Roy A. Medvedev (1972) accurately summarizes the events surrounding the Great Purges which preceded the implementation of the above stated Stalinist directives.
In 1936-39, on the most cautious estimates, four to five million people were subjected to repression for political reasons. At least four to five hundred of them—above all the high officials—were summarily shot; the rest were given long terms of confinement. In 1937-38 there were days when up to a thousand people were shot in Moscow alone. These were not streams, these were rivers of blood of honest Soviet people. The simple truth must be stated: not one of tyrants and despots of the past persecuted and destroyed so many of his compatriots.[8]
One can undoubtedly ask the question as to why no resistance occurred among the judges and other persons assigned to carrying out the directives of Joseph Stalin. Were they not cognizant of the consequences of their actions? Medvedev’s reasoning is accurate as we will be witnessing when examining Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s two novels, Cancer Ward and The First Circle, as appertaining to the question at hand.
Most of the judges and procurators must have known what they were doing when they sanctioned the arrest of innocent people and sentenced them to be shot or imprisoned. These officers of the law knew that they were creating lawlessness, but they chose to be its creators rather than its victims! What turned many NKVD officials into sadists? What forced them to break the laws of humanity? Many of them were once good Communists or Komsonol members who joined the NKVD on orders, not at all by inclination. Many influences were at work on them. In the first place there was the fear of becoming prisoners themselves, which overrode all other feelings. Secondly, a terrible selection went on within the NKVD, sifting out some officials, leaving the worst. Many-and this must not be overlooked-were corrupted by the unlimited power of the prisoners that Stalin gave to the NKVD. NKVD personnel were specially trained to be capable of carrying out any order, even the most criminal. The special brigade of torturers, for example, usually included students from the NKVD schools, young people eighteen to twenty years old. They were taken to torture chambers as medical students are to dissection laboratories, and thus were turned to sadists.[9]
In accordance with the dehumanizing world created here, Alexander Solzhenitsyn is quick to draw the essential distinction between the Tsarist Code and the Stalinist Code.
And especially new and important was the fact that we did not draw the distinction between methods and means the old Tsarist Code had drawn. Such distinctions had no influence either on the classification of the charges or on the penalties imposed! For us, intent and action were identical! A resolution has been passed-we would try them for that.[10]
SELF-IMMOLATION
In 1923, in Vyatka Prison, the (a) Socialist Revolutionary and his comrades barricaded themselves in a cell, poured gasoline over all the mattresses and incinerated themselves.[11] How many were there? Who were they? What were they protesting against? Such an act would have provoked uproar prior to the Revolution. Yet, this time around no one knew of the occurrence-not neither in Moscow— nor in history. And. As Solzhenitsyn observes, “and yet the human flesh cracked in the flames in exactly the same way.”
HUNGER STRIKES
One of the most renowned weapons utilized by the incarcerated Social Democrats and Social revolutionaries was the hunger strike. The new prison heads, operating in secrecy and silence, had acquired several powerful methods for combatting hunger strikes. Firstly, patience was adopted on behalf of the prison administration. Secondly, deception was practiced on a large scale thanks to the total secrecy of the operations. When every step is reported vis-à-vis the media, one is not going to do much deceiving. Thirdly, forced artificial feeding was adapted without question, from experience derived from none other than, experience with wild animals in captivity. By 1937, artificial feeding was evidently already in wide use. For example, in the group hunger strike of socialists that occurred in the Yaroslavl Central Prison, artificial feeding was administered to all those participating on the fifteenth day.[12]
These three approaches to dealing with hunger strikes gave rise to a new view. That the hunger strike is to be viewed as a continuation of counterrevolutionary activity in prison, and accordingly, must be punished with a new prison term. Thus in mid-1937, a new directive was handed down which stipulated that “from now on the prison administration will not in any respect be responsible for those dying on hunger strikes!” A literal translation went as follows: if you seek to kill yourself, go right ahead. For it was the socialists, after all, whom Stalin viewed as the most dangerous enemies of his socialism. For the most part, the concessions obtained through the hunger strikes were infinitesimal when balanced against the extensive loss of life.
Solzhenitsyn also takes issue with the internal political continuum of the Soviet Union and shows how and why resistance gained no firm foundation. Stalin was free to play them off against one another to his political advantage. Divided they would err under Stalin’s fantasy.
…those prisoners to the left of the socialists—the Trotskyites and the Communists—shunned the socialists, considering them exactly the same kind of KR’s (counterrevolutionaries) as the rest, and they closed the moat of isolation around them with an encircling ring. The Trotskyites and the Communists, each considering their own direction more pure and lofty than all the rest, despised and even hated the socialists (and each other) who were imprisoned behind the bars of the same buildings and went outdoors to walk in the same prison courtyards.[13]
It is merely reasonable to understand the non-Western Soviet Union utilizing anti-western sentiments as a rationale for accelerating the industrialization of their nation. Granted, any lesser industrialized nation would have a reason to fear being conquered by a more industrialized nation. Yet, this position can be exploited beyond a reasonable standard of concern.
In Civilization on Trial, Arnold J. Toynbee (1947) the noted historian, demonstrates how and why this anti-western creed is unquestioningly accepted, generation after generation.
Marxism is, no doubt a Western creed, but it is a Western creed which puts the western civilization ‘on the spot’; and it was, therefore possible for a twentieth-century Russian whose father had been a nineteenth-century ‘Slavophil’ and his grandfather a devout Eastern Orthodox Christian to become a devoted Marxian without being required to make any reorientation of his inherited attitude toward the West. For the Russian Marxian, Russian Slavophil, and Russian Orthodox Christian alike, Russia is ‘Holy Russia’ and the Western world of the Borgia’s and Queen Victoria, Smiles’ Self-Help and Tammany Hall, is uniformly heretical, corrupt and decadent. A creed which allows the Russian people to preserve this traditional Russian condemnation of the West intact, while at the same time serving the Russian government as an instrument for industrializing Russia in order to save her from being conquered by an already industrialized West is one of those providentially convenient gifts of the gods that naturally fall into the laps of the chosen people.[14]
ERADICATING DISSENT
Another conscious move by the Stalinist system to eradicate any dissent was to place common thieves in the same cells with the other zek prisoners. Many of the common thieves worked for the prison administration in exchange for amnesty, special privileges, food, clothing and money. Solzhenitsyn observes the conditions conducive to striking out and explains why to a great extent their non-existence. It is also noteworthy that these common thieves not only sought damaging statements from the other zeks which would certainly come back to haunt them in time. They were also notorious for mugging zeks in their cells and stealing their food parcels, clothing and personal valuables. Resistance by the zeks against the thieves when it did occur was in a rage of self-defense, rather than a group effort at resisting.