Inside Gorbachev's Kremlin Book

From a distance, the period in the Thirties when Stalin serially maneuvered to eliminate allies and potential rivals in the Politburo, the Red Army, the regional administration and even the police looks like a decisive and systematic rise to power. "The Road to Terror" by J. Arch Getty and Oleg V. Naumov, relying heavily on the Soviet archives, argue that the decision to focus on successive "traitors" was more improvisational and even, at the beginning, based on a real sense that conspiracy was being hatched within the Party. Getty and Naumov make clear just what a terrifyingly insular logic and language the Stalinists wielded. Those accused were not even guilty until proven innocent; the charges themselves were the proof, and the only recourse of those caught in the maw of Soviet justice was to acknowledge treasonous error in what Getty and Naumov characterize as a public rite of confession. There was no appeal and the Politburo did not make mistakes; if the campaign of arrest and execution it ordered had become excessive, it was the fault of those who carried out the directives. Last year's ally in defeating Trotsky or Zinoviev and Kamenev or Bukharin or in carrying out a terror campaign was this year's traitor. Three of the executed stand out: Nikolai Bukharin, who spent his long imprisonment writing incessantly, letters to Stalin, Marxist theory, even a novel; Marshal Tukhachevsky, a vicious hero of the Revolution, whose archived confession is spattered with blood (and whose loss was deeply felt when Hitler betrayed Stalin and invaded); and Nikolai Yezhov, the drunken head of the NKVD (predecessor of the KGB and its current incarnation, the FSB, where Vladimir Putin built the first part of his career), who gave his name to the 1937 terror, the Yezhovschina. The circular logic of the dialogue as the accused are confronted by the Politburo, including Stalin, is beyond even Orwell's harrowing rendition of the Soviet terror-state in "1984". Thus, Vyacheslav Molotov, to Bukharin, who had argued thatthere was no truth in the accusations against him: " You're always acting as a lawyer." And when Bukharin asserted the right to defend himself, Molotov continued, "I agree, you have the right to defend yourself, a thousand times over. But I consider it my right not to believe you. Because you are a political hypocrite." A key bit of evidence in a certain conspiracy was that two high-ranking Party members had gone to pick out a dog together, which Stalin turned into a surreal series of questions--was it for hunting or as a guard? Did they get the dog? Was it a good one? It is a stunning performance of power asserting itself, showing that whether or not the accusation was true or not is beside the point, trivializing any effort to discover the truth or dispute the charges. Even the medieval trial by ordeal at least admitted the possibility of innocence. One finishes the book astonished at how devalued the English vocabulary has become, that people use the word "tyranny" because they lose elections or dislike policy. No, Getty and Naumov show us what tyranny really is: the pandemic abuse of basic human rights, an environment in which facts do not matter, where doubt and due process are weakness, the deployment of a logical system in which something is true because the right person has stated it.