Modern Times: The World From the Twenties to the Nineties (60 page)

Foreign Communists who had sought asylum in Moscow were murdered too, in large numbers. They included Béla Kun and most of the Hungarian Communist leaders, nearly all the top Polish Communists; all the Yugoslav party brass except Tito, the famous Bulgarians Popov and Tanev, heroes of the Leipzig trial with Dimitrov (who escaped by sheer luck: Stalin had a file on him); all the Koreans; many Indians and Chinese; and Communist leaders from Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, Bessarabia, Iran, Italy, Finland, Austria, France, Romania, Holland, Czechoslovakia, the United States and Brazil. Particularly hard hit were the Germans who had taken refuge from Hitler. We know the names of 842 of them who
were arrested, but in fact there were many more, including wives and children of the leaders, such as Karl Liebknecht’s family. Some of the Germans who survived were later able to display the marks of torture of both the Gestapo and the
NKVD
, and were thus living symbols of the furtive contacts which the security services of Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia maintained throughout this period. On the whole, European Communists were safer in their own fascist homelands than in the ‘Socialist mother-country’. Roy Medvedev, the independent Soviet Marxist historian, noted: it is a terrible paradox that most European Communist leaders and activists who lived in the USSR perished, while most of those who were in prison in their native lands in 1937–8 survived.’
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That Stalin exchanged lists of ‘wanted’ activists with the Nazis is certain, and he may have done so with other totalitarian regimes which his propaganda assailed with mechanical ferocity. He took a close interest in the fate of the foreign Communists he dealt with. But then he took a close interest in all aspects of his terror. At one point during the trial of his old comrade and victim Bukharin, an arc-light briefly revealed to visitors the face of Stalin himself, peering through the black glass of a small window set high under the ceiling of the court.
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Arthur Koestler’s brilliant novel,
Darkness at Noon
(1940), gave the impression that Stalin’s leading victims, trapped in their own Marxist theology, and the relative morality they shared with him, were induced to collaborate in their own mendacious testimony – even came to believe it. Nothing could be further from the truth. While leading ‘conspirators’, whose evidence was needed to build up the basic structure of the fantasy, were brought to confess by a mixture of threats to kill or torture wives and children, promises of leniency, and physical violence, for the overwhelming majority of those who were engulfed, Stalin’s methods differed little from Peter the Great’s, except of course in scale, which precluded any subtlety.

During these years something like 10 per cent of Russia’s vast population passed through Stalin’s penitential machinery. Famous Tsarist prisons, such as the Lefortovskaia, which had been turned into museums and peopled with waxwork figures, were put into service again, the wax replaced by flesh and blood. Churches, hotels, even bathhouses and stables were turned into gaols; and dozens of new ones built. Within these establishments, torture was used on a scale which even the Nazis were later to find it difficult to match. Men and women were mutilated, eyes gouged out, eardrums perforated; they were encased in ‘nail boxes’ and other fiendish devices. Victims were often tortured in front of their families. The wife of Nestor Lakoba, a strikingly beautiful woman, preferred to die under torture, even when faced with her weeping fourteen-year-old son,
rather than accuse her husband. Many faced a horrible death with similar stoicism. The
NKVD’S
plan to stage a show-trial of the Youth Movement was frustrated by the fact that S.V.Kovarev and other leaders of the Komsomol Central Committee all preferred to die under torture rather than confess to a lie. Large numbers of army officers were killed in this fashion:
in extremis
they might sign their own ‘confessions’ but they would not implicate others. According to Medvedev,
NKVD
recruits, aged eighteen, ‘were taken to torture-chambers, like medical students to laboratories to watch dissections’.
¹⁴⁹

