10.103- The Final Chapter

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Hello, and welcome to Revolutions.

Episode 10.103,

the final chapter.

On May 19th, 2019, I published the first episode of the 10th and final season of the Revolutions podcast.

It was episode 10.1, the International Working Men's Men's Association.

And now here we are more than three years later.

It took 39 episodes just to get through the Revolution of 1905.

Then a hiatus to finish Hero of Two Worlds, which went from a blank piece of paper when I started this series, to a completed manuscript, to the hardcover release.

And now, as I read this, the paperback is imminently forthcoming.

The pandemic hit, and then it went on and on and on.

It still goes on.

I was personally in and out of French operating rooms.

Then we moved back to France, not that those two are explicitly linked.

There have been a million upheavals, big and small, personal, professional, public and private.

There have been political upheavals that we all follow, even if I don't talk about it here on the podcast.

Wars and insurrections, mass protests and attempted coups, ruling class intrigues, systemic failures and insufficient responses.

The greedy, the timid, the daring, the inept, the fearful, the blind, the cunning, the unwilling, and the bold all crashing into one another.

The unthinkable is thinkable, the impossible possible.

The past, not even past, but the future staring us dead in the face.

It's been a long three years that went by in the blink of an eye.

Now, in episode 10.1, we saw a scruffy crew of political dissidents and radical social activists convene in London in 1864 to plot a new course for European civilization, and, by virtue of Europe's colonial stranglehold on the the world, to plot a new course for human civilization.

Most of them were veterans of the barricades of'48, or at least the printing presses of 48,

and they worked in the reactionary aftermath of the failures of'48.

Their concern was a monstrously exploitive economic system enforced by the hired guns of the ruling class.

Their objective was nothing less than total revolution.

not just swapping out this ruler for that ruler, but the end of rulers.

Not just transferring property from this tribe to that tribe, but the end of property.

Not just the rise of one tiny political faction overthrowing another tiny political faction, but the end of factions entirely.

The end of the minority ruling the majority.

The end of mass exploitation, misery, and degradation.

The triumph of dignity, justice, and prosperity for all.

Liberty, equality, and fraternity.

Finally.

From its inception, the International Socialist Movement was run through through with internal conflicts, arguments, backbiting, shit-talking, and infighting.

Their assaults on capitalism and imperialism were almost as vicious as their assaults on each other.

In a few short years, the First International Workingmen's Association, explicitly organized to unite them in unbreakable solidarity, broke into two rival camps, two internationals, with each side expelling all the members of the other side.

Purges and counter-purges were baked into the foundation from the start.

And so it went for the Russian wing of international socialism, through the decades where nothing happened and the weeks where decades happened.

Marxist and anarchist, orthodox and revisionist, Bolshevik and Menshevik, internationalist and chauvinist, social democrat and communist, the left opposition, the right deviationists.

Every few years or months or weeks, a new round of purges, expulsions, and walkouts.

As any one of the several socialist parties out there broke into two camps, then those two into four and those four into eight, those eight into sixteen, each group declaring themselves to be the avatars of socialist purity and righteousness, and everyone else a blockheaded bunch of losers.

Now in fairness, it's always easier for the defenders of the status quo to stick together.

The status quo is a tangible, existent thing.

It's here and now.

It's what exists.

Unity of purpose is simply defending what exists, protecting how things are.

And not only that, they have the tangible resources to protect themselves because what they are defending are those tangible resources.

Meanwhile, the fight to replace the status quo means creating something new that presently exists only in the imagination.

It's a blank slate of infinite possibilities.

It's a utopia approachable from an infinite number of paths.

some of them leading in wildly different directions, up, down, around, or behind, to this valley or that mountaintop, or that paradise by the sea.

And because there are an infinite number of places to go and an infinite number of ways to get there, the critics of the status quo, the enemies of the status quo, can divide into an infinite number of factions, while the defenders of the status quo can just sit tight and stay put.

That's literally all they have to do.

It's all they want to do.

It's all they ever will do.

And so the socialists and the anarchists and the communists fought amongst each other and within their own ranks.

The battleground of factional infighting, from the first international forward, was always the Congress and the Executive Committee.

Always and everywhere, we find Congresses and committees, whatever the party, whatever the faction, Congresses and committees.

A Congress of delegates would convene to vote on platforms and policies for this party or that party, but most importantly, to vote on the permanent committees who would supervise the work after the Congress disbanded.

By simple, practical necessity, the members of these various standing executive committees were empowered to articulate and enforce policies, platforms, tactics, strategies, and objectives.

To win control of one of these executive committees meant winning control of the party, winning control of the movement, and possibly winning control of the whole revolution.

It meant making your vision of the revolution the official vision of the revolution, and thus the only permissible vision of the revolution.

From the standing committees of the First International through the executive committees of the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party to the Central Committee of the Bolshevik Party and now the Politburo of the Communist Party, we've seen time and again that winning control of these small committees of perhaps five or seven or nine members was a great prize.

