Stalin officially announced the end of the NEP in December 1929, but as early as April 1928 he terminated "civil peace" as the prevailing condition. "We have internal enemies. We have external enemies. This, comrades, must not be forgetten for one moment."28 The Shakhty trial was the signal for the war against society to begin. In March 1928 the authorities announced the discovery of a "counterrevolutionary plot." Fifty-three engineers, technicians, and directors of the coal industry at the Shakhty mines in the Donbass (Donets basin) were arrested and accused of wrecking and espionage. A sensational six-week trial followed, from May to July, with still more revelations later in the year. This was the first in a series of "wreckers' trials" that went on into 1931. The word wrecker (vreditel) in fact became one of the most widely used terms in Soviet officialese.
The Shakhty trial was the first public show trial since that of the SRs in 1922. The respite of the NEP had intervened. Robert Conquest, author of the most complete history of the Great Terror (aside from Solzhenitsyn's Gulag Archipelago), suggests that the Shakhty affair was initiated by Evgeny Evdokimov, the GPU official in charge of the region where Shakhty was located.29 Without discounting the individual initiative of Evdokimov, a former criminal who made a brilliant career in the "organs" during the civil war and who became one of Stalin's boon companions,30 we may conclude that the Shakhty defendants were deliberately selected at a higher level.
Among the accused were three German engineers. In this way the Shakhty trial was designed to accomplish foreign policy aims as well as domestic ones. Moreover, it was a test model for the show trials to come. The defendants were accused of sabotage and spying for the benefit of a foreign power with whom relations at the moment were bad. Some of the defendants signed confessions, which constituted the main evidence against all of them. (Two of the Shakhty defendants never appeared in court, undoubtedly because they refused to sign or died under interrogation. Several disputed the charges presented by the prosecutor, Nikolai Krylenko.) The indignation of the Soviet people was aroused throughout the affair. Twenty years later George Orwell's 1984 described a state in which "two minutes of hatred" were held every day. Citizens would gather in front of television sets; the image of Goldstein, the enemy of the people, would appear on the screen, and everyone would hate him. In the Soviet Union in the 1920s there were no television sets. There were newspapers instead. The first experiment in organized hatred was carried out at Lenin's instigation in the SR trial. During the Shakhty trial, hatred was organized on a significantly broader scale.
An investigation took place in Ekaterinburg in the summer of 1920 into the murder of a group of "specialists," technicians working at the Egor- shinsky mines. The specialists had been killed by "local party comrades," who considered them counterrevolutionaries. Witnesses questioned by the court testified that they knew of no counterrevolutionary actions by the murdered technicians. The murderers were defended by N. V. Kommodov, who argued: "Healthy blood flows in their veins. They have experienced all the burdens of social inequality and have learned to hate their class enemies. It was this feeling that guided their actions."31
Eight years later an editorial in Pravda entitled, "A Class Trial," said: 'Today in the Hall of Columns at the House of Trade Unions before the Supreme Court of the USSR there appeared the constellation of 'heroes' of Shakhty. ... They were firmly guaranteed the deadly class hatred of the workers and toiling people of the whole world."32 Kommodov, who acted as attorney for one of the defendants, could find no convincing arguments for his client, in whose veins flowed the "diseased blood" of a specialist. The hate campaign whipped up by the press included a statement by the twelve-year-old son of one defendant, asking that his father be shot.
A new era had begun.
FOREIGN POLICY
The Treaty of Rapallo opened up a period of normal diplomatic relations with the capitalist world; 1924 became the year of the Soviet Republic's "recognition"—by Great Britain in February, followed by Italy, Norway, Austria, Greece, Sweden, China, Denmark, and in October, France. But Soviet foreign policy had two levels: traditional diplomatic relations on one level and, on the other, the activity of the Comintern. After hopes for a revolution in Germany were dashed, the principal task of the Communist parties was to support the foreign policy aims of the Soviet Republic. At the end of 1924, S. Medvedev and A. Shlyapnikov, representatives of the "workers' opposition," wrote in an open letter to the Baku Worker that the entire activity of the Comintern amounted to
artificially creating materially sick Comintern sections and supporting them at the expense of the masses of Russian workers, who had paid for their property with blood and sacrifices but who were unable to use it for themselves under the present circumstances; in reality, hordes of petit bourgeois servants supported by Russian gold have been created."33
While it may be true that the Comintern sections lived off of "Russian gold," it is difficult to agree that their only activity was to collect their pay. The Comintern sections actively, though blindly, carried out orders from Moscow. In cases where there was discontent with disobedient leaders, they were immediately replaced by obedient ones. The foreign Communist parties surrounded themselves with a cloud of pro-Communist mass organizations, societies, and clubs that sympathized either secretly or openly with the party and mobilized world public opinion for the defense of the Soviet Union. The German Communist Willy Munzenberg became a master of the new methods of propaganda: he organized and directed the International Organization for Aid to Revolutionaries, the League of Struggle Against Imperialism, and a pro-Communist (that is to say, pro-Soviet) press group in Germany and conducted worldwide campaigns for the defense of the victims of capitalism (the German anarchist Max Hoelz, the Hungarian Communist Maty as Rakosi, and the American anarchists Sacco and Van- zetti).
Quite often the two levels of foreign policy functioned together and it was difficult to determine where one ended and the other began. Walter Krivitsky, who was head of the Soviet military intelligence network in Western Europe and who in 1937 refused to return to Moscow (where he knew he would be shot), recounts in his memoirs that in 1923, when the French occupied the Ruhr, the Soviet government expected a revolution at any moment. Krivitsky and five other officers were sent to Germany to create within the heart of the Communist party the core of the future German Red Army and the future German Cheka, as well as special detachments of propagandists whose mission it was to undermine morale in the bourgeois army and reserves.34 By autumn 1924, the situation in Germany had stabilized itself, but Zinoviev, the chairman of the Comintern, declared that a revolutionary situation had arisen in Estonia. Berzin, head of military intelligence, received an order from Zinoviev to back up the revolution: sixty officers were sent immediately to Estonia. On December 1, 1924, a "revolution" broke out in Revel. The Soviet agents and local Communists received no support at all from the population, and the putsch ended in a bloodbath.35
In the fall of 1927 Stalin (who by this time was directing the Comintern) was offended by the reproaches of the Trotskyists, who accused him of betraying the world revolution; he decided that a revolutionary situation had arisen in China. Stalin sent the German Communist Heinz Neumann and the Soviet Communist Besso Lominadze to Canton. In December 1927 Stalin's agents stirred up a rebellion in Canton that was immediately crushed. In Revel, more than 150 people were shot. In Canton, more than 5,000 were executed.