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Course note · Lecture 3 slides (file not included in this release)
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Verbatim transcript supplied by Anthony for Lesson 3, “Stalin’s Paranoia Unleashed,” on 2026-09-22. It has not been checked against the video. Transcription errors and unsupported historical assertions may be present; see the linked course note for selected source checks.
Transcript
The Soviet Union thus began a process of what became known as “unpersoning”, by which people not only ceased to exist in the present day, but their existence in the past was retroactively removed as well—something Orwell parodied very well in his book, 1984. A very famous example of this is the picture known as The Commissar vanishes. By rewriting the past, even the past that was in recent memory, Stalin began to have even more control over the present day.
The problem was, there was one group of people who knew with absolute certainty what Stalin had been up to with these show trials and what his level of involvement was. In the fall of 1936, Stalin turned on the secret police themselves. He started at the top, switching out his chief torturer, Yagoda, with Yezhov, to be people’s commissar of the interior, which is the head of the NKVD, which is what the secret police were known as at the time. Then he could claim innocence of the entire terror and say that this had all been Yagoda’s fault.
Yezhov brought 300 new officials with him. These were the understudies in Stalin’s play of terror, and they knew that the entire main cast was about to be replaced. In March of 1937, Yezhov dispersed many of the main NKVD personnel, ostensibly to have them check on various regions of the Soviet Union. Separated and isolated, the men would never reach their supposed destinations. Their assistants met with the same fates. Yezhev took control of the passports so the agents couldn’t travel abroad, and he took control of the aviation squadrons so they couldn’t commandeer a plane.
Then came the mass arrests of Stalin’s secret police. Some of the interrogators turned to suicide, knowing full well the privations they would certainly face under arrest, for they themselves had recently been the perpetrators of such tortures. A few jumped to their deaths from their windows in central Moscow, and there wasn’t even a pretense of a trial for many of the others. Three thousand were executed in 1937 alone, and Yagoda’s judges, those who had rubber-stamped the executions of hundreds of thousands of innocent people, they were also arrested en masse.
As one survivor wrote, “Many prisoners found considerable satisfaction in meeting their own judges who had bawled accusations of ‘counterrevolutionary’ and ‘spy’ at them, in prison on the same charges.” For a good measure, Yezhov arrested Yagoda’s family, exiling the man’s wife, parents, sisters, nieces, and nephews, and Yagoda himself would finally be executed at the start of 1938. The biggest crime in the Soviet Union was knowing too much about Stalin, and the inevitable penalty for that was death.
If the secret police were a threat to Stalin’s authority, there was another strong power center in the Soviet Union, as it is in any country, the military. In 1937, Stalin’s purge turned toward the military because they theoretically could have deposed him in a coup. Eight leading Red Army generals were arrested, the newspapers full of articles claiming that they were working for a foreign state, namely Nazi Germany. The fact that three of them were Jewish was of no relevance to these demented accusations for which no evidence was, of course, put forward. They were all tried and executed, something which would have enormous consequences during World War II when such brilliant men were not to be found in Stalin’s staff.
Stalin’s purge of the Red Army reached levels that seem incomprehensible to us. He killed three of the five marshals of the Red Army, 13 of the 15 army commanders, 8 of 9 admirals, 50 of 57 army corps commanders, 154 out of 186 division commanders, 25 of 28 army corps commissars, all 16 army commissars. Voicing disapproval of Stalin’s purge was itself grounds for arrest. One woman was turned in. She commented that Mikhael Tukhachevsky, who had been marshal of the Soviet Union, was a handsome man. As a result of this, she was sentenced to 10 years for praising an enemy of the people, an enemy of the people who had been the pride and joy of the Soviet Union just days prior.
What Stalin unleashed with his great terror was an assault on civil society itself. Now, the bourgeois idea is that people working together, neighbors, family members, colleagues at work, students at your school, by working together collaboratively, you create the basis for what makes a society strong. But in the eyes of Stalin, this is the basis for a conspiracy. Parents were turned against children, neighbor against neighbors, husbands against wives. Any connection that was private was a threat to the common good, by which he meant himself.
