All this caused widespread criticism amongst Party members. Some of them were passing the carefully suppressed facts on to Trotsky, whose newspaper quoted them and stated that a ‘fundamental change’ must soon take place in the leadership. In 1933, Stalin reacted by having thousands of Party members expelled. His former colleagues Zinoviev and Kamenev were exiled to Siberia.
In ancient Rome, Stalin would have been murdered. In Soviet Russia, his secret police were able to surround him with a wall of security. But Stalin’s wife, who had become increasingly concerned about the Terror, committed suicide in 1932. Stalin, a typical Right Man, was deeply shaken by this, and at a meeting of the Politburo, offered to resign. There was a long silence – no doubt the members could hardly believe their luck, yet were afraid to show any sign of enthusiasm. Finally, Molotov broke the silence by declaring that Stalin had the Party’s full confidence. Stalin never again repeated his offer.
But his paranoia increased. Surrounded by people who wished him dead, he may have felt that the best form of defence was attack. In 1934, the Party secretary, Kirov, was murdered. Stalin decided it was time to get rid of anyone who might harbour the slightest opposition to his dictatorship – particularly older Party members. After the trial of the Kirov assassins, a commission was told to ‘liquidate the enemies of the people’. Soon, sixteen leading Party members, including Zinoviev and Kamenev, were on trial, accused of conspiring to overthrow the government. All were found guilty and executed immediately.
What astonished the rest of the world was that many of the accused admitted their guilt in court. And this continued to be true in later ‘show trials’ that continued for the next two years, until 1938. The ‘confessions’ seemed absurd – and, in fact, were later shown to be absurdities. The general view was that the accused had been tortured, or kept for long periods without sleep, to induce confession. But in Darkness at Noon, Arthur Koestler dramatised a theory that later proved to have some foundation in fact: that these older revolutionaries were caught in a trap of their own Marxism. They had fought for the revolution; now it had come, and they were superfluous. They were being asked to make a final sacrifice for the revolution. If they refused, and went to their death denouncing Stalin, they were handing a weapon to the capitalists and undermining the revolution. In effect, Stalin was behaving like a gunman who grabs a hostage as a living shield; if the old communists dared to shoot, they risked killing communism.
As the show trials continued, there were mass arrests all over the country. Workers, clergymen, civil servants, intellectuals, all were ‘interrogated’ in the prisons; one authority estimates that between seven and eight million people were executed between 1934 and 1938. These included enormous numbers of Party members – of the 140 members of the Central Committee who had been elected in 1934, only fifteen were still at large in 1937.
In fact, Stalin had struck a greater blow against communism than all its enemies put together. Marxism is basically a theory designed to explain the existence of evil in the world. Its explanation is that evil is due to capitalist oppressors, and that once they have been removed, the oppressed will heave a sigh of relief and live happily ever after. Soviet Russia was a living demonstration that evil has very little to do with economic circumstances, and a great deal to do with human self-assertion.
In the rest of Europe, the lesson was slightly less obvious – at least in the years that followed the Armistice. Long wars always leave behind them a longing for change. When the soldiers returned to their homes and found scarcity and hardship, there was a tendency to look towards Russia, where – according to the socialists – the world’s greatest experiment in social justice was taking place. The communist parties of Europe suddenly increased their membership dramatically. In Germany and Italy – where jobs were particularly scarce – it looked as if it could only be a matter of time before the workers took over the means of production. In 1920, the Italian workers anticipated the revolution by taking over six hundred factories. In Germany, Communist Party ‘cells’ spread over every major city. Everywhere crowds of workers were on the march waving red banners, or listening to socialist agitators outside the factories and docks. Benito Mussolini, a socialist who liked to think of himself as ‘the Lenin of Italy’, was heavily defeated in elections in 1919, but the riots and strikes of 1920 gave him his chance. His ‘combat groups’ – fascio di combattimento – helped to break the strikes by attacking communists, whom they regarded as unpatriotic extremists. The symbol of these groups was the fasces, an axe in the centre of a bundle of rods, an old Roman symbol of power. In 1922, the ‘fascists’ marched on Rome, and encountered no resistance. The king appointed Mussolini premier. Italian businessmen and bankers preferred a patriotic socialist to a communist.
