I do not think anyone anywhere knows the full story of the excesses that occurred in the USSR in 1936–38, or can yet assess properly the blame. An uncounted number of people, certainly many tens of thousands, were arrested without warning, and sent without trial to convict camps in the north and far east; thousands were executed and their fate not even reported to their friends. After Stalin’s death, the USSR began to review these cases. Khrushchev, in attacking Stalin in February, 1956, at the Twentieth Party Congress, reported 7,679 cases of persons “rehabilitated” in the past two years. Most of these were dead. The most shocking revelation was that of the 134 members of the Party’s Central Committee, elected in 1934 at what was called the “Congress of Victory,” 98 persons—70 percent of all—had been arrested and shot, mostly in 1937–38.
The anti-Soviet press finds easy solution; it claims that socialism is by nature “totalitarian and ruthless.” Nobody who knows the initiative of Soviet people in recent years and their passion for what they call their “freedom,” accepts such a view. Khrushchev and others have an almost equally simple explanation; Stalin, and “the cult of the individual,” are blamed. Stalin must certainly be held responsible but a statement of his guilt is no final answer. For Stalin acted through channels; a plenary session of the Central Committee of the Party supported the actions that were set in motion in February, 1937. An entire regime was involved. Moreover, Khrushchev himself says that Stalin, in all these actions, “considered that it must be done in the interests … of the working masses, in the defense of the revolution’s gains.” Some day, I think, the Soviet Union, in its review of cases and of history, will assess what happened. Meantime, I see it as “the great madness” and look for hints of how it came about.
All governments have the problem of “subversion” by enemy agents or disaffected citizens. Seldom is it handled quite sanely by due process of law. Often—we note our own land—it becomes a source of witch-hunts and neighborhood terror. This lack of balance doubtless comes from the fact that the offenders are not ordinary criminals, easy to catalogue, with penalties to match. They are men of different loyalties from those demanded by the state. A stable or confident regime is not greatly worried by them; for they are a small minority. But in times of war, or to any regime under stress, they are more disturbing than ordinary criminals.
All of Europe was thus disturbed in the late 1930’s. The Spanish War produced the term “fifth column” to describe the secret followers of Franco who helped take Republican Madrid from within. Later, Hitler’s “fifth column” so penetrated many governments of Europe that they collapsed at the first touch of war. Broadly speaking, this fifth column included men like Prime Minister Chamberlain and Premier Daladier, who weakened the defenses of their nations by destroying democracy in Spain and, later, by giving the Czech fortifications to Hitler, in order to tempt his armies eastward. It included American industrialists who sold scrap iron to Japan, and strengthened her against the USA. None of these people considered themselves traitors. Nor, probably, did Quisling and Laval and others who, with various excuses, took part in puppet governments serving the invader. From the standpoint of Nineteenth Century nationalism, they were traitors to their nation. From the standpoint of today’s progressives, they were traitors to mankind. If Hitler had won, they would be judged otherwise. The victors write the history books.
With this as background we consider Russia. The USSR was invaded in its first years by many foreign armies invited by former Russian leaders; only by costly wars were they driven out. Pressures and threats from capitalist states continued, using any disaffected group within the country. The first two years of the Five-Year Plan saw an “epidemic of sabotage” by the higher engineering staff, many of whom had contacts with former foreign owners of industries now nationalized. Let us glance at this sabotage; any American who in those years worked in Soviet industry can give you examples.
In its simplest form, it was hardly more than the making of graft on the side. A representative of a Cincinnati firm that sold machines to Soviet industries was told that the machines were no good. He had to fight official red tape even to go from Moscow to Samara to see the factory where the machines “failed to work.” When he got there, he had to force his way in with the aid of the political police. He found a terror-stricken superintendent who admitted that the American machines had never been tried but were still in their cases. The superintendent had been bribed by a German company to send the bad report, and had arranged with a Moscow official to keep the American from reaching Samara. My American informant was not much shocked; he grinned at the “trick” he had exposed. To Russians, building public industry at heavy cost, such acts were crimes.
My own first contact with the intrigues of foreign agents came in 1930 when I visited the first tractor station near Odessa. Twice on the train, I was questioned by GPU officers; when I convinced them that I was an American writer, they left. “Why is the GPU so busy around here?” I asked the porter. “Is it because the line runs close to the Romanian frontier?”
