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Assignment in Utopia

By eugene lyons.

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Review by George Orwell of

Assignment in Utopia   by Eugene Lyons

in   New English Weekly , 9 June 1938

To get the full sense of   our ignorance as to what is really happening in the U.S.S.R., it is worth trying to translate the most sensational Russian event of the past two years, the Trotskyist trials, into English terms. Make the necessary adjustments, let Left be Right and Right be Left, and you get something like this:

Mr Winston Churchill, now in exile in Portugal, is plotting to overthrow the British Empire and establish Communism in England. By the use of unlimited Russian money he has succeeded in building up a huge Churchillite organization which includes members of Parliament, factory managers, Roman Catholic bishops and practically the whole of the Primrose League. Almost every day some dastardly act of sabotage is laid bare sometimes a plot to blow up the House of Lords, some times an outbreak of foot and mouth disease in the Royal racing-stables. Eighty percent of the Beefeaters at the Tower are discovered to be agents of the Comintern. A high official of the Post Office admits brazenly to having embezzled postal orders to the tune of £5,000,000 and also to having committed   lèse majeste   by drawing moustaches on postage stamps. Lord Nuffield, after a seven-hour interrogation by Mr Norman Birkett, confesses that ever since 1920 he has been fomenting strikes in his own factories. Casual half-inch paras, in every issue of the newspapers announce that fifty more Churchillite sheep-stealers have been shot in Westmorland or that the proprietress of a village shop in the Cotswolds has been transported to Australia for sucking the bull's-eyes and putting them back in the bottle. And meanwhile the Churchillites (or Churchillite-Harmsworthites as they are called after Lord Rothermere's execution) never cease from proclaiming that it is they who are the real defenders of capitalism and that Chamberlain and the rest of his gang are no more than a set of Bolsheviks in disguise.

Anyone who has followed the Russian trials knows this is scarcely a parody . The questions arises, could anything like this happen in England? Obviously it could not. From our point of view the whole thing is not merely incredible but a genuine conspiracy, it is next door to incredible as a frame up. It is simply a dark mystery, of which the only seizable fact - sinister is its way - is that Communists over here regard it as a good advertisement for Communism.

Meanwhile the truth about Stalin's régime, if only we could get hold of it, is of the first importance. Is it Socialism, or is it a peculiar form of state capitalism? All the political controversies that have made life hideous for two years past really circle around this question, though for several reasons it is seldom brought into the foreground. It is difficult to go to Russia, once there it is impossible to make adequate investigations, and all one's ideas on the subject have to be drawn from books which are so fulsomely ‘for' or venomously ‘against' that the prejudice stinks a mile away. Mr Lyons's book is definitely in the ‘against' class but gives the impression of being much more reliable than most. It is obvious from his manner of writing he is not a vulgar propagandist, and he was in Russia a long time (1928-34) as a correspondent for the United Press Agency having been sent there on Communist recommendation. Like many others who have gone there full of hope, he was gradually disillusioned, and unlike some others he finally chose to tell the truth about it. It is an unfortunate fact that any hostile criticism of the present Russian régime is liable to be taken as propaganda   against Socialism ; all socialists are aware of this, and it does not make for an honest discussion.

The years that Mr Lyons spent in Russia were years of appalling hardship, culminating in the Ukraine famine of 1933, which a number estimated at not less than three million people starved to death. Now, no doubt, after the success of the Second Five Year Plan, the physical conditions have improved, but there seems no reason for thinking that the social atmosphere is greatly different. The system that Mr Lyons describes does not   seem to be very different from Fascism. All real power is concentrated in the hands of two or three million people, the town proletariat, theoretically the heirs of the revolution, having been robbed by the elementary right to strike; more recently by the introduction of the internal passport, they have been reduced to a status resembling serfdom. The G.P.U. are everywhere, everyone lives in constant terror of denunciation, freedom of speech and of the press are obliterated to an extent we can hardly imagine. There are periodical waves of terror, sometimes the ‘liquidation' of kulaks or Nepmen, sometimes some monstrous state trial at which people who have been in prison for months or years are suddenly dragged forth to make incredible confessions, while their children publish articles in the newspapers saying ‘I repudiate my father as a Trotskyist serpent.' Meanwhile the invisible Stalin is worshipped in terms that would have made Nero blush. This -- at great length and in much detail -- is the picture Mr Lyons presents, and I do not believe he has misrepresented the facts. He does, however, show signs of being embittered by his experiences, and I think he probably exaggerates the amount of discontent prevailing among the Russians themselves.

