Andrei Kuznetsov
15th August 2009, 14:32
http://mikeely.wordpress.com/2009/07/13/on-socialist-methods-and-the-stalin-era-purges/
We at the Kasama Project (http://www.kasamaproject.org/) have been discussing the importance of summing up the history of socialist revolution (http://mikeely.wordpress.com/2009/07/12/are-we-serious-about-communist-history-or-not/) in the twentieth century — and the problem of silence on such events as the “Great Purges” in the 1930s Soviet Union. In that thread, a commentator “Reading You” (http://mikeely.wordpress.com/2009/07/12/are-we-serious-about-communist-history-or-not/#comment-15585) wrote a defense of the mass executions of those times. Here is a reply.
By Mike Ely
On one level, there is a mind-numbing contradiction at play. The communist movement (justifiably!) denounces the beating of Rodney King, the killing of Oscar Grant, the shooting of Amadou Diallo, the assassination of Malcolm or King, the jailing of Peltier and Mumia, the holding of so-called “enemy combatants” without evidence or trial… These are outrages — and often the innocence of the victim is a part of that outrage.
So what does it mean, if someone like “Reading You” can (with a wave of their hand) minimize the state execution of hundreds of thousands of people (without trial and often, it must be said, without evidence)? Is it that different because those were nominally socialist cops who pulled the triggers?
There were in the 1930s quotas for arrests (just like there were quotas for other forms of production) — i.e. the cops in a particular locality were required to produce so many spies and reactionaries. Imagine what that produced? There was permission to torture signed at the highest level. Imagine what that meant for the emergence of “confessions” and new denunciations of new suspects for the machinery.
How often we rage when cops in the U.S. presume the guilt of “perps” (”They wouldn’t have been arrested if they hadn’t done something” or “I can tell a criminal just by looking at him.”) Does it suddenly become ok, to arrest and punish without evidence or public hearings if the system is socialist?
And what kind of justice would the people get from activists with such a blindspot if they got to be part of a new state power?
“Reading you” writes:
“Mike, can you make clear what you are saying?”
Yes, I would like to do that. I would like to thank you for posting your views sharply and challenging mine sharply.
“Are you saying that if there were in fact 680,000 executions, they were largely unjustified? Doesn’t there have to be a more particular assessment of specifics?”
First, i’m saying that there HAS already been a more particular assessment of specifics. We are now seventy years after those purges and the soviet collectivization, many decades after the whole debate over Trotsky’s theses in “Revolution Betrayed,” after Krushchev’s speech of 1956, after Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s 1973 Gulag Archipelago, after Mao’s sharp rejection and critique of Stalin’s methods (over the 50s and 60s), after a rich body of scholarly work has emerged from the now-open archives in the 1990s.
Without (obviously) endorsing any or all of the works just mentioned (several of which are by notorious reactionaries), i’m saying it is rather bizarre for communists to ( a ) not engage these things publicly and deeply, and ( b ) act (as Avakian does) as if we just can’t know or say anything deep or complex or new about this period.
There is a body of analysis and debate that is rich, detailed, and nuanced — and it has gotten more so thanks to the recent work of scholars. And people will not forgive us if we sit it out, or answer with cartoon nonsense.
I was reading a book on developments in genetic biology — and one scientist remarked that “it will not be long before we will have pretty solid answers to all the main previous controversies around nature vs. nurture.” We will actually come to know much more precisely what is genetic and what is not, and what the interplay is. Similarly, on many matters of the 1930s, vast amounts of evidence and documentation is in, and the world is not waiting around for communists to come up with the final “particular assessment of specifics” — people are coming up with their own “particular assessment of specifics” in a real absense of communist engagement with those specifics.
And I am saying it is long past time to engage that existing set of informatin and a whole world of existing assessments. (And obviously, it is not as if all communists have abdicated — I have carefully studied this all my life, and met others who treat such serious matters seriously.)
