaders who lost their support or constituency, and that this was a "flaw" in that system. But saying this is to state a criticism of a particular social system: it is not a criticism of Yezhov’s thesis.
Yezhov worked within a particular social system: Stalin’s unabashed dictatorship of those who ruled in the name of the proletariat. Yezhov’s thesis that criticism necessarily becomes or begets counter-revolutionary terrorism was meant by him to apply to the social system in which he lived and about which he theorized and wrote. He was not making any sort of universal world- historical claims of the type in which Deutscher and King show interest. Their "observed" historical pattern in which victorious revolutions shortly swing toward repression of all opposition is a miniature historical paradigm in its own right, but one having great claims of generality. Yezhov’s thesis does not appear to be the outcome of "observing" or working within so general a paradigm. Yezhov was not an academic. He was writing about real problems he had worked and dealt with in the society in which he lived. The "intellectual framework" within which he wrote his thesis was not even a "Marxist-Leninist" paradigm, but rather the accepted social "givens" and tacit assumptions believed by almost any of the second generation Communists and common workers from whose ranks he rose to a position of leadership within the Communist social system that had only recently been established by his elders.
That Yezhov had such an "uncritical" point of view should be compared with the psychology of Mancur Olson’s beliefs. Olson is a distinguished and highly respected Western sociologist and political economist, having been a former Distinguished Professor of Economics at the University of Maryland at College Park. He has written disparagingly on the economic performance of Communist countries, saying that this performance is yet worse after Communism is abandoned. He related that in his "student days" his "democratic convictions" were "jarred" by reading Edward Banfield’s account of the beliefs of poor Southern Italian villagers in The Moral Basis of a Backward Society (1958). Olson read Banfield quoting one villager as saying, "Monarchy is the best kind of government because the King is then the owner of the country. Like the owner of a house, when the wiring is wrong, he fixes it." The naive Olson spent "years" afterward trying to reconcile (what he eventually conceded to be) a "germ of truth" in this villager’s remark with his own "democratic convictions" and the "case for democracy," which he nonetheless still continued to hold to be stronger overall (Olson, Mancur, "Dictatorship, Democracy, and Development," American Political Science Review, vol. 87, No. 3, Sept. 1993).
Olson was a Rhodes Scholar with a Ph. D. in Economics from Harvard, was vice-chairman of the Health Services Review Commission of the State of Maryland, served as Deputy Assistant Secretary of the U.S. Department of Health, Education, and Welfare, and was an Assistant Professor of Economics at Princeton University. He received numerous professional honors, and held many past-presidencies of many organizations, such as in the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Despite this impressive (partial!) resume and educational training, he spent many of his adult professional years lecturing and writing about his struggle with "Long live the King!," a simple and common sentiment that he was surprised to find was shared by many contemporaries he said he would have to consider "reasonable men." This was a problem for Olson because what he glibly refers to as "the case of democracy" and his own "democratic convictions" were actually the uncritically accepted beliefs that had been deeply inculcated in him by his own education, upbringing, and background in the English-speaking Western world. This makes him no different from the run of most of his professional and academic peers. (That he spent any time at all attempting to legitimize and show some sort of "reasonableness" to the Italian village monarchist’s beliefs is commendable and makes him somewhat unusual.) He is a Western counterpart of Yezhov in that the only real difference for the psychology of their beliefs is that the society in which Yezhov lived, had been reared, and received his education ("second generation" Communist) was very different from Olson’s. Olson wrote freely of what he believed to be the widespread "moral appeal of democracy." By "democracy" he meant societies in which there are competitive elections, social pluralism, and the absence of autocracy. (He did not include universal suffrage. See article cited, p. 575, note 12.) As with Yezhov, Olson had, all his life, done his thinking within a loosely held and vaguely defined "belief system" too inchoate and implicitly accepted to qualify as a conscious paradigm. Olson, like Yezhov, was very "orthodox," putting faith, trust, and confidence in ideas widely held by his teachers. These ideas had great psychological, moral, and intellectual force for him, primarily through early (juvenile) familiarity and repetition, rather than through experience (empiricism) or critical thinking (logic and analysis). It is difficult to see a real difference between Yezhov and Olson here. They were both forced to "swallow" a lot of "ideas" as youth. Given the religious basis of much of Western belief systems (recall the Chain paradigm described above), it would not be surprising if a closer and more critical comparison of Yezhov’s and Olson’s thinking would reveal that Yezhov’s was freer of presuppositions, cant, and shibboleths than the young Olson. It is here that purveyors of the totalitarian paradigm (like King, Conquest, Deutscher, and Tsitriniak) create and then exaggerate a difference where there is none, except as to the content of the two subjects’ beliefs (Yezhov and Olson).
