Changing Views of Stalin’s Rule in the Light of New Evidence1

Myroslav Shkandrij

After 1990, secret police files were declassified and made available to researchers and the wider public in many countries throughout the former communist countries.

It should be noted that early hopes of finding quick answers to spe­cific questions in the form of sensational documents, or “smoking guns,” were often disappointed. Instead, the need for long-term programs of painstaking research become evident, and reasserted the importance of informed interpretation, of putting together in new ways the pieces of the mosaic, or the jigsaw puzzle, produced by such a mass of materials.

Moreover, in regard to a range of questions, the archives are unable to provide a complete picture. Many files were destroyed as the USSR and Eastern European regimes fell apart.

Addiction to secrecy and lack of transparency are legacies of the past. The archives reveal that throughout the Soviet period, there was an effort to conceal the decision-making process and the internal mechanisms of power. In Stalin’s day, certain decisions were not implemented through written documents at all, but passed on to the relevant people over the telephone. No minutes seem to have been taken of meetings in the high­est decision-making forums.³ Deliberate attempts were made to conceal the very existence of certain institutions, either through total secrecy or through constant changes of name and reorganizations.

Language was meant to conceal more than to reveal. Stalin often com­municated in half-words (Brent 2008, 223). Code words were used to legitimize repression or to suggest where to look for victims (Rosenfeldt 2009, vol. 1, 36). The Special Department of OGPU/NKVD used coded communication (ibid., vol. 2, 15-17). This was done in large part to con­ceal the truth about who really took the initiative and pulled the strings (ibid., 74). For example, although a decision might actually have been taken in the Politburo, this would not be indicated on a document, which would often be stamped as coming from the Central Committee or a state organ (ibid., 75). It was forbidden to pass extracts from minutes of Party meetings or Central Committee resolutions to lower offices without per­mission, so that the origins of decisions could not be traced (ibid.). The core of the system, one researcher has argued, lay in the demand that all evidence revealing the Communist Party’s actual role in running the rest of society was by definition to be treated as “strictly secret” or “conspira­torial” (ibid., vol. 1, 105).

Nonetheless, the declassified information has caused a significant shift in the way the Stalin period is seen. Today, those historians of the Soviet era who avoided discussing the harsh realities of the Second World War,

The Archival Revolution and Contested Memory 137 or of the Stalin period as a whole, “so as not to offend the memory of veterans” now appear “timid” and “weighed down by numerous ideo­logical prejudices” (Hrynevych 2012, 36). Brent has put the key issue as follows: “Over time, a larger question began to take shape: what was the mechanism by which the Soviet system operated as a whole?” According to him, understanding the mechanism eventually became the overriding goal of the volumes of archival documents he edited (Brent 2008, 6).

As scholars like Andrea Graziosi, Vladimir Tismaneanu, Niels Erik Rosenfeldt, and Jonathan Brent have pointed out, the documents made available since the fall of the USSR tend to vindicate the “traditionalist” or “totalitarian” school, which emphasized the role of ideology and terror, and the decisive role of Stalin. By contrast, the “revisionist” school of the 1970s and 1980s, which focused more on society and structural features, has been in retreat. The theories of “revisionists” argued, among other things, for the amplifying role of local bureaucracies in creating disas­ters like the Famine of 1932-33. Documents show, however, that local authorities did all they could to oppose the hard line. This is why Stalin constantly insisted on absolute ruthlessness and sent his most trusted col­leagues to impose the most draconian and murderous policies on local communists. In the 1980s, a new generation of revisionists, particularly in the USA, argued that Stalin exercised only a limited amount of control over society, that local forces played a crucial role, and that the Great Terror of the thirties was not carried out primarily for political motives, was not planned from above, and was less extensive than traditionalists claimed (Rosenfeldt 2009, vol. 1, 20). The archives have brought to light documentary evidence that overwhelmingly contradicts this interpreta­tion and supports “the traditionalist emphasis on Stalin’s personal rule” (ibid., 20-21). This conclusion has in turn shifted interest toward the motives behind Stalin’s political initiatives. His intentions continue to be debated, largely because of the difficulty of imputing subjective content to documentation.