Entire ethnicities were rounded up and deported to sever the connections between the people and their ancestral lands. The Cossacks were deported in the early 1930s, with parents and children automatically separated from one another in the process. Greeks who were in the Soviet Union were accused of plotting to hand over Ukraine to Greece, and 200,000 of them would be deported as a consequence of this insane claim. Half of Kazakhstan’s eventual population consisted of people exiled from other lands.
In 1937, one order from the secret police demanded ethnic cleansing for the arrest of all remaining Polish war prisoners, all Polish refugees, and all anti-Soviet activists from Polish-speaking regions of the Soviet Union. This led to the arrest of people who simply had Polish-sounding last names, and the guards were instructed to “beat the Poles for all you are worth,” which resulted in plenty of confessions from innocent people. As a result of this one order, over 100,000 people were executed without trial.
Jewish Socialists who escaped Hitler to the Soviet Union were accused not just of being filthy refugees, but also accused of being spies for the Nazis. Over half a million Jews were executed while others were sent to prison camps. German, Austrian, Yugoslav, Italian, Bulgarian, Finnish, Baltic, English, and French communists who emigrated to the Soviet Union with this promise of building a better land were all shot or imprisoned. Thousands of Polish communists who fled Hitler were executed in 1937 alone.
Collecting stamps, speaking Esperanto, or even having a pen pal were grounds for arrest because now you’re a spy, right? A veterinarian was arrested for treating dogs that belonged to foreigners. The Ukrainian writer Isaac Babel, his works remain with us, he had a worldwide reputation during his lifetime. But because he was friends with the French author, André Malraux, he was tortured and executed as a spy. We can see him on the left in happier times, and we could see him on the right after they got their hands on him.
Pravda and Izvestia were the two biggest Soviet periodicals. At one point, their entire staffs, almost entirely, were disappeared. Not only was contact with the outside world grounds for the death penalty, so was simply being a foreigner because you knew too much about reality. The American Communist Party saw African Americans as a target to further their cause, understandably in the 1930s, given the position of black Americans in the United States. There was even a pamphlet called The Negroes in a Soviet America, promising the former confederacy to be handed over to black Americans to govern as their own.
As a result of this, more than a few black Americans went to the Soviet Union as part of the outreach, to try to build a better world for themselves and their families. Jamaican engineer Robert Robinson immigrated to the USSR in 1930. Years later, he admitted that “every single black I knew in the 1930s who became a Soviet citizen disappeared within seven years.” We’ll never know what happened to them, but it’s pretty clear what did.
In 1937 and ‘38, the terror turned to members of the government itself. The following people were all arrested—commissar for heavy industry, finance, agriculture, interior trade, education, military industry, justice, state farms, communications, sea and river transport, the chairman of the state bank, the secretary of the central executive committee, the Ukrainian Prime Minister, all his deputies, and 99 of the 102 members of the Party Central Committee. In 1936, Stalin introduced a new constitution. Everyone who worked on it were later executed as traitors. The President of the Belorussian Republic killed himself as well.
As Yezhov himself put it, “We are launching a major attack on the enemy. Let there be no resentment if we bump someone with an elbow. Better that 10 innocent people should suffer than one spy get away. When you chop wood, chips fly.” What this meant in practice, I think anyone here can understand. This created an enormous sense of paranoia within the population as people understandably were led to the belief that there were spies everywhere and there was their duty to turn those spies in.
When Chopin’s funeral march was played the same day that Zinoviev and Kamenev were executed, a radio listener wrote in to ask if this was a signal from Trotsky. Illiterate peasants were accused of being Trotskyites, and they went to jail asking what it meant to be a [Trotskyite]. One prisoner explained, “Every Soviet citizen is suspected of espionage if he has ever been abroad or been associated with a foreigner. And of course, every foreigner is suspect.” By association, they meant any correspondence with relatives, friends, acquaintances, or professional colleagues abroad. People who had earlier been sent by the government itself abroad to study were suspected of espionage because of those journeys. So were the employees of diplomatic and trade missions abroad. Of course, any encounter with a foreigner inside the Soviet Union was itself dangerous.