That Hitler’s example helped to spur Stalin to his great terror is clear enough, and his agents were always quick to learn anything the Gestapo and the ss had to teach. But the instruction was mutual. The camps system was imported by the Nazis from Russia. Himmler set them up with great speed; there were nearly one hundred Nazi camps before the end of 1933. But at all stages, even at the height of the ss extermination programme in 1942–5, there were many more Soviet camps, most of them much larger than the Nazi ones, and containing many more people. Indeed, the Soviet camps, as Solzhenitsyn and others have shown, constituted a vast series of substantial territorial islands within the Soviet Union, covering many thousands of square miles. Like the Nazi camps, which ranged downwards from Dachau, the ‘Eton’ or ‘Groton’ of the system, the Soviet camps were of many varieties. There was, for instance, a special camp for the widows, orphans and other relatives of slaughtered army officers; and there were prison-orphanages for the children of ‘enemies of the people’, who were themselves liable to be tried and sentenced, as was Marshal Tukhachevsky’s daughter Svetlana, as soon as they were old enough.
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Most of the camps, however, served a definite economic purpose, and it was their example which inspired Himmler, from 1941 onwards, to seek to create a substantial ‘socialized sector’ of the Germany economy. The Soviet Union did not engage in a deliberate and systematic policy of genocide, though Stalin came close to it when dealing with the Soviet ‘nationalities’ in the Second World War. But the Soviet camps were (and are) ‘death camps’ all the same. The sign in iron letters over the camps in the Kolyma region, among the very worst, which read ‘Labour is a matter of honour, valour and heroism’, was as misleading as the Nazi imitation of it, hung over the entrance to Auschwitz:
Arbeit Macht Frei
(Work Wins Freedom). Within these camps the
NKVD
frequently carried out mass-executions, using machine-guns: 40,000 men, women and children were thus killed in the Kolyma camps alone in 1938. The ‘special punishment’ and gold-mine camps were the worst killers. Lenin and
later Stalin built up the world’s second-largest gold industry (after South Africa’s) and huge gold reserves, on the backs of men working a sixteen-hour day, with no rest days, wearing rags, sleeping often in torn tents, with temperatures down to sixty degrees below zero, and with pitifully small quantities of food. Witnesses later testified that it took twenty to thirty days to turn a healthy man into a physical wreck in these camps, and some claimed that conditions were deliberately planned to achieve a high death-rate. Savage beatings were administered by the guards, and also by the professional criminal element, who were given supervisory duties over the masses of ‘politicals’ – another feature of the camps imitated by the Nazis.

In these circumstances, the death-rate was almost beyond the imagining of civilized men. Medvedev puts the figure of the great terror victims summarily shot at 4–500,000. He thinks the total number of victims in the years 1936–9 was about 4.5 million. Men and women died in the camps at the rate of about a million a year during this and later periods, and the total of deaths caused by Stalin’s policy was in the region of 10 million.
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Just as the Roehm purge goaded Stalin into imitation, so in turn the scale of his mass atrocities encouraged Hitler in his wartime schemes to change the entire demography of Eastern Europe. In social engineering, mass murder on an industrial scale is always the ultimate weapon: Hitler’s ‘final solution’ for the Jews had its origins not only in his own fevered mind but in the collectivization of the Soviet peasantry.

Granted their unprecedented nature, the atrocities committed by the Nazi and Soviet totalitarian regimes in the 1930s had remarkably little impact on the world, though the nature (if not the scale) of both, and especially the former, were reasonably well known at the time. More attention was focused on Hitler’s crimes, partly because they were nearer the West, partly because they were often openly vaunted, but chiefly because they were publicized by a growing émigré population of intellectuals. As a self-proclaimed enemy of civilization, as opposed to
Kultur
, Hitler was a natural target for the writers of the free world even before he became Chancellor; once in power he proceeded to confirm his image as a mortal enemy of the intelligentsia. His public book-burning started in March 1933 and reached a climax in Berlin that May, with Goebbels presiding, quoting the words of Ulrich von Hutten: ‘Oh century, oh sciences, it is a joy to be alive!’ Exhibitions of ‘degenerate art’ were held at Nuremberg (1935) and Munich (1937). Museums were bullied into disposing of some of their paintings: thus, at a sale in Lucerne in June 1939, works by Gauguin and Van Gogh went for derisory prices, and Picasso’s
Absinthe-Drinker
failed to find a buyer. Regular lists of émigrés deprived of their German citizenship were published. They
included Leon Feuchrwanger, Helmut von Gerlach, Alfred Kerr, Heinrich Mann, Kurt Tucholsky, Ernst Toller (August 1933), Robert Becher, Einstein, Theodor Plievier (March 1934), Bruno Frank, Klaus Mann, Piscator (November 1934), Friedrich Wolf, Berthold Brecht, Paul Bekker, Arnold Zweig, Thomas Mann (1935–6), and scores of other famous figures.
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These, and thousands of Jewish and anti-Nazi university professors and journalists, who were prevented from making a living in Germany and were virtually obliged to emigrate, swelled the chorus of those who sought to expose conditions within Hitler’s Reich.

