These shifts of emphasis were reflected even in the Soviet Press. Some writers argued: Yes, we are stronger, but the need for vigilance is greater than ever. Others reversed the argument: Yes, we need vigilance, but we are stronger than ever.
We are stronger than ever and therefore we can afford leniency — said the preamble to the decree of amnesty, without so much as a mention of ‘vigilance’.
The terms of the amnesty were remarkable in many respects.
For the first time the government officially told the world that there had been in the prisons and concentration camps mothers with children, pregnant women, sick and old people, and boys and girls under eighteen.
All convicts of these categories were released, regardless of the nature of their offence and the terms of their sentence. All other convicts sentenced to less than five years also regained freedom. The sentences of those serving more than five years were reduced by half. The excluded were counter-revolutionaries, embezzlers of very large sums, and bandits guilty of murder. The amnesty applied to military as well as civilian convicts. All prosecutions for offences covered by the decree immediately ceased.
Perhaps the most striking feature of the amnesty was that it restored civil rights to all those released under its terms, and also to those who had served their sentences and had been released before the amnesty. Thus the old principle ‘once a criminal always a criminal’, a principle by which no Soviet citizen who had once been in the hands of the political police could ever again become a free man, was abandoned.
The decree left one point vague: it did not define who were the counter-revolutionaries excluded from pardon. All the same, the amnesty must have resulted in the closing down of many or most of the concentration camps. Among the inmates of those camps the majority were people sentenced to not more than five years; and in recent times very few seem to have been convicted for counter-revolution. But hitherto the terms of a sentence had often been meaningless: after the lapse of five years, the political police could ‘administratively’ detain the convict for a further term. The amnesty apparently also put an end to this barbarous practice.
The deeper moral implications of the act were most significant. In the hearing of the whole of Russia and of the world Malenkov's government said in effect to the released prisoners:
‘You have suffered innocently, you pregnant women, you mothers and children, you boys and girls under eighteen, you the old and the sick, and all the rest of you!
It was Stalin who needlessly kept you behind bars and barbed wire, and who deprived you of civil rights.
We have no need for such barbarity. We are releasing you. Remember to whom you owe your freedom.’
Perhaps Malenkov and his associates did not want to intimate as much as that. Perhaps they only sought to gain popularity. But this is how Russia was bound to understand the message of the amnesty. No more telling blow could be dealt to the Stalin cult.
To underline the fact that a new era was being inaugurated, the decree of amnesty also foreshadowed a revision of the criminal codes. True, there had been talk of this even while Stalin was still alive. But it had never been made clear in what spirit the revision was to be carried out. Evidently this too was a bone of contention between the reformers and their adversaries.
The decree of March 28th stated that the new codes would abolish criminal responsibility for minor offences committed by officials, industrial managers, workers, and collective farmers. They would also reduce punishment for a variety of other offences. Thus a promise was made to abolish or soften the harsh martial discipline that had prevailed in factories and collective farms during nearly two decades. This was no mere gesture of magnanimity on the part of a new government seeking popularity. The reform would be in line with the new outlook of the Soviet economy which no longer requires that millions of uprooted and illiterate peasants be forcibly trained in the industrial way of life. The old discipline that furthered Russia's economic development at one time has now become an obstacle to it.
Altogether the implications of the decree of March 28th were so far-reaching as to permit us to describe that day as the birth date of a new regime.
Another week had scarcely passed before, on April 3rd and 4th, the political police was subjected to devastating humiliation. Its latest feat of vigilance, the ‘discovery’ of the ‘doctors' plot’, was exposed before Russia and the whole world as a criminal fraud. A certain Riumin, chief of the Investigation Department in the former Ministry of State Security, was named as the official responsible for the concoction. He was arrested. A woman informer, Doctor Timashuk, who had helped to arraign the Kremlin physicians and had been awarded for this the Order of Lenin and been celebrated as a national heroine, was deprived of the Order and disgraced.
Three days later, on April 6th, Ignatiev, the former Minister of State Security, so recently elected to the General Secretariat of the Party, was dismissed with ignominy from his new post. At the same time the government firmly disavowed the campaign of anti-Semitic insinuation and incitement which had been waged since the alleged discovery of the doctors' conspiracy.
If this had been all, the event would have been startling, but it would not necessarily have signified a dramatic break with the Stalin era. Under Stalin too, Russia had seen chiefs of the G.P.U. or N.K.V.D., masters of life and death, suddenly dismissed in disgrace. One of them, Yagoda, was even tried and executed as a ‘traitor’ and ‘enemy of the people’. But such occurrences were merely incidents in the great purges; and we now know that Yagoda was victimized because he had shown himself reluctant and half-hearted in arraigning the old Bolsheviks. Up to 1939 the political police was purged only in order to force it to intensify the purges. This was obviously not the motive behind the dismissal of Ignatiev and Riumin. The political police was now ‘purged’ in order to prevent it from starting a new series of frame-ups.
This was shown clearly by the manner in which the Kremlin physicians were rehabilitated. The government declared that the political police had extorted the evidence against them ‘by methods which were inadmissible and strictly forbidden by Soviet law’. In other words, the police had forced the doctors to make confessions in line with those that had figured so strangely and prominently in every purge trial and invariably had provided the only ‘evidence’ for the prosecution.
It should be pointed out that in 1939, when Beria was winding up the purges, many of the victims were also released and even rehabilitated. This was done on the ground that the accusations had been ‘based on a deplorable misunderstanding’ — these words became a routine formula at the time. Never during the Stalin era was the political police charged with illegal extortion of evidence. Never was the secret of the ‘confessions’ officially and publicly exposed.
It was on those ‘confessions’ that the omnipotence of the police rested. Their regularity, their inevitability, and their nightmarish character had invested the political police with a mysterious power, a basilisk look, which no Soviet citizen could hope to withstand or elude. No matter how innocent he might be of the crimes attributed to him, the citizen knew that he was helpless and would not be allowed to prove his innocence. Subjected to ceaseless day-and-night ‘interrogation’ over weeks and months he was sure to reach the limits of endurance, to collapse and confess, and thus supply his persecutors with the ‘evidence’ they needed. In recent years this technique was not frequently applied in Russia, although it was readily exported to Czechoslovakia, Hungary, and Bulgaria. But as long as the technique was not officially and publicly exposed the mainspring of the machinery of terror remained intact.