He once succeeded in interviewing Stalin, and found him human, simple and likeable. It is worth noticing that H. G. Wells said the same thing, and it is a fact that Stalin, at any rate on the cinematograph, has a likeable face. Is it not also recorded that Al Capone was the best of husbands and fathers, and that Joseph Smith (of brides in the bath fame) was sincerely loved by the first of his seven wives and always returned between murders?

Notes in relation to Orwell's above parody of the Moscow Show Trials:

•    Lord Nuffield   - was the UK 's leading car manufacturer.   http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Morris,_1st_Viscount_Nuffield

•    Norman Birkett , was an eminent lawyer at the time; one time Liberal MP who later went on to become the UK 's main War Crimes' trial judge at Nuremberg http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norman_Birkett,_1st_Baron_Birkett

•    Bulls' Eyes , used to be popular English sweets, which from personal memory, were actually the size of actual eye balls with the texture & consistency of rock-hard, ivory pool-balls, no doubt given to children since Edwardian days & by completely filling their small mouths, kept them quiet, as proverbially; 'children should be seen and not heard'!

•    The   Primrose League   – now defunct, was a popular 19th Century Conservative society which upheld capitalist principles and apparently named after Disraeli's favourite flower and conceived by Churchill's father, Randolph.   http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Primrose_League

•  The brothers; Alfred & Harold   Harmsworth   – AKA Lord Rothermere & Lord Northcliffe; were British newspaper magnates. h ttp://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/BUrothermere.htm

•  And finally,   Westmorland , is an archaic term for a small rural county in the North-West of England's Lake District, which became part of Cumbria in the 1970s, where the sheep were and presumably still are the predominant inhabitants.   http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Westmorland

Notes on the Historical Significance of this review...

1) Orwell's stated in his 1947 Preface to the Ukrainian Edition of   Animal Farm   :    "Thus the main outlines of the story were in my mind over a period of six years before it was actually written [in 1943]" ,   which would have coincided with his reading & reviewing of Lyon's book. Indeed there is to my mind, a notable similarity between Orwell's above Churchillite parody and the 'fairy tale' style of writing he later used in   Animal Farm .

2) Orwell mistakenly called the 'NKVD', the ‘GPU', four years after their change of name; he was not up-to-date with Soviet secret police nomenclature, despite personally being on the ‘wrong' side of their modus opernedi in 1937 during the Spanish Civil War. He was also probably not 'au fait' about previous Soviet shenagigans over the Holodomor, until such time as after his experiences of Spain, when Eugene Lyons' words would have been music to his ears; and especially realising that Lyons mentions Gareth's murder.

4) As an aside, Lyons and Orwell both specifically use the phrase ‘ human being(s) ' in their descriptions of Gareth exposing the famine. In Animal Farm:

It was vitally necessary to conceal this fact from the outside world. Emboldened by the collapse of the windmill, the human beings were inventing fresh lies about Animal Farm. Once again it was being put about that all the animals were dying of famine and disease, and that they were continually fighting among themselves and had resorted to cannibalism and infanticide... [ see here ] And, here in Lyons' Assignment in Utopia, when he wrote; 'Poor Gareth Jones must have been the most surprised human being alive when the facts he so painstakingly garnered from our mouths were snowed under by our denials" . [ See here ]

3) Lyons' book is most probably Orwell's first realisation of Duranty being worthy of inclusion in his controversial, 'deathbed', MI5 crypto-Communist list! FYI - Lyons' 550-page book contains just one 10-page chapter on the famine, and in the above review, he chose to remark only upon this subject and Lyons' personal meeting with Stalin; though nothing from the rest of Lyons' book is mentioned, bar the odd show trial.

4) Orwell's references the Ukrainian famine (and Duranty, obliquely) in his 1945 essay “The Prevention of Literature”,;

"The fog of lies and misinformation that surrounds such subjects as the Ukraine famine, the Spanish civil war, Russian policy in Poland, and so forth, is not due entirely to conscious dishonesty, but any writer or journalist who is fully sympathetic for the U.S.S.R. - sympathetic, that is, in the way the Russians themselves would want him to be - does have to acquiesce in deliberate falsification on important issues."