“It is your German leather coat,” he replied. “They thought you might be one of these agents stirring up Mennonites.” Later, I learned from local farmers that German agents were a factor in the sudden decision of large numbers of Mennonite farmers, German by descent, to “flee the atheist land.” Whole villages had sold or abandoned homes and cattle and gone to Moscow, demanding passports abroad. Some harvests that could ill be spared, were thus demoralized.
Many Americans told me of sabotage they found in industry. One had a supervisory job in an auto works. A GPU investigator summoned him and, showing him pieces of metal, asked if he knew their nature.
“Certainly,” he said. “They are parts of a heavy machine-gun.” The investigator then astounded him by the news that they were being made in his own shop on the night shift. The foreman and one technician were found to be the offenders; the rest of the workers had not known that they were equipping a secret arsenal for a traitorous gang.
Another American who investigated breakdowns in steel-mills, laughed as he told me: “I’m picking out saboteurs. I don’t pick the actual people. But when I open the gear-box of a cranky machine, down under a steel table that takes half a day with a crane to remove, and find those gears clogged with nine pailfuls of dirt and steel shavings, then I show it to the director and say: ‘This couldn’t happen by accident.’ He’s a good guy who doesn’t know his way around steel mills, but his eyes light up. He knows whom to grab.”
As more Russians learned the technical side of industry, sabotage lessened for it was more easily detected. The engineers were also won to loyalty by the success of the Five-Year Plan. In 1931, Stalin announced that engineers and technicians, formerly under suspicion, were “turning towards the Soviet government” and should be met by cooperation from the workers. The “epidemic of sabotage” thus passed but the deeper sabotage inspired by foreign agents remained. This, when it reached the courts, was treated with increasing leniency in 1931–34. The economy was advancing; the few saboteurs were not greatly feared. Earlier “wreckers,” most of whom had been sentenced to work in their own profession on some construction under the GPU, reappeared in normal occupations, sometimes with the Order of Lenin, which they had won while working under duress.
The GPU still justified itself by turning up plots, but sentences lessened. The fifty-two engineers and technicians in the Shakhta Case, convicted in 1928 of wrecking coal mines, were given death sentences, and five were actually executed. A similar conviction two years later, in the Industrial Party case, brought automatic death sentences but these were commuted “in view of repentance.” Those convicted soon had good jobs again. The Mensheviks convicted in 1931 of “inspiring peasant uprisings in connivance with foreign powers” were only given prison terms; it was stated that they were no longer dangerous enough to be executed.
This growing leniency was due to the country’s growing confidence. The fear that Japan would attack had been strong in 1931, but lessened when Japan reached the Siberian border and did not invade. Hitler, of course, had stated claims to the Soviet Ukraine, but few people then expected Hitler to last. Litvinov was successfully making non-aggression pacts with neighbors; it seemed the USSR might avoid that always-dreaded war. As the first Five-Year Plan passed into the second, the good feeling we noted in the previous chapter grew. Especially after the 1933 harvest, the Soviet people felt confident in their growing strength.
The assassination of Sergei Kirov, on December 1, 1934, smashed this dream of security. Kirov, secretary of the Communist Party in Leningrad, was Stalin’s close friend and probable successor. He was murdered by a Communist who had access to the headquarters through his membership card. A shock went through the land, that a Communist might hate the leadership enough to murder. The shock grew when officials of the GPU, assumed to be protecting Kirov, seemed implicated, and when investigation found connections with foreign powers, i.e. Germany, through one of the Baltic States. There followed a year and a half of investigation in which most people forgot Kirov. Then, suddenly, it was announced that the higher ranks of Communists were involved. The Procurator of the USSR brought to trial the so-called “Leningrad Center.” Zinoviev, Kamenev, and others went on trial August 16, 1936. They were convicted and executed. Other trials, both national and local in scope, followed, culminating on July 11, 1938, with the court martial of eight leading Red Army generals and their execution on charges of treason. It was probably the most sensational series of treason trials in history.
The most important cases were tried in a large hall to which were admitted the Soviet and foreign press, the foreign diplomatic corps and a changing stream of representatives from factories and government offices. I sat in the court and watched the tale unfold. Zinoviev and Kamenev, once friends of Lenin and eminent theoreticians, told the judges, the audience and the world that, having lost power through the rise of Stalin, they had conspired to seize power by assassinating several leaders, presumably including Stalin, through agents who, if caught, would not know the identity of the top conspirators, but would appear to be ordinary agents of the German Gestapo. The chief conspirators, with reputations intact, would then call for “party unity” to meet the emergency. In the confusion they would gain leading posts. One of them, Bakayev, slated to become head of the GPU, would liquidate the actual assassins, thus burying all evidence against the higher ups.
