The Great Terror

6

LAST STAND

Singleness of purpose became with him duplicity of action.

Karl Marx on Ivan III

AUTUMN MANEUVERS

The Zinoviev Trial, and particularly the executions, severely shook the “officer corps” of the Party—“those elements who, until recently, had considered themselves the sole possessors of the right to occupy themselves with politics.”¹ Everything had been arranged without consulting them. Nothing could now be done about the dead. A dangerous precedent had been successfully established.

Preparations for the next round were already at hand. N. I. Muralov, former Inspector-General of the Red Army, had been arrested on 17 April 1936. He had previously been working in Western Siberia. On 5 and 6 August² two more ex-Trotskyites from the same area—Y. N. Drobnis and M. S. Boguslavsky—were pulled in. These were distinguished old revolutionaries of the second rank.

Drobnis, a worker, a shoemaker, an active revolutionary at the age of fifteen who had served six years in a Tsarist prison, had survived three death sentences. From one of these, when captured and wounded by the Whites during the Civil War, he had escaped by a rare chance. He had later been a Secretary of the Ukrainian Central Committee. The giant Muralov came from a poor toiling family and had joined workers’ circles in 1899 and the Party in 1905.³ He had had an extraordinary Civil War record. Boguslavsky, too, was a veteran of both the underground and the Civil War.

We have already noted the arrests of the more important figures of Sokolnikov (26 August) and Serebryakov (17 or 18 August),⁴ who were under interrogation soon after. Sokolnikov was already confessing, though “vaguely,” in August.⁵ And as Vyshinsky had said in his statement of 21 August, Bulcharin, Rykov, Pyatakov, Radek, and Uglanov were to be the subject of further investigation, with Tomsky, who had, however, escaped by suicide.

On 27 August, two days after the executions, most of the members of the Politburofn1 were in Moscow, including the Kiev-based Kossior and Postyshev. On the last day of the month, Molotov returned from leave.⁶ Apart from Mikoyan, the only full member not there was Stalin himself, who was still holidaying at Sochi, where he was to remain for several weeks. Yezhov, however, was in Moscow, and doubtless in touch with his superior.

Bukharin now wrote letters to the members of the Politburo and to Vyshinsky protesting his innocence, and followed them up on 1 September with a letter to Voroshilov in more personal terms, approving the executions and saying that perhaps even Tomsky had become involved with the opposition. Voroshilov answered curtly on 3 September, returning the letter and referring to Bukharin’s “disgusting” attacks on the Party leadership. Bukharin then wrote to him again, defending himself at some length, but got no reply.⁷

Over the next week or so, the Party leadership discussed the cases of the newly incriminated, and the revulsion felt seems to have shown itself in opposition to further persecution. To question the guilt of Zinoviev and Kamenev, or the conduct of the case, was now impossible, for they were proven traitors. But with Bukharin and Rykov, it was different. Moreover, they were popular in the country and in the Party in a way that Zinoviev and Co. had never been. And the suicide of Tomsky had evidently been a severe shock.

On 8 September 1936, Bukharin and Rykov were brought to a “confrontation” with Sokolnikov in the presence of Kaganovich, Yezhov, and Vyshinsky. Sokolnikov repeated the charges, but said he had no direct evidence and had heard of the Rightist involvement only from Kamenev. When the guards removed Sokolnikov, Kaganovich said to Bukharin that the testimony was all lies and that Bukharin should go back to his editorial offices and work tranquilly.⁸

On 10 September, in a small paragraph at the top of page 2, Pravda announced that the investigation into the charges against Rykov and Bukharin was being dropped, for lack of evidence. This reversal is said to have been made “under pressure of some members of the Politburo.”⁹

Politically, the exculpation is understandable. From a judicial point of view, it is fantastic. The accused in the Zinoviev Case had been sentenced to execution on their own evidence against themselves. But their evidence against Rykov and Bukharin was of exactly the same status, neither more nor less credible. It might be thought that this alone would have shown Western observers the meaninglessness of the whole trial. (Moreover, though the case against the two Rightists was suspended, it was not found necessary to make amends to their colleague Tomsky. Article 107 of the Criminal Code of the RSFSR laid down penalties for provoking suicide by moral or physical persecution. It was not applied.)

It is improbable that a majority against the Purge now existed in the Politburo. Voroshilov, Kaganovich, and probably Andreyev were by now committed to it. Molotov, too, must already have learned his lesson. At least, he was back in good odor by 21 September,¹⁰ when an alleged attempt on his life was being put into the scenario for the next trial. And this return to favor can hardly be accounted for except on the view that he had aligned himself wholeheartedly with Stalin’s plans in the September discussions.

Nevertheless, Stalin retreated as far as the two Rightists were concerned. He had, it should be noted, never committed himself finally to their arrest. He may well have intended no more at this stage than a preliminary sounding, a putting of the Bukharin problem on the agenda, as it were, in his usual devious style. In that case, it was not a question of decisive votes in the supreme body. And in his absence, his own prestige was not directly involved.

As I write in 1989, there is still some uncertainty about the plenums of the Central Committee which took place in the last half of 1936, but were never announced. For many years, the only reference to any in an official document came in evidence at a later trial referring to “one of the autumn plenums of the Central Committee of the Party,” which, from the context, must have been after March 1936 and before 1937.¹¹ Roy Medvedev writes of “one of the plenary sessions held in the late summer or early autumn of 1936,” at which the arrest of Pyatakov (and “apparently” of Sokolnikov) was sanctioned.¹²

As to “late summer,” one former official has described a four-day plenum held in early September, with the Bukharin issue debated on the last day. But this is hard to reconcile with the absence of various leaders, and it shows signs of confusion with later plenums. Moreover, we are told that a plenum discussed the Bukharin issue “for the first time” in December.¹³ The December plenum (described as “unofficial”) was only confirmed in 1988.¹⁴ If the other was convened in “early autumn,” it was presumably in late September or October.

As for the constitutional point, this does not, after all, help us with this plenum’s dating. Khrushchev remarks that the Central Committee members arrested in 1937 and 1938 were expelled from the Party illegally through gross violation of the Party statutes, since the question of their expulsion was never studied at a Central Committee plenary session. By implication, the arrests of Pyatakov and Sokolnikov, the only Central Committee member and candidate member known to have been arrested in 1936, were legalized. But we are now told that this was not done, as Khrushchev implies, by a plenum. Instead, the Central Committee was polled on 25–26 August in the case of Sokolnikov, and on 10–11 September in the case of Pyatakov.¹⁵ The plenum, when it assembled, was presumably required to vote formal approval. It was quite a different matter, as yet, from proceeding against men like Kamenev and Zinoviev, already in jail, already expelled from the Party.

Stalin had made certain gains. The materials were in his hand for prolonging the Purge. He now had, after all, a reasonable quota for the next trial: Serebryakov and Sokolnikov, and now Radek, arrested on 22 September, and Pyatakov, who had been taken on 12 September, while Sokolnikov (though not Serebryakov) was already confessing. The failure over Bukharin and Rykov, even if Stalin had not been certain of success at the first attempt, evidently rankled. It was plain that a powerful effort, a new campaign, would be needed. In the Black Sea sunshine, he considered the next move. The Soviet press concerned itself with other matters: democracy, the triumph of Soviet aviation, the successful harvest, and massive support for the struggle of the Spanish Republic.

Like a general who transfers the weight of his offensive from a line where the going is heavy to an easier approach, Stalin shifted his attack to Yagoda.