The manner in which these arrests were made were not exactly meant to keep the population in a state of comfort. It was the middle of the night. You’d hear a car stopping in the street in a time when very few people had cars. You’d hear the men walking up the stairs and pounding on the door when everyone in the building was asleep. The location was searched, the suspect taken away. The Russians, with our sense of dark humor, would joke how relieved they were that someone knocked on the door in the middle of the night to tell them the building was on fire. Smart people knew to pack a bag in the expectation that possibly they would be arrested. Parents vanished without saying goodbye to their kids because they were told they’d be back home momentarily.
One of those arrested later described the typical experience. From the moment he’s arrested, the prisoner is kept in constant suspense. No matter what is done to him or where he is taken, he’s given no explanation. This permanent uncertainty and complete helplessness in the grip of a silent, uncanny power produces in every prisoner exactly what is expected to produce, fear. He begins to fear every change in his condition. Perhaps it may be a change for the better, but he’s afraid anyhow. The NKVD plays with virtuoso skill upon this fear. Even when the prisoner is not called for interrogation, he’s never allowed to settle down. Women will be taken into staircases, stripped naked in order to lift their hands up. Every crevice is examined in the apartment building in view of their neighbors.
Men were treated no better. Anything that could be used to harm oneself or somebody else was confiscated. Glasses were taken away because, of course, you could break your glasses and slit your wrists. Prisoners were packed shoulder to shoulder in rooms with hot air, of people desperate to breathe, in cells where people were kept in complete isolation for months or even years at a time. Some were kept in solitary confinement for so long that they’d lost the ability to speak because the muscles of their mouths became atrophied from a lack of someone to talk to.
The enemies of the people were reduced to nothing more than animals. The whole process of the disintegration of personality took place before the eyes of everyone in the cell. A man could not hide himself even for an instant. Even his bowels had to be moved on the open toilet right in front of the room. He wanted to weep. If he wanted to weep, he had to weep before everybody. If he wanted to kill himself, he would quickly be discovered by one of the cell’s insomniacs and prevented from finishing the job. Prisoners were forbidden to talk, shout, sing, write on the walls of the cell, leave marks or signs anywhere in the prison, stand by the window, or attempt to communicate with those in other cells in any way. Napping was forbidden, and strong electric lights throughout the prison were never turned off.
What was fascinating is many of the interrogators would grow frustrated by the prisoners who refused to confess to their crimes. They knew that the prisoner was perfectly innocent, but it was just a matter of getting them to sign the confession that everyone knew was fake. As a result of this, it frustrated them because it was taking up precious time that they could be spending elsewhere. The crazier the reason for your arrest, the harder it was to prove your innocence. One Czech citizen was reported as having had to confess that he became a German spy early in the First World War, at a time when neither Czechoslovakia or the Soviet Union even existed.
People wrote letter after letter to the authorities in hopes of reaching someone who would release them, many to Stalin himself, with the claim being, “Oh, if only Stalin knew.” The ones who were the most loyal to the party, the ones who were the most loyal to Stalin, were the ones who took the longest to realize what was being done to them. The guards understood the situation very well. As one admitted to his captive, “We never arrest anyone who’s not guilty. Even if you weren’t guilty, we can’t release you because then people would say we’re picking up innocent people.”
This led to some questions in the West because, if you have this conspiracy, and there’s hundreds of thousands of people confessing and being killed, how is it that this gigantic conspiracy, which reaches the top of the military, the top of the secret police, the top of the different governments in the republic, and the head of the USSR, only managed to kill one person, Kirov? That defies belief.
There was someone named John Dewey. He was the dean of American progressivism, the Dewey Decimal System, and he had a lot of work to do with education, progressive education. He formed what was called the Dewey Commission. They investigated these different claims about the guilt, the false guilt, of those men who were put on trial. As he put it, as the commission concluded, “It is hardly credible that, had all these men decided to overthrow the Soviet government through terrorism, they would have gone about it through such amateurish ways.” So what did Stalin do? He created new victims, and perhaps the first imaginary victims in Soviet history.
Maxim Gorky remains known as one of the greatest writers of all time. He died in 1968. Valerian Kuybyshev had been a member of the Politburo who had died at age 46 in 1935. He’d been one of Stalin’s closest economic advisors. And finally, Vyacheslav Menzhinsky, he’d been chairman of the secret police for eight years before dying in 1934. So, if we can prove that these three men had been murdered, that would mean that Kirov wasn’t the only victim of these terrorists. So, who could they blame? They blame the doctors.