That was the tale I watched unfold in the court day after day. The defendants were vocal; they bore no evidence of torture. Kamenev said that by 1932 it became clear that Stalin’s policies were accepted by the people and he could no longer be overthrown by political means but only by “individual terror.” “We were guided in this,” he said, “by boundless bitterness against the leadership and by a thirst for power to which we had once been near.” Zinoviev stated in court that he had become so used to giving orders to large numbers of people that he could not endure life without it. Minor agents gave testimony connecting the group with the Gestapo. One of them, N. Lurye, claimed to have worked “under guidance of Franz Weitz, personal representative of Himmler.” Some of the lesser lights apparently first learned in court of rhe fate their chiefs had reserved for them; this added to the venom with which they attacked those chiefs.
“Let him not pretend to be such an innocent,” cried the defendant Reingold against co-defendant Kamenev. “He would have made his way to power over mountains of corpses.”
Was the story credible? Most of the press outside the USSR called it a frame-up. Most people who sat in the court-room, including the foreign correspondents, thought the story true. Ambassador Davies says in his book Mission to Moscow, that he believes the defendants guilty as charged. D. N. Pritt, eminent lawyer and British Member of Parliament, was similarly convinced. Edward C. Carter, Secretary-General of the Institute of Pacific Relations, wrote: “The Kremlin’s case is … terribly genuine. It makes sense … is convincing.” Even Khrushchev’s comprehensive attack on excesses of this period, does not say that any of the open trials were a fraud.
For me, as I listened to the defendants, often from only a few feet away, the process by which once revolutionary leaders became traitors seemed understandable. They began by doubting the Russian people’s ability to build socialism without outside help; this was the open discussion in 1924–27. Their doubt deepened through the contrast between Russia’s inefficiency—which even brought the land to famine in 1932—and the efficient German organization they had known. Was it hard to believe that Russia might profit by German discipline, impressed by the iron heel? Plenty of irritated people in those days made such remarks.[2] Eventually there would be a German revolution; they themselves might promote it from within. Meantime, they would be rid of the hated Stalin.
If once we admit that these first trials were genuine—and trained foreign observers thought they were—then we have a situation that might well drive a nation off its sane base. Not only were they surrounded by hostile capitalist states; their own revolutionary leadership seemed deeply penetrated by agents, plotting assassination and government overthrow. After the conviction of Zinoviev and Kamenev, arrests and trials spread wider. Tomsky, former chairman of the Central Council of Trade Unions, mentioned in court by one of the defendants, confessed guilt and committed suicide to escape arrest. Regional trials began in the Caucasus, Central Asia, the Far East. In the Far East, the chief of the GPU fled to Japan and many of his subordinates were arrested as Japanese agents.
The army was next involved. The chief of its political commissars, Marshal Gamarnik, committed suicide June 1, 1937. On July 11, Marshal Tukhachevsky, only recently a Vice-Commissar of Defense, was court-martialed with seven other top commanders, the first big trial to be held in secret. It was announced that die defendants admitted to being in the pay of Hitler, whom they had promised to help get the Ukraine. They got the death sentence. Some corroboration of their guilt came from abroad. G. E. R. Gedye, Prague correspondent of the N. Y. Times, cabled June 18 that “two of the highest officials in Prague” told him they had “definite knowledge that secret connections between the German General Staff and certain high Russian generals had existed since the Rapallo Treaty.” I myself was later told by Czech officials that their military men had been the first to learn and to inform Moscow that Czech military secrets, known to the Russians through the mutual aid alliance, were being revealed by Tukhachevsky to the German High Command.
What most startled Soviet citizens was probably the fact that the treason trials finally pulled in Yagoda, chief of the GPU. When he was executed as a traitor and when many GPU officials were jailed on the charge of “arresting innocent citizens” and “using improper means to extort confessions,” doubts were spread about the investigating arm of the government. Who then was guilty? Who innocent? Who was arresting whom?
