PEOPLE OF THE PAST AND POLITICAL DARWINISM
In their discourse and practices, the first governments of People’s Commissars understood the class struggle in a manner that seems to owe more to Social Darwinism than to any eschatology drawn from the Communist Manifesto of 1848.
Lenin himself offers an example, in an article drafted in the final weeks of 1917 but only published in Pravda in 1929:Thousands of practical forms and methods of accounting and controlling the rich, the rogues and the idlers must be devised and put to a practical test by the communes themselves, by small units in town and country. Variety is a guarantee of effectiveness here, a pledge of success in achieving the single common aim, to clean the land of Russia of all vermin, of fleas - the rogues, of bugs - the rich, and so on and so forth.[374]
The insects were, initially, the merchants, the bourgeoisie, the nobility, the clerics. Alexandr Solzhenitsyn gave a definition of what such an expression might mean in the second volume of the Gulag Archipelago:
It is not possible for us at this time to fully investigate exactly who fell within the broad definition of insects', the population of Russia was too heterogeneous and encompassed small, special groups, entirely superfluous and, today, forgotten. The people in the local zemstvo selfgoverning bodies in the provinces were, of course, insects. People in the cooperative movement were also insects, as were all owners of their own homes. There were not a few insects among the teachers in the gymnasiums. The church parish councils were made up almost exclusively of insects, and it was insects, of course, who sang in church choirs. All priests were insects - and monks and nuns even more so. [...] And telegraphers, for some reason, were, for the most part, inveterate insects who had no sympathy for the Soviets. [.] It would have been impossible to carry out this hygienic purging, especially under wartime conditions, if they had had to follow outdated legal processes and normal judicial procedures.
And so an entirely new form was adopted: extrajudicial reprisal, and this thankless job was self-sacrificingly assumed by the Cheka, the Sentinel of the Revolution, which was the only punitive organ in human history that combined in one set of hands investigation, arrest, interrogation, prosecution, trial, and execution of the verdict.[375]Cleansing could have meant converting the privileged into proletarians. But this was precisely not the case. In fact, a slogan that was in heavy circulation among the Party leadership and its propaganda was that in the socialist homeland there could be no room for people of the past. In Russian, the notion of people of the past is evoked by the term: "byvshie liudi.” This idea is associated with the grandiose perspective of the classless society that was supposedly in the process of gestating. But, in the short term, it might just as well have been a variant of Social Darwinism. It meant that in the course of the revolutionary process, certain social groups would be incapable of adapting themselves and therefore of remaining in society. Their inadaptability meant that they would have to disappear. According to the watchword of the Cheka, quoted in a novella by Alexander Yakovlevich Arosev, a close comrade of Vyacheslav Mikhailovich Molotov: "a new life calls to the new men and the old must go to the junkyard.”[376]
With the creation of the Cheka, which would later be the GPU and then the NKVD, the security organs pursued the "enemies of the people” according to the norms of revolutionary legality. The police gave chase to these individuals and caught them in factories, railroads, the kolkhozes and even the organs of the Party itself. For an individual, one of the primary causes for suspicion was having an enemy of the people among one's relatives. Crime against the State was apparently shared by all members of a family, with the exception, at times, of those who denounced their own parents.
Arrested citizens had to prove their class origins, sometimes over several generations, going all the way back to before the Revolution.When a victim of repression was shot or sent to one of the Gulags, or off to the frontier in Siberia or Kazakhstan, it was common for spouses and widows to also be condemned to five or ten years of deportation for the crime of not having reported their husbands (or sons, or fathers). A consequence of this policy of repression was that it condemned the children of these families to fates that were for the most part atrocious. Those under the age of three were taken in by hospitals run by the security organs. Older children were dispatched to distant orphanages, far from the regions where their parents were serving their sentences. More often than not, they were denied the possibility of pursuing higher education beyond the level of secondary school. Not only was guilt shared horizontally, by spouses and family members of the same generation, but it took root in references to the family origins of the condemned, and in a terrible way, determined the lives of their offspring.