The most outstanding heart specialist in the USSR was someone named Dimitry Pletnyov, and one of Yezhev’s secret police operatives accused him of having bitten her in the breast, and the newspapers ran with it. He became known as the sadist Pletnyov. He was denounced by his former friends and students, not that they had much of a choice. Another target, Dr. Levin, had treated both Stalin and his daughters, and Dr. Kazhekov was the third target of these accusations. One at a time, the men were sat down and told what they had done. They had took Gorky from an overheated room into freezing cold over and over until he died, and they had their hands in the deaths of the other two. Pletnyov was spared death, but the other two doctors were executed. In any event, Kirov was now not only the only one who had been the victim of this nationwide conspiracy.
How did they get these men to confess to crimes, not only that they didn’t commit, but that were literally impossible? Well, they were nothing, if not creative. We know someone named Konstantin Rokossovsky. He was 40 years old. When he was arrested, he was a brilliant military man. So they broke his ribs and they smashed his toes with a hammer. They pulled out his nails and they pulled out nine of his teeth as well. When that was not enough, they told him he was going to be executed. They took him in front of firing squads, but they never actually shot him. He didn’t break, and eventually he was freed, and he worked alongside Stalin against Hitler with a smile full of new steel teeth. But he was one of the lucky ones.
Someone whose name is now lost to history, we call him Comrade Ivanov, was an old Bolshevik. He had repeatedly been arrested by the Tsar. After the revolution, him and his wife made the mistake of siding with Trotsky. They were deported to Siberia before being brought back in a prison in Moscow in 1936. For four months, they tried to break him, but old Bolsheviks do not break so easily. What are four months in a prison to someone who’s done 10 years doing hard labor in some god-forsaken corner of Russia, right?
So Yezhov himself decided, “OK, what is taking so long?” So all he had to do was call the man’s mother-in-law in front of him. He said, “This is the NKVD. Comrade Ivanov wants to know how his children are.” The mother-in-law says, “It’s the middle of the night. The young boy is asleep.” Yezhov asked, “Ivanov, do you want me to give her a message?” And Ivanov understood what was happening. He got to tell her to take good care of the boy. So the Bolsheviks did in months what the Tsar couldn’t do in a decade. They broke him. He cried when they hung up the phone, and he signed whatever confession they put in front of him.
In 1935, the Soviet government lowered the age of criminal responsibility to age 12, partly with the aim of threatening those in prison with the arrest of their children if they refused to confess to their crimes. In effect, hostage-taking was legalized. It’s amazing what human beings will do when their families are threatened and when they’re aware of how little they can do to save their children. Eventually, every inquisitor of the secret police was obliged to have on his desk during the interrogation the law which decreed the application of the death penalty to children.
But this isn’t even the worst of what was done. This is Stanislav Kosior. It’s an unusual photo for the Soviets because he’s right below Stalin. Stalin is laughing and rubbing his bald head. From 1928 to 1938, he had been first secretary of the Communist Party of Ukraine, a very important position. In December 1933, he blamed, of course, the kulaks for what had happened and thanked Stalin for Stalin’s good work during that whole situation, but he knew too much. In 1938, he was pulled to Moscow to be the deputy prime minister of the USSR, not a minor position. In May 1938, he was arrested.
We don’t know what they did to Stanislav Kosior. The most common means of torture is the conveyor, by which you’re sat down and interrogated for hours. When your interrogator gets tired, a fresh interrogator is brought in and so on and so forth, and all your words are being used against you as you’re deprived of sleep and basic human necessities. The goal was to get the complete disintegration of an individual’s personality. Other methods are, of course, sleep deprivation. People were beaten. They gouged out eyes, perforated eardrums, pulled out fingernails and toenails, broke arms and legs, burned their victims with red hot irons, and mutilated sex organs. Others were beaten until their eyes popped out of their head. And prisoners who were beaten to death were legally registered as having had heart attacks.
