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Arthur Koestler 1905 - 1983
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Darkness at Noon was one of those books that made a deep
impression on me as a teenager. It is a chilling account in fictional
form of Stalin's Great Terror in the 1930s. It was published in
1940, i. e. during a short "window of opportunity" before
the Soviet Union became an ally in the war against Hitler and revulsion
turned into admiration in the West. Its author, a Hungarian living
in exile in England, was a reformed communist who had taken part
in the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939) on the loyalist side. His perspective
was that of an insider, a sympathizer, a fellow traveller if you
will; something that made his horror at Stalin's excesses all the
more painful for him. In his novel he tried to explain something
that seemed completely incomprehensible to the outside world: the
false confessions
that gushed forth from the accused, even when they could not have
held the slightest hope that their lives would be spared.
Koestler's novel deals with the fate of one senior party official,
Rubashov, who is arrested, interrrogated, persuaded to confess,
and executed. It seems strangely remote from the fate of the millions
of people who fell victim to Lenin's and Stalin's forced collectivization
and industrialisation. There is still the impression that, to Rubashov,
the original bolsheviks were a bunch of good-hearted idealists who
felt that they had to take certain drastic measures to promote the
greater good. The starting point for Rubashov's doubts seems to
be his personal fate. His soul searching and the dialog with his
interrogators Ivanov and Gletkin make up "the meat" of
the novel. With the help of standard interrogation techniques (sleep
deprivation, Mr. Nice and Mr. Bad interrogators, fate of relatives,
etc.), Rubashov is coaxed to confess, so that his death will contribute
to strengthening the Party as an "act of sacrifice". But
it is clear that Rubashov is filled with doubt at the end. His death
is memorably described as a "shrug of eternity". - It
is clear that the author himself finally came to the conclusion
that communism is not "a great theory that was perverted
by the excesses of Stalin". The end cannot justify the means.
A human being is more than "a million people divided by a million".
Koestler's description of Rubashov's predicament rings especially
true, as just a few years earlier Koestler had himself spent some
months in a prison cell awaiting execution during the Spanish civil
war, described in "Dialogue with death". (He was ultimately
released in an exchange agreement.)
Although repression had been a guiding principle of the Communist
Party since it came to power in 1917, the Great Terror is associated
with the time period roughly between 1934 and 1938, when hundreds
of thousands of party members were accused, expelled and punished
with death, or exile in the prison "archipelago". Its
purpose was to consolidate Stalin's power by eliminating those suspected
of harboring deviating political views, but also by creating an
atmosphere of fear that would discourage any potential rivals from
seeking power, regardless of their political leanings.
It worked. As late as during the Brezhnev era in the mid-1970s,
I visited a Russian colleague's home in Moscow. When I mentioned
Stalin's name, my colleague's mother, who was sitting in the kitchen
and did not understand English, started to clink her glass of tea
with a spoon, louder and louder, as a warning to her son to change
the subject.
Estimates of the total number of Stalin's victims (1924-1953) vary
between 10
and 50 million. Most of the deaths were due, not to executions,
but to starvation and disease among the prison population, and among
entire ethnic groups who were shifted around without the means to
support themselves. Famines, caused partly as a matter of policy
(food was exported to pay for industrialisation), partly by sheer
incompetence, killed at least 4 million people from 1932. Millions
of civilians lost their lives during WW2 as a result of Stalin's
"scorched-earth" tactics, most of them in the Ukraine.
Some historians claim that Stalin suffered from paranoia, and that
this was the underlying cause of the recurrent purges and executions
of even his closest associates. Be that as it may, one should bear
in mind that "Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean
they're not out to get you". In fact, it is widely believed
that Beria had Stalin poisoned in March 1953. And no doubt, it was
the climate of fear that in turn led to Beria's execution later
that year. - By the way, I vividly recall that a page was sent to
all registered subscribers of the Soviet Encyclopedia to replace
the entry on Beria with an extended article on Bering's
Strait. (The regime also routinely doctored images to eliminate
"non-persons" from them. This practice continued at least
into the 1960s. For instance, previously published images were retouched
to remove cosmonaut candidates who had fallen into disgrace!)