And this was the substance of Trotsky's critique of the Bolsheviks when he said, in the internal politics of the party, These methods lead to the party organization substituting itself for the party, the central committee substituting itself for the party organization, and finally the dictator substituting himself for the central committee.

The only thing he got wrong about this in projecting the future layout of the Communist Party is the additional rung of the Politburo between the Central Committee and the dictator.

And while Trotsky was of course prescient, he did not complain much about these things when he was in the Politburo.

Now through the years, it was always woe to those who disagreed with the executive committees, especially if and when and where its handful of members realized they were empowered to set rules about who could be a member of the party, who could participate in party congresses, who was allowed to vote for members of the executive committees.

Once control over the process was secured, the results would always be the same, because those who controlled the process controlled the results.

This could become permanent once the executive committee established themselves as the court of final appeal, to whom all complaints must be sent and from whom all final judgments would be handed down.

The circuit would be closed.

Whatever the Politburo said was right, even when it was wrong.

The only options left would be to conform, quit, or be expelled.

Now obviously I'm talking about all this because we've come to the final chapter of the Russian Revolution, which, if it wasn't called the final chapter, would be called the Great Purge.

In the Great Purge, Joseph Stalin would carry the logic of committee rule and banishment of opposition, logic that had been a part of revolutionary socialism since the days of Marx, Engels, and Bakunin, to its most monstrous conclusion.

It was the final elimination of all mental, legal, and political lines that separated disagreement with Stalin from treason against the party, the Soviet Union, and the Revolution.

By the early 1930s, Stalin had danced his Politburo quadrille with ruthless agility, isolating and removing his rivals one by one until the only dance partners left were those of Stalin's choosing.

Then they only danced to the tunes Stalin called.

But his victory brought him no rest.

When you've played treacherous games against a thousand hidden enemies your whole life, it's impossible to not see hidden enemies everywhere all the time.

Especially once you've surrounded yourself with people who agree with you because they are terrified of disagreeing with you.

And so we have this tragic irony that just as Stalin's power inside the Soviet Union became truly unassailable in the mid-1930s, he unleashed a massive campaign of terror.

Stalin aimed his great purge at all levels of Soviet society.

Up at the top, he aimed to eliminate Lenin's thin stratum of old Bolsheviks.

Anyone who could claim political authority, legitimacy, or respect due to their own service to the party and the revolution, rather than simply Stalin's whims.

In the middle rungs, he aimed at state bureaucrats, party officials, and local functionaries, anyone who even so much as hinted at the existence of a method of Communist statecraft different from the glorious system handed down by Comrade Stalin.

This middle group also included pretty much anyone who had gotten a college education before the Revolution, including most of the cultural intelligentsia, writers, poets, artists, musicians, theater directors, filmmakers, anyone who showed any interest of thinking for themselves.

This also included academic elites like professors and scientists and researchers, plus that class of engineers and technical specialists and managers who had already been feeling the heat of political terror since the beginning of the first five-year plan.

And then last but certainly not least, because they felt it the most, we had the general masses.

Hundreds of thousands of workers, peasants, shopkeepers, secretaries, cleaning staff, teachers.

People denounced for God knows what reason, put on a list, arrested by the police, and either shoved on a cattle car and sent off to a labor camp, or dragged to a basement where they would be shot.

Now, explaining the Great Purge, of course, begins with Stalin's own paranoid megalomania and his obsession with eliminating personal enemies.

Stalin would always act and behave as if the USSR, the Revolution, the Communist Party, the Central Committee, the Politburo, and he himself were all one and the same thing and, moreover, in a state of constant siege.

They were encircled by enemies.

Now Stalin's paranoia was driven partly by an intense feeling of perpetual victimization, that he was always the butt of slander and unfair attacks from everyone else, that everyone was out to get him, and so he could always justify going off and getting them first.

Stalin also came ready-equipped, just as Lenin did, with the personality of a bully.

When he saw people backing down, he didn't take that as a time to let up, but instead to go harder.

That it wasn't enough to beat your enemies, you had to to degrade them, humiliate them, and ruin them, and then destroy them.

But while Stalin's own increasingly unhinged personality is a necessary part of explaining the Great Purge, it is not sufficient.

Stalin's siege mentality wasn't just a psychological idiosyncrasy.

It was the essential worldview of the Bolshevik Party.

The idea that they were always and everywhere, surrounded by enemies trying to beat down the gates, climb over the walls, come up through the sewers.

And this is understandable given that they had come from the revolutionary underground, where people absolutely had been out to get them, all the time.

And not just visible enemies like policemen, gendarme, or soldiers, but hidden enemies right in their own ranks.

Every good comrade at every party meeting might, in reality, be an agent of the Ichrana, a spy, an informer, an agent provocateur.

This wasn't paranoid delusion.

This was just a fact of daily life.

It is an idle paranoia to suspect your closest comrade of secretly working against you.

It's in fact in the job description of any alert revolutionary.

This culture of paranoia grew proportionately when the Bolsheviks seized power and became the Communist Party.

It was no longer about the police or the Ministry of the Interior, but about entire nations and armies and peoples, all of them out to destroy Soviet Russia and the revolution.