How did Stalin exercise power? One important discovery has been the existence of a “Special Chancellery” (Rosenfeldt’s term) that hid behind many veils and for most of its existence operated under the titles of “Secret Department” (Sekretnyi otdel) or “Special Sector” (Osobyi sektor). Until the 1970s, there was virtually no information on this apparatus.

Stalin to bypass the Central Committee and local Communist Party lead­erships (Brent 2008, 231).

Many of the secret police archives in Kyiv and Kharkiv deal with the thousands of individuals—mainly writers and members of the Ukrainian intelligentsia—who were arrested and interrogated in the thirties. Most were condemned for subversive activities and destroyed physically. The psychology of both the victimizer and the victim has always fascinated researchers. One set of questions concerns the psychology of the chek- ist or GPU agent. Although some were brutes, others were intelligent men and women. What motivated them, and what were they thinking? Another set of questions concerns what happened during the trials, arrests, and interrogations of the 1930s. In particular, why did so many people confess? What process was used in breaking individuals and get­ting them to admit to charges?

A series of high-profile show trials and conspiracy cases took place between 1929 and 1934. They were pretexts for the imprisonment of thousands of people who were active in developing the policy of Ukrain­ization in education, the press, and political and cultural life. The scale was massive; most leading academics, many teachers, all Ukrainians who came from Galicia (some 60,000) to work in the educational, scholarly, and cultural fields were arrested.⁴ The Ukrainization policy had been declared in 1923 and implemented since 1925.

But why did so many people admit their guilt in public? The answer lies in the fact that only certain individuals were selected for show trials. They were coached, prepared, blackmailed, and threatened for months until the secret police were convinced that it could get the desired result. Anyone who refused to cooperate or was considered an unreliable “actor” was never allowed to “perform” in staged proceedings.

The interrogation process can now be studied in thick files. The first document in an individual’s file is normally an “autobiography.” Neatly and lucidly penned by the prisoner, it was invariably “rejected” by the interrogator. The prisoner was then tortured through sleep deprivation, poor food, appalling cell conditions, threats (normally to his or her fam­ily), and violence. As a result, the text of the prisoner’s story undergoes a change: the words of the interrogator supplant those of the prisoner; the prisoner’s handwriting becomes huge, deformed; smudges caused by blotches of water (perhaps tears or sweat) sometimes appear on the pages. There may be long pauses between recorded interrogations, dur­ing which time the prisoner was allowed to rot for weeks or months in a cell. The final document in the file is a confession, usually written by the interrogator and then typed by a typist. It is only signed by the prisoner, although even the signature is missing on many confessions. The broken prisoner confesses to an attempted assassination of Stalin, or the head of the GPU in Ukraine, to membership of an underground fascist organiza­tion, to contacts with Ukrainian nationalists abroad, to fomenting revolt in the countryside—in fact to anything that the interrogator demanded.⁵ This led to amusing, if macabre, moments in which the prisoner discussed with the interrogator the appropriateness of including certain charges. The most popular Ukrainian humorist in the 1920s, Ostap Vyshnia, dur­ing his interrogation suggested that he should confess to being a German spy, since he had visited Germany. The interrogator told him this was unnecessary.

This entire procedure is an example of the mechanism that operated within the Soviet Union, one that worked to reduce “people to non­people” once they were identified as enemies. Brent has argued that “the mechanism of this process lies at the heart of the Stalinist state. It fused a way of thinking, a way of seeing, with a set of powerful political ideas. At the heart of this way of thinking is Josef Stalin” (Brent 2008, 15).

The show trials and mass arrests took place at the same time as the collectivization, the deportations and the Great Famine (Holodomor) of 1932-33. The latter event holds a particular interest for researchers working in the Ukrainian archives. Scholars have wondered how an event of this magnitude could have occurred. (Almost 4 million died, according to the Ukraine’s demographic commission, which released its findings in 2008-09.) Thousands of documents dealing with this issue have now been published, and many have been made available on the internet, stim­ulating public interest in a number of issues. Information available today shows the complicity of the Soviet leadership in orchestrating events and demonstrates its knowledge of what was happening, and efforts from the start to organize a coverup.