A sense of insecurity spread among the Soviet people, replacing that exultant sense of progress they had felt in 1934. It was not due alone, and not even primarily, to personal fear of arrest or to concern for friends. It was due to the knowledge that the enemy had penetrated high into the citadel of leadership, that nobody knew who was loyal. This was the first time any nation came to grips with the deadly efficiency of the Hitler Fifth Column. They felt it as a fight for the nation’s survival, but a fight in the dark. This nightmare quality of the struggle affected not only the people, but also, I think, Stalin. He produced the theory that the nearer a country got to socialism the more enemies it would have.
The defendants in open trials were far from being the only victims. Those years, and especially 1937, are recalled by all Soviet citizens as a time of great mental distress caused by many unexplained arrests and the suspicion these spread in all circles. People were taken away at night and never seen afterward. Sometimes they re-appeared. George Andreichine was twice exiled to Siberia and each time came back fairly soon to a better job. Most people thus arrested were not executed but sent either to a convict labor camp or to residence in a distant place. The “terror” was due not so much to knowledge as to lack of knowledge of the fate of friends.
My closest woman friend, who had lived with me several years before she married and moved to Leningrad, was exiled with a ten-year sentence. Nine years later, I again met her in Moscow and learned what had happened. Her husband had been arrested; she never learned the details of the charge against him. Believing him innocent, she pestered the offices of the GPU and was herself arrested, charged with being “the wife of an enemy of the people.” She was sent, not to a camp but to a small town in Kazakstan where she got a job as teacher in the high school. Once a month she had to report to a local GPU official, an intelligent man with whom she had “many interesting discussions.” Several times he questioned her about her view of her own arrest and the many other arrests that she knew occurred.
“The way I have figured it,” she replied on one occasion, “is that the Nazi fifth column penetrated the GPU and got high in it and has been arresting the wrong people.” Her questioner replied; “Many people have that view.” He did not say what kind of people shared the view or whether he was one of them.
This theory may, in part, explain Khrushchev’s most shocking revelation, that of the 1966 degelates to the 1934 Party Congress, 1,108 were later arrested, and that of the 134 persons this congress elected to the Central Committee, 98—or 70 percent of all—were not only arrested but shot. Those who attribute this to a mad paranoia of Stalin have still to explain why even a paranoiac should eliminate his most successful and loyal supporters. The “Victory Congress” of 1934 was composed precisely of those who had stuck to Stalin’s line, and celebrated the triumph of socialism in both industry and farming. Their drastic elimination within three years becomes somewhat more credible as the successful attempt of a Nazi Fifth Column to get rid of the nation’s most efficient patriots.
Such cases as I myself knew would support the view that it was often “the wrong people” who were arrested, people who seemed almost picked out for the purpose of disorganizing. On our Moscow News staff, three people were suddenly taken. If I had to pick our three most useful, energetic workers, these would have been the ones. They were Party members, always working hard both for the paper and the trade union, always willing to work nights in emergencies. Yet, our staff was supposed to go to a trade union meeting and “thank the government for removing the wreckers.” I refused to go. I even protested about it to our editor-in-chief.
He agreed that there might be innocent victims. “Let them take it up with their deputies,” he said. “The deputies to the Supreme Soviet are handling lots of these complaints. People who are conscious of innocence and fight for it will eventually come back.” It was true that all the deputies were handling complaints of constituents. The famous actor, Kachalov, deputy from my ward, told me such appeals formed the greatest part of that year’s work. But it was not true that the innocent always came back. Thousands died in exile.
Let us now turn to the revelations of what was happening in the Party’s upper circles, as revealed by Khrushchev’s attack on Stalin in 1956. He also dates the excesses as beginning “after the criminal murder of Sergei N. Kirov,” from 1935–38. “It was precisely during this period,” he says, “that the practice of mass repression through the government apparatus was born … first against the enemies … and subsequently against many honest Communists.” He reveals that immediately after the Kirov murder, and on Stalin’s initiative, directions were issued to the courts to speed up investigations, sentences and punishments. At that time, Yagoda was chief of the GPU. Stalin found him too dilatory and wired from Sochi on September 25, 1936, that Yezhov should be appointed Commissar of Internal Affairs, since Yagoda showed incompetence. Yezhov’s appointment and his plans were approved by the plenary session of the Central Committee in February, 1937. The number of arrests at once multipled; Khrushchev states that between 1936 and 1937 the arrests increased tenfold. Torture was used, he says, to extort confessions; Stalin authorized it. Previously, the Soviet people had prided themselves on the absence in their jails not only of the torture used by the Nazis, but of even the third-degree as practiced in the United States.