The white armies were backed by an international gallery of enemies.

France, Britain, Germany, the United States, Poland, and Japan.

It hardly matters that after historians got the time to sift through the various government archives, that it became clear the international interventions by these powers into Russia during the Civil War were far less vast, coordinated, or committed than the Soviet leaders supposed.

Doesn't matter because in the heat of the Civil War, they saw enemies everywhere.

because there were enemies everywhere, internal and external, at home and abroad, inside and outside, above and below, the consequences of too much paranoia paled in comparison to the consequences of too little.

It's also not like the 1930s were a time to let one's guard down.

Now, from our vantage point almost 100 years later, we can see plainly that what's about to happen in the Soviet Union is a grotesque farce.

A deadly exercise in creating absurd fantasies that all participants recognized as absurd fantasies, but then pretended were real.

And we also know that internally, the opposition to Stalin was hopelessly atomized, weak, and inconsequential.

But in the 1930s, the USSR was still surrounded by enemies.

The Nazis had come to power in Germany, Mussolini ruled Italy.

In the Far East, the Empire of Japan, who had already dealt Russia a humiliating defeat a generation earlier, was aggressively expanding.

Meanwhile, the lingering belief that the headquarters of Western capitalism in Britain, France, and the United States, the leaders of the international bourgeoisie were always devising ways to undermine and then overthrow the Soviet Union.

Was it beyond belief that right now, at this very moment, any one of those powers was suborning spies and saboteurs inside the Soviet Union?

That political opposition to Stalin was ready to accept aid from any power willing to give it?

It wasn't crazy.

All you had to do was look at the history of the Communist Party itself.

The Bolsheviks had, after all, pulled into Finland station on a train paid for by the Kaiser.

Now whether he was working in the Kremlin, making the official rounds through the Soviet Union or relaxing at his beloved retreat on the Black Sea, Stalin's mind always returned from whatever project he was working on to the larger problem of all those enemies out there out to get him.

Foreign powers like Germany and Japan passing money and information to dissident political leaders inside Russia, who used that money and information to turn workers and peasants against Comrade Stalin, and by extension the the Politburo, the Central Committee, the Communist Party, the Soviet Union, and the Revolution.

As his mind returned to this place, one face stood out clearer than any other, one voice rose above the rest, one pen would not stop scribbling.

Trotsky, the stepson Daddy liked best.

The man whose intellectual arrogance rankled twice as hard because his intellectual superiority could not be denied.

Trotsky, who embodied a totally legitimate communist alternative to Stalin, whose claim to being Stalin's true heir was distressingly plausible.

Trotsky had been a world-famous political celebrity back when Stalin was an anonymous functionary.

It's safe to say that Trotsky had lived rent-free in Stalin's head for 20 years, and time had only increased Stalin's obsession, his fear, and his hatred of Trotsky.

And it's why Trotsky's name will be everywhere in 1936, 1937, and 1938.

Every confession would include links to Trotsky.

I met with Trotsky.

I corresponded with Trotsky.

I'm a member of a group led by Trotsky.

Trotsky, Trotsky, Trotsky.

It would always come back to Trotsky.

Now, as with all of Stalin's paranoia, he was not wholly unjustified.

All those people he had isolated and ditched in the Politburo quadrille, plus anyone associated with the old workers' opposition or the left opposition or the united opposition or the right deviationists, all those guys had networks of friends, allies, and supporters who had been pushed out into the political wilderness where they nursed deep and bitter resentments and plotted their comeback.

All of them fully intended their time in the wilderness to be merely temporary.

And when they staged their great comeback, it would be to fulfill the dying words of Lenin, get rid of Stalin.

In the fall of 1932, the secret police uncovered a couple of long documents written by an old Bolshevik named Martimyon Ryutin.

The first was called An Appeal to All Members of the All-Union Communist Party, and the other was a 200-page booklet called Stalin and the Crisis of the Proletarian Dictatorship.

Ryutin, who had been an ally of the right, called for an end to forced collectivization, the slowing of industrialization, and the reinstatement of all exiled party members, including Trotsky.

The appeal provocatively called Stalin the gravedigger of the revolution and the evil genius of the Russian Revolution, and stated bluntly Stalin must be removed by force.

So, though Stalin's imagination was a feverish swamp of paranoia, it's not like he was wrong that lots of people would love to see him overthrown, tossed in prison, or executed.

These threatening anti-Stalin tracks enjoyed wide circulation among all flavors of the opposition, and when the author was identified, Ryutin himself was arrested and sentenced to 10 years in prison.

But the most troubling thing of all was not that somebody had written all this, but how many people had read it, and how many people chose not to report it.

Stalin's natural paranoia further grew into unnatural proportions in December 1934 when he was dealt a sudden blow.

Now if you will recall when Zinoviev was ousted from all his party positions in 1926, leadership of the Communist Party in Leningrad was handed to a guy called Sergei Kirov.

Kirov was widely popular inside the party, had a genial good nature and an ability to get along with everyone at a time when that wasn't just out of fashion, but potentially dangerous.

But he could get along with anyone because he got along with Stalin.

