home
***
CD-ROM
|
disk
|
FTP
|
other
***
search
/
TIME: Almanac of the 20th Century
/
TIME, Almanac of the 20th Century.ISO
/
1930
/
30stalin
< prev
next >
Wrap
Text File
|
1994-02-27
|
25KB
|
523 lines
<text>
<title>
(1930s) Stalin
</title>
<history>
TIME--The Weekly Newsmagazine--1930s Highlights
</history>
<link 08180>
<link 08181>
<link 08182>
<link 08185>
<link 00019><link 00040><link 00045><link 00046><article>
<source>Time Magazine</source>
<hdr>
Stalin
</hdr>
<body>
<p> [The great evil of the 20th century's fourth decade was the
triumph of totalitarian regimes in which of Europe, and the fear
and moral cowardice that they engendered in much of the rest of
the world. German national socialism and Russian Marxism-Leninism
and to a somewhat lesser degree, Italian fascism, have more to
unite than to divide them. Josef Stalin's dictatorship used the
theme of class hatred to whip up enthusiasm, divide his enemies,
and drown dissent. Adolf Hitler's used race hatred, then a more
widespread obsession than in today's closer-linked, cosmopolitan
world. Neither man paid more than lip service to ideology; both
were absolute autocrats, who gathered all power into their own
hands and relied on systematically applied terror to hold on to
it.
</p>
<p> Stalin had inherited the apparatus of totalitarianism set up
by Vladimir Lenin--the overlapping state and party organs, the
systemic deceit, spying and betrayal, and above all a
ubiquitous, brutal secret police organization. Italy's Benito
Mussolini was an admirer of Lenin. Hitler learned from Lenin and
Stalin how to entrench a vicious minority regime in power. Later
in the decade, Stalin used the pattern of Hitler's purges of his
own henchmen and supporters for use in his own Great Terror.
</p>
<p> As the decade opened, Stalin had decided that the eight years
of relatively lenient treatment of the Russian peasantry would
have to end. The policy had been adopted after the great famine
of 1921, which occurred because the more than 100 million
farmers refused to be coerced into providing an agricultural
surplus, and millions were starving in the cities. But no longer
were the peasants to remain outside the system of totalitarian
control.]
</p>
<p>(January 13, 1930)
</p>
<p> Since in any country rich farmers are always the most
conservative not to say reactionary class, it has been obvious
from the first that they must be destroyed in Soviet Russia, but
recently this has not seemed practical. "It is now," said Stalin
with quiet menace last week. He launched into an argument which
may be summarized thus: 1) Even two years ago the Government was
largely dependent upon the kulak to produce what is called the
"export surplus" of Russian grain. It is this surplus which the
Government sells abroad, using the gold received in exchange to
buy foreign manufactured goods. Since foreign manufacturers will
not take they pay in Russian rubles, the surplus grain which
equals gold is vitally important; 2) During the past two years
thousands of kulak estates have been confiscated and turned
over to collectivist farm workers for intensive cultivation
under the direct supervision of the State. It is now found that
in 1929 these collective farms produced a greater export surplus
than did the kulak farms in 1927; 3) Ergo, argued Stalin last
week, the Government is no longer dependent upon the kulak and
will proceed to destroy him as a class, confiscating his lands
but allowing him to exchange the stultifying sloth of wealth for
hard, invigorating work as a collectivist farm hand, perhaps on
what was once his own estate.
</p>
<p> [Virtually all peasants resisted collectivization, and in the
violence unleashed in the next few months five million were
killed, as many as ten million sent to labor camps. The peasants
burned their crops and slaughtered their livestock rather than
turn them over to the state. Little of this reached the Western
press, however, until the telltale signs of hunger appeared
again in cities like Moscow.]
</p>
<p>(September 12, 1932)
</p>
<p> Whether enough food got into Russian stomachs was an academic
question to Moscow correspondents until last week. Suddenly
Dictator Josef Stalin announced, for the first time, short food
rations for not only all foreign correspondents but even for
previously pampered foreign engineers.
</p>
<p> Worse still, the price of rationed food was drastically upped.
Egg prices rose 250% overnight. Meat prices almost doubled. This
winter the only foreigners in Russia to eat well will be the
diplomatic corps, privileged to bring in food duty free under
diplomatic seal.
</p>
<p> For the moment green vegetables remained plentiful in Russian
cities peddled by peasants under Dictator Stalin's decree of
last spring permitting limited resumption of private trade.
</p>
<p> Autumn grain sowing throughout the Soviet Union is "highly
satisfactory," with only 7,000,000 acres sown this year as
compared to 15,000,000 last year (to Aug. 25).