It is confusing to make the issue of the evaluation or "reasonableness" of Yezhov’s thesis hinge on "what form of government is better." This is the kind of confused thinking that has been eagerly embraced by anti-Soviet Kremlinologists for decades. Sloan fully appreciated a social fact that has escaped King, Deutscher, and others who have been blinded by admiration for various Western systems and for Trotsky’s criticisms of the Stalinist system.
Trotsky opposed Lenin on vital issues as early as July, 1917, winning fame and popularity with his speeches. When Lenin died, Trotsky laid to rest all of his old quarrels with Lenin, no longer leveling his worn accusations of "bureaucratic" and "reactionary" against him and his party. Trotsky now introduced these very same accusations against Stalin and those Stalin represented claiming, in order to emphasize the forceful and righteous-sounding accusation of "betraying the revolution," that Stalin broke policy with Lenin at some point. As Sloan put it, unlike former leaders of the British Labor Movement whom workers have rejected, Trotsky and other Stalin antagonists had no means of "advertising their personalities" since they did not live in a capitalist system. Such publication was not a legitimate or allowed occupation or "business" in the Soviet Union. Many Westerners today also find such "occupations" repulsively vain, vulgar, and self-indulgent, wondering what kind of real work or contribution its practitioners are making to society. In many Western social systems, as Sloan pointed out, rejected politicians actually have a choice as to whether they want to advertise themselves "in politics or capitalist business," and either way it is all "within the framework of capitalism." If they lived in the former Soviet Union, they would have been barred from raising private funds to finance themselves in "new" political careers, which many savvy American voters, for example, know are most often just "more of the same." In the Soviet system, this was automatically regarded as action against the workers’ class interests. The interests of no other class (bourgeois, aristocrat, etc.) had any political standing. One can criticize this system or defend it, but only by highlighting this difference can one see why Yezhov’s idea that opposition turns into terror is not unreasonable or extremist for the social context in which he lived in the first few decades after the Bolshevik Revolution. Indeed, as mentioned above, there are American and British police and justice agencies today that are staffed with policy makers who are unpopular with liberals because they believe that something similar to Yezhov’s thesis holds even for liberal democracies, in which alternate "safe ways" or "safety valves" do exist for such "professional dissidents." In short, if an opposition member in the Soviet system did not actively seek to overthrow that system, he had only to submit, leave, or pipe dream.
There is a logical next step which Yezhov took which is missed by anyone who has never had any real contact with oppositionist or other social undergrounds, even if it is the adversarial contact which police authorities have with them. When a critic or dissident turns from mere verbal opposition to serious secret fighting, he is bound to come into contact with other such secret fighters. In the Soviet Union at the time under discussion, he would have come into contact with agents of German fascism, Japanese imperialism, and other determined, professional, foreign-trained and financed anti-Communists sworn to the eradication of Bolshevism, conspirators of the type previously described (Reilly et. al..) This reasoning was not peculiar to Yezhov, but can be found among many of the most adept law enforcement figures in history. J. Edgar Hoover, for example, former head of the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation (from 1924 until his death in 1972), thought the very same way when, in the late 1960’s and early 1970’s, he established programs known by the acronym COINTELPROs, which stands for Counterintelligence Program(s). In fact, these went far beyond anything the NKVD did under Yezhov.