5) And finally from a Gareth perspective, if one accepts that Lyons' famine chapter (which relates Gareth's off-limits trek through Ukraine at the height of the famine) made a lasting impression upon Orwell; was he perhaps alluding to Gareth (who overcame both the difficulty of visiting the USSR as well as making independent observations), when Orwell wrote in this review?:

"It is difficult to go to Russia, once there it is impossible to make adequate investigations..."

Lyons acually wrote of Gareth's off-limits trek and subsequent murder, which certainly would have been noted by Orwell;:

"The first reliable report of the Russian famine was given to the world by an English journalist, a certain Gareth Jones, at one time secretary to Lloyd George. Jones had a conscientious streak in his make-up which took him on a secret journey into the Ukraine and a brief walking tour through its countryside. That same streak was to take him a few years later into the interior of China during political disturbances, and was to cost him his life at the hands of Chinese military bandits."

[Lyons clearly remarked upon Gareth's untimely murder by bandits in North China.; One might ponder whether Orwell did too, even back in 1938, having his own suspicions as to who might have been behind Gareth's untimely death; namely, possibly the NKVD?

One might also like to cross-reference this possible Soviet retributional notion in relation to Gareth, with Orwell's passage from his 1945, 'Prevention of Literature' essay, hen Orwell wrote:

“A heretic-political, moral, religious, or aesthetic-was one who refused to outrage his own conscience. His outlook was summed up in the words of the Revivalist hymn:

Dare to be a Daniel

Dare to stand alone

Dare to have a purpose firm

Dare to make it known 

To bring this hymn up-to-date one would have to add a 'Don't' at the beginning of each line. For it is the peculiarity of our age that the rebels against the existing order, at any rate the most numerous and characteristic of them, are also rebelling against the idea of individual integrity. 'Daring to stand alone' is ideologically criminal as well as practically dangerous…”  ]

CLICK HERE   for Nigel Colley's 'work-in-progress' critique on whether Gareth was possibly behind Orwell's naming of 'Mr Jones', the farmer in his fairy tale;   Animal Farm ?

Also see Nigel's Colley's appraisal of Orwell's symbolism of the Holodomor in   Animal Farm -   Click HERE

Finally, to read an online transcript of Lyons' chapter 'The Press Corps Conceals a Famine' from Assignemt in Utopia, then please   Click HERE

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Assignment in Utopia by Eugene Lyons

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Eugene Lyons was born July 1, 1898, to a Jewish family in the town of Uzlyany, now part of Belarus but then part of the Russian empire.

His parents were Nathan Lyons and Minnie Privin. His parents emigrated to the U.S., and he grew up among the teeming tenements of the Lower East Side of New York City.

"I thought myself a 'socialist' almost as soon as I thought at all," Lyons recalled in his memoirs. As a youth he attended a Socialist Sunday School on East Broadway, where he sang socialist hymns such as "The Internationale" and "The Red Flag."

He later enrolled as a member of the Young People’s Socialist League, the youth section of the Socialist Party of America (SPA).

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Assignment in Utopia

• ISBN-10 0887388566
• ISBN-13 978-0887388569
• Editorial Routledge
• Fecha de publicación 31 Enero 1991
• Idioma Inglés
• Dimensiones 6.25 x 1.25 x 9 pulgadas
• Número de páginas 681 páginas
• Ver todos los detalles

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Biografía del autor.

Eugene Lyons (1898—1985) was journalist and author of numerous books about the Soviet Union, and the danger of Communist hegemony. He spent his mature years as an editor at the Reader's Digest.

Ellen Frankel Paul is deputy director of the Social Philosophy and Policy Center and is professor of political science and philosophy at Bowling Green State University. She is also an adjunct scholar at the Cato Institute. Her writings have appeared in numerous journals, including Public Affairs Quarterly, Harvard Journal of Law and Public Policy, and the Canadian Journal of Law and Jurisprudence. Her books include Liberty , Property, and Government: Constitutional Interpretation before the New Deal, and Totalitarianism at the Crossroads.

Detalles del producto

• Editorial ‏ : ‎ Routledge (31 Enero 1991)
• Idioma ‏ : ‎ Inglés
• Rústica ‏ : ‎ 681 páginas
• ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0887388566
• ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0887388569
• Dimensiones ‏ : ‎ 6.25 x 1.25 x 9 pulgadas
• nº10,159 en Comunismo y Socialismo (Libros)
• nº13,983 en Historia de Rusia (Libros)
• nº16,547 en Libros de Política Europea

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Spartacus Educational

Pravda (Truth) was a newspaper published by Leon Trotsky in Geneva and Vienna between 3rd October, 1908 to 23rd April, 1912. It resumed publication in St Petersburg by the Bolsheviks on 22nd April, 1913. The offices of the newspaper was transferred to Moscow on 3rd March, 1918.