Andrea Graziosi has used the archives to construct a new interpreta­tion of the Soviet period from 1918 to 1934 as a “war on the peasantry” and the imposition of a “second serfdom.” Since the peasant and national questions in Ukraine were so closely linked, he argues, the war on the peasantry was in fact a disguised war on the Ukrainian people (Graziosi 1996).6 The evidence shows clearly that the Soviet leadership used the agricultural disaster to mold the countryside. As many scholars have pointed out, Stalin “used” suffering whenever he felt it would achieve the ends he desired (Brent 2008, 271). He therefore exploited hunger and fear to “teach a lesson” to recalcitrant opponents of the regime. Graziosi, Oleg Khveliuk, and Stanislav Kulchytskyi are among scholars who argue the leader’s personal role in directing the application of violence, a role that can be traced in his correspondence, as well as the decrees and instruc­tions he issued.⁷ Kulchytskyi has argued that the language used in the correspondence and decrees was a kind of code: “kulaks,” “speculators,” and “traders” were words for those who resisted or opposed collectiviza­tion; “grain” meant all food; the evidence for “theft” was the presence of anything edible. When on 1 January 1933 an instruction was issued to remove all food (not just grain, but any scrap of food), it was couched in language suggesting that the very existence of any food items meant that “theft” had occurred.⁸ Molotov, Postyshev, and Balytskyi all fell into line by making similar statements, speaking of “organized sabotage and mass thefts,” the existence of a “counterrevolutionary underground” led by “nationalist” and “Petliurite” elements. “Nationalist” and “Petliurite” were also code words for anyone who resisted or even questioned the leadership’s policy in Ukraine. Eventually, almost all leaders of the Com­munist Party in Ukraine were tagged with these terms. Practically the entire Central Committee was removed by the end of the thirties. Most were imprisoned and killed. Kulchytskyi is among those researchers who have concluded that the Famine was a tactical move to head off a poten­tial revolt of massive proportions, one that was triggered by the grain extraction through collectivization and requisitioning.

The archival collections provide a wealth of data that has convinced most skeptics inside and outside academia not only of the terrible scale of the event, but also of its deliberate and preventable nature. It is notable that a number of scholars, including Kulchytskyi and Graziosi, now put together three sets of data—the tragedy of the peasants, the simultaneous targeting of the Ukrainian elite, and the curtailment of Ukrainization—in order to make this case. In this way, the Famine’s national dimension—long suppressed or denied—has come to the fore.⁹ Recently new questions have emerged. How did this event shape ensu­ing Soviet history? How did the trauma of silence and denial affect the minds of ordinary people? And how could it have been kept quiet for so long? These questions are related to our understanding of the Sec­ond World War and the postwar period. Here the archival revolution has shed light, for example, on long-suppressed events, such as the secret protocols of the Hitler-Stalin pact, the union with Nazi Germany, the Katyn massacre, and the war against Finland in 1939-40, which began

The Archival Revolution and Contested Memory 141 after a provocation was organized on the border in the village of Mainila (Hrynevych 2012, 23). This last act of aggression and the subsequent bombing of Finnish towns led to the expulsion of the Soviet Union from the League of Nations (ibid.). Some research has been done into popular attitudes. During the war, secret police reports were kept on moods in the Red Army and the army bureaucracy. The secret police in the USSR and the Ukrainian SSR had analytical departments that prepared detailed reports on attitudes to specific events. They surveyed workers, peasants, the intelligentsia, and various national groups, age groups, and regions. The results were sent to the higher party authorities and are now avail­able in the Branch Archive of the Secret Police (Haluzevyi Derzhavnyi Arkhiv SBU) (ibid., 38-39). The SBU has published a significant number of these materials (ibid., 39). As a result, many “uncomfortable truths” raised by Western historians have been confirmed: the repression in Western Ukraine 1939-41, the shooting of prisoners by NKVD in 1941, the escape in panic of town administrations in the first weeks of war, the mass desertions from Red Army, ruthless forms of mobilization in 1943-44, and punitive expeditions against partisans and the population of Western Ukraine (ibid., 46).