Yagoda’s position at that time remains something of a mystery. It is clear that he was involved in the preparations for the 1936 Trial from the start—though perhaps excluded from the key discussions and conversations preceding the case. He is indeed said to have “urged that the case be discussed in the Politburo.”¹⁶ At the same time, it seems that he was himself deceived by Stalin’s assurance that Zinoviev and Kamenev would not be executed.¹⁷ He was later to be accused of shielding I. N. Smirnov—though there was an obvious motive here, in that this was advanced as an explanation for Smirnov’s unsatisfactory behavior in the dock.¹⁸ Nevertheless, it does seem that Yagoda may have made some attempt to temper the wind to the oppositionists.¹⁹ He was to be similarly accused of ordering that Uglanov’s testimony be kept “within certain limits.”²⁰ And there are other reports of underground obstruction within the NKVD which took the form of framing questions in such a way as to protect those interrogated.²¹ The most likely occasion for the development of more definite resistance on Yagoda’s part would be following the executions. This could only have manifested itself in the discussions about the fates of Bukharin and Rykov.

We can be sure that Yezhov (who was to replace Yagoda) offered stronger resistance to clearing the Rightists. He seems to have acquiesced very reluctantly in the decision. He regarded the rehabilitation of Bukharin and Rykov as temporary, “vowing that he would yet make good the ‘mistake,’”²² and he and Agranov almost immediately started accusing Yagoda of laxness.

For the moment, Bukharin and Rykov were safe. The former continued to hold his position as editor of lzvestiya, and both remained candidate members of the Central Committee. It was clear that some leaders hoped that the momentum of the Purge would peter out with the forthcoming Pyatakov Case. But if Stalin could not obtain the support he needed in the highest Party bodies, he had other methods of gaining his ends. He proceeded to the coup which was to bring the Terror to its most frightful climax—the appointment of Yezhov as People’s Cornmissar for Internal Affairs.

On 25 September, Stalin and Zhdanov sent a telegram from Sochi to Kaganovich, Molotov, “and other members of the Political Bureau”:

We deem it absolutely necessary and urgent that Comrade Yezhov be nominated to the post of People’s Commissar for Internal Affairs. Yagoda had definitely proved himself to be incapable of unmasking the Trotskyite–Zinovievite bloc. The OGPU is four years behind in this matter. This is noted by all Party workers and by the majority of the representatives of the NKVD.²³

The “four years” is significant and sinister. It was four years almost to the day since the September session of 1932 which had blocked the attempt to execute Ryutin. It has since been suggested that the phrase might refer to the four years passed after meetings and connections between Trotsky’s son and Soviet sympathizers, and the alleged formation of the Trotskyite–Zinovievite bloc, in 1932. But the chief offender, I. N. Smirnov, had been arrested within weeks, and since 1934 the NKVD had been finishing off Trotskyites and Zinovievites by the score, so could hardly have been said to have fallen behind four years. The point is hardly a crucial one. But in fact it was now that Ryutin was brought back to the Lubyanka from an isolator and his interrogation began. On 4 November, he was signing a “categorical refusal” to confess to terrorism.²⁴ It seems certain that Stalin proposed to use him in the next show trial, but despite “illegal methods” he remained recalcitrant.

No one, of course, thought for a moment that Yagoda’s removal indicated mere “incapability.” It was at once noted in the Party that “it was not a question of dissatisfaction with his insufficiently active work … this indicated political distrust of him.”²⁵

The transfer of Yezhov to duties that he was already much concerned with in any case could hardly have been the occasion for members of the Politburo to oppose the General Secretary, even if Ordzhonikidze, Chubar, or Kossior might have wished this. Although the tone and the intention of the new appointment would be obvious, as a practical measure it would be hard to argue against.

The following day, Molotov carried out instructions. The shift was used to rid the Soviet Government of Rykov. Next day, the papers announced Rykov’s “release,” without the conventional comment that he was going to “other work”; the appointment of Yagoda to Rykov’s post of People’s Commissar of Communications; and Yezhov’s appointment as Head of the NKVD.

On 29 September 1936 (and again on 21 October 1936) circulars were issued from the Central Committee. They called in effect for the end of unfair expulsions from the Party and a stepping-up of fair ones. They were followed by press censures of a number of local leaders for failure in one or another of these respects. On 29 September, too, a secret directive (drafted by Kaganovich, accepted by the Politburo, and signed by Stalin) called for settling with the Trotskyite–Zinovievites, including not only those arrested whose interrogation was complete, and those like Muralov, Pyatakov, and Beloborodov, whose investigation had not yet ended, but also “those who were earlier exiled.”²⁶ That is to say, Ryutin and others who had never been Trotskyites or Zinovievites.

Yagoda handed over his office on 30 September 1936. On the same day, the announcement of M. D. Berman as Deputy Head of the NKVD was made, while Yagoda’s Second Deputy, G. E. Prokofiev, was transferred with him. On 17 October, a more sinister figure still, the puffy-faced M. P. Frinovsky, was also appointed a Deputy Head of the NKVD (and on 3 November, L. N. Bel’ski). Neither Berman nor Frinovsky nor Bel’ ski had been serving in the old Secret Police apparatus proper. Berman had headed the Labor Camp Administration, Gulag; Frinovsky commanded the Frontier Guards; while Bel’ski was Head of the Militia. Otherwise, the old NKVD chiefs were not yet disturbed. Even Yagoda’s personal assistant remained in the NKVD for some time. Molchanov and the other departmental chiefs kept their posts, though Yezhov brought in his own men from the Central Committee apparatus to help them in their work, and to learn how to supplant them.

A team of more than twenty-five interrogators headed by Agranov started to prepare the new trial.²⁷ The original script for this described Pyatakov and his fellow accused simply as a “Reserve Center” which had plotted but not acted. By this means, the case was represented as less serious than that of August, and one not implying the death penalty. It was no doubt partly by this means that Stalin had gained the leadership’s consent to go forward with the Pyatakov Case—which, it might be hoped, would be no more than a tidying-up of loose ends in a fairly restrained fashion.

But after the NKVD had proceeded on these lines for a few weeks, the line suddenly changed. Molchanov, in Yezhov’s presence, instructed a meeting of interrogators that “a new line of investigation” was to be pursued. The accused were to be required to confess that they had plotted to seize power and had worked with the Nazis for this purpose.²⁸

Stalin had not, since Radek’s recantation in the 1920s, had anything to complain about from him. He had betrayed Trotsky’s emissary, Blyumkin, who as a result was shot in 1929. In early September 1936, Radek wanted to remind the General Secretary of these services in exposing Trotskyites, but feared that if he himself wrote to Stalin, his message would be intercepted by the NKVD. So he had asked Bukharin to write to Stalin about it if he himself were arrested.²⁹ Radek was one man who had truly burned his bridges to the opposition; at the same time, he was nowhere regarded as a serious politician, and there was no question of his ever competing for even the lowest rung of power. What Stalin’s motive was in bringing Radek in particular into the plot at all is obscure. It may simply be that until he could secure the arrest of the Rightists, he was rather low on big names for another trial. And Radek was at least a very well-known man.

Sokolnikov seems to have had an interview with Stalin and to have been promised his life. It is not clear why Sokolnikov believed this promise. It was, in all probability, made before the execution of Zinoviev and his followers. But Sokolnikov seems to have been convinced of its efficacy even after the executions. But in any case, he had little choice. He had a young wife and a son by a previous marriage who was in his twenties.³⁰

Sokolnikov was brought to a “confrontation” with Radek immediately after the latter’s arrest.³¹ This did not lead to anything at once. Radek was worked on on the “conveyor” system by Kedrov and other interrogators.³² At first he resisted stubbornly.