We don’t know what Kosior did because none of us know what torture is like. The closest analog we have is some Hollywood movie, and it’s Liam Neeson tied to a chair, and his lip is split, and his hair is tousled, and he’s spitting defiance in the face of his captor. But of course, this is a complete fiction. We don’t know if Kosior was defiant. We don’t know if he didn’t talk. We don’t know if he yelled, raised his voice. What we do know is that he wouldn’t break, and this was a problem. We also don’t know if they had their trump card in the back pocket the whole time or if they were forced to desperate measures by his intransigence.
What we do know is that, eventually, interrogators brought Kosior’s teenage daughter, Tamara, and raped her in front of him, and that did it. That broke Stanislav Kosior. He confessed. He managed to outlive her because, shortly thereafter, she committed suicide by throwing herself under a train. Whether her death should be counted as one of the NKVD’s victims, I will leave to historians to determine. I doubt that she is who the New York Times had in mind when they ran their 2017 editorial about how women had better sex under socialism, specifically referring to Eastern European communism.
These trials as a whole left foreigners with a logical dilemma. Former communist, Granville Hicks, put it, “If these men were innocent, the administration of the Soviet Union was a vicious, ruthless tyranny. But if on the other hand, they were guilty, then the leadership of the Communist Movement had been desperately corrupt from the very beginning.” But the show trials worked specifically on those people in the West who were the influencers of their time. As George Orwell put it, “What was frightening about these trials was not the fact that they happened, for obviously such things are necessary in a totalitarian society, but the eagerness of Western intellectuals to justify them.”
As one literary critic put it, “In any view of the American cultural situation, the importance of the radical movement of the ’30s cannot be overestimated. It may be said to have created the American intellectual class, as we now know it, in its great size and influence. It fixed the character of this class as being, through all mutations of opinion, predominantly of the left.” And quite apart from opinion, the political tendency of the ’30s defined the style of the class. From that radicalism came the moral urgency, the sense of crisis, and the concern with personal salvation that marked the existence of American intellectuals.
In fact, the same exact day that Kosior was arrested, a letter was republished in the New Masses, that’s specifically on May 3rd, 1938, signed by a ton of these influencers, insisting that, “We, the undersigned, are fully aware of the confusion that exists with regard to the Moscow trials and the real facts of the situation of the Soviet Union, and that these trials have, by sheer weight of evidence, established a clear presumption of guilt of the defendants.” In fact, most newspapers have discarded the earlier charges of frameup and now admit the validity of the trials, and that any confusion about whether these people were guilty was in part due to obscure the truth about the achievements of the Soviet Union as recorded by honest progressive opinion, including magnificent gains in industry and agriculture.
The influencers agreed with Stalin that the defendants resorted to duplicity and conspiracy and allied themselves with long-standing enemies of the Soviet Union, and degeneration may therefore be charged to the defendants and not to the Soviet Union, which gained strength internally and externally by the prevention of treason and the eradication of spies and wreckers. Eradication, of course, here being the death penalty. And wreckers, of course, meaning someone who doubts Stalin’s wisdom. The influencers asked American leftists to, quote, “support the efforts of the Soviet Union to free itself from insidious internal dangers.”
As the motto went at the time, “Communism is 20th-century Americanism.” Journalist Eugene Lyons pointed out that these influencers gave every benefit of the doubt to an omnipotent state and its firing squads, rather than to its victims. There were no intellectual acrobatics which the fellow travelers would not undertake to save their lovely faith in Russia. Year after year, they had accepted and explained away horror and super-horror, falsification of history, corruption, terror, manmade famine, the death penalty for minor thefts, the punishment of relatives for alleged crimes committed by members of their family thousands of miles away, capital punishment for young children, concentration camps with the population running into millions.
The love affair with Stalin was even stronger in the UK than it was in the US. H. G. Wells, author of The Time Machine and The Invisible Man, War of the Worlds, was an enormous fan of Stalin and managed to get an interview with him in 1934. No mean feat. He told Stalin that “it seems to me, I’m more to the left than you.” Meaning, if H. G. Wells is part of the Overton window, Stalin is basically a moderate. As he also put it, “I have never met a man more candid, fair, and honest,” speaking of Stalin. “And it’s to these qualities and to nothing occult and sinister that he owes his tremendous undisputed ascendancy in Russia.”