Second, i’m saying that the evidence is quite unmistakable that the executions were in the hundreds of thousands (that is the low estimate), and the jailings (deportations etc.) were higher. And that quite of few of those who were jailed died there. (The issue is not specific numbers, which are disputed, but orders of magnitude which are less disputed.) And I am saying that huge numbers of those who were caught up in this were not spies, or reactionaries, or saboteurs, or deserving of death or punishment.
There was explicitly a policy (high in Stalin’s government) of “punishing ten to make sure one doesn’t go free.” There was a terrible rachetting up of harshness, so that the punishment for a casual remark could be denunciation, imprisonment and worse. (Should someone disappear into prison for saying “I wish the Tsar was back”? Mao, by contrast, said that people should be allowed to make such remarks without fear (http://marxists.org/reference/archive/mao/works/1970/haijung.htm).)
There was in the 1930s USSR a conscious policy of “mopping up” — i.e. asusming that the time had come to remove everyone who had ever been suspect, or a problem, or had gotten some taint on their record (support for non-bolshevik parties in their past, involvement with an internal opposition, travels or relatives abroad, history of “making trouble,” and so on.) And there was a policy of blanketly blaming all kinds of industrial breakdowns, snafus, accidents, shortfalls, confusion, chaos, delay, and disagreement on conscious sabotage — to deflect anger and impatience from those in power.
There was a conscious policy at the highest levels of using imprisonment and execution as the means of enforcing discipline within the government i.e. getting republic and enterprise officials to say “how high” when told to jump. (Molotov’s own wife was imprisoned after World War 2, held as a kind of hostage to his continued service.)
And faced with those official police campaigns, there was an outbreak of mass hysteria, spymania and massive false denunciation (a real dog-eat-dog climate of paranoia, where denouncing others may deflect attention from you.)
In other words, I’m saying that the heaviest means were directed in ways that dragged down large numbers of people — for no justifiable reason — while terrorizing the rest.
Who (among the people) would want to participate in Soviet politics after that? And those that did were trained to be the most servile yes-men and cautious careerists. Not only is that unjust, but it is deadly for the revolutionary process (for the existance of a “revolutionary people” to carry forward the revolution).
Are you saying that there were no persons engaged in counter-revolutionary activity in the Soviet Union?
First, there were obviously counterrevolutionaries in the Soviet Union. And yes, there probably were some conscious saboteurs within the Soviet economy — reactionary engineers or managers who wanted chaos and socialist collapse. But, that isn’t really the issue.
This society had had a bitter civil war. (And like after the U.S. civil war) the reactionaries did not go away, and some of them organized underground networks (just as the old slaveowners and conferates organized the KKK in the U.S.) And there were new counterrevolutionaries — who emerged within the communist movement and its leadership…. who (one way or another) embraced political programs leading back to capitalism. And (after the purges, and through the purges) such people came more and more into power (certainly during World War 2, including people like Krushchev and General Zhukov, and then in the war’s aftermath).
Second, however, these purges were not, in the main, aimed at those networks. And the charge that the punished were agents and saboteurs were (in the main) fantasy, paranoia and conscious frameups.
I don’t think people like Trotsky, or Zinoviev, or Bukharin were secret Nazi spy masters and foreign-serving saboteurs. I think that anyone who puts that forward should go look again at the evidence of history (or else admit to a pretty militant and faith-based disdain for evidence and logic).
Clearly if you purge millions of people, and execute hundreds of thousands, your “catch” will include reactionaries. And there were reactionaries in the Gulag camps (as well as political oppositions of a more socialist character). But, the problem (in the Soviet Union by the 1930s) was not that the place was crisscrossed with vast spynetworks, assassination squads and pro-nazi cells that needed to be uprooted and crushed by relentless police roundups.
What there was in the Soviet Union was: Sharp two line struggles over how to proceed with the Soviet revolution — under very difficult conditions that presented very difficult choices. personally i think Bukharin was the first real “bourgeois democrat turned capitalist roader” — and his program foreshadowed Krushchev, Liberman and then Gorbachev.