In Germany, a corporal named Adolf Hitler came back from the war, in which he had served with distinction, and joined the German Workers’ Party in Munich. Communist revolutions had already broken out all over Germany, with councils of workers and soldiers seizing power. By Christmas 1918, a revolutionary group called the Spartacists – after the man who had led the gladiators’ revolt – had taken over Berlin. They had been formed by Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg two years earlier; now the Alexanderplatz was full of workers – two hundred thousand of them – waving red flags. The Free Corps, the German equivalent of Mussolini’s fascists, marched into Berlin and crushed the revolution, killing Liebknecht and Luxemburg. In Munich, Kurt Eisner organised a more successful revolution; the king fled, and Bavaria became a republic. Hitler, like Mussolini, detested these communists with their talk of international revolution, and it did not escape his attention that most of the communist leaders – including Liebknecht, Luxemburg and Eisner – were Jewish. He had already acquired a hatred of Jews in the pre-war years, when he was a half-starved art student in Vienna and Munich, and had observed how many Jews seemed to be in influential positions.
16 October 1919 was a turning point in Hitler’s life – and in European history. At a meeting of the German Workers’ Party in a cellar, Hitler made his first speech, and realised that he was a natural orator. He spoke for an hour; the crowd was fascinated. The next time he spoke, the audience had doubled. And it went on increasing.
The secret of Hitler’s appeal was the emotional force of his delivery, and the clarity of the ideas he put forward. These were as crude and simplistic as Marxist ideology. Germany had been betrayed into defeat by the politicians and the Jews. (There was a widely-held belief in Germany that the army had been strong and undefeated when they were ordered to surrender.) The Jews wanted international socialism because they had no country of their own and were envious of nations with deep roots. But the misery of Germany could be overcome by German courage. The people had only to seize the power from those who had betrayed them, and turn to the great traditions of Germany’s past…
In November 1923, Hitler attempted a ‘Putsch’ (uprising) that was inspired by Mussolini’s march on Rome. His National Socialists – now called Nazis – tried to march on the war ministry, and were easily scattered. Hitler was arrested and tried for high treason; he used his oratory in court to such effect that his judges found themselves virtually on trial, and sentenced him to a mere five years, of which he only served nine months. In prison he wrote his autobiography, Mein Kampf, ‘my struggle’, outlining his central idea – that the Nordic peoples form a ‘master race’, and must accept their destiny to guide civilisation. ‘Non-Nordics’ included the negroes, the Jews and the Slavs.
In England and France, there was no danger of communist revolution, since these two countries had gained by the war. But it left behind enough social dissatisfaction to fuel the socialist cause. In both countries, the socialists came to power in 1924. But when it became clear that they were unable to solve the economic problems, their popularity declined.
When Hitler came out of jail he discovered that his audiences were no longer so large and no longer so enthusiastic. When he had led the Putsch, inflation had made the German mark practically worthless – four thousand billion to a dollar. Socialist governments in England and France took a more moderate attitude towards Germany, and industry began to recover. As prosperity returned, the Germans ceased to look for scapegoats to explain their defeat. The German worker was glad enough to have a job, and promptly lost his interest in politics – a problem that has always been the bane of revolutionaries. But the small farmers and businessmen, whose savings had vanished during inflation, still felt themselves victimised; Hitler now became their spokesman rather than that of the workers. And he began to mix with respectable politicians, who saw him as a bulwark against communism, and with soldiers – such as General Ludendorff – who recognised him as a friend of the army. Hitler quietly consolidated his base, cultivated rich industrialists, and turned the Nazis into a formidable military organisation.