Kiroff was above all a Stalin loyalist and probably the one person in the party Stalin actually considered a real personal friend, somebody he enjoyed hanging out with.

But on December 1st, 1934, while Kirov was walking through the corridors of the Smolny Institute, still the headquarters of the revolution in Leningrad since the dramatic days of 1917, a disgruntled former member of the party came up and shot him in the the head.

Now the assassin turned out to be a classic lone nut,

and even under suggestive torture couldn't make any convincing claims to being the trigger man for some vast coordinated conspiracy.

All the investigation into Kirov's assassination revealed was that security around the Smolny Institute was lax and that a political opposition to Stalin existed, but there was nothing really to connect the two.

This conclusion was not entirely satisfactory to Stalin, but that was the conclusion even of the secret police.

Now the secret police had been reorganized again in July 1934.

That which had started as the Cheka and then became the GPU was now folded into a larger apparatus of internal security called the People's Commissariat for Internal Affairs, known by the Russian acronym the NKVD.

The head of the NKVD was a guy called Genrik Yagoda.

Now the details of Yagoda's early career are disputable, but he joined the Bolsheviks before the October Revolution and quickly found a home in the Cheka.

He rose to become its deputy chairman and run day-to-day operations after it was reorganized as the GPU, and he held that operational position for a decade.

When the GPU became the NKVD in July 1934, Yagoda was named People's Commissar for Internal Affairs, giving him broad jurisdiction over both the regular police and the secret police, which was now a huge network of agents operating pretty much independently of all other party and state organizations.

The NKVD was above, below, and behind you all the time, and everyone knew it.

But while Yagoda was a careful political survivor and had absolutely no ethics to speak of, he did, after all, continue to hold his position as Stalin throughout faction after faction, he was not among those whose career had been entirely made by Stalin.

He was not 100% Stalin's man, and it was a fact both of them were well aware of.

Meanwhile, up through the ranks of the party apparatus rose rose another man who was willing to be far more accommodating of Stalin's wishes, particularly the wish to uncover the vast conspiracy he knew existed.

This is Nikolai Yezhov.

Yazhov came from the lower classes.

He'd started his life as a tailor's assistant and a factory worker.

He served two years in the army in World War I, joined the Bolsheviks in 1917, and then spent the Civil War serving in the Red Army.

Through the 1920s, he bounced up the rungs of both the state and the party, promoted ever upward as people better than him, more talented than him, and more independent of him, were ousted by Stalin.

Finally, in 1934, Yazhov was elected to the Central Committee of the Communist Party.

Now unlike Yagoda, Yazhov was Stalin's man.

He was one of Stalin's favorites, and he was constantly in and out of the boss's office.

And as I just said, he was more than willing to enable Stalin's most paranoid fantasies.

Yezhov harshly criticized the NKVD's investigation of the Kirov murder for failing to uncover a vast opposition network that must have been behind the assassination.

Eventually, Stalin was himself convinced of what he was already convinced of, and at the end of 1935 reopened the Kirov case.

Yagoda, who knew which way the winds blew, ramped up arrests and investigations of this vast Trotskyite conspiracy, well aware that Stalin had told Yazhov to keep a close eye on the NKVD.

They had better deliver what the boss wanted.

And so they did.

In early 1936, without anyone being fully cognizant of what was happening, neither the perpetrators nor the victims, the great purge began.

And the most infamous expression of the purge would be the Moscow show trials of 1936, 1937, and 1938.

The show trials were the mechanism by which Stalin systematically targeted and eliminated all the old Bolsheviks.

It was a mechanism that had been first introduced with the trial of the SRs, and then refined during all those trials against economic wreckers in the late 1920s and early 1930s.

And the method would be the same.

Almost no evidence would be needed.

The show trials were first and foremost a show, and would rest largely on dramatic confessions by the accused.

These confessions would be extracted by various threats and torture and false promises, and which provided Stalin with both public propaganda and the personal satisfaction of watching his enemies humiliated, ashamed, and groveling.

At first on the docket were Zenoviev and Kamenev.

Since their political defeat in 1927, they had been kicked out of the party, but then later reinstated, kicked out again, and then secretly convicted of complicity in Kirov's assassination, even though no evidence existed, because they had nothing to do with it.

In 1936, they were hauled back to Moscow and subjected to extended interrogations that broke them down mentally and physically.

By the summer of 1936, they were ready to confess to anything to make it all stop.

To secure the deal, Stalin personally promised they would not be executed if they admitted to being co-ringleaders of a vast conspiracy organized by Trotsky.

He also promised not to do anything to their families.

And so, they confessed.

Confessed to things they had nothing to do with.

In August 1936, the first trial began.

Zinoviev, Kamenev, and 14 other defendants admitted to leading what was officially dubbed the Trotskyite, Kamenevite, Zinovieite, leftist counter-revolutionary bloc.

In a shocking display, trumpeted for all the world to see, Zinoviev, Kamenev, and the other leading lights of the Communist Party stepped forward one by one to confess in the most groveling terms treasonous acts against the Soviet Union and the Revolution.