</p>
<p> Every Russian food shortage is produced by the same cause: a
failure of sufficient goods to reach the peasantry in time to
stimulate them to grow more food than will suffice their own
needs. Lazy and shrewd, the Russian peasant will not pile up a
food surplus which the Government may seize from him by force.
</p>
<p> It was thought that with a State-appointed Communist in charge
of each farm the peasants would produce, produce, produce. For
a time they did. But this year the State's failure to ship
sufficient goods to the mechanized collectives is producing a
new and most ominous "collective strike."
</p>
<p>(April 10, 1933)
</p>
<p> Gareth Jones, a serious young man with glasses, arrived in
Berlin last week after a three-week tour of the Ukraine. He had
a dreadful tale to tell:
</p>
<p> "I walked through the country visiting villages and
investigating twelve collective farms. Everywhere I heard the
cry: `There is no bread, we are dying!' This cry is rising from
all parts of Russia; from the Volga district, from Siberia, from
White Russia, from Central Asia and from the Ukraine black dirt
country.
</p>
<p> "Most officials deny any famine exists, but a few minutes
following one such denial in a train I chanced to throw away a
stale piece of my private supply of bread. Like a shot a peasant
dived to the floor, grabbed the crust and devoured it. The same
performance was repeated later with an orange peel. Even
transport and G.P.U. officers warned me against traveling over
the countryside at night because of the numbers of starving,
desperate men...A foreign expert who returned from Kazakstan
told me that 1,000,000 of the 5,000,000 of inhabitants there
have died of hunger.
</p>
<p>(July 3, 1933)
</p>
<p> Nothing brings such a thunderous frown to the dark brow of
Josef Stalin as reports from the farm front that food production
is lagging. Promptly agents of his Gay-Pay-Oo pounce (usually
at night) on peasant laggards, ship them off from their
ancestral farms to saw wood and split rocks in bleak Siberia.
All last year food shortage gripped the Soviet Union, peasant
deportations continued, prophesies flew that a peasant "passive
strike" might crack the Stalin regime.
</p>
<p> In Moscow, last week, relieved State statisticians produced
curves and sheaves of figures which made Stalin smile.
Apparently the State spring sowing campaign is now 95.4%
fulfilled--and this year's figures, even if a trifle
optimistic, should be far more accurate than last year's. For
conspiring to deceive Dictator Stalin last year with
over-optimistic farm statistics 35 comrades were shot.
</p>
<p> The great fact is that the Soviet State has plowed definitely
through a "famine winter." Last week Stalin's smile translated
itself into prompt action. More than 100,000 thoroughly punished
peasants were released from their harsh exile, sent back on
joyously clattering trains to help till the 225,000,000 Soviet
acres thus far sown. Best of all, from the peasant's standpoint,
Dictator Stalin created an All-Union Procuratorial Department
to curb and supervise his strong-arm agents: the Gay-Pay-Oo,
the militia, the criminal police.
</p>
<p> [Emboldened by the success of Hitler's blood purge of his
followers, Stalin in 1934 began to move against the Old
Bolsheviks of his party, mostly men who had been his equals or
better and who had opposed or angered him in the past. For an
excuse, he used the murder of Sergei Kirov, the Leningrad party
boss. The killing was almost certainly engineered by Stalin
himself.]
</p>
<p>(December 17, 1934)
</p>
<p> When some 77 Germans were shot during Adolf Hitler's "blood
purge," they at least were accused of plotting with that
plug-ugly pederast Captain Ernst Roehm. Last week Josef Stalin
resorted to more drastic Bolshevik Terror, terror in its purest
form. Because a member of the Soviet Politbureau or Red Big Ten
had been assassinated, Soviet firing squads last week mowed down
66 Russians, one a woman, who were not accused of having
anything to do with Assassin Leonid Nicolaev or his crime.
According to dispatches passed by the Soviet censor, "they died
to express the Government's determination that Nicolaev's act
should not be the model for others."
</p>
<p> Assassin Nicolaev himself was being carefully nursed in a
Leningrad hospital, doctors hoping to prevent Death from his
self-inflicted wound and the beating he received. if saved, he
was expected to go, first to the Gay-pay-oo for third degree,
then into a monster Soviet propaganda trial and finally before
a firing squad. Last week the Gay-pay-oo were reported to have
shot his 85-year-old mother, his wife, his daughters and his
sons--in addition to the 66 executions of pure Bolshevik
Terror.
</p>
<p>(December 31, 1934)
</p>
<p> Twice has Old Bolshevik Grigory Zinoviev organized opposition
to Comrade Stalin's policies within the Party. Twice has Stalin
permitted him abjectly to repent and eat crow. Last week he was
turning obscurely as a minor cog in the Party bureaucracy when
abruptly the Dictator chose to flaunt again and pillory the name
ZINOVIEV.
