A CRIMINAL HISTORY OF MANKIND

What had happened in Russia is what would have happened in France if Robespierre had been able
to stay in power and become dictator. Stalin was not particularly intelligent; but he was cunning
and brutal, and became increasingly paranoid. He was also a dogmatic Marxist, and was quite
determined that anything that looked like private ownership or private enterprise should be
abolished. The small proprietors - kulaks - were forced out, or simply arrested and shot; their farms
were forcibly united into ‘collectives’. Food production dropped dramatically - although Stalin took
care to suppress the figures. Having ordered this forced ‘collectivisation’, Stalin seems to have
become alarmed at the resistance it aroused. He announced publicly that his officials were showing
‘excessive zeal’, and should slow down the process. In this way he managed to appear to be the
defender of the peasants against his own officials, the benevolent father figure who was doing his
best to keep everybody happy. But the policy of destroying the kulaks continued until millions had
been executed or deported. Stalin was committing mass murder on a scale - and with a cool
deliberation -that made Genghis Khan and Ivan the Terrible seem benevolent. Another ten million
died as a result of the famines that swept the country between 1931 and 1933 because of
collectivisation. In many areas, there was cannibalism.
All this caused widespread criticism amongst Party members. Some of them were passing the
carefully suppressed facts on to Trotsky, whose newspaper quoted them and stated that a
‘fundamental change’ must soon take place in the leadership. In 1933, Stalin reacted by having
thousands of Party members expelled. His former colleagues Zinoviev and Kamenev were exiled to
Siberia.
In ancient Rome, Stalin would have been murdered. In Soviet Russia, his secret police were able to
surround him with a wall of security. But Stalin’s wife, who had become increasingly concerned
about the Terror, committed suicide in 1932. Stalin, a typical Right Man, was deeply shaken by
this, and at a meeting of the Politburo, offered to resign. There was a long silence - no doubt the
members could hardly believe their luck, yet were afraid to show any sign of enthusiasm. Finally,
Molotov broke the silence by declaring that Stalin had the Party’s full confidence. Stalin never
again repeated his offer.
But his paranoia increased. Surrounded by people who wished him dead, he may have felt that the
best form of defence was attack. In 1934, the Party secretary, Kirov, was murdered. Stalin decided
it was time to get rid of anyone who might harbour the slightest opposition to his dictatorship -
particularly older Party members. After the trial of the Kirov assassins, a commission was told to
‘liquidate the enemies of the people’. Soon, sixteen leading Party members, including Zinoviev and
Kamenev, were on trial, accused of conspiring to overthrow the government. All were found guilty
and executed immediately.
What astonished the rest of the world was that many of the accused admitted their guilt in court.
And this continued to be true in later ‘show trials’ that continued for the next two years, until 1938.
The ‘confessions’ seemed absurd - and, in fact, were later shown to be absurdities. The general
view was that the accused had been tortured, or kept for long periods without sleep, to induce
confession. But in Darkness at Noon, Arthur Koestler dramatised a theory that later proved to have
some foundation in fact: that these older revolutionaries were caught in a trap of their own
Marxism. They had fought for the revolution; now it had come, and they were superfluous. They
were being asked to make a final sacrifice for the revolution. If they refused, and went to their
death denouncing Stalin, they were handing a weapon to the capitalists and undermining the
revolution. In effect, Stalin was behaving like a gunman who grabs a hostage as a living shield; if
the old communists dared to shoot, they risked killing communism.