Primary Sources

(1) eugene lyons , assignment in utopia (1937).

The Soviet press is officially owned and more rigidly controlled than any other of the state properties. It is frankly and proudly a kept press-kept by the government, the Communist Party, the trade-unions, which are but different names for the same centralized power. The very memory of an "independent" newspaper, in serious disagreement with the government, has faded out. Every sentence in every paper has been censored. Not merely what it actually says but the inflections and overtones of its dreaded voice are political weather-vanes to the initiate. Its very silences are portentous. An editorial is the equivalent of an official pro-nunciamento. The faint hint of a new attitude toward some sector of the population in a random article may foreshadow destiny for millions. The kind of news published, the stress placed on an occurrence, the failure to mention certain events at home or abroad, all have an importance they do not possess where the press is relatively free. The whole ethical baggage of journalism in democratic countries has been thrown overboard by the Bolsheviks. No claim is made for "unbiased" or "objective" reporting. No pretense is made of newspaper independence and no reference is ever made to the freedom or dignity of the Fourth Estate. All this baggage, in fact, the communists regard as a piece of bourgeois hypocrisy. The press is not primarily a conveyor of news at all. It is first of all an agency of the Soviet regime in accomplishing its political economic objectives. Its full force is always focused upon the achievement of specific practical results. In the editorial offices on the top floor of the slate-gray five-story Izvestza building, a prominent Russian newspaperman was explaining this to me one evening. "But how about truth and facts:" I prodded him. "Here am I, a stranger in your midst. What you print is my chief source of information. Can I believe it." "If it's printed, it's truth for us. We don't know and don't care about bourgeois notions of facts. We Soviet journalists are not just reporters. We don't boast of standing above the turmoil like recording angels. On the contrary, we are in the thick of the fight, pioneers in the job of changing our country. If certain information retards this work, we would be crazy to print it. As far as we are concerned, it is then neither news nor truth. It becomes plain counter-revolution." "Well," I smiled, "maybe that explains the first political anecdote I heard in your country. I understand that it's your oldest and best-known popular Soviet joke. I refer..." He laughed. "I know, I know. There is no truth in the News (Izvestza) and no news in the Truth (Brava)." The surface of the Soviet press is painfully drab and monotonous. When news and views are prescribed from a central source there is small margin for originality of style or content. The stilted repetitious language of the Party "theses" prevails throughout, since safety for the news writer and commentator lies in conformity. Originality, even as to the phrasing of a thought, is dangerously on the borderline of heresy. Why risk a startling metaphor or an individual turn of thought when the orthodox formulation of every current theme, from the campaign to raise more potatoes to the drive to liquidate a million kulak families, is at hand?

A People's Tragedy

Russian Revolution

Hugo Dewar 1957

The Moscow Trials ‘Revised’

Source : Problems of Communism , Volume 6, no 1, January-February 1957. Scanned and prepared for the Marxist Internet Archive by Paul Flewers.

For many years Soviet propagandists and pro-Soviet Western observers presented ‘Soviet justice’ as a forward step in the advancement of legal science. Thus, the British jurist DN Pritt wrote, in a contemporary eulogy of the Moscow purge trials of the 1930s, that ‘the judicature and the prosecuting attorney of the USSR [Andrei Vyshinsky] have established their reputation among the legal systems of the world’. [1] Pritt was not at all disconcerted by the singular fact, unparalleled in Western jurisprudence, that the accused in the Soviet trials did not raise a finger to defend themselves, but instead confessed with seeming eagerness to the most heinous crimes. The Soviet government, he blandly stated, ‘would have preferred that all or most of the accused should have pleaded not guilty and contested the case’. [2]

The naïveté, or wilful blindness, of such statements has long been apparent. As early as 1937, an independent commission of inquiry conducted an exhaustive investigation into the Moscow trials of 1936 and 1937 and found them to be clear-cut travesties of justice. [3] The commission’s findings were bolstered by an ever-mounting accumulation of evidence regarding the methods employed to produce the victims’ obviously abnormal eagerness to sign their own death warrants.