As soon as they were done confessing, all sixteen were found guilty and sentenced to death.

Stalin had never intended to keep his word to his old comrades.

On august twenty fifth, nineteen thirty six, Zinoviev and Kamenev were taken down to a prison basement and unceremoniously shot.

The oldest of the old Bolsheviks were done to death just like the Romanovs.

The time had come for the revolution to devour the last of her children.

To prepare this final revolutionary feast, Stalin needed someone who did not harbor any doubts or hesitations, and that meant getting rid of Yagoda.

Now, this is not to exonerate Yagoda in any way.

He oversaw the NKVD during a decade of mass arrests and imprisonments and executions.

He was also a pioneer in realizing you could use slave labor from the gulags to help build Russian infrastructure.

But he was resistant to the Great Purge.

He had always doubted the existence of a grand coordinated conspiracy surrounding Trotsky, and in 1936 suggested they maybe not go forward with any more show trials because it would be bad for publicity on the world stage.

These were doubts and hesitations Stalin could not tolerate.

So, in the fall of 1936, Stalin wrote a memo to the Politburo that said, We consider it absolutely necessary and urgent that Comrade Yazhov be appointed to head the People's Commissariat of Internal Affairs.

Yagoda has obviously proved unequal to the task of exposing the Trotskyite Zanovyite bloc.

The GPU was four years late in this matter.

All party heads and most of the NKVD agents in the region are talking about this.

The very next day, Yagoda was demoted to a minor post in the government, and Nikolai Yezhov was named People's Commissar for for Internal Affairs.

Now, under Yazhov's direction, a second Moscow trial was staged in January 1937.

This one also focused on a conspiracy allegedly organized by Trotsky.

This second Moscow trial was called the Case of the Anti-Soviet Trotskyist Center and featured 17 more old Bolshevik defendants.

The most famous of them was Karl Radik, the steadfast communist internationalist and revolutionary veteran of Poland and Germany and Russia.

Also among the accused was Yuri Pyotakov, who'd been name checked by Lenin's testament as one of the up and coming theoreticians of the Communist Party.

Standing beside them was also Grigory Sokolnikov, longtime Commissar of Finance.

The charges were all absurd, that they were leading members of a conspiracy organized by Trotsky and backed by Nazi Germany to overthrow the USSR.

Thirteen of them were sentenced to death.

Karl Raddick was given only a term in a labor camp for providing the most convincing confession, confirming the great lie that there there was not just an inner conspiracy, but a huge network of sympathizers and fellow travelers left to be identified and eliminated.

This trial was also broadcast for the whole world to see and hear.

Shocking confessions of the most incredible crimes by the least likely suspects.

It was unbelievable.

As well, it should have been.

Adjacent to the attack on the old party leadership, Stalin also targeted the upper rungs of the Red Army and Navy.

The senior military staff was full of heroes of the Civil War who commanded respect, influence, and authority independent of Stalin, and who, by the very nature of the military's hierarchy, commanded armies and navies that might be turned against Stalin.

In 1937, the NKVD fabricated a right-wing Trotskyist military conspiracy, like literally fabricated as in forged the documents themselves and tortured junior officers into making incredible confessions implicating the most decorated officers in the Red Army who were now accused of being spies and saboteurs working for the Nazis.

But the trial of the military officers would not be one of the show trials.

Stalin seems to have understood that dispatching party flax was one thing, but tearing down military heroes was another.

Might not go over well publicly.

So, in June 1937, they held a secret trial, done quickly and away from the spotlight.

At the top of the list were three of the five marshals of the Soviet Union, the senior-most leaders of the military, elevated to those positions because they had won the Civil War.

They were all found guilty of heinous acts of treason and executed right then and there.

This trial was the beginning of a massive subsequent purge of the Red Army.

Almost the entire uppermost rung of the officer corps was dispatched.

By the end of 1938, about 5% of the total officer corps had been purged, including most of the senior commanders.

So, heading into World War II, All the best and brightest and most experienced commanders the Red Army had were gone, which, I can tell you, had the senior leadership of the Nazi Party absolutely giddy with delight.

Down a social rung from all those elite leaders, the Great Purge spread out into the middle strata of Soviet society, most infamously devouring the cultural intelligentsia.

During these years, thousands of writers, musicians, scientists, poets, linguists, philosophers, playwrights, movie directors were arrested, imprisoned, sent to labor camps, or outright executed.

Universities and research departments and publishing houses and theaters and and music companies were all placed under constant surveillance by the NKVD, and the slightest ping of disloyalty or independent thought merited a knock on the door in the middle of the night.

Now this was all part of Stalin's broader cultural campaign to make everything and everyone conform to Stalin's vision of communist society.

And during the same period those who conformed to Stalin's vision of society were promoted and extolled.

until he changed his mind, and yesterday's celebrated writer became today's sinister villain and tomorrow's erased memory.

Now the Great Purge was never aimed solely at senior officials and educated elites.

It also targeted the general population.

On July 2, 1937, Stalin issued top-secret orders to regional leaders of the party in the NKVD.