</p>
<p> Some sort of name simply had to be produced in the third week
of capriciously shooting batches of Russians in oriental
vengeance for the murder of Josef Stalin's "Dear Friend Sergei"
Kirov.
</p>
<p> Conviction grew that the Kirov assassination was indeed a
major inside job, the only kind of job that could conceivably
get the Dictator himself. On the growing hypothesis that
steel-nerved Stalin for once has been badly scared, his
executions of "pure terror" and continued arrests were
understandable last week. Down in Kiev, ancient, church-jammed
Mother Town of All the Russias, star chamber trials continued
under famed Judge Ulrich. Meanwhile Comrade Nicolaev, the
assassin of "Dear Friend Sergei," remained alive awaiting trial.
</p>
<p> For six days the Government concealed the fact that Comrade
Zinoviev was arrested last week, along with Comrade Lev Kamenev,
onetime Soviet Ambassador to Italy, Comrade G.E. Yevkokimov,
one-time Red Boss of Leningrad, and 13 others. All had been
members of the Left Opposition which fought Stalin in 1926-27.
</p>
<p> [Nikolaev and his 13 purported co-conspirators were shot after
a secret trial, along with a total of 117 others. But Zinoviev
and Kamenev were not tried until 18 months later, it having
taken that long to extract their enthusiastic confessions.]
</p>
<p>(August 31, 1936)
</p>
<p> As thick clouds rolled over Moscow one afternoon last week
the ornate chandeliers of the onetime Nobles Club were lighted,
Soviet soldiers in blue caps appeared with fixed bayonets, and
some 500 people were admitted to the stately Hall of Columns
after their credentials had been checked and rechecked by
sentries at the doors.
</p>
<p> Somewhat less light of step and panther-like than usual
entered Chief Prosecutor Andrei Vishinsky, longtime pouncer in
broadcast Bolshevik trials. At the left of Judge Ulrich was the
box of 16 prisoners around whom stood Red Army guards, changed
every half hour.
</p>
<p> A clerk at Judge Ulrich's elbow read rapidly an indictment of
the accused so complex that his swift sentences left spectators
blurred as to details. Quite clear, though, were the main
charges that the 16 prisoners had contrived among themselves at
least four separate plots to kill Joseph Stalin, Secretary
General of the Communist Party and as such Dictator of Russia.
It was announced that the prisoners had all chosen not to be
defended by Soviet lawyers but to defend themselves. One by one
each of the 16 popped up in the box and cried:
</p>
<p> "I admit the charge against myself."
</p>
<p> Asked Prosecutor Vishinsky: "Did you, Zinoviev, organize the
Terrorists?"
</p>
<p> "Yes."
</p>
<p> "Did you plot the death of Kirov?"
</p>
<p> "Yes."
</p>
<p> "Did you organize the plan to kill Stalin?"
</p>
<p> "Yes. I am guilty of every charge in the indictment."
</p>
<p> A few minutes later two other prisoners became tangled in
argument with each other as both were rapidly confessing. A
third prisoner named Bakayev, a bearded figure in a khaki
blouse, arose and loudly interrupted, "I know that Zinoviev
ordered his own secretary to kill Stalin!"
</p>
<p> Said Zinoviev: "I acknowledge that."
</p>
<p> "The secretary," breathlessly continued Bakayev, "instead of
killing Stalin killed himself!"
</p>
<p> With the air of a professor addressing pupils of none too
great intelligence and striving to make everything crystal
clear. Prisoner Kamenev made his confession at such length that
his lecture was interrupted four times by the changing of the
soldiers guarding the prisoners' box.
</p>
<p> In case this academic presentation in a two-hour address
should go over the heads of millions of Russians striving to
comprehend in their cities, towns and villages. Prosecutor
Vishinsky, showing marked deference to a once great Party figure
who was Lenin's friend and is Trotsky's brother-in-law,
interrupted Prisoner Kamenev with the simple question: "Were you
a blood-thirsty enemy of the Government?"
</p>
<p> Replied Kamenev readily: "Yes, I was."
</p>
<p> Kamenev and Zinoviev, although confessing by the yard to the
greatest crimes possible in Russia, split hairs and quarreled
violently before the Court over such fine points as whether
Kamenev had "meant" to write an article such as Zinoviev
actually wrote for Soviet newsorgans excoriating the assassins
for Kirov.
</p>
<p> "You did mean to write it!": cried Zinoviev.