Trotsky was (i believe) something else — with his own program, network and assumptions — much of it rooted in a view that Russia could not advance without western Europe, and so quickly going over to forms of desperate demoralization when Soviet Russia ended up standing alone. But the idea that someone needed to kill hundreds of thousands of people to root out a Nazi “fifth column” in the Soviet Union is absurd — and, in fact, the purges did not prevent “fifth columns” to jump out, especially in those places like the western Ukraine or southern Russia most embittered by the collectivization and modernization of society.
The purges involved an overlay of several things:
a) a determined terrorizing of the “middle management” (inclouding especially communist leadership at the republic and enterprise level) to enforce an extreme responsiveness — in part as part of the preparation for war.
b) an approach to solving political problems and disunity that rested heavily on police killing or disappearing those raising political disagreements.
c) a runaway process of mutual denunciation and witchhunting that raged far outside any single central control (mutual denunciations, clique struggle by arrest, settling of old grievances and suspicions) etc.
d) an acute high level line struggle over how to deal with the threat of Nazi invasion (with Litvinov, Bukharin and perhaps Tukachevsky on the side of continuing to seek alliance with britain and france, and Molotov and Stalin deciding to deflect Hitler by seeking a “non-aggression pact.” It was a struggle analogous to the sharp fight between Lin Biao (on one side) and Mao with Zhou enlai (on the other) over how to deal with the mounting threat of a Soviet strike on chinese nuclear facilities.
“Do you believe that the raw numbers of executions, standing alone, necessarily condemns what was done?”
This is a fair and important question.
First, I don’t think the purges themselves are some kind of “rosetta stone” that “tell us all we need to know.” We are focusing on these purges of 1937-38, because they are a stark example of the previous communist approach to their own history — not because those purges are themselves the single decisive event of this history.
I think the study of the Soviet experience needs to study the whole arc… It is not so simple that a period of “red terror” condemns the revolution (though it has to be sharply debated whether the purges were an example of “red terror” against reactoinaries).
I think that the politics and directions of the 1930s should (overall) be sharply criticized (based on what we now know about socialism, about preventing the restoration of capitalism, and about the events in the Soviet Union). But it is not a matter of “raw numbers of execution” alone — all of this has to be seen in context (of isolatin, of Nazi threat, of the weaknesses of the Soviet state, of the extreme urgency of preparing national defense, the large swaths of resentful and angry people, etc.)
“Do you think, for example, after a successful revolution in the U.S. that it is not possible that there could be one, two, or three million relatively consciously counter-revolutionary people actively engaged in tryingt to restore the old system? Will we merely scold them with harsh language? Is it not possible that we might have to send lots of them to prison? Is it that unlikely that, in an individual year, there might have to be 680,000 executions?
To put it simply: Yes there will be millions of people (in a future socialist North America) who actively want return to the old ways. And yes, one way or another, the most active and vicious counterrevolutionary organizations (the modern equivilent of the post-civil war klan) would need to be pursued, exposed, broken up and politically exposed.
But it is starkly wrong to casually suggest that “Is it that unlikely that, in an individual year, there might have to be 680,000 executions?”
Yes it is “unlikely” that this would be correct, or necessary, or tolerable!
Yes, we should reject such an assessment, and we should make it clear that such events should never happen again.
Yes, that is not the preferred method. But wouldn’t that be better, if needed, than the possibility that these assholes would succeed, reimpose the imperialist system, and again impose the nightmare of domination by U.S. imperialism on the world?
Like Paul (http://mikeely.wordpress.com/2009/07/12/are-we-serious-about-communist-history-or-not/#comment-15598), I find the assumptions here “appalling.” First, that the dead in the Soviet Union were simply “assholes.” And second that problem of reactionary “assholes” needs to be (or CAN be) solved by mass execution.
No, on the contrary to what you say, if a post revolutionary society went that way, it would not be far away from creating a new U.S. empire, with a returned to the hardened, ruthless, murderous policies that massacred the Indians and enslaved African Americans.
