The Workshop Of The Revolution. I. N. Steinberg 1953
Only those who have felt its heavy hand, can know the true meaning of the Bolshevik terror. Over the years since the revolution the citizens of Russia have grown inured to its tightening grip. Its various manifestations which, in the beginning, had mortified and shamed the soul, have come to be taken for granted. And men have adapted themselves to its ways as they do to a slowly diminishing bread ration.
Were you to ask a weary Russian today, “What is terror?” he would be unable to describe the system of violence that oppresses him. He would point to one or another aspect of the terror, which particularly strikes his eye-senseless arrests, or mass executions, or the high-handed ways of officials. And, of course, this Russian would be mistaken; for terror is no individual act, no isolated, enhance expression of a regime’s momentary fury.
Terror is a system of violence, dispensed from above. Terror is a planned and quasi-legal program to intimidate and terrify a people into submission. Terror is a detailed, well thought-out plan of threat and punishment by which the regime bends a population to its absolute will.
And who wields this power? Who holds the threat over the heads of the entire population? If there is no alien invader, could a people thus oppress itself?
Of course not. In such a system there can be no rule by a majority. Government by terror is always government by minority, a minority that senses its isolation and fears it. Perpetual panic drives a terrorist regime to spread its net ever farther afield, to include ever new sections of the people among its enemies.
As part of the system of terror, the “enemy of the revolution” makes his appearance and he becomes the scapegoat for all the revolution’s failures and the people’s sufferings. As long as the revolution is on the march, the “enemy” does not loom important. But whenever the revolution’s luck changes, he seems closer at hand, becomes more visible, more tangible. As long as the revolution’s path is guided by a majority of the people, it need not fear the “enemy”; he can be dealt with easily. But whenever power is seized by a fearful, lonely, suspicious minority, the “enemy of the revolution” (or the “suspect” of the French Revolution) grows into a colossus casting its shadow across the entire country until, finally, “everybody but the rulers,” becomes an enemy of the revolution. The “enemy” becomes identical with the people.
These, then-the rulers and the “enemy"-are the two participants in a system of terror. And what are the weapons trained on the “enemy"? Can one ever recount their number in full? They are too numerous; and the imagination of their wielders is prolific. The quantitative scale of the terror is determined not by the evidence of crime in individuals, but by the concept that all persons are “suspect”; and it thus becomes infinite. And the quality, the actual content of the terror, grows to unlimited proportions as a result of the principle: “All is permitted.” The minority, which rules by force, simplifies matters for itself by spreading in advance this principle of moral license. “All is permitted” toward the “enemy of the people"-these are the two guiding concepts of terror. In practice it amounts to the use of every means of violence and coercion against all. And this is done “in the name of the revolution,” in the name of the highest ideals aspired to by man.
Let us review the known forms of terror. No need to separate physical and psychological terror, for each act of repression contains both ingredients. It strikes some men directly and immediately; indirectly it will strike at others, at many more, at everyone.
Terror is murder, bloodshed, execution. But the death penalty is only the dome of the terrorist edifice. For terror has innumerable faces. It can be recognized even in the disbanding of lawful organizations such as Soviets, political parties, private charitable institutions. In all these the people’s active will found free expression. Without such outlets men turn into human dust. Terror is in the muzzling of free speech-everywhere along the vast stretches of the revolutionary land-at the most decisive moment in its history. Neither in print, at public meetings nor in organizations does the ruling power permit a single expression of dissent. And if even a word of criticism, protest or despair escapes from one who is too careless or too bold, the word dies in mid-air, either because no action results, or because its results are punishment for the speaker. His words are met only by the bleak, humiliating silence of the listeners around.
A people living in a land of terror can neither speak freely, nor learn the truth about themselves. Terror is in the heavy chains of censorship that shackle even a man’s thoughts and his creative energy. As a result, thought either freezes into icy silence or degenerates into slavish obedience. It is in the nature of human genius to pronounce the defiant, “I cannot be silent.” But in the land of terror the strictest bounds are set to this human impulse. And thus cowardice, trepidation and staleness of thought penetrate to every recess of consciousness.