The sacrifice of Pyatakov is perhaps the clearest sign of Stalin’s motives. He had been, it was true, an oppositionist, and an important one. But he had abandoned opposition in 1928 and had worked with complete loyalty ever since. He was regarded by the Trotskyites as a deserter. Trotsky’s son Sedov, chancing to meet him on the Unter den Linden, had publicly insulted him.³³ He had not liked, but he had honestly accepted, Stalin’s leadership. There was, in his case, no real question—as might have been thought of Zinoviev and Kamenev, and of Bukharin—of any desire to present an alternative leadership.

And his services to Stalin’s Government were extremely valuable. His energy and intelligence, probably unrivaled in the whole leadership, had been channeled into carrying out Stalin’s industrialization plans.

What was there to be said against him?

He had loyally accepted the Stalin leadership, but he would have accepted an alternative leadership if Stalin could have been overthrown; he supported him with reservations. He had been a major critic of Stalin’s in the 1920s. He had made it clear that he regarded his rise to power as unfortunate. Above all, he was even now, whatever his own desires, leadership timber. Lenin had named him among the six most important figures in the Party (of them all, Stalin was to allow none but himself to survive). He had even been thought of as an alternative Prime Minister to Lenin in the “Left Communist” plans of 1918.

Ordzhonikidze, as People’s Commissar for Heavy Industry, depended entirely on the genius of Pyatakov, and was generous enough to admit this. Pyatakov’s was the brain and the driving force behind the Plan, creating a major industrial base against all the handicaps that resulted from Stalin’s system—the wastages due to the purges of experts, the establishment of impossible prestige targets, and the suspicions and inefficiencies of administrators.

There is a report that after Pyatakov’s arrest, but before its announcement, the director of a scientific institute who knew of it made a public attack on him in Ordzhonikidze’s presence. Ordzhonikidze interrupted him with the remark “It is very easy to attack a man who is not there to defend himself. Wait till Yuri Leonidovich returns.”³⁴

But Pyatakov broke down comparatively quickly—in thirty-three days (Radek held out for two months and eighteen days, Serebryakov for three months and sixteen days, Muralov for seven months and seventeen days). We have already noted the extravagance of Pyatakov’s earlier submission to “the Party.” When he was incriminated in August 1936, Yezhov had told him that he was being demoted to a post in the Urals. He denied the terrorist charges (Yezhov reported), but said that he deserved demotion for not having denounced his ex-wife’s connections with Trotskyites. To regain the trust of the Party, he would be willing to appear for the prosecution at a trial, and would personally offer to shoot all the accused, including his ex-wife, and announce this publicly. Yezhov said that this was absurd. Pyatakov then wrote to Stalin, denying the accusations and saying that he would die for the Party and Stalin. He was to have his wish, but not yet.³⁵

SABOTEURS IN SIBERIA

One theme already well established in Soviet mythology, that of sabotage, had not been raised in the Zinoviev Trial. It would have been difficult, in fact, to charge men who were all either in prison or cut off from major work with such acts; anybody can commit assassination, but sabotage is carried out by industrialists and engineers or, anyhow, people with access to the relevant machines. Almost all those in the group now coming to trial had held, until shortly before their arrests, posts as People’s Commissars, Assistant People’s Commissars, leaders of industrial complexes, engineers, and so forth. And to show that no breach in tradition was intended, they were specifically linked with the saboteurs of the earlier period.

The concept of sabotage as a political weapon is in general an absurd one. The very word, with its implications of peasants throwing clogs into machinery, is a fair description of what is almost invariably an individual and illiterate protest. The only real exception is to be found in large underground movements in occupied countries in time of war, operating with the sympathy of most of the population. In those circumstances, on the one hand, it becomes possible on a fairly wide scale; and on the other, it becomes, or at least appears to be, a genuine contribution to the defeat of the enemy. In peacetime, a small conspiracy could scarcely hope to achieve any political result whatever by such means. In any case, plotters working to remove the political leadership by terror would hardly dissipate their forces, or run the extra risk of discovery, for local and indecisive actions of this type. Nor had any previous conspiracy of the sort ever done so. The illogic of the accusations was not the sort of consideration to stop Stalin, and over the following years sabotage became the theme of a mass purge at all levels.

The official definition of sabotage was now extended, and the penalties for it were made more severe: “On 29 November 1936, Vyshinsky ordered that within a month all criminal cases of major conflagrations, accidents and output of poor-quality products be reviewed and studied with the aim of exposing a counter-revolutionary and saboteur background in them and making the guilty parties more heavily liable.”³⁶

In the new industrial region of the Upper Ob basin—the “Kuzbas”—almost 2,000 miles east of Moscow, a number of reconstructed Trotskyites held posts suitable to their condition. The great plants had gone up, amid a squalor for the workers—mainly deportees—which the old industrial revolutions in the capitalist West had not matched. At the same time, unrelenting pressure for results at all costs had led to the virtual abandonment of the usual sort of safety precautions. Frightful accidents were common.

On 23 September 1936 there was an explosion in the Tsentralnaya Mine at Kemerovo. Its director, Noskov, and several of his subordinates were at once arrested. His superior, Norkin, Head of the Kemerovo Combined Works Construction Trust since 1932, was arrested on 30 September.³⁷ For the NKVD this was a most useful line of responsibility, as Norkin was an immediate link with Drobnis and, through him, with Muralov. A whole “Trotskyite nest” in West Siberia, operating moreover under the direct orders of the Deputy People’s Commissar for Heavy Industry, Pyatakov, was thus laid open to easy attack. To make it yet easier, the NKVD ordered its representative in the Kemerovo industrial area, Shestov, to accept the role of accomplice.³⁸

It was thus possible to establish the idea of widespread sabotage before Pyatakov and the others came to trial. From 19 to 22 November, a great trial took place in Novosibirsk, before a court of the Military Collegium under Ulrikh, in which the accidents in the mines and factories of that city and Kemerovo were charged against Noskov and eight other defendants, including a German engineer, Stickling. In addition, the charge was now put forward that an attempt had been made to assassinate Molotov. The defendants were linked, through Drobnis and Shestov (who appeared as “witnesses”), with Muralov and Pyatakov.

At this trial there were confessions, and even documents, about an anti-Soviet printing establishment. It seems that this actually existed. The cellar where it had stood still showed signs of its presence three years later. But the whole thing had been an NKVD operation. The job had been done at night by prisoners under guard awaiting execution. As to the thousands of leaflets supposed to have been distributed, it was clear that this had not happened, since anyone caught with such a leaflet would have been arrested, and no one in Kemerovo knew of any such arrests. One local commented, “Maybe the conspirators printed them up just to provide themselves with bedtime stories.”³⁹

One of the accused, the German engineer Stickling, was not given a death sentence. Later, in the Gestapo prison in Lublin, he said that his confession was false, and implied that it had been obtained because the NKVD was able to blackmail him about his private life.⁴⁰

A Soviet industrialist who was sent to Kemerovo in 1939, and actually took over the very office from which Norkin had allegedly organized his crimes, has produced an account of the background of the trial. As a prominent local figure pointed out, though the saboteurs were now dead, the accidents still went on. In any case, if engineers had really wished to make trouble, it was clear that they could have blown the whole place to pieces. Moreover, in the files there were many reports from the executed men sent by them to the Commissariat of Heavy Industry coal administration warning about the conditions which were bound to lead to accidents.⁴¹

But the Tsentralnaya Mine disaster was not the only one which a determined investigation could turn up in the Kuzbas. On 29 October, a Commission of Experts was sent to Kemerovo to investigate two explosions and other accidents which had taken place in the plants of the Kemerovo Combined Works Construction Trust in February, March, and April 1936. A similar body started work on a series of pit fires in the nearby Prokopyevsk coal mines—sixty of these had occurred up to the end of 1935.⁴² The experts produced findings of sabotage. The material now available was sufficient by any standards to damn the West Siberian defendants.

