Lenin's indignant words were to come true:
Scarcely at any time in the past has there been such a degree of overcrowding of prisoners: they have been placed in fortresses and in castles as well as prisons and given special accommodations at police stations. Even private homes and apartments have been temporarily converted into prisons. There is no place to accommodate all those who have been seized, no way of sending the exiles to Siberia in the usual "transports" without organizing special convoy forces.51
Lenin's indignation over the inhumanity of the tsarist regime was expressed in 1902, when there were 89,889 people in prisons.
After the October revolution prisons were abolished. They became known as houses of detention. Convict labor (katorga) was eliminated until 1943: it was replaced by the "corrective labor camp." Even the word punishment was struck from the law dictionary and replaced by the expression "measures of social defense." And there was no punishment: people who broke revolutionary law were to be annihilated, isolated, or, in the case of "socially friendly" workers and peasants influenced by "survivals of the accursed past," reeducated. Advanced Western methods were used for "reeducation." Political prisoners (members of other socialist parties or Communist oppositionists) enjoyed almost the same rights they had had under the tsars. Marxist legal experts spoke of the impending "withering away" of the law, which would lead to the "liquidation" of the system of coercion, prisons, and so forth.
After 1926 the GPU's prerogatives began to expand. Quite a few hopes were aroused by the disappearance of the Cheka. The GPU, reported one German traveler, "is more refined and elegant than the Cheka. Its agents are extremely courteous, charming, and obliging; they wish to erase the memory of the Cheka."52 Foreigners who came to know the "work of the GPU" directly, as clients of that institution, had a different opinion. One of the first foreign accounts of the Solovetsky concentration camps was entitled, as we have noted before, In the Land of the NEP and the Cheka, by the Finnish writer Boris Cederholm.53 Technically, the title was wrong; it should have said GPU not Cheka, but Cederholm saw no difference between them. Neither did the American journalist George Popov, who entitled his memoirs about his time in Lubyanka prison in 1924 simply The Cheka.5* The GPU inherited its main residence, the Lubyanka, whose very name inspired horror, from the Cheka: "Shake someone awake at night and say the word 'Lubyanka' and he will stare at his bare feet, say goodbye to everybody, and even if he's young, and healthy as an ox, he'll break down and cry like a baby. ',55 And of course the GPU inherited Dzerzhinsky, its chairman, from the Cheka.
During the early years of NEP some indecisive attempts were made "to reinforce a very important democratic principle, according to which only judicial bodies should have the right to mete out punishment."56 But these attempts ended quickly. In October 1922 the GPU acquired the right to apply "extrajudicial" measures of repression, including execution, to "bandits." Its pool of clients quickly widened. On May 6, 1926, for example, the central newspapers reported the GPU's execution of three officials of the Commissariat of Finance "for speculation in gold, foreign currency, and government bonds."
From the Cheka the GPU inherited its own places of detention, including Solovki, the prison camp on the Solovetsky Islands. Until the appearance of Hitler's camps, the Solovki served as a symbol of arbitrariness, cruelty, and tyrannical power. "Here, we don't have Soviet power; we have Solovetsky power." That was how the head of the camp greeted the prisoners. "Solovetsky power" was the power of the GPU, but after all, that was the quintessence of Soviet power.
From 1927 on, the GPU took a more and more active part in the struggle unfolding within the party, although it had been involved since 1923. To commemorate the tenth anniversary of the "organs" in December 1927, Pravda saluted their successes and declared that the GPU was vital in the struggle against the class enemy and in maintaining law and order.57 Throughout 1927, the GPU's prerogatives continued to expand. After the assassination of Voikov in July, the GPU was "obliged" to take decisive measures in order to defend the country against foreign spies, provocateurs, and assassins, as well as from their monarchist allies and the White Guard.58 After an explosion at a party club in Leningrad (perhaps a provocation), the GPU announced the execution of ten former monarchists, who were charged with espionage. The repression broadened and intensified. The humanitarian penitentiary system was denounced as a manifestation of bourgeois humanism, an anti-Marxist deviation.
In 1928 Bukharin, who already knew what Stalin was, declared: "We are creating and will create a civilization in comparison with which capitalist civilization will seem like a vulgar street dance compared with the heroic symphonies of Beethoven."59 In fact, a new civilization was being born. Its unusual nature was understood by one of the rare foreigners who visited the Soviet Union in 1927, Alfred Fabre-Luce, who declared that it existed only "in the future, that is, in the realm of the impossible." "I feel like some hero of Einstein's relativity concept," he wrote in his conclusion, "who returns to his native planet, gray-haired after a ten-minute voyage."60
Osip Mandelstam defined the dawning civilization less poetically and more precisely: "They think," he said to his wife regarding the people of Moscow, busily going about their affairs, "they think that everything is normal just because the streetcars are running."
CHAPTER
THE
GREAT RUPTURE, 1929-1934
FIVE IN FOUR
The dream of a planned economy along the lines of Germany's war economy had preoccupied Lenin as early as 1918. In 1920 the first long-term plan was drawn up by GOELRO, the State Commission for the Electrification of Russia. This plan initially provided for the construction of one hundred power plants. Lenin proclaimed electrification as the key to communism. But in January 1921, Zinoviev spoke of no more than twenty-seven power plants. In the end, the GOELRO plan remained on paper.
In 1927 Soviet economists began drafting the first five-year plan—a comprehensive plan providing for the development of every region, using every resource for the industrialization of the country. It was supposed to go into effect in October 1928, but was not even submitted for approval until the Sixteenth Party Conference in April 1929.
Just as an experienced boxer prepares his opponent for a knockout by "softening him up" with blows to the liver, stomach, kidneys, and heart, Stalin softened up the country before hitting it with the Great Change. The softening up of the party was brought to completion with the elimination of the "right wing." In February 1929, at a joint session of the Politburo and the Central Control Commission, Bukharin was censured for his "unprincipled behavior" in conducting talks with Kamenev. Rykov, chairman of the Council of People's Commissars, and Tomsky, leader of the trade unions, were also censured. In April 1929 the Central Committee removed Bukharin from his posts as editor of Pravda and president of the Comintern and Tomsky from his post as chairman of the Ail-Union Central Council of Trade Unions. Bukharin's supporter Uglanov lost his positions as secretary of the Moscow Committee, secretary of the Central Committee, and candidate member of the Politburo. In November 1929, Bukharin was expelled from the Politburo. "Right deviation" had become a crime.
In April 1929 the Sixteenth Party Conference passed a resolution calling for a second general purge (the first was in 1921): anyone who at any time (from 1921 to 1929) had voted against Stalin or supported an opposition platform—no matter which one—was purged. The conference decided to extend the purge to include nonparty officials working in Soviet institutions. All Soviet functionaries were subject to the purge—or, one might say, passed through purgatory. Broad strata of "worker activists" were enlisted to help in checking over the biographies, service records, conduct, and loyalty of these functionaries. Special "light cavalry" units were set up, consisting of Komsomol members, while trade union officials and shock- workers acted as judges. Thus the party involved broad sections of the population in repressive activity.