The year 1937 was the high tide of repression. Suddenly, Yezhov disappeared from the scene; he was rumored to have been taken to a mad-house. A new Party resolution was passed in early 1938. The madness began to recede. It was recognized as having been madness, even in Stalin’s days. In the middle forties, I asked a GPU official whether a certain case that had happened in 1937 could be reviewed. “Anything that happened in 1937 can reviewed,” he replied. Thousands of the cases, however, were not reviewed until after Stalin’s death.
In fixing the blame for the criminal railroading of innocent people in 1937, Khrushchev makes several statements. “We are justly accusing Yezhov for the degenerate practices of 1937,” he says. He adds, however, that Yezhov prepared lists of persons whose sentences were determined in advance of any hearing, and sent the lists to Stalin for approval, and that Yezhov could hardly have sentenced certain prominent victims without Stalin’s okay. “Stalin was a very distrustful man, sickly suspicious,” says Khrushchev. His precise summing up of what happened is important:
“Using Stalin’s formulation that the closer we are to socialism the more enemies we will have, and using the resolution of the February-March Central Committee Plenum, passed on the basis of Yezhov’s report, the provocateurs who had infiltrated the State Security organs, together with conscienceless careerists, began to protect with the Party name the mass terror.”
The picture is clearly not a simple one of Stalin, as despot, getting rid of his enemies. It is a complex picture, combining the acts of many groups. Stalin’s responsibility was that, being “distrustful and sickly suspicious”—a not unnatural state in a man whose close friend has been assassinated and who has heard in open court that his own assassination was planned—he appointed Yezhov, gave orders to hurry up the investigations and sentences, and devised the theory that enemies multiply as socialism nears success. Yezhov, later found to be a madman, gave the effective orders. The Central Committee, convinced by Stalin’s argument and Yezhov’s reports, also approved the acts. The actual initiators, as stated by Khrushchev, were “provocateurs”—i.e., agents of Nazi-fascism—and “conscienceless careerists”—i.e., men who invented plots to advance their own jobs.
This analysis by Khrushchev does not greatly differ from that of my exiled friend, who said that the Nazi fifth-column “penetrated high in the GPU and arrested the wrong people.” I have called the actions of this period “the great madness,” because the actions were not sane, but were participated in by many people, and are not yet fully understood. The Soviet investigators who are reviewing the cases will, I think, eventually get to the bottom of them. They will find the key, most probably, in actual, extensive penetration of the GPU by a Nazi fifth-column, in many actual plots, and in the impact of these on a highly suspicious man who saw his own assassination plotted and believed he was saving the Revolution by drastic purge.
It would be naive to think that the years around 1937 saw the only unjust arrests and executions, in the USSR, of the Stalin era. They occurred in lesser numbers from the beginning of the revolution through the last days of Stalin, when certain doctors were accused of plotting against the health of Soviet leaders, confessed— presumably under torture—and were later found innocent. The arbitrary power of the political police was the greatest evil of the Stalin era. It was not invented by Stalin; it was born of the “black hundreds” of tsardom, and nourished on “the terror” under Lenin. All good Communists said a special, extra-legal arm was needed to protect the revolution. Such terrors have attended other revolutions, including the American and the French. But it is easier to create a political police than to abolish it The rulers find it useful; it checks dissenters. So Stalin, in 1922, when the political police was slated for down-grading under local authority, decided to centralize it as a means of control. Three times, in my years in the USSR, it was decided to limit the police powers and bring the State Security organs under law; each time the name changed but the powers resumed. Such a police becomes a state wdthin a state, with a vested interest in finding “plots,” some of which really exist. Such a police presents another danger; its hidden membership is the first organization penetrated by enemy provocateurs.
Was any political police needed? The Soviet people seemed to think that it was. My own husband, when he learned of the exiling of my best woman friend, said only: “Too bad that she had to get entangled with that husband.”
Other Russian friends took an even more ruthless view. I recall one who maintained that if the political police held one hundred suspects and knew that one was a dangerous traitor but could not determine which one, they should execute them all, and the ninety-nine innocent ones should be willing to die rather than let a traitor live.
