Terror

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TERROR.

TERROR IN NINETEENTH- AND TWENTIETH-CENTURY EUROPE
STALINIST TERROR IN THE SOVIET UNION
BIBLIOGRAPHY

Wherever there are people, there will also be violence. Human violence, however, can emerge in different manifestations, it arises from different motives and occasions, and if it dissociates from the underlying causes, it may develop a momentum of its own. In the latter case, violence itself is the only language spoken. The way in which violence shapes life in human societies, though, depends on its manifestations. It may appear as a pogrom, as interethnic conflict, as a military campaign, as annihilation, or as terror.

Terror is a form of violence that distinguishes itself from other forms by the fact that it pursues certain goals and is at the service of certain interests. Terror surfaces in the name of systems, states, parties, and ideologies; reference to the maliciousness of the opponents serves to justify and legitimate it. Terror constitutes violence organized by state or political organizations, setting it apart from spontaneous acts of violence, from riots and pogroms. What really matters to all violent regimes practicing terror is to spread fear, to stigmatize people, and to identify them as victims of persecution, or to intimidate society by threatening and carrying out violence as a means to gain obedience by force. This was the scenario during the French Revolution, in the colonial wars of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, in the early stages of the National Socialist (Nazi) dictatorship in Germany, and in the Soviet Union in the 1930s and in China during the Cultural Revolution in the 1960s.

Terror, applied on a regular basis, generates an atmosphere of anxiety and paranoia, creating a new reality in which terror dissociates from the occasions that have caused it in the first place. It takes on a life of its own. Under these circumstances, anyone can become a victim of state violence, and the perpetrators are no longer able to differentiate between real and imagined enemies; they become prisoners of their idées fixes and sometimes even themselves victims of terror. This is what happened in the phase of the Terror (1793–1794) during the French Revolution, in the Soviet Union in the 1930s, in Mao Zedong's China during the Great Leap Forward in the 1950s and in the course of the Cultural Revolution from the mid-1960s onward, and finally, yet importantly, in Cambodia under the dictatorship of Pol Pot in the 1970s.

Wherever violence aimed not only at suppressing deviations but also at eradicating them forever, and where minorities were targeted for marginalization or extermination, terror turned into annihilation. The most tangible place of modern exterminatory force is the camp, in which the claim of totalitarian regimes to purge societies from their "eternal" enemies was institutionalized through a practice of systematic deprivation of rights and dehumanization. Extermination left victims with no other way out but to die. Therefore, the kind of exterminatory force exerted by the Nazis against the Jews differs from the type of terror intent on forcing obedience and spreading fear and terror. Terror amounts to arbitrariness; extermination, on the other hand, is unambiguous. Nevertheless, the dividing lines separating terror and annihilation are not clear-cut. Representative of this fact are, above all, the Stalinist regimes in the Soviet Union and in China, whose terrorist methods became a practice of extermination during specific phases—in the years 1937 and 1938 in the Soviet Union and during the 1950s in China.

To be sure, the causes and motives for the use of terror are variable over the course of history. Wherever perpetrators practice terror, they justify their actions either by reference to their ideological convictions or to circumstances forcing them to exercise terror against others. As a rule, state authorities decide to employ terror if they feel they can no longer control the situation, if they perceive themselves to be surrounded by enemies and threatened by foreign powers, or if they have lost confidence in their position of power. A confused state of affairs and a power vacuum constitute the perfect seedbed for conspiracy theories that view the world as a place that is populated by enemies, saboteurs, and spies and one that can be liberated from all evil only by means of terror. Terror does not represent an inevitable result of revolutions and dictatorships. Yet, the interlocking chain of events already mentioned seems to favor its development.

TERROR IN NINETEENTH- AND TWENTIETH-CENTURY EUROPE

Modern terror was born in the French Revolution as a method of enforcing authority. It was exercised systematically and justified ideologically by the political elite vis-à-vis a number of adversaries: against the members of the royalist governing elite who were stigmatized as conspirators and traitors; and against clergymen and peasants in the Vendée who were supposed to be subjugated through merciless terror. The European colonial powers also resorted to terror in the early twentieth century in order to make rebellious tribes and ethnic groupings submit to their will: this included hostage-takings, executions, and systematic depopulation of the territories inhabited by the rebels. The Nazis, too, made use of such instruments, especially at the beginning of their rule, when they built camps for oppositional Communists and Social Democrats and persecuted citizens of Jewish descent. In the last year of the war, the terror reappeared one more time, with the aim of nipping any resistance in the bud and deterring potential adversaries. Nonetheless, Nazi rule in Germany did not rest on terror against the population. Instead, it was based on popular assent. The Nazis' terror developed to the full beyond the German borders, in places where resistance emerged and enemies had to be defeated: above all, in Poland, Yugoslavia, and the Soviet Union.

STALINIST TERROR IN THE SOVIET UNION

More than any other dictatorship of the twentieth century, the Stalinist system in the Soviet Union was identified by both contemporaries and future historians as a rule of terror. The Bolsheviks themselves spoke of the "Red Terror" to label the violence they exercised against their real or perceived adversaries in the postrevolutionary period and during the Russian civil war (1918–1920). In 1920 Leon Trotsky, the military leader of the Bolshevik Revolution, declared publicly that the revolution killed individuals and acted as a deterrent to thousands of others. For that reason, Trotsky added, the Red Terror was state-organized terror, which took as the ultimate yardstick the suitability of violence for reaching revolutionary objectives. In fact, Vladimir Lenin and his followers systematically used violence against the members of the former tsarist elites, against officeholders of the old regime, and against striking workers and rebellious peasants in order to intimidate and deter them from resisting the regime. This approach pivoted on a perfidious system of hostage-taking, calculated executions, and public humiliation. In carrying out these measures, the political police—the Cheka—were not bound by any restrictions whatsoever. The terror reached a climax toward the end of the civil war, when troops commanded by the Bolshevik military leader Mikhail Tukhachevsky advanced against rebellious peasants in the southern Russian province of Tambov using poison gas and transported their families to concentration camps. Hundreds of thousands died during the civil war due to terrorist use of violence.