As Mao wrote: “A revolution is not a dinner party, or writing an essay, or painting a picture, or doing embroidery; it cannot be so refined, so leisurely and gentle, so temperate, kind, courteous, restrained and magnanimous. A revolution is an insurrection, an act of violence by which one class overthrows another.”
Paul (http://mikeely.wordpress.com/2009/07/12/are-we-serious-about-communist-history-or-not/#comment-15599)answered this well.
In warfare there are extreme measures taken. but the episode we are discussing was almost twenty years after the Soviet Civil war — these were measures that erupted within a society that was not (yet) at war, or in the midst of an armed internal uprising.
To take another brief passage from Fitzpatrick’s book:
After the outbreak of the Civil War, the Cheka became an organ of terror, dispensing sumary justice including executions, making mass arrests, and taking hostages at random in areas that had come under mass arrests, and taking hostages at random in areas that had come under white control or were suspect of leaning towards the Whites. According to Bolshevik figures for twenty provinces of European Russia in 1918 and the first half of 1919, at least 8,389 persons were shot without trial by the Cheka and 87,000 arested.” (page 76)
These are the kinds of events that Mao is talking about (during the intense life and death fighting of a civil war). And such thing happened in the Chinese revolution, and also in the actions of the National Liberation Front of South Vietnam in the 1960s, and so on.
But we can see the different scale (orders of magnitude) that happened in the 1930s — when in fact mass roundups and executions happened in waves (often without evidence or trial or records or family notifications) in times that were relatively “peaceful” — i.e.amid sharp social conflict but without a war, or an armed uprising, where there was actually time for evidence and trials and public discussion.
Anyone who thinks that second kind of repression (recklessly using the full means of an established state in this way) is justified or should be imitated, has abdicated a responsibility to learn from this past, and has really announced their determination to become new oppressors. And even if you don’t think so, everyone else will!
And I might add: that people who want to conduct mass campaigns of execution should declare themselves early and loudly — so they can be carefully kept far far away from revolutionary preparations and future state power.
We at the Kasama Project (http://www.kasamaproject.org/) have been discussing the importance of summing up the history of socialist revolution (http://mikeely.wordpress.com/2009/07/12/are-we-serious-about-communist-history-or-not/) in the twentieth century — and the problem of silence on such events as the “Great Purges” in the 1930s Soviet Union. In that thread, a commentator “Reading You” (http://mikeely.wordpress.com/2009/07/12/are-we-serious-about-communist-history-or-not/#comment-15585) wrote a defense of the mass executions of those times. Here is a reply.
By Mike Ely
On one level, there is a mind-numbing contradiction at play. The communist movement (justifiably!) denounces the beating of Rodney King, the killing of Oscar Grant, the shooting of Amadou Diallo, the assassination of Malcolm or King, the jailing of Peltier and Mumia, the holding of so-called “enemy combatants” without evidence or trial… These are outrages — and often the innocence of the victim is a part of that outrage.
So what does it mean, if someone like “Reading You” can (with a wave of their hand) minimize the state execution of hundreds of thousands of people (without trial and often, it must be said, without evidence)? Is it that different because those were nominally socialist cops who pulled the triggers?
There were in the 1930s quotas for arrests (just like there were quotas for other forms of production) — i.e. the cops in a particular locality were required to produce so many spies and reactionaries. Imagine what that produced? There was permission to torture signed at the highest level. Imagine what that meant for the emergence of “confessions” and new denunciations of new suspects for the machinery.
How often we rage when cops in the U.S. presume the guilt of “perps” (”They wouldn’t have been arrested if they hadn’t done something” or “I can tell a criminal just by looking at him.”) Does it suddenly become ok, to arrest and punish without evidence or public hearings if the system is socialist?
And what kind of justice would the people get from activists with such a blindspot if they got to be part of a new state power?
“Reading you” writes:
“Mike, can you make clear what you are saying?”
