Red Moon Rising Sputnik and the Rivalries That Ignited the Space Age - Matthew Brzezinski [18]
“Don’t you see what will happen?” Kaganovich had protested. “They’ll hold us accountable. . . . We were in the leadership, and if we didn’t know, that’s our problem, but we’re still responsible for everything.”
Kaganovich’s feigned ignorance must have provoked a cynical snicker from the other members of the Presidium. How any Soviet citizen, least of all a fawning Stalin henchman like Lazar Kaganovich, could profess no knowledge of the fratricidal inferno that raged between 1929 and 1953 and engulfed 18 million lives was baffling. What had begun as a settling of accounts in the Central Committee had degenerated into a national feeding frenzy that left no corner of the Soviet empire unscarred. People turned in their neighbors because they wanted their apartments. Subordinates ratted out superiors because they wanted their jobs. Economic failures were blamed on “wreckers” and foreign saboteurs. Ethnic minorities were arrested en masse. Baits, Jews, Chechens, Volga Germans, Crimean Tatars, and Western Ukrainians were shipped by the trainload to Arctic jails. The Siberian death trains ran from as far west as Warsaw, where more than one million Poles were sent to the gulags, half never to return. The gulag archipelago that became their final resting place stretched over thirteen time zones, encompassed three thousand prison and labor camps, and employed hundreds of thousands of guards, administrators, and factory technicians. Vast railway networks had been carved over the permafrost to supply it with inmates and to haul the gold, coal, diamonds, and timber that their slave labor produced. Entire swaths of the Soviet economy depended on the blood-soaked revenue generated by the gulags, which did double duty as an engine of mass murder no less efficient than the Nazi concentration camps. The weeks-long cattle-car journeys could kill half the arrivals. Cold, disease, malnutrition, and overwork did the rest.
It was impossible for Kaganovich not to know any of this, just as it was impossible for the delegates of the Twentieth Party Congress not to have noticed that more than 1,000 of their 1,500 predecessors from the Seventeenth Congress in 1949 had been shot. Of course Kaganovich had known. Everyone knew. Each Presidium member, Khrushchev included, had personally signed thousands of arrest and death warrants. In their speeches, they had all exhorted the security men to exceed their brutal interrogation quotas, to root out shirkers, reactionary right-leaners, and foreign spies. Molotov, in his memoirs, even justified arresting the wives and children of enemies of the people: “They had to be isolated. . . . Otherwise, of course, they would have spread all sorts of complaints and demoralization.” Molotov’s own wife fell victim to the purges, but he did not try to save her from a Siberian labor camp. Nor did Kaganovich rise to the defense of his brother, who committed suicide rather than face trial. They had had to remain silent, to be more Stalinist than Stalin himself, because betraying even the slightest hint of hesitation would have cost them their lives. “All it took was an instant,” Khrushchev recalled. “All you did was blink and the door would open and you’d find yourself in Lubyanka,” the KGB headquarters.
For the men of Stalin’s inner circle, participation in the purges had been a matter of personal survival. But now that Khrushchev had unmasked Stalin’s reign of terror, would they survive an accounting for their actions? That was the real danger of Khrushchev’s speech—not the professed knowledge of the purges but the official acknowledgment of them, as the CIA report on the secret speech underscored. “A change from violence to diplomacy and from tension to relaxation cannot but have a deep psychological impact on the people inside the communist orbit” was the analysis in Washington.