The terror excesses arose from a chain of several circumstances: the ideological furor of the Bolshevik leaders bent on delivering society from its enemies, the resistance of the "White" counterrevolution during the civil war, and the lack of influence and power wielded by Communists in the provinces as well as their affinity to violence. In the face of chaos and uncontrollable circumstances, violence represented the only source of power available to the warring factions. The Bolsheviks were merely more successful in applying it than their adversaries.

Terror and bolshevism were no synonyms, because along with the stabilization of political and social conditions between 1924 and 1928 the violence ended. It was not until the beginning of the cultural revolution, of industrialization and the collectivization of agriculture between 1928 and 1933, that terror reappeared on the scene as an instrument of power. The cultural revolutionary interventions in the life spheres of Soviet subjects, the nationalization of land and peasant property, and the ruthless strategy of industrialization provoked riots and rebellions and caused chaos in production; millions of people were uprooted and set in motion. Now the Bolsheviks got a taste of their own powerlessness. They responded to the self-induced crisis with terror, falling back on the techniques of violence already familiar from the civil war. Managers and factory directors—so-called bourgeois specialists—were charged and sentenced in public show trials as "vermin" and saboteurs; aristocrats and functional elites from the ranks of tsarist society, clergymen, tribal chieftains, and members of former national parties faced arrest; and several million peasants went to concentration camps as kulaks or they were deported to Siberia.

In the mid-1930s, the terror got out of control. In 1935, following the assassination of the Leningrad party leader Sergei Kirov in December 1934, hostages were executed; alleged class enemies—"socially harmful elements"—deported from the cities; and national minorities removed from the border regions of the USSR. Eventually, during the years of the Great Terror—1937 and 1938—the political leadership yielded to Joseph Stalin's urging, deciding to arrest and execute enemy groups and members of national minorities reputed to be undermining the Soviet order and to be in the pay of neighboring countries. The Politburo prescribed quotas for each region to serve as orientation for security forces. In the course of just over one year—between August 1937 and November 1938—almost seven hundred thousand people were murdered on state orders. Mass shootings took place in all of the camps across the Soviet Union. The boundary to extermination had been transgressed, even though for a short time only.

By the mid-1930s, the terror was eating its way into party and state authorities as well. The preceding purges in the party constituted the reason for this wave of terror; they had alerted political leaders to the fact that only a few party members really deserved their trust. From that point onward, the focus was no longer just on kulaks, class enemies, and enemy nations striving for the destruction of the Soviet Union. Now the enemy appeared to be at work in the party, the military, and industrial enterprises, and among state authorities as well. This conviction seems to have become firmly fixed in the minds of Stalin and his followers, as the foreign-policy threat to the Soviet Union emanating from Nazi Germany and the authoritarian governments of central and eastern Europe and of Asia grew. In view of this menace, the defiance by peasants in the empire's multiethnic frontier regions and the failure of the Soviet planned economy appeared in an entirely different light to the Stalinist leadership. Accordingly, it was the responsibility of the Communist elites to meet this danger by means of terror. But when the powerful patronage systems dominating state and party in the Soviet Union resisted Stalin's demands for the exercise of excessive terror, violence struck the inner circle of power as well. The period between 1936 and 1938 witnessed the self-destruction of party and state authorities, the physical annihilation of the economic elite and of the Soviet officer corps. Show trials, denunciations, and vigilance campaigns created an atmosphere of fear and fright in which the terror took on a life of its own and continuously supplied the leaders with new evidence of their enemies' perniciousness. Thus, terror spawned enemies and the enemies spawned terror. There was no escape from this vicious circle as long as Stalin and his followers remained unwilling to put an end to the self-perpetuating horror.

To be sure, an order issued by Stalin in 1939 ended the worst excesses of terror; but the atmosphere of suspicion and all-embracing conspiracy continued even after the Great Terror. Moreover, it was liable at any moment to produce terror once again, just as it did during the occupation of Poland and the Baltic republics from 1939 to 1941, during World War II, and in the territories recaptured by the Red Army after 1944. Not least of all, this connection is underscored by the terror against the peasants between 1947 and 1948, against alleged traitors to their own country and "cosmopolitan" Jews accused by the regime of being in the pay of Western secret services, and against the nationalist resistance in the western regions of the Soviet Union.

Stalin and his followers were brutal characters caught in a deep sense of insecurity, believing in the immanence and imminence of betrayal and conspiracies, and failing to conceive of any other way of eliminating them but by exercising terror. They fashioned a world that matched their conceptions and that they could not escape from anymore. One might also argue that they fell victim to their own persecution complex. The terror died along with Stalin himself, not only because the violent dictator had died, but also because in the 1950s the political leaders had actually managed to establish their power firmly and therefore ceased to mistrust the population and cast suspicion on anyone. The institutionalization of power and the nationalization of the Soviet Union spelled at the same time the end of the terror. Most likely, the rule of terror practiced by Mao in China and Pol Pot in Cambodia would call for a similar assessment.

See alsoPurges; Soviet Union; Stalin, Joseph; Terrorism.