Abstract
In August 1941 a young NKVD officer was taken captive by the Germans. He pretended to be a peasant’s son who had studied agronomy and mathematics, before being ‘mobilised’ to work in the political police in the spring of 1938, at the age of twenty-five. He also pretended to having rendered some services to German intelligence in Riga in 1940. His interrogators were impressed by his willingness to cooperate and to present himself in a favourable light.1 They were equally impressed by his manifestly sincere conviction that there was hardly any sphere of Soviet society where conspiracies were not present in the 1930s. In some respect the young man was far from being poorly informed. Apparently assigned to the surveillance of Komintern officials and foreign Communists in Moscow, he possessed pertinent information about people who must have been unknown even to police cadres, if they were not specialised in his field.2
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Notes
R. V. Ivanov Razumnik, Tiurmy i ssylki (New York, 1953) p. 277
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R. W. Davies, The Socialist Offensive — The Collectivisation of Soviet Agriculture 1929–1930 (London, 1980) p. 330;
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Reiman, pp. 244–5. For the ‘bloc’ see Getty, pp. 119–22; Id., ‘Trotsky in Exile: The Founding of the Fourth International’, Soviet Studies (1986) No. 1, pp. 28–9; P. Broué, ‘Trotsky et le bloc des oppositions de 1932’ Cahiers Leon Trotsky (1980) No. 5, pp. 5–37.
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Getty, Origins … pp. 209–10; G. T. Rittersporn, ‘Soviet Politics in the 1930s’, Studies in Comparative Communism (1986) No. 2, p. 112.
R. Service, The Bolshevik Party in Revolution (London, 1979) pp. 175–99; Reiman, pp. 118–71.
See his letter to Voroshilov in D. Volkogonov, ‘Triumf i tragediia’, Oktiabr’ (1988) No. 12, pp. 118–19.
A. Rossi, Generational Differences in the Soviet Union (New York, 1980) pp. 216–19, 228–30.
R. W. Thurston, ‘Fear and Belief in the USSR’s “Great Terror”: Response to Arrest 1935–1939’, Slavic Review (1986) No. 2, pp. 213–34;
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A. Inkeles, R. A. Bauer, The Soviet Citizen (Cambridge, Mass, 1959) pp. 23, 108, 245; Rossi, pp. 184, 186, 217, 229, 239, 324.
M. Lewin, The Making of the Soviet System: Essays in the Social History of Interwar Russia (New York, 1985) pp. 275–6, 310.
For a similar impact of élite concepts and practices on popular beliefs and behaviour see N. Cohn, Europe’s Inner Demons (London, 1975) pp. 225–55;
R. Kieckfeber, European Witch Trials (London, 1976) pp. 73–92.
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© 1992 Nick Lampert and Gábor T. Rittersporn
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Rittersporn, G.T. (1992). The Omnipresent Conspiracy: On Soviet Imagery of Politics and Social Relations in the 1930s. In: Lampert, N., Rittersporn, G.T. (eds) Stalinism: Its Nature and Aftermath. Studies in Soviet History and Society. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-12260-8_5
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