Yes, I would like to do that. I would like to thank you for posting your views sharply and challenging mine sharply.
“Are you saying that if there were in fact 680,000 executions, they were largely unjustified? Doesn’t there have to be a more particular assessment of specifics?”
First, i’m saying that there HAS already been a more particular assessment of specifics. We are now seventy years after those purges and the soviet collectivization, many decades after the whole debate over Trotsky’s theses in “Revolution Betrayed,” after Krushchev’s speech of 1956, after Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s 1973 Gulag Archipelago, after Mao’s sharp rejection and critique of Stalin’s methods (over the 50s and 60s), after a rich body of scholarly work has emerged from the now-open archives in the 1990s.
Without (obviously) endorsing any or all of the works just mentioned (several of which are by notorious reactionaries), i’m saying it is rather bizarre for communists to ( a ) not engage these things publicly and deeply, and ( b ) act (as Avakian does) as if we just can’t know or say anything deep or complex or new about this period.
There is a body of analysis and debate that is rich, detailed, and nuanced — and it has gotten more so thanks to the recent work of scholars. And people will not forgive us if we sit it out, or answer with cartoon nonsense.
I was reading a book on developments in genetic biology — and one scientist remarked that “it will not be long before we will have pretty solid answers to all the main previous controversies around nature vs. nurture.” We will actually come to know much more precisely what is genetic and what is not, and what the interplay is. Similarly, on many matters of the 1930s, vast amounts of evidence and documentation is in, and the world is not waiting around for communists to come up with the final “particular assessment of specifics” — people are coming up with their own “particular assessment of specifics” in a real absense of communist engagement with those specifics.
And I am saying it is long past time to engage that existing set of informatin and a whole world of existing assessments. (And obviously, it is not as if all communists have abdicated — I have carefully studied this all my life, and met others who treat such serious matters seriously.)
Second, i’m saying that the evidence is quite unmistakable that the executions were in the hundreds of thousands (that is the low estimate), and the jailings (deportations etc.) were higher. And that quite of few of those who were jailed died there. (The issue is not specific numbers, which are disputed, but orders of magnitude which are less disputed.) And I am saying that huge numbers of those who were caught up in this were not spies, or reactionaries, or saboteurs, or deserving of death or punishment.
There was explicitly a policy (high in Stalin’s government) of “punishing ten to make sure one doesn’t go free.” There was a terrible rachetting up of harshness, so that the punishment for a casual remark could be denunciation, imprisonment and worse. (Should someone disappear into prison for saying “I wish the Tsar was back”? Mao, by contrast, said that people should be allowed to make such remarks without fear (http://marxists.org/reference/archive/mao/works/1970/haijung.htm).)
There was in the 1930s USSR a conscious policy of “mopping up” — i.e. asusming that the time had come to remove everyone who had ever been suspect, or a problem, or had gotten some taint on their record (support for non-bolshevik parties in their past, involvement with an internal opposition, travels or relatives abroad, history of “making trouble,” and so on.) And there was a policy of blanketly blaming all kinds of industrial breakdowns, snafus, accidents, shortfalls, confusion, chaos, delay, and disagreement on conscious sabotage — to deflect anger and impatience from those in power.
There was a conscious policy at the highest levels of using imprisonment and execution as the means of enforcing discipline within the government i.e. getting republic and enterprise officials to say “how high” when told to jump. (Molotov’s own wife was imprisoned after World War 2, held as a kind of hostage to his continued service.)
And faced with those official police campaigns, there was an outbreak of mass hysteria, spymania and massive false denunciation (a real dog-eat-dog climate of paranoia, where denouncing others may deflect attention from you.)
In other words, I’m saying that the heaviest means were directed in ways that dragged down large numbers of people — for no justifiable reason — while terrorizing the rest.
Who (among the people) would want to participate in Soviet politics after that? And those that did were trained to be the most servile yes-men and cautious careerists. Not only is that unjust, but it is deadly for the revolutionary process (for the existance of a “revolutionary people” to carry forward the revolution).