The role of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) during the war is another area of interest among contemporary scholars mining the archives. In particular, scholars have asked how the OUN should be characterized and what role it played in the 1930s and during the war. Much new archival material has been integrated into recent research, but definitive answers to these questions have still not been produced. One interesting revelation is the deep penetration of the OUN by Soviet agents. We now know that all OUN(B) (Bandera faction) contacts in Poland, for example, went through Leonid Lapinskyi (Leon Lapinski, alias Zenon, Ryshard, Boguslaw, Roman). He was a member of the OUN from 1941 and its leader in Eastern Poland (Chelm and Podlasie) in 1945-48. Recruited by the Polish and Soviet secret service in the years after 1947, he controlled all the OUN(B)'s channels into Poland and Ukraine at a time when emigre members were trying to establish contact with the underground. The organization therefore had no choice but to work through him, which meant that all messages were picked up, and scores of couriers were arrested and shot.¹⁰

The image of Soviet apologists has also been affected by the archives, although here the evidence is still closely guarded since it involves spy operations and disinformation campaigns. The general point to be made is that the long-delayed recognition of mass crimes and the regime’s crim­inal nature was due to the state’s control of information in Eastern Euro­pean countries, the belatedness of archival openings, and the nervous reaction of some pro-communist circles in Western Europe (especially in France, Greece, and Spain) to what they saw as a political instrumental- ization of the past (Tismaneanu 2012, 36).

A large part of the problem, according to Tismaneanu, has been the refusal to characterize the regime as criminal. Unlike Nazism, in which genocidal practices were “built into” the system, Soviet genocidal practices took place “by consequence.” Nonetheless, as Tismaneanu points out, pre-determined victimhood did become a state norm under communism (ibid., 39-40). In other words, the regime murdered entire populations not because of some racial theory, but because it felt this was required for its survival. Moreover, the Gulag can be seen as “the normative design at the basis of the Communist project of modernity, the original source of the misdevelopment brought about by all Soviet-type regimes” (ibid., 41, emphasis in original). In short, both the genocidal politics and the Gulag are today increasingly viewed by scholars as the very essence of the Soviet experience.

There were, of course, many reasons why intellectuals in the West often turned a blind eye to Soviet reality. Tismaneanu has indicated that the perceived need to support anti-fascist resistance was an important fac­tor. But there were among Western intellectuals fervent believers in the utopian experiment, dupes, cheerleaders, victims of blackmail, reticent or cynical diplomats, greedy businessmen hoping to deal with the Soviet Union, scholars afraid of having their visas denied, and embarrassed vic­tims who sometimes preferred to forget their past suffering rather than relive the trauma.

Why is it important to recall this today? One reason is that, unfortu­nately, a high price must be paid for silence and denial. On the shelves of bookstores in the former Soviet space, one can today read outright denials of this past. A certain A. T. Kuptsov has written: “The paranoid phantasmagoria of ‘the bloody Russian past’ has been (and continues to be) implanted into the heads of all citizens of Russia. [...] However, there was no hunger in Ukraine in 1933, although the entire world is convinced of its real existence” (Kuptsov 2006, 4). The millions of corpses that cov­ered the devastated land of Russia was, in Kuptsov’s opinion, exclusively the work of the White armies: “Tens of millions of false ‘execution’ accu­sations were written” (ibid., 5). “The White terror accounted for over twenty-six million citizens of Russia” (ibid., 6). Kuptsov uses the silence of Western sources as evidence that history is now being rewritten in a perverted manner: “Does it not amaze anyone that neither the League of Nations, nor a single Western journalist from those who were present at the open trial proceedings condemned the legal actions of the Soviet administration?” (ibid., emphasis in original). The writer describes the great purge, the building of canals by forced labor, and the Cheka terror as “myths.” The Cheka, according to him, “did not shoot or imprison anyone” (ibid., 136).

There are also more sophisticated justifications of mass murder, Sta­lin, and the Gulag. In another readily available book, a certain Mikhail Morukov argues that the Second World War (in his words, the Great

The Archival Revolution and Contested Memory 143 Patriotic War) “in effect confirmed the vitality and adequate efficiency of the model of development chosen by the USSR” (Morukov 2006, 5). Prison labor, he insists, played a great role in the economy’s moderniza­tion and the country’s defense: “The Gulag in its ‘pure’ form was a tool of extensive development, which lost its value when the transfer to more intensive methods occurred.” In the end, the country was able to “accom­plished gigantic tasks at less material expense” (ibid., 172). In other words, the Gulag, collectivization, and Stalinism were a justified form of modernization. They served their purpose, which included industrializa­tion, construction of a powerful state, suppression of internal resistance, and overcoming threats from abroad.