Although this West Siberian group was to provide no less than seven out of the seventeen accused in the forthcoming trial, two other sabotage groups were also being prepared. One was headed by Rataichak, Chief of the Central Administration of the Chemical Industry in Pyatakov’s Commissariat: on 22 October 1936 the Head of the Gorlovka Nitrogen Fertilizer Works, Pushin, was arrested in connection with an explosion there on 11 November 1935. He confessed at once and implicated his chief.⁴³ This group of saboteurs was completed by an NKVD agent, Hrasche,⁴⁴ who worked in the Foreign Division of Rataichak’s Administration, and so formed a useful link with Japanese espionage and other sinister foreign forces.

More important was the third and last of the saboteur groups—that devoted to wrecking the railways. Its three leaders were Yakov Livshits, an Old Bolshevik and reformed Trotskyite, who was now Kaganovich’s Deputy People’s Commissar of Communications, and the lesser figures of Knyazev, Assistant Chief of the Central Traffic Department in the Commissariat, who had formerly been Head of the South Urals Railway, and Turok, Assistant Head of the Traffic Department of the Perm Railway.

Livshits’s dismissal was announced on 14 November, and Knyazev was giving evidence in mid-December, later than the other main figures, so it seems that the railway theme was the last to be brought in. It implicated in particular Serebryakov, who had run the Commissariat in the 1920s, and it linked up with Boguslavsky, who was responsible for railway wrecking in the West Siberian set-up.

The charge of sabotage was a serious one. But, ironically enough, it could have been represented to the Central Committee as a sign of possible clemency. Professor Ramzin, the main “saboteur” in the “Industrial Party” Case, not only had been amnestied a couple of years after sentence and repentance, but had been restored to office and to favor, and even awarded an Order.fn2

Stalin is reported back in Moscow, from his holiday, at a reception for a Mongolian delegation on 4 November. With him were several members of the Politburo, including Mikoyan and, of course, Yezhov. At the 7 November Parade, all the Politburo members based in Moscow were on the stand.

The slogans for this nineteenth anniversary of the Revolution included a violent attack on the Trotskyite—Zinovievite spies. There was no reference to the Right deviation, which presumably shows that the issue was still in abeyance. But the cat-and-mouse game with Bukharin continued. At the Red Square celebrations, he and his wife were on one of the minor stands. A soldier came over with Stalin’s invitation to join him on the Lenin mausoleum.⁴⁵ Soon after, Bukharin was served with an eviction order from his Kremlin apartment. Stalin telephoned, and on being told of this said angrily that the evictors must get out immediately, and they did so.⁴⁶

And now Stalin, perhaps looking ahead from the purge of the ex-oppositionists to the completer sweep he was to make of the Party, made his first move against one of his own followers.

Postyshev had served in Kiev from 1923, becoming a Secretary of the Kiev Committee in 1924, and from 1926 to 1930 had been a member of the Ukrainian Politburo, before going to Moscow to be a Secretary of the Central Committee. He had been again intruded on the Ukrainian apparatus in January 1933 to toughen it in its difficult struggle with the peasantry and Ukrainian national feeling. Although Kossior and his group were not displaced, as much power and prestige attached to Postyshev as to his theoretical superior. In addition to his Ukrainian Second Secretaryship, he held the First Secretaryship of the Kiev Provincial Committee of the Party.

During the whole period, it became customary to give Postyshev what, on the face of it, looked like an anomalous seniority. When greetings were sent to the Soviet Government, to the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party, or to the Ukrainian Government, in each case only the single leading figure was named as the recipient. But when it came to the Ukrainian Central Committee, both Kossior and Postyshev were conventionally named.fn3

A younger and better-looking man than most of the others, with a clipped moustache and high hair swept back over his oval head, Postyshev was in fact an irreproachable Stalinist. His reputation for fair-mindedness (within the limits of the system) was fairly good. It is said that he had been among the opponents of the proposal to shoot Ryutin, and had redeemed himself in Kiev. Opposition from such a source could, as with Kirov’s, have been a real threat.

Postyshev had been interpreting the Central Committee circulars on expelling Party members in the wrong fashion. He was expelling provocateurs and slanderers and retaining their victims. One of these delators was a woman called Nikolayenko, who had been particularly troublesome for a year.⁴⁷ Postyshev had expelled her from the Kiev Party organization.

Clearly, this expulsion was an action totally contrary to the whole spirit of the Purge and particularly to Central Committee decisions of 29 September and 21 October 1936, which may indeed have already been aimed at Postyshev. Everywhere, as the “Yezhovshchina” got going, it was precisely through the denunciation by such types that the police got their grip on the leaders of the Party organizations. It was later to be alleged that in Kiev, more than anywhere else in the Ukraine, Trotskyites had been able to gain important posts.⁴⁸ Postyshev’s attitude is thus plainly established as being against this system, even before the showdown. In November, Stalin, seeking a pretext, took over the Nikolayenko case.⁴⁹ The Central Committee apparatus in Moscow, that is to say, examined her appeal against expulsion in a favorable fashion. She was later found to have the execution of “some eight thousand people” on her conscience.⁵⁰

The New Constitution finally passed into law amid a fanfare of speeches, ovations, and a press campaign which culminated in a speech by Stalin on 27 November. He went at great length into the questions which had arisen about how best to guarantee democracy, freedom of the subject, and all the other attributes of a State fully attuned to the people’s will.

Meanwhile, the issue of Bukharin and Rykov again came to the fore. Even before Yagoda’s fall, the NKVD was sending Stalin the interrogation records of E. F. Kulikov and others, which implicated Bukharin, Rykov, and Tomsky. On 7 October, Tomsky’s former secretary, Stankin (admitting to implication in a terrorist act planned against Stalin for November 6), gave testimony that Tomsky had told her of a “Right Counter-Revolutionary Center” consisting of “Tomsky, Bukharin, Rykov, Uglanov, [V. V.] Shmidt and Syrtsov.” The former director of the Lenin Library, V. I. Nevsky, gave testimony on 23 November that Bukharin, Rykov, and Tomsky were the leaders of the counter-revolutionary Rightist organization. (In January 1937, he was to withdraw this, and at his secret trial on 25 May 1937 he said that the NKVD had insisted on his signing it in the interests of the Party.)⁵¹

The Central Committee plenum met on 4 to 7 December. On 4 December, Yezhov reported on “the Trotskyite and Rightist anti-Soviet organizations” and said that Bukharin and Rykov had not “laid down their arms” but had gone underground. He produced the evidence of Kulikov and others, and Bukharin and Rykov were violently denounced by Kaganovich, Molotov, and Voroshilov. Although many seem to have remained silent, and Ordzhonikidze is reported as making remarks implying distrust of Yezhov,⁵² many speakers demanded the expulsion of the two Rightists from the Central Committee and the Party (all the Central Committee—including Bukharin and Rykov themselves—had been receiving confidential copies of the testimony against the two men). They strongly denied the accusations. During intervals they were brought to confrontations with Kulikov and with Pyatakov and Sosnovsky. But Stalin again temporized, and the plenum accepted his proposal “to consider the question of Rykov and Bukharin as incomplete. Further investigation to be undertaken, a decision postponed until the next plenum.”⁵³

It was now that many of the accused in the Pyatakov Case were beginning to confess. This may show that a reluctant compromise had been reached among the leadership about the trial. At any rate, Ordzhonikidze already seems to have obtained from Stalin a promise to spare Pyatakov’s life. Comparable tactics, combined with the conveyor and the stoika, helped with others.⁵⁴ On 4 December, Radek gave his first evidence. He had in the end decided to surrender if Stalin would give him the same guarantee he had given Sokolnikov. For some time Stalin refused to see him—but finally, it is said, he visited the Lubyanka and had a long talk with Radek in the presence of Yezhov. Radek then became the closest collaborator of the interrogation, and helped replan the scenario of the plot.⁵⁵ Muralov, who had held out so long, now gave in—reportedly under Radek’s influence—and on the following day he too was confessing. Norkin started confessing about the same time. By January, hundreds of pages of evidence from all the defendants were in the files.