Are you saying that there were no persons engaged in counter-revolutionary activity in the Soviet Union?
First, there were obviously counterrevolutionaries in the Soviet Union. And yes, there probably were some conscious saboteurs within the Soviet economy — reactionary engineers or managers who wanted chaos and socialist collapse. But, that isn’t really the issue.
This society had had a bitter civil war. (And like after the U.S. civil war) the reactionaries did not go away, and some of them organized underground networks (just as the old slaveowners and conferates organized the KKK in the U.S.) And there were new counterrevolutionaries — who emerged within the communist movement and its leadership…. who (one way or another) embraced political programs leading back to capitalism. And (after the purges, and through the purges) such people came more and more into power (certainly during World War 2, including people like Krushchev and General Zhukov, and then in the war’s aftermath).
Second, however, these purges were not, in the main, aimed at those networks. And the charge that the punished were agents and saboteurs were (in the main) fantasy, paranoia and conscious frameups.
I don’t think people like Trotsky, or Zinoviev, or Bukharin were secret Nazi spy masters and foreign-serving saboteurs. I think that anyone who puts that forward should go look again at the evidence of history (or else admit to a pretty militant and faith-based disdain for evidence and logic).
Clearly if you purge millions of people, and execute hundreds of thousands, your “catch” will include reactionaries. And there were reactionaries in the Gulag camps (as well as political oppositions of a more socialist character). But, the problem (in the Soviet Union by the 1930s) was not that the place was crisscrossed with vast spynetworks, assassination squads and pro-nazi cells that needed to be uprooted and crushed by relentless police roundups.
What there was in the Soviet Union was: Sharp two line struggles over how to proceed with the Soviet revolution — under very difficult conditions that presented very difficult choices. personally i think Bukharin was the first real “bourgeois democrat turned capitalist roader” — and his program foreshadowed Krushchev, Liberman and then Gorbachev.
Trotsky was (i believe) something else — with his own program, network and assumptions — much of it rooted in a view that Russia could not advance without western Europe, and so quickly going over to forms of desperate demoralization when Soviet Russia ended up standing alone. But the idea that someone needed to kill hundreds of thousands of people to root out a Nazi “fifth column” in the Soviet Union is absurd — and, in fact, the purges did not prevent “fifth columns” to jump out, especially in those places like the western Ukraine or southern Russia most embittered by the collectivization and modernization of society.
The purges involved an overlay of several things:
a) a determined terrorizing of the “middle management” (inclouding especially communist leadership at the republic and enterprise level) to enforce an extreme responsiveness — in part as part of the preparation for war.
b) an approach to solving political problems and disunity that rested heavily on police killing or disappearing those raising political disagreements.
c) a runaway process of mutual denunciation and witchhunting that raged far outside any single central control (mutual denunciations, clique struggle by arrest, settling of old grievances and suspicions) etc.
d) an acute high level line struggle over how to deal with the threat of Nazi invasion (with Litvinov, Bukharin and perhaps Tukachevsky on the side of continuing to seek alliance with britain and france, and Molotov and Stalin deciding to deflect Hitler by seeking a “non-aggression pact.” It was a struggle analogous to the sharp fight between Lin Biao (on one side) and Mao with Zhou enlai (on the other) over how to deal with the mounting threat of a Soviet strike on chinese nuclear facilities.
“Do you believe that the raw numbers of executions, standing alone, necessarily condemns what was done?”
This is a fair and important question.
First, I don’t think the purges themselves are some kind of “rosetta stone” that “tell us all we need to know.” We are focusing on these purges of 1937-38, because they are a stark example of the previous communist approach to their own history — not because those purges are themselves the single decisive event of this history.
I think the study of the Soviet experience needs to study the whole arc… It is not so simple that a period of “red terror” condemns the revolution (though it has to be sharply debated whether the purges were an example of “red terror” against reactoinaries).