To understand the pervasive fear among the general population during
the Great Terror, and in particular among the party leadership,
it is useful to recall some revelations
made by Nikita Khrushchev at the 1956 congress of the communist
party in closed session: "Out of the 139 members and candidates
of the Central Committee who were elected at the 17th Congress
[in 1934], 98 persons, i.e., 70 per cent, were arrested and shot
(mostly in 1937-1938). ... Of 1,966 delegates with either voting
or advisory rights, 1,108 persons were arrested on charges of anti-revolutionary
crimes, i.e., decidedly more than a majority." - Khrushchev
reported that Stalin had personally signed 383 execution lists [comprising
44,500
individuals], containing "thousands" of names. This
was not the whole picture, perhaps understandably in view of Khrushchev's
own record as a political commissar, and of the sensibilities of
his audience. After the dissolution of the Soviet Union, detailed
records from NKVD archives have been published. They show that
681,692 prisoners were executed during the short period of 1937-1938.
Many more were put in prison camps or sentenced to internal exile.
At the height of the Great Terror, target figures for arrests and
executions per geographical area were established centrally. Many
regional leaders considered it prudent to exceed those numbers.
Of course, this contributed to an environment where denunciations
and personal vendettas became an important factor in the struggle
for survival. Any contact with foreigners became a liability. -
After WW2, those Soviet prisoners-of-war who had survived the war
and been liberated by the Red Army were considered unreliable and
put in prison camps, or shot for cowardice.
Although it is a cliché that "The revolution eats
its own children" (Danton, Robespierre, Röhm, Trotsky...),
the Great Terror was unique in that nobody was safe
from arrest. It has been described as Stalin's war on his own population.
Almost everybody knew somebody who had been arrested and
disappeared for no obvious reason. - When I visited the Soviet Union
in the mid-70s, as we passed the KGB headquarters, the infamous
Lubyanka prison in downtown Moscow, my Russian colleague mentioned
that it was "the tallest building in Moscow...".
Then he completed the bitter joke: "...because from there
you can see all the way to Siberia".
For
Swedish readers, I recommend an essay on Stalin's show trials of
the 1930s from the perspective of Bucharin's wife, written by Peter
Englund. An excerpt from "Brev från nollpunkten"
can be found here.
See also a list
of literature in Swedish on stalinist terror.
There is no doubt in my mind that the perceived threat of communism
during the 1920s and 1930s paved the way for Hitler's rise. According
to Marxist theory, the communist revolution should start in the
industrialized countries. As early as 1918, there was an armed uprising
in the German naval base in Kiel. (A relative of mine, Wolfgang
Zenker, was killed when he refused to lower the imperial flag on
his ship.) During six months in 1918-1919, Bavaria was a socialist
republic ruled by Soldiers' and Workers' Councils. In 1919 the Spartakist
uprising occurred in Berlin. It was crushed, and its leaders were
executed. Street fights between communists and nazis were common
throughout the 1920s and early 1930s. - My paternal grandfather,
who was a prominent church dean in Leipzig, wrote in his memoirs
(1927): "...and the still ongoing persecutions of Christians
in Russia, make it seem not impossible to us, that we German Christians
perhaps shall be forced to confirm our faith with the death of martyrs
('Zeugentod')."
It seems to me that Stalin's Great Terror has attracted less attention
in the West than it should, especially among young people, who need
to "study history, or be condemned to repeat it".
In the wake of the Holocaust, the central lesson to emerge from
the WW2 era has become the evil of racism and its terrible consequences,
and the need for democratic rule. This is as it should be, but racial
hatred was not what brought Hitler to power, nor was a democratic
form of government enough to prevent his rise. The all-important
step was acceptance of his suppression of political and human rights
"for the greater good". As Benjamin Franklin pointed out:
Any society that would give up a little liberty to gain a little
security will deserve neither and lose both. This observation
is just as valid today, perhaps even more so in an era preoccupied
with terrorism, and where every citizen's every move and transaction
can be electronically traced.
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