Carroll Quigley - Tragedy and Hope - A History of the World in Our Time

For every leader who was publicly eliminated by these “Moscow Treason Trials” thousands were eliminated in secret. By 1939 all of the older leaders of Bolshevism had been driven from public life and most had died violent deaths, leaving only Stalin and his younger collaborators, such as Molotov and Voroshilov. All opposition to this group, in action, word, or thought, was regarded as equivalent to counterrevolutionary sabotage and aggressive capitalistic espionage.

Under Stalinism all Russia was dominated by three huge bureaucracies: of the government, of the party, and of the secret police. Of these, the secret police was more powerful than the party and the party more powerful than the government. Every office, factory, university, collective farm, research laboratory, or museum had all three structures. When the management of a factory sought to produce goods, they were constantly interfered with by the party committee (cell) or by the special department (the secret police unit) within the factory. There were two networks of secret-police spies, unknown to each other, one serving the special department of the factory, while the other reported to a high level of the secret police outside. Most of these spies were unpaid and served under threats of blackmail or liquidation. Such “liquidations” could range from wage reductions (which went to the secret police), through beatings or torture, to exile, imprisonment, expulsion from the party (if a member), to murder. The secret police had enormous funds, since it collected wage deductions from large numbers and had millions of slave laborers in its camps to be rented out, like draft animals on a contract basis, for state construction projects. Whenever the secret police needed more money it could sweep large numbers of persons, without trial or notice, into its wage deduction system or into its labor camps to be hired out. It would seem that the secret police, operating in this fashion, were the real rulers of Russia. This was true except at the very top, where Stalin could always liquidate the head of the secret police by having him arrested by his second in command in return for Stalin’s promise to promote the arrester to the top position. In this way the chiefs of the secret police were successively eliminated; V. Menzhinsky was replaced by Yagoda in 1934, Yagoda by Nikolai Yezhov in 1936, and Yezhov by Lavrenti Beria in 1938. These rapid shifts sought to cover up the falsifications of evidence which these men had prepared for the great purges of the period, each man’s mouth being closed by death as his part in the elimination of Stalin’s rivals was concluded. To keep the organization subordinate to the party, none of the leaders of the secret police was a member of the Politburo before Beria, and Beria was completely Stalin’s creature until they perished together in 1953.

It would be a grave mistake to believe that the Soviet system of government, with its peculiar amalgam of censorship, mass propaganda, and ruthless terror, was an invention of Stalin and his friends; it would be equally erroneous to believe that this system is a creation of Bolshevism; the truth is that it is a part of the Russian way of life and has a tradition going back through czarism to Byzantianism and to caesarism. In Russia itself it has typical precedents in Ivan the Terrible, Peter the Great, Paul I, or Alexander III. The chief changes were that the system, through the advance of technology, of weapons, of communications, and of transportation, became more pervasive, more constant, more violent, and more irrational. As an example of its irrationality we might point out that policy was subject to sudden reversals, which not only were pursued with ruthless severity, but under which, once policy had shifted, those who had been most active in the earlier official policy were liquidated as saboteurs or enemies of the state for their earlier activities as soon as the policy was changed. In the late 1920’s officials in the Ukraine had to speak Ukrainian; in a few years those who did were persecuted for seeking to disrupt the Soviet Union. As leaders were shifted, each demanded 100 percent loyalty, which became an excuse for liquidation by a successor as soon as the leader changed. The reversals in policy toward the peasants created many victims, as did the violent reversals in foreign policy. Soviet-German relations shifted from a basis of friendship in 1922-1927 to one of most violent animosity in 1933-1939, changed to patent friendship and cooperation in 1939-1941, to be followed by violent animosity again in 1941. These reversals of policy were difficult for the heavily censored Russian people to follow; they were almost impossible for Soviet sympathizers or members of Communist parties in foreign countries to follow; and they were very dangerous to the leaders of the Soviet system, who might find themselves under arrest today for having followed a different (but official) policy a year previously.

Yet in spite of all these difficulties, the Soviet Union continued to grow in industrial and military strength in the decade before 1941. In spite of low standards of living, racking internal tensions, devastating purges, economic dislocations, and large-scale waste and inefficiency, the industrial basis of Soviet power continued to expand. Nazi Germans, and the outside world in general, were more aware of the tensions, purges, dislocations, and inefficiency than they were of the growing power, with the result that all were amazed at the Soviet Union’s ability to withstand the German assault which began on June 22, 1941.

IX GERMANY FROM KAISER TO HITLER, 1913-1945

Introduction

The Weimar Republic, 1918-1933

The Nazi Regime

COMING TO POWER, 1933-1934

THE RULERS AND THE RULED, 1934-1945

Introduction

The fate of Germany is one of the most tragic in all human history, for seldom has a people of such talent and accomplishment brought such disasters on themselves and on others. The explanation of how Germany came to such straits cannot be found by examining the history of the twentieth century alone. Germany came to the disaster of 1945 by a path whose beginnings lie in the distant past, in the whole pattern of German history from the days of the Germanic tribes to the present. That Germany had a tribal and not a civilized origin and was outside the boundaries of the Roman Empire and of the Latin language were two of the factors which led Germany ultimately to 1945. The Germanic tribe gave security and meaning to each individual’s life to a degree where it almost absorbed the individual in the group, as tribes usually do. It gave security because it protected the individual in a social status of known and relatively stable social relationships with his fellows; it gave meaning because it was all-absorbing-totalitarian, if you will, in that it satisfied almost all an individual’s needs in a single system.

The shattering of the Germanic tribe in the period of the migrations, fifteen hundred years ago, and the exposure of its members to a higher, but equally total and equally satisfying, social structure—the Roman imperial system; and the subsequent, almost immediately subsequent, shattering of that Roman system caused a double trauma from which the Germans have not recovered even today. The shattering of the tribe left the individual German, as a similar experience today has left many Africans, in a chaos of unfamiliar experiences in which there was neither security nor meaning. When all other relationships had been destroyed, the German was left with only one human relationship on which he turned all his energy—loyalty to his immediate companions. But this could not carry all his life’s energy or satisfy all of life’s needs—no single human relationship ever can—and the effort to make it do so canonly turn it into a monstrosity. But the German tribesman of the sixth century, when all else was shattered, made such an effort and tried to build all security and all meaning on personal loyalty. Any violence, any criminal act, any bestiality was justified for the sake of the allegiance of personal loyalty. The result is to be seen in the earliest work of Germanic literature—the Niebelungenlied, a madhouse dominated by this one mood, in a situation not totally unlike the Germany of 1945.