During Stalin's Great Terror, accusations of treason struck fear in the
hearts of Soviet citizens-and lengthy imprisonment or firing squads
often followed. Many of the accused sealed their fates by agreeing to
confessions after torture or interrogation by the NKVD. Some, however,
gave up without a fight.
In Stalinist Confessions, Igal Halfin investigates the phenomenon of a
mass surrender to the will of the state. He deciphers the skillfully
rendered discourse through which Stalin defined his cult of personality
and consolidated his power by building a grassroots base of support and
instilling a collective psyche in every citizen. By rooting out evil
(opposition) wherever it hid, good communists could realize purity,
morality, and their place in the greatest society in history. Confessing
to trumped-up charges, comrades made willing sacrifices to their belief
in socialism and the necessity of finding and making examples of its
enemies.
Halfin focuses his study on Leningrad Communist University as a
microcosm of Soviet society. Here, eager students proved their loyalty
to the new socialism by uncovering opposition within the University.
Through their meetings and self-reports, students sought to become
Stalin's New Man.
Using his exhaustive research in Soviet archives including NKVD records,
party materials, student and instructor journals, letters, and
newspapers, Halfin examines the transformation in the language of
Stalinist socialism. From an initial attitude that dismissed dissent as
an error in judgment and redeemable through contrition to a doctrine
where members of the opposition became innately wicked and their reform
impossible, Stalin's socialism now defined loyalty in strictly black and
white terms. Collusion or allegiance (real or contrived, now or in the
past) with "enemies of the people" (Trotsky, Zinoviev, Bukharin,
Germans, capitalists) was unforgivable. The party now took to the task
of purging itself with ever-increasing zeal.
