Red Terror Declared in Response to White Terrorism

SPINNING THE FLYWHEEL

At the February-March Plenary of the Central Committee of the VKP(b) in 1937, in the report "On the Deficiencies of Party Work and Measures for the Liquidation of Trotskyist and Other Double Dealers," Stalin formulated three conclusions: "First, the sabotage and diversionary espionage work of agents of foreign states, among whom Trotskyists played a rather active role, affected to some extent all or almost all our organizations, both economic and administrative and party. Second, agents of foreign states, including Trotskyists, penetrated not only into grassroots organizations but also into some responsible positions. Third, some of our leading comrades, both in the center and in the regions, not only failed to recognize the true face of these saboteurs, diversants, spies, and murderers but were so careless, complacent, and naive that they often contributed to the advancement of agents of foreign states to various responsible positions."

Based on these ideas, Stalin created a situation of "special favor" for the NKVD, the Supreme Court, and the Prosecutor's Office of the USSR.

But was Stalin the sole author of the organization of mass terror?

Historical facts (a stubborn thing!) allow us to assert that his comrades were also "co-authors."

The Red Terror, declared in response to white terrorism, opened the way to the violation of many legal norms.

Stalin's thesis that as socialism is built, class struggle will intensify, justifying mass repressions against "enemies of the people" in the 1930s, was a gross and shameless distortion of the positions expressed by the Bolshevik-Jacobins during the period of open and fierce class struggle. In his main theoretical work "The Economy of the Transition Period," N. Bukharin characterized the socialist revolution as follows: "He who imagined the revolution of the proletariat as a change in the upper echelons of organizational apparatuses, he who painted for himself the classical type of the proletarian revolution, will recoil in horror from the universal tragedy experienced by humanity... He will forever remain a miserable petty-bourgeois, whose intellect is as cowardly as his 'politics.'

The old society... is splitting, shaking to its very foundations, down to the very last depths."

Yes, the leading core of the party, like the Jacobins of the time of the Great French Revolution, was ready to apply all means in the name of the victory of the Great Revolution of the 20th century without hesitation. But to build socialism through increasingly intensifying "extraordinary measures" directed against the majority of its own people was something neither Lenin nor his true comrades, including N. I. Bukharin, Rykov, Tomsky, and those who were part of the well-known leadership "trio" with Stalin, Zinoviev and Kamenev, ever intended; they considered it a betrayal of Leninism.

At the combined April (1929) Plenary of the Central Committee of the VKP(b) — in the year of the "great break" — N. I. Bukharin formulated this position as follows: "The infamous 'theory' that the further we go towards socialism, the more the class struggle must intensify and the more difficulties and contradictions must befall us has now gained full citizenship in the party. This theory was outlined at the July Plenary by Comrade Stalin and especially developed and brilliantly 'deepened' by Comrade Kuibyshev. I believe that this 'theory' confuses two completely different things. It confuses a certain temporary stage of intensification of class struggle — one of such stages we are currently experiencing — with the general course of development. It elevates the very fact of the current intensification to some inevitable law of our development. According to this strange theory, it turns out that the further we advance in the matter of moving towards socialism, the more difficulties accumulate, the more the class struggle intensifies, and at the very gates of socialism, we must either open a civil war or starve to death..."

Sentence on the death penalty for Yu. Abdrahmanov