On the anniversary of the founding of the Secret Police, 20 December 1936, Stalin gave a small banquet for the heads of the NKVD. Yezhov, Frinovsky, Pauker, and others were present. Afterward, an account of what happened circulated among the NKVD. When everyone had drunk a good deal, Pauker, supported by two other officers acting the parts of warders, played for Stalin the part of Zinoviev being dragged to execution. He hung by their arms, moaning and mouthing, then fell on his knees, and, holding one of the warders by the boots, cried out, “Please, for God’s sake, Comrade, call up Yosif Vissarionovich!”

Stalin roared with laughter, and Pauker gave a repeat performance. By this time, Stalin was almost helpless with laughing, and when Pauker brought in a new angle by raising his hands and crying, “Hear, Israel, our God is the only God!” Stalin choked with mirth and had to signal Pauker to stop the performance.⁵⁶

In fact, Stalin had good reason to be pleased with his secret policemen, who had their second production almost ready to go on. He now ordered pursuit of the line on which he had been blocked in the autumn. Bukharin and Rykov were to be implicated. At the end of December 1936, Radek’s evidence incriminating the Rightists in terrorism and other crimes was delivered to Bukharin, whose life now became a nightmare of denunciations and confrontations,⁵⁷ until, on 16 January 1937, his name appeared for the last time as editor of lzvestiya.

A number of the Rightists under arrest, including Uglanov and V. V. Shmidt, did not give evidence against Bukharin before his own arrest. Some of his junior associates, however, were testifying to his plans for a “palace coup,” and their statements were sent to him.⁵⁸ Bukharin was then called in for several confrontations in the presence of the whole Politburo and Yezhov. First the prominent ex-Trotskyite Sosnovsky gave testimony that some money Bukharin had given him when he was in trouble was a conspiratorial payment.⁵⁹ Then came a confrontation with Pyatakov. Pyatakov is described as looking like a skeleton, and so weak that he could hardly stand. When he had confessed his membership in a counter-revolutionary center, implicating Bukharin, Ordzhonikidze asked him if his testimony was voluntary. He replied that it was.⁶⁰ The next confrontation was with Radek. Although pale, he was not in such a bad state as Pyatakov, and, unlike the lifelessness reported of the others, was “visibly agitated.” He confessed everything, on his own behalf and Bukharin’s, including a plot of theirs at lzvestiya to assassinate Stalin.⁶¹ Rykov, who had earlier been sent confessions implicating him made by his secretary Ekaterina Artemenko, also had “confrontations” with Sokolnikov, Pyatakov, and others.⁶² Meanwhile, with the Bukharin–Rykov group thoroughly implicated, Stalin was fully prepared to face the resistance of his own “moderates” squarely.

The intervention against Postyshev in the Nikolayenko case was made formal by a decision of the All-Union Central Committee, dated 13 January 1937 (and unpublished at the time), attacking “unsatisfactory leadership” in the Kiev Party and faults in the Ukrainian Central Committee as a whole.⁶³

Postyshev expressed his resentment. As a result, Kaganovich was immediately sent to Kiev to straighten out the situation. In his capacity as Secretary of the Central Committee, he urgently convoked a plenum of the Kiev Provincial Party Committee.⁶⁴ On 16 January 1937 he had Postyshev replaced as First Secretary of the Kiev Provincial Committee, while leaving him his more important post. The official reason given was that Postyshev’s duties as Second Secretary of the Ukrainian Party were too demanding to allow him to hold the Kiev post as well. This was plainly false; indeed, when Khrushchev was appointed in 1938 to be First Secretary of the Ukrainian Party, he held the Kiev post as well without any difficulty arising.

So far, this was no more than one of Stalin’s typical first steps against a victim. Meanwhile, the preparations for the Pyatakov Trial were complete. First, however, the recalcitrant figures of Ryutin and others in like case were disposed of. On 10 January, he, Smilga, Zalutsky, Shatskin, and no doubt others were tried in camera by the Military Collegium and shot.⁶⁵

THE PYATAKOV TRIAL

On 23 January 1937 another gruesome little pageant assembled among the florid columns of the October Hall. It was a bitterly cold day, and the hall was dark and gloomy. Just after midday, Ulrikh and Matulevich, with Divisional Military Jurist Rychkov in Nikitchenko’s old place, took their seats at the judges’ bench. Vyshinsky sat at his old table on the left. The NKVD soldiers were in their winter uniforms, with long coats and muffled helmets.

The men who filed into the dock were of a different sort from those of the previous August. Then, genuine rivals had been crushed. The new accused had presented no such obvious challenge. But they were quite impressive figures. Pyatakov had never been a member of the Politburo, but as we have seen he had long been one of the most prominent and able figures in the Party. Sokolnikov, former candidate member of the Politburo, was a most serious and respected politician. Serebryakov, former Secretary of the Central Committee, was also no negligible figure. And Radek was at least a widely known public person.

The new trial did not have the immediate and obvious aims of the first. The motives remaining are plain enough. First, revenge. Most of the leading ex-Trotskyites were now destroyed. And revenge carried with it, of course, Stalin’s idea of precautionary or preventive measures. A clean sweep, even if there was no more compelling reason for action by normal standards, fitted Stalin’s firm belief in “Stone dead hath no fellow” and “Better safe than sorry.”

Moreover, Stalin had been temporarily balked of a more important prey—Bukharin and the Rightists. The trial was thus not the one he had intended, but a pale substitute. At the same time, it kept the pot boiling. It provided continuity. And it could be, and was, used to implicate the Right once again. A minor mystery, given this motive of Stalin’s, is why Uglanov was not brought into it. He had been named as subject to investigation in the announcement of 21 August. He was not among those rehabilitated in September, and yet he was not tried. It would have been greatly to Stalin’s advantage to have put up so prominent a Rightist in January 1937, as a bridge to Bukharin and Co. And even though Yagoda is alleged to have protected him, there was time, on ordinary reckoning, between Yagoda’s fall and the January 1937 Trial for Yezhov to prepare him. One can only presume that, as we have said, he refused to talk.

The new batch of accused were designated simply “the Anti-Soviet Trotskyite Center.” No other group or faction was represented, unlike the case at the 1936 Trial of the “Trotskyite–Zinovievite Terrorist Center” or the later “Bloc of Rights and Trotskyites.” The first trial had anyhow been, as we saw, unimpressive on the Trotskyite side. Radek was now put up to say,

If you take the composition of the old centre you will find that the Trotskyites did not have a single one of the old political leaders on it. There were Smimov, who was more of an organizer than a political leader; Mrachkovsky, a soldier and a fighting man; and Ter-Vaganyan, a propagandist.⁶⁶

Since there were no genuine Trotskyites to hand, as there were genuine Zinovievites and genuine Rightists, the distinguished ex-Trotskyites had to serve.