My editor-in-chief, when I protested the arrest of our three staff-members, gave me a far more sweeping statement of the reason why the Soviet people were not protesting.
“Why don’t you see the basic picture? Our leading economists think the world will crash about 1939. The greatest struggle mankind has known is due. This struggle will decide whether the world goes down into dark ages of slavery and war, or whether mankind wins through to a better world.
“Where, in this struggle, is there a sure foundation? We Bolsheviks think that, in spite of our technical backwardness, it may devolve on this country to save civilization for the world. Man’s destructive powers grow fast; half the capitalist world has turned back to the Middle Ages. Civilizations have fallen before. What is our duty to the coming world crisis? We must come up to it as strong as possible, with as much wheat as possible, as many healthy people as possible, and as few wreckers as possible. We are going to do it. With two Five-Year Plans completed, we can do it. Those who doubt or interfere are traitors, not only to our Soviet land but to mankind.”
They were strong words; they silenced me. They were said by Michael M. Borodin, who was arrested in 1949 about the time I was, and who died in a far eastern camp.
What safeguards are there anywhere against injustice? There are the hard-won rights of the West—“due process,” “habeas corpus,” “trial by jury”—costly rights, not easily had by poor people, and rights that Russia never knew. An even longer list of rights was guaranteed in 1936 by the Stalin Constitution and violated in the same year by the Constitution’s own author who—even his chief detractor said so—thought he was saving the revolution thereby. The conclusion must be, I think, what the Russians have drawn, that no man should be deified as Stalin was. It is true that his acts went “through channels,” that even the great madness of 1937 was approved by resolution of the Central Committee. But it was approved without the test of a courageous opposition; all who thus approved, with Stalin, bear the blame. Nowhere in the world is justice sure or perfect. Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty and justice, not only under capitalism, but even more under socialism. The value of the Khrushchev speech is not only that it was followed by the curbing of the power of the political police by law, but that it awakened horror among the Soviet people. This active horror of an informed people against injustice is the only sure safeguard.
A certain type of vigilance the Soviet people learned in the great madness. It was something that Russians needed to learn. Appeals to the “watchfulness of the people” against spies and saboteurs filled the press. “Don’t talk in the street-cars about your factory; you may give information that will help the enemy locate and evaluate our industries.” The people heeded; the happy, loquacious Russians became silent towards foreigners. I recall the article I wrote for an American magazine about “My Soviet Daughter,” describing my step-daughter’s fondness for the chemical factory where she worked. My husband asked me to change it to an electric plant, lest I reveal the existence of a chemical plant within an hour’s ride from our home.
Two other personal anecdotes show what this period did to the minds of people. Just before a May-Day demonstration, I learned that several score Americans were upset because they had come to Moscow for the demonstration and there was no space in the tribunes of the Red Square. I suggested to Intourist that they might march with the staff of Moscow News and see the Square in passing. The Intourist representative replied: “We should be grateful, but do you know them well enough to guarantee that they have no pistols or bombs?” That settled it. All correspondents knew how exposed Stalin’s person was at these demonstrations. I had been told that agents of East European lands often came to the USSR as “American tourists.” I refused to guarantee all my fellow countrymen, sight unseen.
I spent that summer on the shores of Moscow River, near the little suburb Fili. I knew there was a big industrial plant there; I had seen Fili workers thousands strong in parades. Years later, in New York, after the war began between Germany and Russia, I read in a paper that the famous six-motor bombers, which rivalled and in some ways surpassed the American “flying fortresses,” were made in that Fili Plant. If that was true, I know how every Fili worker must have longed to brag of it to me, an American. Nobody ever did.
Such silence is not natural to Russians nor pleasant to their friends. But it may have had survival value in those years.
When World War Two finally came to the USSR, the rest of the world noted the relative absence of the Hitler Fifth Column, which had overthrown most of the governments of Europe. Howard K. Smith commented: “Had Russia not liquidated a few thousand bureaucrats and officers, there is little doubt that the Red Army would have collapsed in two months.”[3] This was the judgment of others; I do not entirely share it. But I know that the Soviet people endured those years of madness in the belief that they prepared desperate defenses, that they were already at grips with an enemy that walked in darkness, and that every elimination of a traitor might later save thousands of lives, or even the fate of the land. This sense of fighting in darkness an enemy high in the leadership, was what gave a nightmare quality to those years.