They were told to immediately produce a list of all kulaks and criminals in their districts.

Those named were to be rounded up and either deported or executed depending on the circumstances.

As we we discussed last time, most of the real Kulaks had been rounded up and deported years earlier, and so that left the NKVD to uncover new kulaks, wherever and however they could.

And failure to produce a convincing and long enough list meant that when that list was produced, your name would probably be on it.

So local units of the NKVD, having quotas to hit, rounded up people on the slightest pretense, tortured them into confessing and implicating others, and then rounding up those named and doing the same thing all over again.

In this way, hundreds of thousands of people were accused of various political crimes, including old favorites like economic sabotage and wrecking, spying for foreign powers, or organizing insurrections among the peasants and the workers.

People would then be rounded up, tortured, and signed confessions that would be passed over to little NKVD tribunals, who would review and stamp paperwork they barely glanced at.

There were only ever two sentences, deportation to the gulags, or immediate execution.

The purge fell hard on the general population, but it fell disproportionately hard on non-Russian nationalities inside the Soviet Union, Poles, Ukrainians, Finns, Latvians, whoever.

National minorities comprised 36% of the victims of the Great Purge, despite being only a fraction of the Soviet Union's total population.

Sentences of death were handed down in about 75% of cases involving minority nationalities.

and only 50% of those involving Russians.

The purge of the Poles was particularly intensive.

They accounted for 12.5% of everyone who was killed.

Now, these groups were all targeted because they came from areas on the border with hostile powers and might be in league with those hostile powers.

And so non-Russians were treated to especially harsh and unforgiving treatment because they were plausibly suspected of opposing the Russian Communist Party.

Gee, I wonder why.

After a nearly two-year reign of terror that blanketed every level of Soviet society, Stalin delivered his grand finale in in March of 1938.

It was meant to put the final nail in the final coffin of all opposition.

They orchestrated the third of the great Moscow show trials, this one targeting all the remaining old Bolsheviks with a special emphasis on all the right deviationists, since most of the left had already been purged.

So this meant the group who had helped Stalin run the USSR in the late 1920s, Nikolai Bukharin, Alexei Rykov, Christian Rakovsky, Nikolai Krestinsky.

For them, Stalin saved his most absurd accusations, beginning with the crazy charge that Bukharin and the others had plotted to assassinate Lenin and Stalin back in 1918, and ending with their alleged plot to partition the USSR and hand over all its territories to Germany, Japan, and Great Britain.

Now, this is all clearly insane, and on the first day of the trial, Krestinsky repudiated his written confession and pleaded not guilty to all charges.

But he recanted his recantation the next day after being encouraged to confess with such persuasion that he dislocated his shoulder.

Bukharin held out against confessing for the better part of three months, but finally the combination of the ongoing torturous interrogation and direct threats to his wife and son finally wore him down.

Even still when he stood up and confessed at his trial, it was only to vague crimes of opposition.

He never acknowledged a single one of the specific charges against him.

Not that it mattered.

They were all found guilty.

Bukharin himself was shot on March 15, 1938.

With this final round of confessions and executions, pretty much the entire original leadership of the Bolshevik Party had now been liquidated.

The people who carried the party into the October Revolution, through the Civil War, and all through the 1920s, anyone that Lenin would have recognized as a colleague and collaborator and comrade was now dead.

The original members of the First Politburo, Zanoviev, Kamenev, Bubnov, Sokolnikov, Rykov, and Bukharin, they were all shot.

Only Mikhail Tomsky avoided execution by committing suicide in 1936.

Expanding the scope beyond just the Politburo, practically every member of the original central committees who had run the party in the teens and 20s was now gone.

Their death dates read like a roster of the leaders of the French Revolutions, whose dates of death, no matter the year of their birth, is always -1793 and - 1794.

The Russian equivalent of this is - 1936, - ⁇ 1937 and ⁇ 1938.

Everywhere you look, ⁇ 1936, ⁇ 1937, ⁇ 1938.

Though in fairness, it wasn't all of them.

Some of them made it to ⁇ 1939 and ⁇ 1940.

Karl Raddick was executed in a labor camp in 1939.

Alexei Rykov and Krishnamkovsky managed to make it to 1941 before they were hauled out and shot.

In the end, the men and women who had made the revolution of October were devoured not by the revolution, but by Stalin, who rewrote all the history books to make October the work of two men and two men only, Lenin, the great infallible leader, and Stalin, his great and infallible heir.

Ten years earlier, Trotsky denounced Stalin's actions as the onset of a Russian dermidor, a cynical and conservative retreat from the revolution.

But in hindsight, we can see that when Trotsky settled this in 1927, the revolution in many ways had barely begun.

Collectivization, the five-year plan, and now the Great Purge?

This is not the stuff at Dermidor, but the most feverishly radical days of the Jacobin reign of terror.

Now, Stalin was at least a passing student of revolutionary history, and he knew that after the terror must come a Thermidor.

And so, in 1938, he abruptly shifted gears again.

Rather than go down like Robespierre, Stalin decided to be the author of his own Dermidor, to play both parts in this unfolding historical drama.

