Voodoo Histories: The Role of the Conspiracy Theory in Shaping Modern History (14 page)

A heavy investment had been made, emotionally and politically, in the success of the new civilization. And that was even before the rise of fascism. Hitler’s coming to power, the threat from fascist movements throughout Europe and, in 1936, the beginning of the Spanish Civil War, seemed to force a choice on millions. With the capitalist West appearing to accommodate Nazi Germany and only Russia active in resistance, it had to be Hitler or Stalin. To those who sided with Stalin, the question of sticking with the Soviet government through the trauma of the trials could be presented as one of true commitment. As Pritt put it, “The more faint-hearted socialists are beset with doubts and anxieties . . . [but] we can feel confident that when the smoke has rolled away from the battlefield of controversy it will be realized that the charge was true, the confessions correct and the prosecution fairly conducted.” Were you hardy enough, tough enough, to see it through? And the trouble was that if you lost faith in the process, then all was lost. If the trials were false, then the confessions were false, the accusations were false, the arguments of the anti-Soviet press were right, and the state and its leader were shown to be impossibly flawed. This gave every incentive for people to opt into Pritt’s circular world, where every fact, no matter how awkward, could be construed as confirming the existence of the conspiracy.

What about men like Ambassador Davies, then? What could he possibly have to gain from being credulous about the Pyatakov trial? Five months after Pyatakov’s demise, Davies wrote a dispatch to the U.S. secretary of state, Sumner Welles. It was his opinion, he said, that “The strength of the Red Army and the avowed and well-recognized adherence of the USSR to peace is regarded as a distinct factor in maintaining peace in Europe. It definitely could contribute to the balance of power and buttress the Democratic ‘bloc.’ ”
⁵⁷
And you don’t, if you can help it, undermine a buttress.

A Paranoid Belief

The most intriguing question of all is how far Stalin and his surviving colleagues—men like Molotov, Kaganovich, and Voroshilov—believed in the conspiracy. Was the fabricated evidence at the trials merely an exaggeration of what they presumed actually to be taking place, or was it—as has often been suggested in the years since—a cynical ploy to frame and execute anyone who might constitute a rival or opponent to Stalin’s supreme power within the USSR?

The escalation of internal repression after the Kirov murder led to a number of theories that it was Stalin himself who had had the Leningrad boss killed, thus simultaneously removing a potential rival and providing a pretext for getting rid of others. The defector Orlov made this claim, and in the post-Stalin era, when Khrushchev was leading the campaign to loosen the grip that the dead dictator still had on large sections of the population, the hint was dropped that Orlov might have been right. There were, said Khrushchev, “many things which are inexplicable and mysterious” about the assassination, including some convenient accidents and some timely executions. Two separate commissions were subsequently charged with investigating the events of 1934, but their conclusions were never published. The assumption grew that the Kirov case was Stalin’s Reichstag fire—an event that was just too propitious. Then, in 1989, the last leader of the Soviet Union, the reformer Mikhail Gorbachev, commissioned his colleague Alexander Yakovlev to examine the case again. After working for two years, the Yakovlev team decided that there was no objective material to support either Stalin’s or the NKVD’s participation in the organization and carrying out of Kirov’s murder. The killer, Nikolayev, was apparently a lone gunman with psychological and medical problems, a desire to make history, and a grudge against the party.

But, like Hitler, Stalin had grasped the opportunity when it was presented to him. Knowing from secret police surveillance that there had been clandestine meetings involving supporters of Zinoviev in Leningrad—indeed Stalin had been given a dossier relating to their activities on the day before the murder—the general secretary made Zinovievites the villains of the piece. Torture and duress did the rest.

Stalin, then, was turning what he
feared
might be the case into fact. Two contemporary pieces of evidence, one published long after Stalin’s death, testify to the dictator’s genuine paranoia. The French writer Romain Rolland, like Feuchtwanger, was granted an audience with the Soviet leader. Rolland agreed that he would not publish an account of their private conversation unless Stalin gave his permission, and Stalin never did. Understandably, because at one point the talk turned to plots. “There are women librarians in the Kremlin,” Stalin said, “who visit the apartments of our comrades in the Kremlin to help maintain their libraries. It so happens that some of these librarians were recruited by our enemies to commit acts of terror. We found that these women carried poison, intending to kill some of our senior officials. Naturally, we arrested them but we are not going to execute them—we’ll just isolate them.”
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Someone who can fear being poisoned by a librarian can easily see in any manifestation of opposition the possibility of treachery and murder. And Stalin certainly spoke as though he was convinced of the guilt of the Pyatakov trial defendants. To Feuchtwanger, he expressed his anger with Radek, who had recently written a letter protesting his innocence followed the next day by his confession. “You Jews,” the former seminarian told Feuchtwanger, “have created one eternally true legend—that of Judas.”
⁵⁹

That same year, 1937, in November, Stalin hosted a reception at the Kremlin, and stunned his guests by telling them that the Soviet leadership would annihilate every enemy, even if they were old Bolsheviks. He went on, “We will annihilate his entire clan, his family! We will mercilessly annihilate everyone who by his actions and thoughts—yes, thoughts too—assails the unity of the socialist state. For the total annihilation of all enemies, both themselves and their clan!”
⁶⁰
Stalin’s idea was applied retrospectively. In the hunt for saboteurs and wreckers, it was most natural to start with those who were currently in opposition, and then equally natural to move on to those who once had been in opposition. Their past objective position revealed their current subjective intention. As Getty and his coauthor Naumov put it, “Virtually the entire elite (and even its victims) shared ideas about what constituted treason and conspiracy that differed sharply from ours . . . Their ‘truth’ was different from ours.”
⁶¹

Long after Stalin’s death, the writer and poet Felix Chuyev interviewed the dictator’s old comrade Lazar Kaganovich. Chuyev asked about the trials and the purges, and asked whether it was true that Pyatakov and friends had been shot because of their ideas. “Not for ideas,” retorted Kaganovich. “Why for ideas at all? But who would believe that these old, experienced conspirators, using the experience of Bolshevik conspiracy and cooperation, underground organization, would not get together to form an organization . . . They did form an organization. Tomsky and Zinoviev did get together. They met at their dacha.” Kaganovich outlined his own—and, presumably, Stalin’s—fears: “The entire method of Lenin’s struggle against the bourgeoisie could have been used against us. They had their people everywhere, in the army and elsewhere. They had formed organizations spread out in chains. Bukharin used to meet Kamenev and others and talk over the matters of the Central Committee. How could one let this happen freely?”