In other ways, the new accused presented a different impression from that of their predecessors. Then, there had been a seven-man “Center,” plus various hangers-on. This time, the Center consisted of only four people: Pyatakov, Radek, Serebryakov, and Sokolnikov. Radek and Sokolnikov were not accused of crimes as serious as those of the other two. Pyatakov and Serebryakov were charged with organizing three main sabotage groups (among dozens they had allegedly set up): the railway-wrecking organization headed by Livshits; the “West Siberian Anti-Soviet Trotskyite Center” at Novosibirsk, consisting of Muralov, Boguslavsky, and Drobnis, having under them a variety of industrial wreckers in the area; and the three wreckers in the chemical industry, coming directly under Pyatakov. The specializations were not complete; for example, the railway wrecker Knyazev was also a Japanese spy, while the coal wreckers of Siberia were also the organizers of the attempted assassination of all visiting Politburo members.

The indictment differed greatly from that of August 1936. Then, it had simply been a matter of terrorism. It had been remarked by Vyshinsky and in evidence that the accused had no policy except the seizure of power from Stalin. But such a policy was by no means unpopular,⁶⁷ and soon after the executions the press had started to announce that Zinoviev did have a political program after all—one involving the restoration of capitalism, which he had naturally tried to concea1.⁶⁸ Stalin was to remark:

At the Trial in 1936, if you will remember, Kamenev and Zinoviev categorically denied that they had any kind of political platform. They had full opportunity to unfold their political platform at the Trial. Nevertheless, they did not do so, declaring that they had no political platform whatsoever. There can be no doubt that they both lied in denying that they had a platform.⁶⁹

This theme was strongly put in the new indictment. The accused intended to renounce industrialization and collectivization, and they relied for support in particular on the German and Japanese Governments. They proposed to make territorial concessions to Germany, to allow German capital into the country, and in case of war with Germany to carry out wrecking in industry and at the front. This had all been arranged at a meeting between Trotsky and Rudolf Hess.

Trotsky had also at least implied the desirability of defeat in war, having allegedly written to Radek: “It must be admitted that the question of power will become a practical issue for the bloc only as a result of the defeat of the U.S.S.R. in war. For this the bloc must make energetic preparations.…”⁷⁰

Espionage contact had been established with the Germans and Japanese. And, as in the Zinoviev Trial, a number of terrorist groups had been organized, “in Moscow, Leningrad, Kiev, Rostov, Sochi, Novosibirsk and other towns.” An attempt had actually been made on Molotov’s life by involving him in a car crash at Prokopyevsk in 1934. Nor had their practical activity been limited to the preparation of terrorist acts. In addition, they had been responsible for many industrial accidents and deficiencies.

Other activities likely to prove more unpopular than assassination had been thrown in for good measure. For example, Knyazev was quoted as having confessed that “the Japanese intelligence service strongly stressed the necessity of using bacteriological means in time of war with the object of contaminating troop trains, canteens and army sanitary centres with highly virulent bacilli….”fn4⁷¹

Although such accusations transferred unpleasant responsibilities to the accused, they had the disadvantage of appearing less plausible than those of 1936. Although the Zinoviev trial was full of evident falsehoods, it could at least be argued that there might have been a genuine case, tarted up by the NKVD. It was at least not incredible that the oppositionists might have shot Kirov, and even less so that they might have wished to shoot Stalin. The new accusations were highly unbelievable on any view. Sabotage, by Pyatakov and his subordinates, was most implausible. Moreover, it was virtually incompatible with the charges of terrorism. As we have said, a plot designed to break the Government by terrorist acts could scarcely divert its energies, and risk exposure, by a vast network of people blowing up mines and causing railway accidents, simply to weaken the economy and sow distrust of the Government.

In the economic field, if not in the political, there is nevertheless some sort of rationale in Stalin’s choice of victims. For there were genuine failures which required scapegoats. Men like Livshits were shot, it might be argued, like Admiral Byng fn5 —pour encourager les autres. Even this peculiar style of common sense has its limits. To shoot the best economic organizers in order to encourage the second-best to be more effective than they had been is doubtful policy. It is true that the Soviet Union finally gained a fairly competent cadre of administrators capable of working under the threat of liquidation. But there are no doubt managers who do not give their best in such circumstances, and of whose services the country was deprived.

The sabotage theme was not, of course, new. It was in the old Shakhty Trial tradition—and, indeed, it was expressly stated in evidence that the old saboteurs had linked up with the new. The Shakhty/Metro-Vic Trial technique was also revived. An immense amount of confusing technical evidence was given. As a result, the trial of the present seventeen took seven days as against the five days which had been sufficient for the Zinoviev sixteen.

The accused were this time presented in a more logical order. First, the four leaders, then the seven West Siberian terrorists and saboteurs, then the three railwaymen, and last the three from the chemical industry.

First was Pyatakov. His appearance was still intellectual and dignified, but he had visibly aged and was thin and pale.

He made certain limitations in his evidence. Admitting the responsibility for forming terrorist and sabotage groups, and for planning acts of terror and “diversion” to be carried out in the future, he at no time confessed to complicity in any particular act of violence, and specifically denied being in direct touch with all the plotters. After considerable revelations about the political contacts of the alleged plot, he went on to confess to the organization of sabotage. But his sabotage acts were always of the following type:

In the Ukraine the work was carried on mainly in the coke industry by Loginov and a group of persons connected with him. Their work, in the main, consisted of starting coke ovens which were not really ready for operations, and of holding up the construction of very valuable and very important parts of the coke and chemical industry. They operated coke ovens without utilizing those very valuable by-products which are obtained in coking and thereby huge funds were rendered valueless.⁷²

… Maryasin carried on the wrecking work along the following lines. First of all he sank money in piling up unnecessary materials, equipment and so on. I think that by the beginning of 1936 about fifty million roubles were frozen in the form of materials….

The wrecking activities in the last period assumed new forms. Despite the fact that, after a delay of two or three years, the plant began to enter on its operation stage, Maryasin created intolerable conditions, fomented intrigues, and in a word did everything to obstruct operation.⁷³

… An absolutely faulty plan of development was drawn up for the war-chemical industry … a plan providing for a smaller output capacity and, consequently, for a larger outlay of capital than was required.⁷⁴

Despite the fact that our country abounds in salt and raw materials for soda, and that the process of manufacturing soda is very well known, there is a shortage of soda in the country. The construction of new soda plants was delayed.⁷⁵

That is, the overt acts he directly admitted were ones of negligence and bad planning by subordinates—which may well have been genuine.

He bluntly denied certain incriminations:

Vyshinsky:

Accused Pyatakov, do you agree with what Shestov said?

Pyatakov:

Shestov perhaps talked with somebody, but not with me when he says that somebody with pencil in hand calculated the cost of the ore. There was no such conversation with me.

⁷⁶

And again:

Vyshinsky:

Do you now recall the conversation with Rataichak about espionage?

Pyatakov:

No, I deny it.

Vyshinsky:

And with Loginov?

Pyatakov:

I also deny it.

Vyshinsky:

And that members of your organization were connected with foreign intelligence services?

Pyatakov:

As to the fact that there were such connections, I do not deny; but that I knew about the establishment….

⁷⁷

Whether the line he took was on his own initiative, as Smimov’s had been, or whether he was permitted to evade the more extreme responsibilities as part of the encouragement to him (and to Ordzhonikidze) to think that his offenses would be held to be noncapital, is unclear.

Even as to his relations with Trotsky, he made certain vague reservations, as if to cast doubt on them. For example:

Vyshinsky:

The conversation you had with Trotsky in December 1935 and the line he gave, did you accept it as a directive or simply as something said in a conversation but not binding for you?

Pyatakov:

Of course as a directive.

Vyshinsky:

Hence, we can take it that you subscribed to it?

Pyatakov:

We can take it that I carried it out.

Vyshinsky:

And

carried it out.

Pyatakov:

Not ‘and carried it out,’ but ‘carried it out’.

Vyshinsky:

There is no difference in that whatever.