In a speech that he gave on 7 November, 1937, Joseph Stalin declared to his inner circle:
Anyone who endeavors to wreck this unity of the socialist state, anyone who aspires to detach parts and nationalities, is an enemy, a sworn enemy of the state, of the peoples of the USSR. We will annihilate every such enemy, even if he is an old Bolshevik, we will annihilate his entire clan, his family. We will mercilessly annihilate anyone who in actions or thoughts - yes, even in thoughts - who attempts [to undermine] the unity of the socialist state. [Let us drink to] the annihilation of all enemies to the very end, of [the enemies] themselves, and of their families![377]
The term translated as “clan” is the Russian word “rod.” In practice, under Stalin’s rule, the regime also excluded the children of the condemned, doubtless in the thinking that these offspring might one day act against their parents’ oppressors.
It might be the case that this intergenerational transmission of punishment was less of a matter of some naturalistic intuition than the perception that it was risky for the system to allow families to preserve the memory of repression within themselves. It might be tempting to see this as an attempt, one that could hardly be more traditional, to preemptively protect oneself, or in this case one’s state, against a future vendetta. Whether this was the case or not, the framework of repression and the methods of the bureaucratic machinery seized the ascendants as well as the descendants of victims.Anatoly Vasilyevich Lunacharsky, People’s Commissar of Cultural Affairs, was one of the prosecutors and propagandists at the great trials of the Revolutionary Socialists in summer 1921. In his indictments he refers to them as vermin (vrediteli) capable of infecting the whole population.[378] On numerous occasions he uses the expression “byvshie liudi” borrowed from the title of a short novel published by Maxim Gorky in 1903. In her study of the presence of Nietzschean thought in Soviet Russia, Bernice Glatzer Rosenthal argues that:
The chilling term “former people” (byvshie liudi), usually softened in translation to “people of the past” or “has beens,” became a common place in literature and theater, subliminally disseminating the idea that some people are not quite human.[379]
But the semantic slippage seems to have happened in the opposite direction. Maxim Gorky’s novel of that name depicts wretched and alcoholic characters who, crushed by social and economic pressures, have lost their humanity. In this specific case, the expression “byvshie liudi” refers to people who, in consequence of their circumstances, have ceased to be human. The reader’s gaze upon this degrading spectacle of victimization is one of compassion. But after 1917, in the context of the Bolshevik political propaganda offensives, the same expression did indeed come to mean “person belonging to the past,” which is to say that species of person who has no place in the society being built.
Emptied of all compassion, this second definition is far more terrifying than the first. In the same vein of thought, Rosenthal draws attention to the importance of the expression “superfluous man” (lishnii chelovek). Here again is a Romantic character who shows up in nineteenth century literature. But after the end of the NEP, the plural of this expression (lishnie liudi) came to designate categories of person that did not live directly from their labor. As such, they were the object of every suspicion. A recent survey of the Jewish populations of Belarus in the aftermath of the October Revolution has reconstructed the tribulations of the Jewish bourgeois elements who were confronted with the new political order. The Soviet administration placed them in the category of lishchentsy, which is to say citizens deprived of the right to participate in elections. The author of this study analyzes the meaning of the category and the consequences that this label might have for those on whom it was imposed:From the Russian lischit', to deprive, this new political category designated all “former people,” or byvshie liudi, of non-proletarian background and connected to the “bourgeois putrefaction,” as Lenin put it. This category included therefore members of the pre-revolutionary elite, former officers or high-ranking bureaucrats in the tsarist state service, religious functionaries, and those who profited from hired labor (“exploiters”). Lishchentsy typically became outcasts: even if only one member had been disenfranchised, the entire family experienced restricted access to housing, education, and medical assistance.[380]
The implication here is two-fold: not only did the category “people of the past” designate people incapable, in some sense due to their nature, of participating in this new world but also, in a manner that was, on the whole, logical, this stigma was extended to all of the members of the family, as if the infamy of one member stained the entire household and infected the whole family tree. The theme of people of the past was from this point on present in the world of publications authorized by the state. To take one example, in the attacks that the journalist V. Verner launched in 1926 against the Vecherniaia krasnaia gazeta newspaper, he wrote that this publication was addressed to “people of the past and people without a future”7-[381]
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