The FBI’s COINTELPROs were domestic counterintelligence programs designed to destroy individuals and organizations that FBI chiefs considered politically objectionable. COINTELPRO tactics went very far beyond "mere surveillance" procedures like wire taps and electronic eavesdropping of the politically suspect or "dangerous," such as the now well-known wire-taps of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s offices and accommodations. Many Americans find such surveillance in itself objectionable. COINTELPRO activities included such "observation," but its more insidious tactics utilized inflammatory and provocative bogus mail designed to create irreconcilable or even deadly divisions among the leaders of target organizations; harassment arrests on minor charges or charges for which there was no real hope of conviction in order to "tie up" radicals and drain their finances; negative public propaganda; negative disinformation "leaked" to members of target organizations to defame fellow members or to create suspicions about their own leaders and associates (known among COINTELPRO operatives as "bad-jacketing"); infiltration agents provocateurs who attempted to force shoot-outs with police or produce other clearly criminal activity for which targets could be arrested; use of professional perjurers and fabricated evidence to obtain convictions; extra-judicial pre-dawn executions disguised as police defending themselves while making arrests or conducting legal searches and seizures, and many others techniques which, according to Ward Churchill and Jim Vander Wall, "became an integral aspect" not only of the COINTELPROs, "but FBI procedure ever after" (Agents of Repression by Ward Churchill and Jim Vander Wall, South End Press, Boston, MA, 1990, p. 390, note 27). What was probably the COINTELPROs’ most effective tactic was using bona fide, apolitical ex-convicts to carry on the bulk of the work of disruption and repression of political opposition groups and individuals "in their own manner, by means that may be left to the imagination," as Noam Chomsky put it in his introduction to the book COINTELPRO: The FBI’s Secret War on Political Freedom (Cathy Perkus, ed., Monad Press, New York, 1976). COINTELPROs were launched against the Black Panther Party and its individual leaders, the American Indian Movement, Venceremos, Dick Gregory (the comedic monologist better known for his hunger-strikes), the Young Lords (a Puerto Rican "street gang"), Martin Luther King, Stokely Carmichael, Elijah Mohammed, the Vice Lords, the Berrigan brothers (sibling anti-Vietnam Catholic priests), the SDS (Students for a Democratic Society), the Weathermen, numerous California-based radical groups, and a very large number other groups and individuals.
In its COINTELPROs against the Black Panther Party and its leaders, the FBI went far beyond anything the NKVD had ever done under Yezhov or Beria. There were so many FBI-placed infiltrators and agents provocateurs in the Black Panther Party during one period, that there were actually two Black Panther Parties: one the authentic Black Panther Party of Self-Defense, as it was originally called, the other a virtual "COINTELPRO Black Panther Party" staffed by Black ex-cons and their associates working under FBI direction, as well as by leaders and members of the authentic Panthers whose confidence and favor they had secured. The original Panthers had set up free breakfast programs serving food to hungry inner-city school children each morning so they would not have to sit in class with empty stomachs. They established free health clinics in ghettos where no other medical services were available or affordable. They opened reading rooms where there was no available transportation to libraries and no bookmobile services. They set up free legal clinics, sometimes staffed only by law students and paralegal workers, to counsel people in trouble with the law, landlords, employers, or government agencies. During the COINTELPROs against the Panthers, SAC Marlin Johnson (Special Agent in Charge, the official designation of an FBI agent heading a field office; Johnson ran a "Racial Matters Squad" at the time) received repeated directives "marked to his personal attention from J. Edgar Hoover, demanding that he instruct his COINTELPRO personnel to ‘destroy what the [BPP] stands for’ and eradicate its ‘serve the people’ programs" (op. cit., p. 68). "In May and June of 1969, the Director [Hoover] specifically and repeatedly instructed Johnson to destroy the Panthers’ broadly acclaimed Free Breakfast for Children Program in the city" (ibid.). "COINTELPRO activities were also geared up against the BPP Liberation School and community political education classes, as well as against distributors of the Party newspaper, The Black Panther... infiltrators were ordered to steal BPP financial records, books, literature, tapes, films and other materials at every opportunity" (ibid.), in effect annulling the Panthers’ pro bono programs and clinics by depriving them of their property, equipment, premises, and other necessary paraphernalia. Perhaps even more despicable were the FBI’s hard won efforts to provoke BPP members - especially its leaders - into shoot-outs and other criminal activity for which they could be incarcerated. Though ultimately successful, this did not prove an easy task for the FBI because Panther leadership, contrary to the image of the Panthers fostered by COINTELPRO propaganda intended for the public at large, showed a particular distaste for violence and exercised extraordinary restraint. In one instance, the Chicago Panther leadership repeatedly rejected proposals by a Black FBI infiltrator, ex-con, and agent provocateur named William O’Neal to stockpile weapons and nerve gas in their headquarters, to bomb city hall, and to torture disobedient members using electricity. Panther leaders Fred Hampton and Bobby Rush repeatedly rejected these proposals. All O’Neal could get to listen to him were two wayward BPP members Robert Bruce and Nathaniel Junior, whom he encouraged to engage in burglary and armed robbery as "fundraising." Even among these two, however, only Bruce eventually took up O’Neal’s suggestions, becoming a fugitive of the law. O’Neal was also responsible for the enormous cache of weapons police "discovered" in a raid on the BPP’s Monroe St. office while "searching" for a "fugitive" named George Sams. The nature and size of this arsenal shocked the American public, successfully contributing to the "extremely dangerous hate group" image of the BPP the FBI sought to create and convey. Sams himself, the supposed "fugitive" the FBI was pursuing at the time, was an FBI infiltrator too!