Pyatakov:

There is a difference for me.

Vyshinsky:

What is it?

Pyatakov:

As far as action is concerned, particularly criminally liable action, there is no difference whatever.

⁷⁸

The meeting with Trotsky here referred to was the central point of the whole conspiracy. Trotsky had then laid down the entire program of the plotters—seven pages in the official Report of Court Proceedings.⁷⁹ The difficulty was that Trotsky was in Norway, and Pyatakov never got nearer to him than Berlin, where, in December 1935, he was conducting Soviet Government business. His absence for any length of time would have been noticed, so his evidence was that by arrangement with an agent of Trotsky’s he met in the Berlin Zoo, he arranged to fly to Norway. On the morning of 12 December, he took off from the Tempelhof with a forged German passport, “landed at the airdrome in Oslo” at 3:00 P.M., drove to Trotsky’s home, and there conducted the conspiratorial business (in which Trotsky revealed for the first time that he had met the Nazi leader Hess and made arrangements for cooperation in war and peace).

This story was immediately proved false. Once again Stalin, at whose personal insistence this direct involvement of Trotsky had been inserted into the script,⁸⁰ was to find the disadvantages of a foreign venue for a fabrication. On 25 January, the Norwegian paper Aftenposten published the information that no civil aircraft had landed at Oslo’s Kjeller Airfield during the entire month of December 1935. On 29 January, the Norwegian Social Democratic Arbeiderbladet, after further investigation, established that no aircraft had used the field at all between September 1935 and May 1936.

Trotsky now published a demand that Pyatakov be asked the full details of his alleged flight, including the name on his passport, by which entry could have been further checked. He went on to challenge Stalin to seek his extradition in a Norwegian court, where the facts could be judicially established.

No effective cover story could be found to offset this glaring falsification. In leading Party circles, the truth soon circulated, as Raskolnikov, for example, makes clear (see here).

Vyshinsky’s counter, an extremely weak one, was made at the end of the trial, on 27 January:

Vyshinsky:

I have an application to the Court. I interested myself in this matter and asked the People’s Commissariat of Foreign Affairs to make an inquiry, for I wanted to verify Pyatakov’s evidence from this side too. I have received an official communication which I ask to have put in the records.

(Reads.)

‘The Consular Department of the People’s Commissariat of Foreign Affairs hereby informs the Prosecutor of the U.S.S.R. that according to information received by the Embassy of the U.S.S.R. in Norway the Kjeller Airdrome near Oslo receives all the year round, in accordance with international regulations, airplanes of other countries, and that the arrival and departure of airplanes is possible also in winter months.’

(

To Pyatakov):

It was in December?

Pyatakov:

Exactly.

⁸¹

Thus another agency of the Soviet Government “certified” not the fact, but merely the technical possibility, of Pyatakov’s flight. It might well be thought that this debacle alone would have discredited the whole trial in foreign eyes. Anyone who may have hoped so soon found that Stalin’s ideas about political gullibility were even better based than had first appeared.

Radek, who had been partly responsible for the script of the trial, made a brilliant showing over the morning of 24 January. While the other accused spoke flatly and drearily, he put real feeling into his evidence. He developed the post-1927 history of Trotskyism, and the complex links between those now accused and the Zinoviev group. He then listed a number of fresh terrorist bands, implicated Bukharin, spoke of the “Bonapartist” regime Trotsky intended, which would in fact be under fascist control, and added that Trotsky was already prepared to sacrifice the Ukraine and the Far East to the aggressors.

He aptly explained the belated Trotskyite call for Party democracy: “People begin to argue about democracy only when they disagree on questions of principle. When they agree they do feel the need for broad democracy, that goes without saying.”⁸²

In spite of his agreement to cooperate, he made several points against the indictment, in an oblique fashion. When he complained, “For nothing at all, just for the sake of Trotsky’s beautiful eyes—the country was to return to capitalism,”⁸³ he was in effect saying that the charge of a gratuitous wish to restore capitalism for no other motive than to put Trotsky in power was an extraordinary idea, especially as regards “such men as Yakov Livshits or Serebryakov, with decades of revolutionary work behind them,”⁸⁴ whose “moral fibre” must now be “utterly broken” if they “could descend to wrecking” and “act on the instructions of the class enemy.”

On the whole, Radek was a most cooperative and convincing defendant. Even so, when he had completed the main body of his evidence, Vyshinsky started to bully him, eliciting several sharp retorts, such as “You are a profound reader of human hearts, but I must nevertheless comment on my thoughts in my own words.”⁸⁵ Or again:

Vyshinsky:

You accepted this? And you held this conversation?

Radek:

You have learned it from me, that means that I did hold it.

⁸⁶

Finally, Vyshinsky reminded him that he not only had failed to report the conspiracy, but also had refused to confess for three months, and said, “Does not that cast doubt on what you said about your vacillations and misgivings?”

Radek became irritated and snapped out the weak point in the whole case: “Yes, if you ignore the fact that you learned about the programme and about Trotsky’s instructions only from me, of course, it does cast doubt on what I have said.”⁸⁷

In the course of Radek’s evidence, he had been made to remark that in 1935 “Vitaly [sic] Putna came to see me with some request from Tukhachevsky.”⁸⁸

Thus Corps Commander Putna was once again implicated. More striking still was the mention of Tukhachevsky’s name, even in an innocent context. Moscow was shaken by what appeared to be, conceivably, the first hint of trouble for the Marshal.

During the evening session, Radek was recalled and exculpated Tukhachevsky in a long exchange with Vyshinsky (see here). The threat had nevertheless been made, and understood.

The same day, Sokolnikov was called. He had little to add, apart from identifying a few more terrorist groups. He had, it appeared, little direct connection with terror or sabotage, and unlike the case with Pyatakov, Vyshinsky did not put questions implying the opposite. His main contribution of substance was to make the point about the older generation of saboteurs:

Sokolnikov:

… It was pointed out that former wrecking organizations among the specialists should be found.

Vyshinsky:

Among the former wreckers of the period of the Industrial Party and the Shalchty Trial. Well then, what was your line?

Sokolnikov:

Trotsky’s line, which permitted the wrecking groups of the bloc to establish contact with these groups.

⁸⁹

Serebtyakov, who followed, exposed a number of railway chiefs and explained that the system of railway organization prior to Kaganovich’s appointment in 1935 had amounted to intentional sabotage. Otherwise, he only contributed accounts of a few more terrorist groups to the already large pool. It is uncertain if he knew that Vyshinsky had taken over his dacha.⁹⁰

On 25 and 26 January came the questioning of the “Siberians.” The evidence was mainly concerned, on the one hand, with the establishment of the links between these men and Pyatakov and the Moscow Center; and, on the other, with the detail of the ways in which they had contrived accidents and explosions.

Drobnis started with the usual examples of faulty planning in industry:

Needless to say, this retarded the speed and progress of construction work. It must be said that this was done rather cleverly. For example, there were plans for the main, basic buildings of the Combined Fertilizer Works, but for things like the gas mains, the steam supply pipes and so forth, which might appear of secondary importance but were really of very great importance for starting the plant on schedule, plans were not prepared in time, and of course this constant fussing in dealings with the organizations responsible for the designs led to the plan arriving much too late….⁹¹

… The Kemerovo district power station was put into such a state that, if it were deemed necessary for wrecking purposes, and when the order was given, the mine could be flooded. In addition, coal was supplied that was technically unsuitable for the power station, and this led to explosions. This was done quite deliberately.⁹²

He went on to the case of the Tsentralnaya Mine. He ended, but only after considerable bullying from Vyshinsky, with the confession that the plotters had hoped for as much loss of life as possible from the explosions. Although he had been in jail at the time of the disaster, he accepted responsibility.