Today not even the most naïve apologist can continue his self-deception. At the Twentieth Congress of the CPSU the myth was broken for all time when Nikita Khrushchev, in a secret report to a closed session of the congress, revealed the depths to which Soviet ‘justice’ had sunk:

Stalin originated the concept ‘enemy of the people’. This term automatically rendered unnecessary that the ideological errors of a man or men engaged in a controversy be proven... The formula was specifically introduced for the purpose of physically annihilating such individuals... [4]

It is significant, however, that, in denouncing ‘violations of socialist law’, Khrushchev made no direct mention either of the show trial as such, or of its exportation to the satellites. His remarks about Zinoviev and Kamenev and about the ‘annihilation’ of Lenin’s closest colleagues as ‘enemies of the party’ were furthermore clear attempts to restrict the discussion to ‘violations of socialist law’ in the period following Kirov’s assassination in December 1934 – to the great trials and purges of the 1930s. [5]

This effort is a transparent indication that the present collective leadership cannot make a decisive, radical break with their Stalinist past. It is to Stalin that the present Soviet leaders owe their positions, and it was during his reign that their methods of ‘governing’ and dispensing ‘justice’ were decisively moulded. That is why Khrushchev and his colleagues will not admit that the genesis of the Stalin-type inquisitorial trial goes much farther back than 1934, indeed, as far back as 1922.

The idea of exploiting the judicial trial of political opponents for the purpose of ‘educating’ the masses was first given concrete expression in 1922, when a trial of 22 prominent members of the Social Revolutionary Party was staged. At that time the technique of the show trial had not been perfected, and only ten police stooges consented to play the role of cringing penitents and government propagandists. At first, the state was content with this number and even permitted the rest to defend themselves stoutly. They openly proclaimed their political convictions and even refused to recognise the court. Just prior to the trial, the Bolsheviks entered into an agreement in Berlin with representatives of the international socialist movement by which several prominent socialists were invited to participate in the defence; and in the early stages of the trial they were very active on behalf of the accused. As the trial progressed, however, the intolerable contradictions between accepted conceptions of justice and a Soviet-sponsored political trial were revealed. Bit by bit the essential elements of the show trial, with which the world later became familiar, emerged.

The presiding judge struck the keynote for the proceedings by declaring that the court would be guided not by objective considerations but by the interests of the government. During the course of the trial Bukharin declared the Berlin agreement null and void, and this, coupled with the prosecution’s obstructive tactics, caused the foreign socialists to withdraw. Perhaps most important in the development of the show trial, however, was the first utilisation of the technique of agitating against the accused outside of court. Yuri Pyatakov, the president of the tribunal, spoke at one of the mass demonstrations, as did Bukharin, who applauded the role played in the trial by the ten who had ‘confessed’. [6]

In the course of the next few years the show trial was gradually brought to a high stage of perfection. ‘Evidence’ was manufactured and, by means of inhuman tortures, the accused were brought into court ‘prepared’ to cooperate in arranging their own destruction. During the course of the so-called Shakhty trial (1928), for example, a group of engineers, personifying the ‘bourgeois specialists’, took the blame for the country’s chronic economic ills and accused foreign ‘interventionist circles’ of directing their sabotage. [7] By 1930 the technique had been further perfected, and during the Industrial Party trial every single one of the accused confessed to ‘planned’ sabotage in drafting or implementing the First Five-Year Plan. One of the witnesses, brought in under heavy GPU guard, was Professor Osadchy, formerly a member of the CEC (Central Economic Council) of the Supreme Soviet, and assistant chairman of the State Planning Commission. Incredible as it may seem, Osadchy, who was one of the prosecutors at the Shakhty trial, confessed to having plotted with the very men whom he had sentenced to death in 1928! [8]

Stalin’s speech at the Sixteenth Congress (June-July 1930) gave at least the outward rationale for all the great Moscow trials. [9] His thesis was that whenever the contradictions inherent within the capitalist system grow acute, the bourgeoisie tries to solve them by turning on the Soviet Union. By the bourgeoisie Stalin meant primarily foreign nations, but his main purpose was to justify the purge of internal opposition to his rule. The vast international ‘plots’ which were uncovered regularly involved certain native Communists; often these were among the most celebrated of the revolutionary heroes, their ‘crimes’ consisting in their opposition to Stalin’s dictatorship. Without respect to their previous service, these men were condemned as saboteurs working in collaboration with the outside enemy to wreck the economy of the Soviet Union.

