Abstract
Did Stalin turn insane around the mid-1930s? The scope of his killings among his own comrades in the last half of the decade inevitably raises this question. One might argue that his conduct for many years previous would justify the diagnosis of insanity, but it is hard to sustain this opinion unless one considers the mainstream of Soviet Communism up to that point to have been mad. Stalin succeeded in making himself the leader of this movement by articulating the widespread opinion of psychologically normal people and by providing stable administration, not by imposing on the party and the bulk of the populace notions that most people perceive as deranged. True, he repeatedly had pushed for harsher punishments of defeated Bolshevik opponents than the party élite was willing to approve. The élite realized this, and they probably reasoned that Stalin’s conduct on this matter was extreme but not threatening. He had, after all, no record of imprisoning or killing those who followed the ‘general line’ and he had accepted the restraint of his comrades concerning defeated oppositionists for about ten years prior to the mid-1930s. Some may have been sufficiently disenchanted with Stalin for one reason or another to contemplate parliamentary means of reducing his power or replacing him as leader, but none of the bits of arguable evidence that have reached us concerning such ideas have suggested that there was any serious notion that the issue was Stalin’s sanity. The very absence of any substantial concern on this issue very likely helped to disarm Stalin’s high-level comrades when his conduct toward them did indeed turn vicious rather abruptly after the middle of the decade.
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S. Allilueva, Only One Year (New York, 1969) 358–65.
E. K. Poretsky, Our Own People (London, 1969 ) 182.
S. Allilueva, Twenty Letters to a Friend (New York, 1967) 166;
L. D. Trotsky, Writings of Leon Trotsky (1937–1938) (New York, 1970 ) 88;
L. Shatunovskaia, Zhizn’ v Kremle (New York, 1982) 159–1.
J. A. Getty, Origins of the Great Purges (Cambridge, 1985 ) 48–91;
T. H. Rigby, Communist Party Membership in the U.S.S.R.1917–1967 ( Princeton, N.J. 1968 ) 204–9.
I. Deutscher, The Prophet Outcast (New York, 1963 ) 347–9, 390–6;
J. Van Heijenoort, With Trotsky in Exile ( Cambridge, Mass., 1978 ) 99.
Getty (1985) 119–22; J. A. Getty, ‘Trotsky in Exile: the Founding of the Fourth International’, Soviet Studies, no. 1 (1986) 28–9;
P. Broué, ‘Trotsky et le bloc des oppositions de 1932’, Cahiers Leon Trotsky, no. 5 (1980) 5–37. Although much of Orlov’s narrative concerns the preparation of the trial of Zinoviev and Kamenev, he was unaware of this evidence, which inspires doubt about the reliability of his sources concerning the 1936 trial. I. N. Smirnov is not to be confused with A. P. Smirnov, who was connected with Tolmachev and Eismont.
Stalinskii marshrut prodolzhen (Moscow, 1937) 26–7. K. E. Bailes, Technology and Society under Lenin and Stalin (Princeton, NJ, 1978) 382–93; Stalinskie sokoly (Moscow, 1937) 119–23.
KR,131–2, 93; N. E. Rosenfeldt, Knowledge and Power (Copenhagen, 1978) 131–2; Getty (1985) 116–18.
P,6 July, 12, 13 August, 20–6 November 1936, R. A. Medvedev, Let History Judge (New York, 1971) 206, deals with arrests in Transcaucasia, which he attributes to Beria, not Yezhov.
R. A. Medvedev, Nikolay Bukharin (New York, 1980) 129–30, which also reports that Stalin called off investigators who were searching Bukharin’s apartment, not a publicized step, but one that might circulate by rumour. P, 10 September 1936.
R. A. Medvedev, On Stalin and Stalinism (Oxford, 1979) 101; Getty (1985) 168–70, 173; S, XVI, 231, which also mentions Vainov of Yaroslavl as a bad example.
T. H. Rigby, ‘Stalinism and the Mono-organizational Society’, in R. C. Tucker (ed.), Stalinism (New York, 1977 ) 53–76.
The literature on the terror as a whole is far too large to summarize here. A few works that help to illustrate the present argument are: A. I. Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago (New York, 1974–8);
E. Ginzburg, Into the Whirlwind (London, 1967);
A. V. Gorbatov, Years Off My Life (London, 1964);
I. G. Ehrenburg, Eve of War: 1933–41 (London, 1963 ).
G. Alekseev ‘Kolichestvennye parametry kul’ta lichnosti’, SSSR. Vnutrenie protivorechiia (1982) 9;
J. L. Heizer, The Cult of Stalin 1929–1939 (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Kentucky, 1977 ) 132, 137–8, 141;
R. H. McNeal (ed.), Stalin’s Works. An Annotated Bibliography ( Stanford, Calif., 1967 ) 165–6.
Allilueva (1969) 386; CSP, 181. F. Maclean, The Eastern Approaches (London, 1966) 119–20, maintains that he saw Stalin’s face at a small window high above the court-room at the trial of Bukharin, but no other visitor ever noticed such a thing.
M. N. Tukhachevsky, Izbrannye proizvedeniia (Moscow, 1964 ) 1, 12–13;
J. Erickson, The Soviet High Command (London, 1962) 411–12; Report of Court Proceedings (1937) 105, 146; Marshall Tukhachevskii (Moscow, 1965) 234.
Iu. P. Petrov, Partiinoe stroitel’stvo Sovetskoi armii i flote (Moscow, 1964) 299–300; KR, 88; CSP, IV, 197. The latter statement implies that neither Khrushchev nor later Soviet researchers ever saw the documents that supposedly were forged in Germany and knew of them only through the foreign press.
Petrov (1964) 300–1 (original ellipsis); R. Conquest, The Great Terror (New York, 1963 ) 620.
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© 1988 Robert H. McNeal
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McNeal, R.H. (1988). Yezhovshchina. In: Stalin. St Antony’s. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-07461-7_10
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