</p>
<p> Snorted Kamenev: "I did not! I had no intention of writing an
article."
</p>
<p> Judge Ulrich, who has the reputation of having handed out
more Death sentences than any other jurist in the world, left
the court to cogitate with his three assistant judges for seven
hours, returned to deliver the verdict: all 16 prisoners were
to be shot "within 72 hours," subject to the remote possibility
of an overriding decree of clemency by the Central Executive
Committee of the Soviet Union.
</p>
<p>(February 1, 1937)
</p>
<p> The first quoting interview ever given by J. Stalin to a
foreign journalist was obtained by Eugene Lyons, manager of the
United Press Moscow Bureau for many years. Now resident in the
U.S. and writing widely. Mr. Lyons turned out in the January
American Mercury a dispassionate, detailed six-point analysis
of how it happens that in the Soviet Union there is so much
abject confessing of whatever it would do the Dictator good to
have confessed.
</p>
<p> Mr. Lyons, veteran of innumerable Moscow trials, says in sum
that Soviet prisoners who do not succeed in convincing the
henchmen of Justice that they can be depended on to confess
fairly convincingly in open court are never brought to trial at
all, just taken downstairs and shot.
</p>
<p> Justice today, in Russian cases of importance, according to
Mr. Lyons, does not in the great majority of cases ever reach
a courtroom. Scores, even hundreds of Russians are quietly
executed after the Soviet police have satisfied themselves that
Death is required. In perhaps 1% of cases involving crimes for
which Death is the penalty, sound Red propaganda makes a public
trial advisable. Writes Eugene Lyons: "The prisoners brought to
trial are always a handful carefully selected from a larger
number arrested on the same charge...hand-picked specimens
painstakingly sorted out." After Soviet newsorgans have
announced the confessions, convictions and executions, "a
condemned man whose execution was announced may still be alive,
as a result of a bargain or for some other reason...The Soviet
State does not deliver up the bodies of the men and women it
executes...There is not even habeas cadaver and of course no
habeas corpus in the Soviet Union."
</p>
<p> In a dispatch from Moscow not long ago the rumor that Soviet
scientists had invented a gas with the special property of
deranging the mentality of a prisoner so as to make him speak
and behave for some hours afterward as hypnotically required by
Justice, was cautiously mentioned, the writer still employed in
Moscow. Without resorting to the hypothesis of such "confession
gas," Mr. Lyons mentions that the use of hostages (wives,
children or others dear to the prisoners) is an old Soviet
custom, and moreover that in Moscow the authorities have now had
20 full years in which to perfect their "third degree methods,
familiar enough in all police systems" to "an extreme of
refined cruelty..."
</p>
<p> "There have been instances when...the victim's children were
tortured before his eyes--a more terrible ordeal for the
father than any that could be inflicted on his own body."
</p>
<p> [Arrests and trials followed without end, some public, most
secret. More than 5,000 party members already arrested were
executed after Zinoviev and Kamenev. The secret police
themselves were thoroughly purged. Then Stalin turned on the Red
Army. The widening circle of terror spread to the provinces and
beyond them to the diplomatic corps abroad.]
</p>
<p>(April 12, 1937)
</p>
<p> This week in Moscow the most drastic government shakeup of
vice-Commissars and the official bureaucracy ever ordered by
J. Stalin was in full swing. Simultaneously came the most
sensational demotion in Russia since that of Trotsky eight years
ago: dismissed from the Cabinet of Commissars with every
indication that he is to be arrested and tried was enigmatic
Genrikh ("Henry") Grigorivich Yagoda, who for ten years served
as head of Stalin's Ogpu, the dread secret police, and rose to
be Commissar of Internal Affairs. If this close colleague of
Stalin is now to spout confessions in court, the Dictator will
have discovered an adherent of "Trotskyism" among the two or
three men he most trusted.
</p>
<p> All Moscow signs pointed to Russia containing today so many
"Trotskyists"--that is, critics of Stalin--that the Dictator
must now (in addition to making popular appeals) attempt within
the Communist hierarchy to win over by cajolery and threats as
many "Trotskyists" as he can, and by executions wipe out the
rest. Uncertain this week as to just who are friends, who foes,
harassed J. Stalin made two opposite moves.
</p>
<p>(May 31, 1937)
</p>
<p> Ordered established in all military districts were war
councils of three similar to those set up in the infancy of the
Russian Revolution when a Red Army was being licked into shape
by ex-Tsarist officers who had to be watched closely for signs
of treachery. Stalin thus aimed last week at uncovering
incipient Trotskyism or other heresies in his hitherto potent
military commanders, who in future must get their orders
countersigned by at least one other council member (probably a
civilian) mainly interested in the welfare of the Communist
Party.
