Analysis of the Great Terror

Sidimohammed Mbarki

Professor Whittaker

History 3352

Fall Ð''05

Wanderings Through an Inferno: An Analysis of the Great Terror as Seen Through the Eyes of Eugenia Semyonovna Ginzburg

The following paper will be an analysis of "The Great Terror," that is, the arrest and often execution of millions of Russian and Russian minorities from 1936 to 1938, carried out by the Soviet secret police, known as, and hereafter referred to as the NKVD. The analysis will use Eugenia Semyonovna Ginzburg's, a Russian professor and writer who was arrested early into the purges and experienced, as well as survived, it in its entirety, memoir a Journey Into the Whirlwind as a primary source. More specifically, it will focus on Ginzburg's arrest and subsequent imprisonment from 1936 to 1938, covered in part one of her memoir. The paper will be divided into three parts: the first will attempt to summarize part one of Journey Into the Whirlwind; the second will cover the experience of those targeted by the purges during their early Imprisonment and interrogation; the third will focus on Eugenia Ginzburg's attitude toward the Communist party and it's evolution throughout her experience.

I.

Before February 1937 Eugenia Ginzburg was a typical communist party member. Her fervent devotion to the communist party, the product of "a demagogic education and the mystic spell of Party slogans" (24), was as primal to her being and identity as her name. Ginzburg's position as a History Professor and writer on the local paper the "Red Tartary," made her part of the Russian Intelligentsia, (8) one of the groups targeted by Stalin's purges.

In 1937 Ginzburg was arrested under the charge of associating with "persons already condemned" (30), the condemned was a colleague of hers on the Red Tartary, Elvov, who was charged with being a Trotskyist for writing an article on the theory of "Permanent Revolution" not in accordance with the party line of his time (5). Ginzburg was later formally charged, after a harrowing interrogation process that included inhumane and illegal tactics, with being a "Trotskyist terroristÐ'... dedicated to the restoration of capitalism" (166) by way of an "underground terrorist organization" running out of the "Red Tartary" editorial office (173).

She was sentenced to serve 10 years in solitary confinement, because the only other alternative was death, Ginzburg was elated at the outcome (174).

Ginzburg went on to spend more than 2 years in "solitary confinement", from spring 1937 until spring 1939 (180, 226, 231, 250). In truth, by late 1937 the Soviet prison system was so filled that some prisoners in solitary confinement were given cellmates; Ginzburg was coupled with Julia Karepova a woman that had endured nearly the same journey as her (202-203). The two became in a way "sisters" (264), and would go on to support and help each other survive. By 1939, the soviet government realized that it wasn't economically viable to keep so many people out of work and subsequently sent them to gulags, hard-labor camps (258, 262). Part one of Journey into the Whirlwind ends with Ginzburg and her fellow prisoners being sent to these hard-labor camps (267-70).

II.

From the outset, the purges that occurred in the late 1930's were an organized and planned assault on specific groups within the Soviet Union. More specifically "purgesÐ'... were carried out strictly in accordance with a prearranged plan which affected this or that category of people quite irrespectively of the way they had actually behaved" (17). Such a systematic removal of innocent Soviet citizens from society could not occur if the masses did not think it to be justified. It was to this end that Soviet propaganda of the time promoted the idea of the existence of a vast underground terrorist organization that threatened the very fabric of communism.

The "first victims of the witch hunt" (22) were targeted because they belonged to a particular category of people. Eugenia Ginzburg, for example, was targeted because as a writer and professor she belonged to the Russian intelligentsia. For that same reason many of the famous Russian writers, like Boris Pilnyak and Osip Mandelshtam (133) to name a few, as well as most of Ginzburg's colleagues at the university (8, 77, 101) and on the "Red Tartary" (94) were imprisoned. Other groups targeted were those in the opposition, like the Social Revolutionaries (104, 111), or those who had ever been connected with them, like the communist Pitkovskaya who was arrested because her husband once fought for the opposition (17-19), or a factory manager who was imprisoned because he was in the printing business historically known for being a Menshavik trade (28).

The early victims were accused and charged with roughly the same things, either they were accused of having and spreading ideas outside of the party line, i.e. Trotsky, Plekhanov, (8, 28) or of belonging to an "underground terrorist organization" (173) responsible for the murder of Kirov and whose goal was to overthrow communism in favor of capitalism (175). Those who knew people accused of holding "illegal views" or being terrorist were also arrested for "lack of vigilance," (8) or for "associating with the enemy" (11, 18). At this point in time, almost every arrest was written about in local Communist Party papers that told "exaggerated, not quite real" (31) accounts of what happened, this helped instill fear into the masses of a widespread underground opposition and would allow for Soviet society's' acceptance of future purges.

As the Purges became more widespread, because "every region and every national republic was obligedÐ'... to have its own crop of enemies so as not to lag behind the others" (25) the charges and reasoning behind arrest became pettier. Many non-party members, for example, were arrested for telling political jokes (106). Ginzburg even tells of someone arrested for hearing political jokes and not denouncing the person who told the jokes (110). So too did the charges become less plausible, one elderly woman, for example, was charged with seducing a diplomat (159). The author notes that by July 1937 "no one cared any longer whether the charges bore the slightest semblance of probability" (159, 166). In addition, quotas were passed down the NKVD that called for the imprisonment