Terror is in the tightly woven net of political surveillance with which the regime covers all cells and tissues of society. It is in the secret police which constantly watches-or pretends to watch-each man’s every move. Terror is in the sly, demonic methods of espionage, mutual denunciations and provocations that bare man’s innermost thoughts to the regime. Terror is in the scorn and mockery with which suspects are questioned; in the subtle contrivances of mental torture committed brazenly and more often in the name of “revolution and socialism.” Terror is in the prisons packed to overflowing with starving men and women, prisons whose gates rarely open even for sham amnesties. Terror is in the haphazard convictions that are as unpredictable as the political weather. Terror is in the whims of government careerists, playing politics with the heads of the condemned. Terror is in the arbitrary expropriations and requisitions which purport to aim at the wealthy, but which strike the weary and the poor.
But the most terrible aspect of terror is, of course, capital punishment. Like the “Sacred Guillotine” of former days, it stands again in the forefront of the “Revolution.” Its blade hangs suspended and, at any moment, may fall on any head, guilty or innocent. Terror is in the blood that is shed-mercilessly, senselessly.
Terror is in the cry, “To the wall!” which threatens men equally for failure to pay income tax or for desertion from the army, for withholding horses or grain, for high treason, for petty theft or reckless commercial gambles, for purposeful counter-revolutionary intrigue or a trifling “insult to the regime.”
Terror is in the fact that the cry, “To the wall!” has become an accepted norm, that in the process of reprisals against the weak and the helpless, the bestiality in man is given full sway. Terror is in the animal fear that paralyzes the will, that makes the strong tremble and delivers an entire people to the man with the gun.
Terror, finally, is in the mass executions of the innocent, when random members of the opposing classes, who fall into the hands of the regime, or who happen to be in its prisons, pay for other men’s guilt; terror is in the system of hostages, by which some are held responsible for the deeds of others.
Terror is in the fact that, to defend itself, the regime commits not one or another act of violence, but repeats all such acts endlessly, perpetually, so that they pervade every phase of the nation’s life. Terror is as real in its threat as it is in its acts. The constant threat itself is terror.
Terror creates two camps: the wielders of terror and the terrorized. To the first, terror is daring, toughness and defiance, the first chance, perhaps, in many centuries at self-assertion. To the others, it is grief, humiliation, dread. Between these two camps there can be no understanding, only bitterness and hatred. On one side there is intoxication with power, insolence and ever growing contempt for subordinates; in a word-domination. On the other side there is fear of punishment, resentment, silent envy, fawning on superiors; in a word-slavery. Two new classes are thus established, divided by a bottomless social and psychological abyss; the class of the Soviet Commissars and their henchmen, and the class of Soviet “subjects.”
This moral corruption of the regime in Soviet Russia is apparent not only in its relations to its subjects; it descends into the relations among the subjects themselves. Slavery, as it pervades the population, divides and crushes them. Mutual suspicion and distrust, the battle for a smile or favor from all-powerful superiors, the open or hidden betrayal of neighbors, the assumption of “protective coloring"-all of which is the re-enactment of the terror on a lower level, as it were, in miniature-all these attitudes and actions develop in terrifying measure among those sections of the people who swarm around the throne of the rulers. If all are slaves in relation to the state, then among the slaves each will turn on his neighbor. If terror from above hovers over the citizens, then there will be terror from below among the citizens. And it must be remembered that in Soviet Russia the extent of coercion from the regime is far greater and more all-embracing than in any other social structure. In the czarist or bourgeois order, the regime’s pressures were exerted only in specific fields: politics, religion, nationalism and, rarely, economics. The entire limitless sphere of the citizen’s personal life lay outside the grip of the armed state. But in Soviet Russia all aspects of personal, economic and social living have passed into the hands of state power-a power based exclusively on terror.
This, then, is Russia’s terror. Every group of the population is subjected to it; it covers every sphere of life. All that is done in Russia is done by coercion and derision; nothing by persuasion or agreement. Such a system of deliberately fostered anarchy would be disastrous to any nation. How much worse for Russia, the land only just emerging from centuries of serfdom! How much more dangerous when the evil heritage of czarism mingles with the poison of the new terror!