</p>
<p> This shakeup followed the demotion week before of Mikhail
Nikolaivich Tukhachevsky, youngest and most brilliant of the
Soviet's five field marshals. For some reason not officially
explained he was stripped of his office--and sidetracked to
a comparatively insignificant Volga military district immune
from foreign invasion, with headquarters at Kuibishev. All that
Russians knew was that he had been "mentioned with suspicion"
by the prosecuting GPU during last January's trial of
"Trotskyites." He was entirely absolved, but it was expected in
Moscow that "something might happen to him: because sudden
misfortunes had befallen others similarly "mentioned."
</p>
<p>(June 21, 1937)
</p>
<p> The trial did not take long. The defendants, as is Communist
custom, loudly pleaded guilty. Judge Ulrich gave out the
verdict: "The court had established that the defendants were
employed by the military secret service of a foreign government
conducting an unfriendly policy against the Soviet Union.
They...permitted wrecking acts intended to undermine the power
of the Red Army and to prepare for...the defeat of the Red Army
in event of an attack against it..."
</p>
<p> Promptly then the big gold star was ripped from the cap of
Marshal Tukhachevsky, the four red pips from the collars of his
colleagues, and all eight of them fell dead before the acrid
volleys of a firing squad. Official Pravda wrote their obituary:
"Dogs die like dogs. There is no place for such murderers in the
Soviet scheme of things."
</p>
<p> Because the Bolshevik enthusiasm of Tukhachevsky and his
fellow culprits was not questioned until very recently,the
official charge that they had sold military secrets was not
accepted in any informed quarter. Two conflicting explanations
for the executions seemed equally valid: that Stalin had
uncovered a plot in the high command of the Red Army to usurp
his own political power; that Stalin, now turned conservative,
is systematically doing away with all old-line bolsheviks.
</p>
<p> The Red Army's commander, Klimentiy Voroshilov, is still
Dictator Stalin's most prized adviser. Immediately after the
executions last week "Klim" Voroshilov sent a message to all Red
Army units:
</p>
<p> "Tukhachevsky and other lackeys of capitalism have been
abolished from the face of the earth, their memory to be cursed
and forgotten."
</p>
<p>(December 13, 1937)
</p>
<p> Summons after summons continued last week to call Soviet
ambassadors, ministers and members of their staff's home to
Moscow from abroad. Once they reached the Soviet capital most
of those recalled are no longer seen. Inquiries from friends
abroad or foreign governments with whom they have been
conducting negotiations receive no reply from the Soviet Foreign
Office.
</p>
<p> Meanwhile last week all Russia observed the third anniversary
of the assassination of Dictator Joseph Stalin's famed "Dear
Friend Sergei" Kirov.
</p>
<p> Even since then the Dictator has been almost daily grilling
and shooting prominent Russians especially Communists.
</p>
<p> Among some 1,300 victims have been the President and Premier
of two Union Republics, both suicides; a most illustrious
Marshal of the Red Army and seven of his Generals, all shot; the
onetime Chief of the Soviet Munitions Trust, shot; even the
editor of the Soviet State's own newsorgan Izvestia, who was
arrested. In Russia, where it is impossible to throw up one's
job and flee, since the greater part of the Soviet frontier is
sealed with barbed wire and guarded day and night, the number of
suicides among Russians of consequence is said to have touched
as high as 200 per week.
</p>
<p>(May 9, 1938)
</p>
<p> Meanwhile, since May 1937, according to accounts in the
Soviet press, the example set by Stalin in arraigning as
traitors to Russia her greatest military leaders has been
followed by an epidemic of soldiers denouncing their officers
before Red Army courts-martial, these made up of other officers
afraid not to convict lest they in turn be denounced, no matter
how flimsy the evidence or grudge. Firing squads have been
crackling all over Russia at such a rate than even the official
Red Army organ Krasnaia Zvezda ("Red Star") has expressed
concern at the "great depletion of regimental, brigade and
divisional commanders." In one or two cases prospective purge
victims in the Red Air Force have hopped into Soviet battle
planes, escaped over the frontier.
</p>
<p> [By the time the terror began to ebb, it had claimed the lives
of 1,000,000 party members, 30,000 officers (about one-half of
the corps), 3,000 secret policeman and thousands of provincial
officials. Millions more were sent to the Gulag, the archipelago
of concentration and labor camps that were dotted like islands
across the Soviet heartland. Contemporary estimates by an
independent Soviet historian. Roy Medvedev, are that about
400,000-500,000 people were simply shot, and another 4,500,000
died in the camps.]</p>
</body>
</article>
</text>