Thus, the Great Purge, as well as the thousands of unpublicised local purges, served the double purpose of removing those who opposed Stalin and of providing for the population an ‘explanation’ of the continuing low standard of living. Vyshinsky made the point in the following manner:

It is now clear why there are interruptions of supplies here and there, why with our riches and abundance of products, there is a shortage first of one thing and then of another. It is these traitors who are responsible. [10]

Vyshinsky also underlined the connection between the various trials. Stalin’s thesis had been proved, he said: all the trials had uncovered ‘systematically conducted espionage... the devilish work of foreign intelligence...’. [11]

Characteristically, although it was ostensibly against Stalin’s thesis and its implications that Khrushchev railed at the Twentieth Congress, his anger was aroused most of all by the fact that Stalin’s wrath had been turned against the party itself:

Using Stalin’s formulation... the provocateurs who had infiltrated the state security organs together with conscienceless careerists... [launched] mass terror against party cadres... It should suffice to say that the number of arrests based on charges of counter-revolutionary crimes had grown ten times between 1936 and 1937. [12]

Khrushchev summed up the Stalin era in anguished tones:

In the main, and in actuality, the only proof of guilt used, against all norms of current legal science, was the ‘confession’ of the accused himself; and, as subsequent probing proved, ‘confessions’ were acquired through physical pressures against the accused. [13]

Khrushchev’s speech is a masterpiece of hypocrisy. To be sure, of the 1966 delegates to the Seventeenth Party Congress (1934), 1108 were arrested on charges of counter-revolutionary activity. But Khrushchev well knows that it was not a question of ‘subsequent probing’: every leading Communist in the Soviet Union knew at the time what was going on. They were aware that the ‘confessions’ were shot through with contradictions and obvious absurdities; they knew that the trials were frame-ups.

As a matter of fact, Khrushchev’s speech itself corroborates our previous evidence that the Politburo was well aware of what was going on:

At the February-March Central Committee Plenum in 1937 many members actually questioned the rightness of the established course regarding mass repressions under the pretext of combating ‘two-facedness’. [14]

Khrushchev thus confirms that opposition to Stalin’s iron-heel policy was expressed even within the Politburo. People who had employed the most despicable methods against both non-party and party opponents began to voice ‘doubts’ when the police terror menaced them. Among those who ventured to speak up in 1937 was Pavel Postyshev, candidate member of the Politburo. Indeed, Khrushchev said that Postyshev expressed his doubts ‘most ably’, as did Stanislav Kossior, a member of the Politburo – both were liquidated. Other prominent Stalinist victims of the monster they themselves helped create were Vlas Chubar, Yan Rudzutak, Grigory Petrovsky and Robert Eikhe: all men of the Lenin era who had thrown in their lot with Stalin in his struggle for power.

How was it, then, that Molotov, Mikoyan, Voroshilov, Khrushchev and others survived? They saved themselves either by keeping their mouths shut or, where their closeness to Stalin made this impossible, by sedulously fostering the cult of the ‘brilliant leader’. Certainly Khrushchev was not unaware of what was going on. Kossior, for example, was purged in the Ukraine while he was closely associated with Khrushchev.

Without speculating about the possible splits and rivalries within the top leadership of the CPSU revealed by the varying degrees of vehemence with which individual Soviet leaders condemned Stalin’s ‘cult of personality’, the central goal of the leadership as a whole is perfectly obvious. Khrushchev and his supporters are vitally concerned with ‘rehabilitating’ the party and strengthening its authority vis-à-vis the police apparatus. The terrors of the Stalinist era left party cadres either demoralised and spiritless or, much worse, cynically and brutally opportunistic. In any event, the leadership felt that the support of the new generation of Communists – the managerial caste and the intellectuals – required assurances that the days of arbitrary terror were over. In Khrushchev’s words:

Arbitrary behaviour by one person encouraged and permitted arbitrariness in others. Mass arrests and deportations of many thousands of people, execution without trial and without normal investigation created conditions of insecurity, fear and even desperation. [15]

The exportation of the macabre and revolting confessional trial to Eastern Europe was never much of a success. The process that had transformed the CPSU into a terrorised and docile instrument of the leader took 14 years; in Poland, Bulgaria and Hungary it was telescoped into less than four years – somewhat longer in Czechoslovakia and Rumania. During this time the weak satellite Communist parties (only in Czechoslovakia could the Communists claim any sizeable following) were deprived of their ablest leaders. It was clear from the trials, moreover, that these leaders were imprisoned and executed because they attempted to stand up to the Soviet Union and that the leaders who remained were mere Soviet satraps. The confession trials of ‘national Communists’ therefore destroyed what little basis the Communist parties had for claiming to represent national interests, or even the interests of the industrial workers. At the same time, they failed dismally to destroy either national sentiment among the people or Titoist tendencies within the rank-and-file of the Communist parties.