This is only the tip of the iceberg. Why did the FBI go to these lengths not only to "behead" the BPP, but to gut it of its members as well, and to employ the same tactics against many of the other above-mentioned opposition groups? A poll at the time showed that 25% of the American Black population had a great respect for the BPP, as did 43% of Blacks under 21. This is a case where Hoover emphatically agreed with Yezhov: political factionalism and opposition turns to acts of terror, and must be pre-emptively struck down before it can grow. The idea was to nip growing Panther popularity in the bud. So deeply did Hoover believe "Yezhov’s thesis," that he went a step beyond him: he affirmatively employed every resource the FBI could muster to force the (Panther) opposition to perform the "prophesied" acts of terror that the thesis predicts any opposition will perform in time anyway. Because the COINTELPROs directed at the Panthers brought the latter to an early end, the serious crimes for which prominent Panthers were arrested, such as murder and kidnapping, were all almost exclusively originated and committed by FBI agents themselves. The Panthers were never given a chance to reach a stage where they would - on their own - empirically confirm or refute Yezhov’s thesis. (Keep in mind that Hoover never read Yezhov’s thesis. The point is that he believed the same things.)
Hoover and his colleagues felt they were protecting the "American way of life," ignoring Jefferson’s characterization of the democratic way of life as one that permits open opposition. Interestingly, less than a generation prior to this time, The Collected Works of Thomas Jefferson were removed from the overseas libraries of the Voice of America, which is the U.S. State Department’s foreign information program. The FBI never apologized for any of their disgraceful COINTELPROs. In one instance, two slugs retrieved at a police shoot-out, which killed the unarmed Panther Fred Hampton only a few feet from his bed, were put into evidence at trial. Two police ballistics experts boldly lied and said that the slugs matched Panther weapons when they really matched police guns. These perjurers were never prosecuted for this. The only satisfaction received by families of Panthers who were actually murdered were judgements and awards in civil suits against various police authorities involved in these shoot-outs. There have never been subsequent criminal prosecutions of the police operatives involved.
Hoover, like Yezhov, emphasized the devious cunning of his targets, and encouraged Americans in popular books (like in his Masters of Deceit) to report suspicious politically subversive activity. It is not likely that J. Arch Getty would so glibly characterize Masters of Deceit (Hoover’s book) as "grisly." Yet others have characterized Hoover’s COINTELPROs as the "capstone[s] of ugliness" to his career (Ward Churchill and Jim Vander Wall, op. cit., p. 99). Neither Messrs. Hoover nor Yezhov are being criticized here in this essay: both were doing things they believed right to protect their way of life and all that they believed is good and sacred. There is one great difference, however, between what Yezhov did and what Hoover did: the BPP, for example, never had plans to sabotage wheat harvests, bomb hydroelectric plants, burn bridges, ruin mining operations, derail freight trains, poison the water supply, or even stockpile weapons and "bomb city hall." One might say that the BPP and AIM (American Indian Movement, another target of vigorous COINTELPROs) did not think big enough or were not smart enough. However, the people Yezhov was up against did think big and were smart. They had been involved in open boycott, covert resistance, and internationally supported counter-revolutionary sabotage and terror a lot longer. Because the FBI COINTELPRO operatives had such great difficulty encouraging and provoking criminal acts among these American dissidents, so much so that in many cases the FBI agents had to commit the criminal acts themselves, it is evident that the target dissidents had no plans for doing these things. It is safe to say that one cannot now know if these target organizations would eventually have resorted to such means, which would be evidence that Yezhov’s thesis is correct in its strong form: for liberal democracies. One cannot now know because FBI chiefs during this period firmly believed Yezhov was right, and therefore utilized COINTELPROs to nip these opposition groups in the bud - Yezhov’s own recommendation to Stalin. However, Yezhov never got his real chance to cut off anti-Soviet organizations as they began to overwhelm his mentors’ "empire."
© Copyright by Philip E. Panaggio P. O. Box 85, Lehigh Acres, FL 33970-0085, USA
