Chapter 25: The Scapegoat
The Soviet press, large and small, daily expressed their boundless love and heartfelt gratitude to Comrade Stalin on behalf of the silent people, yet Stalin was not misled by this, and he was well aware of the true attitude of the people toward him. The secret reports of the Ministry of Internal Affairs told him that neither the workers nor the members of the collective farms appreciated his line. Watching closely the growing discontent, he knew, like an experienced stoker, that the pressure in the boiler had risen so high that the needle of the barometer was about to pass the red line and the lever of the bleeder valve had to be grasped. But he had only one means of “pacifying the people”: to send the “most unruly people” to the concentration camps in Siberia and Kazakhstan!
Stalin’s ruthless repression did make the people fearful of his powerful state apparatus, but could not extinguish the discontent of the people. And this discontent was the weakest link in Stalin’s dictatorship.
In the world, throughout the ages, any tyrant has tried to divert the discontent of the people by any means possible and to transfer his evil to others. The Tsarist government incited the ignorant people to hate the “foreigners” and blamed the “foreigners” for the poverty and backwardness of the Russian people. Hitler’s madness in killing Jews was also due to this reason. Stalin also had his own scapegoats; for a long Time he had to create myths about the “remnants of the Russian bourgeoisie” and let the experts and scholars take the blame for his economic failure and the country’s inability to get out of poverty.
The “Schachter case” and the “Industrial Party case”, which were tried in public in 1928 and 1930, were the farce of Stalin’s attempts to pin the blame on others. In these two trials, a number of outstanding engineers and eminent scholars were forced to fabricate lies about how they had followed the orders of capitalists and bankers who had long been in exile to sabotage Soviet industrial construction. Unfortunately, Stalin had no luck in these two trials, as in the subsequent series of farces. For example, during the “Industrial Party Case”, one of the main defendants, the well-known thermographer Ramsin, gave a detailed account to the court of his trip abroad to the former Russian capitalists Ryabushinsky and Vishnegratsky to receive counter-revolutionary orders. However, when the materials of this trial were officially published in the press, the Westerners pointed out in no uncertain terms that these two capitalists had been dead for many years by the time Ramsin received the “instructions”.
Before 1937. Stalin seemed intent on letting the party opposition leaders take responsibility for the economic recession and Food shortages that had shaken the country (a consequence of the forced collectivization of agriculture). However, no sooner had the first Moscow trial ended than the bones of Zinoviev and Kamenev were cold, than Stalin was determined to impose these responsibilities on the “joint Trotsky-Zinoviev headquarters”.
To this end, he changed the propaganda policy of the official press. It will be remembered that in the past, when foreign newspapers reported about the famine in the USSR, the exploitation of workers and the revolt of the peasants, the Soviet press reacted with such indignation, not only denouncing the authors of these reports as the most shameless liars, but also proving time and again that in the whole world only the USSR could offer the happiness of free labor to the working people, and that the welfare of the Soviet people was improving from year to year.
Of course, all this self-deception was said for foreigners, because no amount of clever propaganda could have convinced the long-starved Soviet workers and peasants that their days were getting better year by year.
Suddenly, from 1937 onwards, Stalin decided to admit publicly many facts which he had denied. He wanted to explain to the people that it was not his government, but the leaders of the opposition, who had caused the economic difficulties and the suffering of the people.
Stalin knew that the masses would not believe such bizarre myths if they were spread by himself or by his propagandists. But if the leaders of the opposition could confess these crimes in court and tell in detail how they destroyed large quantities of grain, killed cattle indiscriminately, and caused industrial and commercial chaos, then I am afraid the people would have to believe them.
The task of confessing in court the destruction of agricultural production by members of the opposition was given to two defendants – Mikhail Chernov and Vasily Shalangovich. Stalin did not choose them both by chance: Chernov in Ukraine and Shalangovich in Belarus had left the people with terrible memories. It was none other than Chernov, the then People’s Commissar for Agriculture, who went to Ukraine on Stalin’s orders to enforce the collectivization of agriculture. Moreover, in 1928, on the orders of the Central Committee, he carried out there the policy of grain collection without fail, even using force and violence in order to take grain out of the hands of the peasants. As for Shalangovich, as the former secretary of the Central Committee of the Belarusian Party, he likewise used terror to carry out collectivization campaigns in the Belarusian countryside.
Neither of these men was an old Bolshevik, nor did they join the opposition. They joined the party after the end of the civil war and, like most of Stalin’s cadres promoted in the wake of Lenin’s death, took an active part in the mass roundups of opposition members and were quite “successful”. Incidentally, Chernov also had a proud history: like Stalin, he had studied in theological schools.
Stalin’s trick was to put in the dock the senior aides who had enforced the collectivization of agriculture on his behalf and to order them to declare to the court that they were in fact secret accomplices of Bukharin and Likov, who had instigated their misdeeds on Ukrainian and Belarusian soil, because they had ordered them to incite the peasants to resentment against the Stalinist system. .
Recent Comments