c corps--numerous members of the Central Committee of the Communist Party--almost all the military judges who had sat in judgment and had condemned--the Red Army generals--two successive heads of the NKVD--the prime ministers and chief officials of all the non-Russian Soviet republics--the director of the Lenin Library--the man who had led the charge against the Winter Palace in 1917--a 70 year old schoolteacher who owned a book which included a picture ofTrotsky--an 85 year old woman who made the sign of the Cross when a funeral passed--a man who took down a portrait of Stalin while painting a wall Not since the days of the Inquisition had the test of ideological loyalty been applied to somany people. And not since the days of the French Revolution had so many died for failingthe test. Arrests multiplied tenfold in 1936 and 1937. Anything was used as an excuse foran arrest: dancing too long with a Japanese diplomat, not clapping loudly enough or longenough after one of Stalin's speeches, buying groceries from a former kulak. People wentto work one day and simply did not return -- they were either killed immediately or sent tothe GULAG. The NKVD employed millions of secret informers who infiltrated everyworkplace. Most academics and writers came to expect arrest, exile and prison as part oftheir lives. A historian could be sent to exile for describing Joan of Arc as nervous andtense just when the general party line wished her described as calm in the face of death.When a linguistic theory that held that all language was derived from four sounds wasaccepted as official, professors who opposed this view had their books confiscated. By1938 at least one million people were in prison, some 8.5 million had been arrested andsent to the GULAG and nearly 800,000 had been executed. In fact, before the KGB wasdissolved in 1991, it was revealed that 47 million Soviet citizens had died as a result offorced collectivization and the purges. That figur...