And why not?

It's not like anything mattered.

It's not like anyone could stop him.

So one of the defendants at the third and final show trial was none other than Gengrick Yogoda, charged now with unjustly orchestrating a campaign of indiscriminate terror, of presiding over the imprisonment and murder of thousands of innocent people.

For shame, for shame, Comrade Stalin is ashamed.

Yogoda was found guilty and executed in March of 1938.

But sending Yogoda out as a sacrificial offering to the gods of Dermidor was not enough.

In the summer of 1938, after the final show trial, Stalin turned on Nikolai Yezhov.

He cut him out of the loop and trashed him in party meetings, which was a clear precursor to expulsion, as anyone close to Stalin knew.

And Yezhov was close to Stalin.

So Yazhov himself resigned as head of the NKVD in November 1938, but this did not save him.

He was arrested in April 1939 and accused of, quote, massive, unfounded arrests of completely innocent persons.

The story was now going to be that Yagoda and then Yazhov had gone completely rogue, misleading Comrade Stalin and the other party leaders and building a giant machine of death to satisfy only their own sadistic pleasures.

By now, Stalin had issued an order suspending all the death sentences and winding down mass repression and the Great Purge.

So, Stalin got to have his cake and eat it too.

He directed a campaign of mass murder to secure his power and position forever, and then took credit for ending it.

Yazhov himself was shot on February 2nd, 1940, in an execution room of his own special design.

His replacement as head of the NKVD was like Stalin a Georgian, a Georgian by the name of Lavranti Beria.

A kind, generous, and compassionate soul, the ascension of Beria would signal the arrival of a kinder and gentler secret police.

There would be no more reigns of terror in the Soviet Union, ever again.

Now through all this, the great boogeyman of Stalin's imagination was still out there.

Trotsky was still talking, still scribbling with his pen.

Now he had been evicted from France in 1936 and proceeded to live for a time in Norway.

But once he was evicted from Norway, he was invited to come live in Mexico by left-wing President Luzaro Cardenas.

And now we're back to episode 9.27 of the Mexican Revolution.

Trotsky lived in Mexico for the final four years of his life, continuing to write, and in his own special way, continuing to alienate and ostracize anybody who might support him.

It's actually kind of funny that Stalin was obsessed with the idea that Trotsky was organizing a vast coordinated conspiracy, because anyone who got close to Trotsky was eventually pushed away.

And Trotsky believed to his very last breath that his present condition of exile was exactly like the exile he had endured before 1917, that eventually his story would end with a triumphant return to Russia, where he would reclaim the mantle as Lenin's heir.

But that is not how the story of Trotsky ends.

It ends instead with an ice axe to the back of the head on August 21, 1940.

The Russian Revolution was over.

Stalin had won.

Over the course of the Great Purge from 1936 to 1938, the total estimate of arrested was somewhere between 1.5 and 2.5 million people.

The gulags now burst with prisoners, who were put to work as de facto slaves in the Soviet Union's ongoing projects of industrialization and modernization.

The total executions were somewhere in the neighborhood of 700,000, give or take 100,000 here and there.

If you include all those who subsequently died in the camps thanks to the brutal conditions, the total death toll of the Great Purge is around about a million.

Many families followed the officially accused off to their deaths.

Stalin promised not to harm the families of the old Bolsheviks if they confessed, but he broke those promises.

Kamenev's sons were executed, so was his first wife Olga.

She was executed in 1941 along with 160 other prominent political prisoners, including the great SR leader, Maria Spiridanova.

Bukharin's wife was sent to a labor camp, but she survived and saw her husband rehabilitated a half century later.

But most families were not rounded up.

They just endured the pain and trauma of having loved ones disappear one day.

Typically, the families of those put put to death were told their loved ones had been sentenced to 10 years in a prison camp, but they were forbidden to write home or communicate in any way.

When these 10-year periods elapsed at the end of World War II in 1946 and 47 and 48, the families were told their relatives had died in prison.

Now, if we pull back and look at the big picture, The loss of life in Russia and the Soviet Union during this revolutionary period is staggering.

So not even counting the 2 million soldiers and civilians who died in the midst of World War I, we're probably talking about a million or a million and a half people killed during the Russian Civil War, the 5 million who died in the famine of the early 1920s, the 10 million who died in the famine of the early 1930s, and here we've got another million or so killed in this great purge.

These are all rough estimates, but it pushes the number of what we would call excess deaths stemming from the revolution and the civil war and every other thing that happened close to something like 20 million.

And this is all leading into the catastrophic catastrophic disasters of World War II that's estimated to have killed 27 million people.

I can't even begin to fathom the trauma endured by someone who was born in like 1900 and who managed to live to the age of 50.

To have come of age in the Revolution of 1905 and its repressive aftermath, and then World War I, and then the Revolution, and the Civil War, and collectivization, and the purges, and then World War II.

I mean, it's just, my God, it's horrific.

There are hard times in history, and then there are hard times in history.

These were hard times.

So, let us return now to the beginning and take stock of where we stand.

