Who are the enemies? Where do they come from? What are their purposes? Providing answers to these questions was the main function of the show trials. Maintaining vigilance, stigmatizing the presumed villains, and preserving the psychology of universal anguish were the tasks Stalin assigned to the masterminds of successive purges. No fissures were admitted in the Bolshevik shield, no doubt could arise that did not conceal mischievous ploys aimed at undermining the system. Time and again the refrain was repeated by spineless sycophants: we are surrounded by sworn enemies, we are invincible only inasmuch as we stay united. Expressing dissenting views necessarily meant weakening the revolutionary avant-garde. Breaking ranks was considered a mortal sin, and suspiciousness was the ultimate revolutionary virtue. In fact, when acquiescence is the golden rule, it takes great moral courage to rebel. In the homogenous space of totalitarian domination, opposition amounted to crime and opponents were treated as mere criminals. They incarnated difference and were therefore seen as outcasts. Ostracism led ultimately to mental emancipation, the autonomy of the mind acquired by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s zeks, the population of Stalin’s gulag. The barbed wire was thus the symbol of a new kind of boundary between absolute victims and relative accomplices of evil. The whole tragedy of Communism lies in this hallucinating statement: the vision of a superior elite whose utopian goals sanctify the most barbaric methods; the denial of the right to life to those who are defined as “degenerate parasites and predators,” the deliberate dehumanization of victims.
The image of man as a mechanism, put forward by French philosophes, found its strange echo in this all-pervading technology of socially oriented murder. This was the acme of radical utopianism, when nothing could resist the perpetual motion of foul play. Marxist eschatology was imposed through Stalinist demonology. The purge functioned as a panopticon where sinners and their secrets came into the open. It was a ritual of self-deprecation and ultimate submission to the party’s sacrosanct will. Criticism and self-criticism were party rituals of certitudo salutis for the inner-worldly vocation of its members: “The party appeared as a panopticon which could discover at ‘open meetings of the nuclei’ the ‘moral corruption and discreditable conduct on the part of Party members. The required self-criticism and criticism of the party cadres was used as medium to reach their inner conscience, and therefore to convert and to convince them to show self-discipline and ‘self-sacrificing work for the benefit of communism.’”54 Within this construct, morality was defined in terms of loyalty to a sense of ultimate historical transcendence. Igal Halfin eminently presented the process by which, through cyclical purges in the Soviet Union (one can consider their embryonic stage as 1920-21), Marxist eschatology morphed into a demonology that reached its discursive, exacerbated, and criminal maturity with the Second Socialist Transformation triggered by the pyatiletka unleashed to build socialism in one country.55 Public discourse was saturated with frightening images of deviators, heretics, spies, agents, and other scoundrels. By the mid-1930s, one can see under Stalinism a process that bears a strong resemblance to terror practices under Nazism: “the desubjectification of the victim” became “a programmed precondition for his/her victimization, a precondition enabling the perpetrator’s enactment of the narrative program of extermination.”56 A phenomenology of treason was devised to justify carnage, and there was no paucity of intellectuals to support this morbid scenario. In other words, perpetrators successfully defined victims in their own terms. A lingering sentiment that there was after all something moral in Bolshevik utopianism, plus the exploitation of anti-Fascist emotions, led to a persistent failure to acknowledge the basic fact that from its inception Sovietism was a criminal system.
In Stalin’s mind the purges were means of political consolidation and authority-building, a springboard for newcomers and time-servers. They would secure the human basis for effective control over society. One of the foremost biographers of Stalin commented on the function and consequences of the Great Purge: “He wanted to achieve an unrestricted personal dictatorship with a totality of power that he did not yet possess…. Emerging from the events of 1936-38 as a personal dictator in what was now a truly totalitarian system of power, Stalin had achieved the international political purpose of the Great Purge.”57 In one of his most poignant essays, published before World War II in Partisan Review, Phillip Rahv put forward a thorough interpretation of the mechanism that led to the “great terror”: “These are trials of the mind and of the human spirit…. In the Soviet Union, for the first time in history, the individual has been deprived of every conceivable means of resistance. Authority is monolithic: property and politics are one. Under the circumstances it becomes impossible to defy the organization; to set one’s will against it. One cannot escape it: not only does it absorb the whole of life but it also seeks to model the shapes of death.”58 Without the purges the system would have looked radically different. Both victims and beneficiaries of the murderous mechanism were lumped together by this sacrificial ritual. For some of the Bolshevik militants liquidated or deported during the great purge, the terrorist ordeal amounted to necessary self-deprecation and self-abasement. Moreover, it was an opportunity to attain the long-expected absolution for those moments of “derailment” when they had dared to oppose Stalin. Zbigniew Brzezinski synthetically listed long ago the main objectives of the purge: “The cleansing of the party, the restoration of its vigor and monolithic unity, the elimination of enemies, and the establishment of the correctness of its line and the primacy of the leadership.”59 An entire phenomenology of mystical servility came about in the process of massacring society, and it was irresponsibly (and enthusiastically) reproduced by many intellectuals who had accepted this emasculation of their critical faculties. Residual hopes for elusive crumbs of morality within the Communist utopia combined with a Machiavellian exploitation of anti-Fascist sentiment led to a tragic failure to acknowledge the criminal nature of the Soviet experiment. Still, one needs to mention those who saw the reality and refused to remain silent. Among these voices of lucidity, one should mention Panait Istrati, Boris Souvarine, Ignazio Silone, Carlo Roselli, George Orwell, and other intellectuals who challenged the Big Lie.60