I think that the politics and directions of the 1930s should (overall) be sharply criticized (based on what we now know about socialism, about preventing the restoration of capitalism, and about the events in the Soviet Union). But it is not a matter of “raw numbers of execution” alone — all of this has to be seen in context (of isolatin, of Nazi threat, of the weaknesses of the Soviet state, of the extreme urgency of preparing national defense, the large swaths of resentful and angry people, etc.)
“Do you think, for example, after a successful revolution in the U.S. that it is not possible that there could be one, two, or three million relatively consciously counter-revolutionary people actively engaged in tryingt to restore the old system? Will we merely scold them with harsh language? Is it not possible that we might have to send lots of them to prison? Is it that unlikely that, in an individual year, there might have to be 680,000 executions?
To put it simply: Yes there will be millions of people (in a future socialist North America) who actively want return to the old ways. And yes, one way or another, the most active and vicious counterrevolutionary organizations (the modern equivilent of the post-civil war klan) would need to be pursued, exposed, broken up and politically exposed.
But it is starkly wrong to casually suggest that “Is it that unlikely that, in an individual year, there might have to be 680,000 executions?”
Yes it is “unlikely” that this would be correct, or necessary, or tolerable!
Yes, we should reject such an assessment, and we should make it clear that such events should never happen again.
Yes, that is not the preferred method. But wouldn’t that be better, if needed, than the possibility that these assholes would succeed, reimpose the imperialist system, and again impose the nightmare of domination by U.S. imperialism on the world?
Like Paul (http://mikeely.wordpress.com/2009/07/12/are-we-serious-about-communist-history-or-not/#comment-15598), I find the assumptions here “appalling.” First, that the dead in the Soviet Union were simply “assholes.” And second that problem of reactionary “assholes” needs to be (or CAN be) solved by mass execution.
No, on the contrary to what you say, if a post revolutionary society went that way, it would not be far away from creating a new U.S. empire, with a returned to the hardened, ruthless, murderous policies that massacred the Indians and enslaved African Americans.
As Mao wrote: “A revolution is not a dinner party, or writing an essay, or painting a picture, or doing embroidery; it cannot be so refined, so leisurely and gentle, so temperate, kind, courteous, restrained and magnanimous. A revolution is an insurrection, an act of violence by which one class overthrows another.”
Paul (http://mikeely.wordpress.com/2009/07/12/are-we-serious-about-communist-history-or-not/#comment-15599)answered this well.
In warfare there are extreme measures taken. but the episode we are discussing was almost twenty years after the Soviet Civil war — these were measures that erupted within a society that was not (yet) at war, or in the midst of an armed internal uprising.
To take another brief passage from Fitzpatrick’s book:
After the outbreak of the Civil War, the Cheka became an organ of terror, dispensing sumary justice including executions, making mass arrests, and taking hostages at random in areas that had come under mass arrests, and taking hostages at random in areas that had come under white control or were suspect of leaning towards the Whites. According to Bolshevik figures for twenty provinces of European Russia in 1918 and the first half of 1919, at least 8,389 persons were shot without trial by the Cheka and 87,000 arested.” (page 76)
These are the kinds of events that Mao is talking about (during the intense life and death fighting of a civil war). And such thing happened in the Chinese revolution, and also in the actions of the National Liberation Front of South Vietnam in the 1960s, and so on.
But we can see the different scale (orders of magnitude) that happened in the 1930s — when in fact mass roundups and executions happened in waves (often without evidence or trial or records or family notifications) in times that were relatively “peaceful” — i.e.amid sharp social conflict but without a war, or an armed uprising, where there was actually time for evidence and trials and public discussion.
Anyone who thinks that second kind of repression (recklessly using the full means of an established state in this way) is justified or should be imitated, has abdicated a responsibility to learn from this past, and has really announced their determination to become new oppressors. And even if you don’t think so, everyone else will!
And I might add: that people who want to conduct mass campaigns of execution should declare themselves early and loudly — so they can be carefully kept far far away from revolutionary preparations and future state power.