Although these books, published in Russia, continue to be sold in bookstores throughout the former Soviet space, things have changed, at least in the academic community. Outright deniers of the mass terror, Famine, and Gulag are today generally seen as eccentrics, fools, or paid propagandists. The vast amount of information in the archives entirely contradicts their views. Ironically, the archival data that was kept from the public in order to shield the real workings of Soviet power from scru­tiny now offers up a “deferred” meaning, one that works to expose the criminal nature of Stalin’s regime, and the violence and abuse of legality throughout the Soviet period. Much of this research and the publication of its findings was done by a cohort of young scholars. It hardly needs emphasizing that their revelations played a significant role in stimulating the post-independence generation to action during the protests that led to the Euromaidan Revolution of 2013-14.

Notes

1. Originally published in Myroslav Shkandrij, “The Archival Revolution and Contested Memory: Changing Views of Stalin’s Rule in the Light of New Evidence,” Kyiv-Mohyla Humanities Journal 1 (2014): 189-204, http://kmhj. ukma.edu.ua/article/view/25720/23173.

2. Individual criminal cases, including the secret police’s operational materials, can be found in the HDA SBU (Branch State Archive of the Security Ser­vice of Ukraine—Haluzevyi Derzhavnyi Arkhiv Sluzhby Bezpeky Ukrainy), which has an estimated 800,000 case files; the TsDAHOU (Central State Archive of Civic Organizations of Ukraine—Tsentralnyi Derzhavnyi Arkhiv Hromadskykh Obiednan Ukrainy); TsDAVOU (Central State Archives of the Higher Organs of the State—Tsentralnyi Derzhavnyi Arkhiv Vyshchykh Orhaniv Vlady); the AU SBUKhO (Archive of the Security Service of Ukraine of Kharkiv Oblast—Arkhiv Upravlinnia Sluzhby Bezpeky Ukrainy Kharkivs- koi Oblasti); and the DAKhO (State Archive of Kharkiv Oblast—Derzhavnyi Arkhiv Kharkivskoi Oblasti).

3. Stalin’s subordinates conducted themselves in a similar manner. Vsevolod Balytskyi, the head of the Ukrainian secret police, explained in a letter of 22 March 1933 to Genrikh Yagoda, the chief of the OGPU, that he had requested from his subordinates that no written reports on the Famine by the OGPU should be circulated among party secretaries. Instead, oral

reports should be given to him personally (Werth and Berelowitsch 2011, 279-280).

4. On the treatment of this emigration, see Rublov and Cherchenko (1994); and Bertelsen and Shkandrij (2014).

5. On the construction of these “nationalist conspiracies” in the early thirties, see Chapter 3 in this volume.

6. For a brief overview of the historiography, see Cipko (2017, xv-xvii and 230-232)

7. See Kulchytskyi (2008, 32). Khlevniuk sees an important function of the ter­ror in “ensuring that society was kept in a state of submissiveness, suppress­ing dissent and opposition, and solidifying the sole authority of the leader” (Khlevniuk 2009, 168). For letters mailed from the Italian consulate, see Graziosi (2007, 29-40). See also Shapoval (2008).

8. The indirect and often obfuscatory use of language is discussed in Kulchytskyi (2008, 31, 83, 140, 168-169, 171, 193-203). He makes the point that “even in his most secret correspondence Stalin communicated with his closest sub­ordinates in an Aesopian language” (227).

9. Kulchytskyi has argued: “Stalin really did fear losing Ukraine, as he admit­ted in his letter to Kaganovich of 11 August 1932. But in the period between December 1932 and February 1933, he delivered a warning blow of ter­rible force that completely eliminated the development of events along a path that might lead to the appearance of a ‘Ukrainian independent republic’” (Kulchytskyi 2008, 298). Graziosi believes that Stalin’s intention was simul­taneously to break the peasantry and cripple Ukraine’s intellectual and politi­cal elite (Graziosi 2009).

10. For a discussion of Lapinskyi’s career, see Halagida (2005).

References

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