All the same, Hitler had his vocal admirers. They included Lloyd George, the Duke of Windsor and Lord Rothermere, owner of the
Daily Mail.
Major Yeats-Brown, author of the famous
Lives of a Bengal Lancer
, testified that it was his ‘honest opinion that there is more real Christianity in Germany today than there ever was under the Weimar Republic’. Among those who expressed qualified approval of fascism in its various forms were Benedetto Croce, Jean Cocteau, Luigi Pirandello, Giovanni Gentile, James Burnham, W.B.Yeats, T.S.Eliot and Filippo Marinetti, as well as actual pro-fascist intellectuals like Charles Maurras, Louis-Ferdinand Céline, Ezra Pound, Oswald Spengler and Martin Heidegger.
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The overwhelming majority of intellectuals, however, veered to the Left. They saw Nazism as a far greater danger, both to their own order and to all forms of freedom. By the mid-Thirties, many intelligent people believed that fascism was likely to become the predominant system of government in Europe and perhaps throughout the world. There were quasi-fascist regimes in Germany, Italy, Spain, Portugal, Poland, Hungary, Austria, Turkey, Greece, Romania, Japan and many other states; and flourishing fascist parties virtually everywhere else. To them the Soviet Union appeared to be the only major power wholly committed to opposing, and if necessary fighting, fascism. Hence many of them were not only prepared to defend its apparent virtues but to justify the manifest ruthlessness of the Stalin regime. Very few of them, at any rate at that stage, were aware of the true nature of the regime. Jewish writers, in particular, knew little or nothing of Stalin’s violent anti-Semitism. It was not known that he sent over 600 writers to the camps, many (including Isaac Babel and Osip Mandelstam) to their deaths; that he almost certainly murdered Maxim Gorky; and that he, like Hitler, took millions of books out of circulation and burnt them, though not publicly.
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Yet Western intellectuals knew enough about Soviet severity to oblige them to adopt a double standard in defending it. Lincoln Steffens set the tone: ‘Treason to the Tsar wasn’t a sin, treason to Communism is.’
¹⁵⁵
Shaw argued: ‘We cannot afford to give ourselves moral airs when our most enterprising neighbour … humanely and judiciously
liquidates a handful of exploiters and speculators to make the world safe for honest men.’
¹⁵⁶
André Malraux argued that ‘Just as the Inquisition did not affect the fundamental dignity of Christianity, so the Moscow trials have not diminished the fundamental dignity of Communism.’ Many intellectuals, including some who knew what totalitarian justice meant, defended the trials. Brecht wrote: ‘Even in the opinion of the bitterest enemies of the Soviet Union and of her government, the trials have clearly demonstrated the existence of active conspiracies against the regime’, a ‘quagmire of infamous crimes’ committed by ‘All the scum, domestic and foreign, all the vermin, the professional criminals and informers … this rabble … I am convinced this is the truth.’
¹⁵⁸
Feuchtwanger was present at the 1937 Pyatakov trial (which led up to the Bukharin and other trials) and wrote an instant book about it,
Moscow 1937
, which declared: ‘there was no justification of any sort for imagining that there was anything manufactured or artificial about the trial proceedings.’ Stalin immediately had this translated and published in Moscow (November 1937) and a copy of it was pressed on the wretched Bukharin on the very eve of his own trial, to complete his despair.
¹⁵⁹

The
NKVD
, indeed, made frequent use of pro-Stalin tracts by Western intellectuals to break down the resistance of their prisoners. They were assisted, too, by pro-Stalin elements in the Western embassies and press in Moscow. Ambassador Davies told his government that the trials were absolutely genuine and repeated his views in a mendacious book,
Mission to Moscow
, published in 1941. Harold Denny, of the
New York Times
, wrote of the trials: ‘in the broad sense, they are not fakes’ (14 March 1938). His colleague, Walter Duranty, the paper’s regular Moscow correspondent, was one of the most comprehensive of Stalin’s apologists. As Malcolm Muggeridge wrote: ‘There was something vigorous, vivacious, preposterous about his unscrupulousness, which made his persistent lying somehow absorbing.’ His favourite expression was ‘I put my money on Stalin’.
¹⁶⁰
Of the Pyatakov trial he wrote: it is unthinkable that Stalin and Voroshilov and Budyonny and the court martial could have sentenced their friends to death unless the proofs of guilt were overwhelming.’
¹⁶¹
To suggest the evidence was faked, echoed Ambassador Davies, ‘would be to suppose the creative genius of Shakespeare’.
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