What can we make of the Russian Revolution?

What can we make of the long arc from Marx to Stalin?

Now, in theory, the Bolshevik Party, and subsequently the Communist Party, was the party of the proletariat.

That is where they came from.

It's who they were meant to represent.

The Communists were a manifestation of industrial capitalism, an answer to its horrors and degradations and exploitations.

Opening chapter 2 of the Communist Manifesto, Marx and Engels wrote, In what relation do the Communists stand to the proletarians as a whole?

The Communists do not form a separate party opposed to the other working-class parties.

They have no interests, separate and apart from those of the proletariat as a whole.

They do not set up any sectarian principles of their own.

by which to shape and mold the proletarian movement.

And now look, I don't want to point out the obvious here, but I think that the Russian Communist Communist Party has strayed quite a bit in the interval between Marx and Stalin.

The Communists absolutely opposed other working-class parties.

They did have interests separate and apart from those as the proletariat as a whole.

They absolutely developed sectarian principles of their own, which they used to shape and mold the proletarian movement.

I think that the critics of the Russian Communists, inside and outside the party, inside and outside the Soviet Union, have a fair point here.

The inner party, the Central Committee and the Politburo, they cut themselves off from that base.

No matter how many times the Central Committee and the Politburo declared that the Communist Party was identical with the proletariat, it's very clear they were not, they developed into a run-of-the-mill ruling clique with their own interests.

This had been clear since at least 1918.

And whatever else the Communist Party was and the Soviet Union were, it was not by and for the workers.

The Soviets had long ago been co-opted and were controlled by political appointees representing the party interests, not that of the workers.

The The spontaneous participation of the workers, it was over before the bullet holes were even patched up in the Winter Palace.

It's why the Kronstadt rebellion happened.

It's why there was a whole workers' opposition movement inside the party.

And what happened to those who tried to give voice to the workers?

They were repressed, expelled, and ultimately liquidated once and for all in the Great Purge.

Now, in terms of the little list of objectives that Marx and Engels put in the Communist Manifesto, admittedly, the Russian Communists did pretty well.

They abolished private property, they set up universal free education, they centralized credit and communications and transportation in the hands of the state.

Marx and Engels also explicitly called for the, quote, establishment of industrial armies, especially for agriculture, which Stalin could point to any time he wanted to justify collectivization.

Now, when they got down to the brass tax of what communism meant, Marx and Engels wrote,

The distinguishing feature of communism is not the abolition of property generally, but the abolition of bourgeois property.

Modern bourgeois private property is the final and most complete expression of the system of producing and appropriating products that is based on class antagonisms and on the exploitation of the many by the few.

Now obviously the Russian communists succeeded in eliminating bourgeois property, but I am among those who believes that the elimination of such property was never meant to be an end unto itself.

It's why they made it clear that they wanted to abolish this system of exploitation of the many by the few, whether in the workplace or in the state or in the family.

That the dictatorship of the proletariat, so often invoked and so often misunderstood, meant to them simply the first moment in history when the many would rule the many.

Bourgeois property and capitalist exploitation needed to go because it was a legal and economic system that locked into place this system of the few ruling the many for their own benefit.

And unfortunately, again, to look at the system that wound up prevailing in Russia, first under Lenin and then Stalin, that the few did not continue to rule the many.

They abolished bourgeois property, sure, but was their dictatorship of the proletariat the rule of the many over the many?

Or was it simply a dictatorship?

It's impossible to look at the Soviet Union as it was ultimately constituted under Stalin and not recognize that the revolutionary dream of a world free, of a tyrannically exploitive ruling class composed of a tiny fraction of society ruling over everybody else, had gone unfulfilled.

It is a dream that remains unfulfilled.

We still live in a world in search of an answer to the conundrum posed by Bukharin.

Liberty, without socialism, is privilege and injustice.

But socialism, without liberty, is slavery and brutality.

So that's it.

As far as the Revolutions podcast goes, this will be my final narrative episode.

The last time I'll tell you about the who and the what and the when and the where of revolutionary history, with a little why and how thrown in for good measure.

By my account, which is probably not exactly right, I've written and edited and recorded 320 of these narrative episodes.

From the kingdoms of Charles Stewart

to Stalin's Great Purge.

I've written somewhere in the neighborhood of 1.5 million words, give or take.

I've enjoyed writing and reading and sharing every one of those words.

Telling these revolutionary stories has been my life for nine years.

But the story is now over.

And the podcast isn't over, and when we come back in a few months, I'll do my wrap-up episodes.

But those are going to be essays that are reflective and thematic, not narrative.

The story is over.

This is the final chapter.

But even though the podcast is going to end, I'm not going anywhere.

And you'll notice that published right alongside this episode is some information about a book tour and speaking engagements that will start up in September and October, a tour that will run concurrently with the the last run of episodes.

And after that, it's just more podcasts, more books, more of whatever else I happen to dream up.

And I've still got a lot of dreams left.

But the tenth and final season of the Revolutions podcast is now done.

The Russian Revolution, all 103 episodes of it, it's over.

And I'll see you on the other side.