Quite on the contrary, there can be no doubt that the confession trials in Eastern Europe played a great role in enhancing anti-Soviet feeling and in undermining the Communist parties’ faith in themselves. The enormous crowds that attended the reinternment of Rajk in Hungary after his posthumous rehabilitation were symptomatic of the anti-Soviet mood that had been generated by the ‘educational’ methods of Soviet-inspired ‘justice’. The bloodless revolt in Poland and the heroic uprising of the Hungarian workers, peasants and intellectuals were due in large part to the exposure of Soviet methods and aims which resulted from the export of the ‘modern inquisition’. The people of the satellite nations share with the Russian people a deep and bitter hatred of the secret police, and a deathless desire to end the insufferable horrors which the confession trial represented.

That the Soviet leaders were, and remain, keenly aware of this was implicit in their repudiation at the Twentieth Congress of the Stalinist inquisition and in the gradual steps that have been instituted to correct some of the more objectionable features of the police and judicial apparatus. They obviously are attempting to restore public confidence in a party and system that had become thoroughly and openly compromised. In so doing, however, they paradoxically underlined still further the bankruptcy of the system that claimed to have produced that ‘glorious workers’ paradise’, the ‘most advanced country in the world’, and they reveal nakedly their inability to cast off the imprint of this system of terror and ‘educational justice’.

1. DN Pritt, The Moscow Trial Was Fair (Russia Today, London, nd).

2. DN Pritt, The Zinoviev Trial (Gollancz, London, 1936).

3. This Commission was headed by the noted American philosopher, John Dewey. Its findings were published in two books: The Case of Leon Trotsky (Secker and Warburg, London, 1937); and Not Guilty (Secker and Warburg, London, 1938).

4. The Anti-Stalin Campaign and International Communism: A Selection Of Documents (Columbia University Press, New York, 1956), p. 13.

5. For a full discussion of these trials see this author’s The Modern Inquisition (Allan Wingate, London, 1953).

6. The most complete record of this trial is in VS Voitinski, The Twelve Who Are About To Die (Delegation of the Party of Socialists-Revolutionists, Berlin, 1922). The death sentences passed against the accused were never carried out.

7. No official records of this trial have been published. Of secondary sources, the best are HH Tiltman, The Terror in Europe (Frederick A Stokes, New York, 1932); and Eugene Lyons, Assignment in Utopia (Harcourt, Brace, New York, 1937), especially pp. 114-33.

8. Andrew Rothstein (ed), Wreckers on Trial (Modern Books, London, 1931).

9. Some of the sources on the most important Moscow trials are the following: on the 1931 Menshevik trial – The Menshevik Trial (Modern Books, London, 1931); on the 1933 Metropolitan-Vickers Industrial Company Trial – The Case of NP   Vitvitsky... [and others] Charged With Wrecking Activities at Power Stations in the Soviet Union (three volumes, State Law Publishing House, Moscow, 1933); on the 1936 trial – The Case of the Trotskyite – Zinovievite Terrorist Centre (People’s Commissariat of Justice of the USSR, Moscow, 1936); on the 1937 trial – Report of Court Proceedings in the Case of the Anti-Soviet Trotskyite Centre (People’s Commissariat of Justice of the USSR, Moscow, 1937); on the 1938 trial – Report of Court Proceedings in the Case of the Anti-Soviet ‘Bloc of Rights and Trotskyites ’ (People’s Commissariat of Justice of the USSR, Moscow, 1938).

10. Report of Court Proceedings in the Case of the Anti-Soviet ‘Bloc of Rights and Trotskyites ’, pp. 636-37.

11. Report of Court Proceedings in the Case of the Anti-Soviet ‘Bloc of Rights and Trotskyites ’, pp. 636-37.

12. The Anti-Stalin Campaign , p. 30.

13. The Anti-Stalin Campaign , p. 12.

14. The Anti-Stalin Campaign , p. 29.

15. The Anti-Stalin Campaign , p. 14.

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