These men had, he reminded Chuyev, been unreliable in the past. Rykov, Kamenev, and Zinoviev had been against the October Revolution; Trotsky had once been a Menshevik; Bukharin had disagreed with Lenin in 1920. As he explained it: “With such people around him, Stalin could not have possibly waited for such a time when these people would have caught him by the neck and, as they did to Robespierre, annihilated him . . . Stalin acted decisively and strongly. Stalin was a man of great historical will.” And then, in what seems to come off the page with a sigh, Kaganovich concluded: “Not everybody can understand this revolution where you have to destroy your own comrades and relatives. Each revolution, they say, devours its own children. Nothing of the sort!”
⁶²
Which meant, of course, everything of the sort.

The Trotskyite plot in which Kaganovich’s closest comrades were supposed to have been involved was the product of a very specific kind of conspiracy theory. Most modern theories have been conceived as a kind of historical revolt against the official version of events, but for authoritarian regimes in transitional periods, the idea of conspiracy becomes convenient for the authorities themselves, and also offers a painless explanation for massive failure. In Stalinist Russia, the revelation that a dedicated band of plotters had been at work sabotaging the first socialist state’s otherwise inexorable march toward nirvana was—if anything—a relief. Because, if it were true, then the great problems of state socialism could be solved by rooting out the plotters. As
Time
magazine put it in the case of Pyatakov, his execution “leaves Dictator Stalin’s ‘Dear Friend Sergei’ Ordzhonikidze Commissar for Heavy Industry, vindicated in the Soviet press for Heavy Industry’s having fallen behind the Five-Year Plan. Other confessions and executions of the week vindicated virtually all Russia’s thousands of recent wrecks and breakdowns.”
⁶³

In more recent times, the failure of Arab states to democratize, modernize, or, in many ways, satisfy their citizenry has led to official toleration and propagation of conspiracy theories involving Israel. It would be reassuring to believe that these theories originated in pure cynicism. Reassuring but, as in the case of Comrade Pyatakov, probably wrong.

3. CONSPIRACIES TO THE LEFT

He didn’t create this situation of fear; he merely exploited it, and rather successfully. Cassius was right, “The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves.”

—EDWARD R. MURROW ON SENATOR JOE MCCARTHY
¹

T
his is the story of how the idea of conspiracy at the very heart of government took root in the American psyche. It takes us from the U.S. Midwest to Pearl Harbor and on to Hollywood, but it begins in the early 1930s, with the activities of one John T. Flynn, a muckraking financial journalist with a specialty in attacking government links to big business.

In the 1930s, the term “muckraker” wasn’t necessarily pejorative. It was used first in 1906 by President Theodore Roosevelt to describe the new breed of reporter that had risen with the expansion of newspapers at the end of the nineteenth century, the breed that performed valuable work in exposing and attacking abuses of power by unregulated corporations and corrupt politicians. Roosevelt did, however, have certain reservations about the role. “The men with the muck-rakes,” he said, “are often indispensable to the well-being of society; but only if they know when to stop raking the muck, and to look upward to the celestial crown above them, to the crown of worthy endeavor. There are beautiful things above and round about them; and if they gradually grow to feel that the whole world is nothing but muck, their power of usefulness is gone.”
²

Muckraking journalism appealed hugely to the ever-growing number of newspaper and magazine readers in America, boosting the profits of the newspaper magnates and turning many of its exponents—people like Upton Sinclair, Lincoln Steffens, and Ida Tarbell—into quasi-celebrities. Initially, these investigative journalists, as we would call them now, tended to be men and women of the political left. Lincoln Steffens famously went to Soviet Russia and said, “I have seen the future, and it works”; Upton Sinclair stood in elections as a socialist candidate. But their appeal was not limited to the left. They were seen as taking on the likes of Standard Oil and J. P. Morgan on behalf of the little guy, and therefore dovetailed into an aspect of American political life that was almost as psychological as it was ideological—populism.

At this time, America was a frontier and an immigrant nation. Its foundation had been based on rebellion against oppression, its development upon pioneering, and its essential myth on the fulfillment of individual dreams. Its people tended to see themselves as having escaped persecution or poverty to make a new life for themselves almost entirely through their own efforts. Their successes, therefore, were their own; their failures were another matter altogether. When things went wrong or when times were difficult, it was natural to look around for an external culprit. Or culprit
s
, because populism typically imagined a loose and infernal alliance of multiple foes.

The problem for populism was that the forces it was battling against—those of economic change and mass migration—were problematically impersonal. Marxists, with their detailed worldview, might be satisfied with the ideas of historical process and class war, but less holistic ideologies required something more immediate, and therefore fluid. From the 1820s onward, there was a remarkable consistency in the language used to describe the threat to Americanism, but there was also a remarkable diversity of threats. These started with the Freemasons, against whose machinations the inventor of the telegraph, Samuel Morse, wrote an entire book in 1835. By the 1890s, the conspiracy was led by a group of bankers.