Shestov, the NKVD agent, confirmed Sokolnikov on the old saboteurs. He gave a useful warning to engineers throughout the country: “… Although Ovsyannikov was not a member of our organization he was the sort of manager who left everything to the engineers and did not do anything himself, and he could quickly be converted into a Trotskyite.”⁹³

His own excavation system in Prokopyevsk had resulted in no fewer than sixty underground fires by the end of 1935.⁹⁴

Shestov explained that it was Trotskyites rather than Government policy which was rendering the worker’s life intolerable:

Instructions were issued to worry the life out of the workers. Before a worker reached his place of work, he must be made to heap two hundred curses on the heads of the pit management. Impossible conditions of work were created. Not only for Stalchanovite methods but even for normal methods.⁹⁵

Norkin and Stroilov gave similar evidence of sabotage. Norkin had “planned to put the State District Power Station out of action by means of explosions. In February 1936 there were three explosions.”⁹⁶ He had also been responsible for a faulty investment program.⁹⁷ When asked the motives of his confession, he contrived to hint at the truth:

Vyshinsky:

And why did you afterwards decide to give way?

Norkin:

Because there is a limit to everything.

Vyshinsky:

Perhaps pressure was brought to bear upon you?

Norkin:

I was questioned, exposed, there were confrontations.

Vyshinsky:

You were confronted with evidence, facts?

Norkin:

There were confrontations.

⁹⁸

Stroilov’s evidence is chiefly interesting for what is presumably Stalin’s view of Trotsky’s writings: “I said that I had read Trotsky’s book, Mein Leben. He asked me whether I liked it, I said from the literary point of view he, as a journalist, wrote well, but because of the infinite number of ‘I’s’ in it, I did not like it.”⁹⁹

At the end of his testimony, Vyshinsky, who had not bothered to check the Oslo airfield situation, went through a long rigmarole to establish the reality of a minor contact of Stroilov’s from Berlin:

Vyshinsky:

I request the court to have attached to the records a statement by the Savoy Hotel: ‘Foreign tourist H.V. Berg, born 1874, German subject, merchant by profession, Hotel Savoy, Room 223 (it is identical with the telephone number), December 1–15, 1930, arrived from Berlin.

‘In the room occupied by Berg there was a telephone No. 8–50, ext. 223. Director of the hotel. Seal and reference number.’

¹⁰⁰

Immediately afterward, he was doing the same thing about an address in Berlin Stroilov had visited:

Vyshinsky:

I request the Court to have attached to the record this Berlin address and telephone number taken from this official publication [hands to the Court a big book in a red binding].

Here

, against No. 8563 there is Wüster, Armstrasse, and the address of this Wüster, which is mentioned also in Stroilov’s notebook.

¹⁰¹

The Court acceded to both these requests, so that the Telephone Address Directory of the German Reich, 7th edition, Volume 2, now forms part of the dossier, which, somewhere in the purlieus of the Soviet State Archives, has been gathering dust for half a century.

Like Drobnis, Muralov had been in jail at the time of the Tsentralnaya explosion. But he refused to accept responsibility.

The President:

Did you know that at the Kemerovo coal mines the Trotskyites had gassed the pits and created absolutely intolerable conditions of work?

Muralov:

Drobnis was at the Chemical Works—these are under one trust, and the mines are under another trust.

The President:

I understand. I am speaking about the Kemerovo mine.

Muralov:

I did not know that there they had adopted the course of gassing the Tsentralnaya Pit, and Drobnis did not report this to me. This occurred when I was already in prison.

The President:

One of the passages in your testimony contains this sentence: ‘At the Kemerovo mine the Trotskyites gassed pits and created intolerable conditions for the workers.’

Muralov:

I learned about that while I was in prison, as being a result of all the undermining Trotskyite work.

¹⁰²

His main concern, in any case, was assassination. One of the weaknesses in the whole legend came to light:

Vyshinsky:

But was it not said that terrorism in general produces no result if only one is killed and the others remain, and therefore it is necessary to act at one stroke?

Muralov:

Both I and Pyatakov felt that it was no use working by Socialist-Revolutionary, guerrilla methods. We must organize it so as to cause panic at one stroke. We regarded causing panic and consternation in the leading ranks of the Party as one of the means by which we would come into power.

¹⁰³

But while admitting to the preparation of attempts on Eikhe and Molotov, he warmly repudiated the accusation that Ordzhonikidze was another intended victim:

Muralov:

…About 1932 and Shestov’s reference to the attempt on the life of Ordzhonikidze, I categorically declare that this belongs to the realms of Shestov’s phantasy. I never gave such instructions.

Vyshinsky:

He is mixing things up?

Muralov:

I do not know whether is he mixing things up or whether he is simply letting his phantasy run away with him.

¹⁰⁴

Vyshinsky was so annoyed that he referred to this is his closing speech: “Muralov, who will under no circumstances agree to having the preparation of an attempt on the life of Comrade Ordzhonikidze attributed to him … admits that he did indeed organize a terrorist act against Comrade Molotov.” And it certainly is anomalous. We can hardly see it as other than a demonstration of loyalty to, and hope of help from, Ordzhonikidze.

As to the attempt on Molotov, this is interesting as the only piece of action the terrorists had accomplished since the Kirov murder. The presumable truth of the matter was given in 1961:

Here is still another example of Molotov’s extreme cynicism. On a trip to the city of Prokopyevsk in 1934, the car in which he was riding went off the road, its right wheels landing in a ditch. None of the passengers was injured in any way. This episode subsequently provided grounds for a story about an “attempt” on Molotov’s life, and a group of completely innocent people was sentenced for it. Who knew better than Molotov that in reality there had been no such attempt? But he had not a word to say in defense of these innocent people.¹⁰⁵

As explained by Muralov, the plan was for the driver to sacrifice himself by plunging Molotov to destruction:

Muralov:

The car was to turn into a ditch while at full speed. Under such circumstances, the car by its own momentum would overturn and get smashed, while the people …

Vyshinsky:

Was the attempt made to overturn the car in the ditch?

Muralov:

The attempt was made, but then the chauffeur funked and the car did not fall into the ditch….

Shestov:

… One spot—for those who know Prokopyevsk—was near Pit No. 5 on the way to the Mine Management Office, and the second spot was between the workers’ settlement and Pit No. 3. There is a gully there, not a ditch, as Muralov said, a gully, about 15 metres deep.

Vyshinsky:

A ‘ditch’ 15 metres deep! Who chose this spot?

Muralov:

Permit me to say something about Shestov’s explanation. I will not argue with Shestov about whether it was a ditch or a gully….

Vyshinsky:

Have you yourself been at the spot where this ditch is?

Muralov:

No, I have never been there.

Vyshinsky:

So you have not seen it?

Muralov:

No, but there are many gullies in Prokopyevsk, gully upon gully, hill after hill.

Vyshinsky:

If you have not seen the place you cannot argue about it.

Muralov:

I will not argue about it.’

¹⁰⁶

Muralov’s disturbing reference to the alleged ravine as a “ditch” was presumably based on definite knowledge. Vyshinsky commented in his closing speech, “But the fact remains a fact. An attempt on the life of Comrade Molotov was made. That the car overturned on the brink of the 15-metre ‘ditch’, as Muralov here modestly called it, is a fact.”¹⁰⁷

It is curious, moreover, that the only terrorist plot (apart from the Kirov murder) which actually reached the stage of any action was not committed by one of the trained and devoted Trotskyites, but by the locally recruited petty adventurer “Arnold, alias Ivanov, alias Vasilyev, alias Rask, alias Kulpenen …” as Vyshinsky put it.¹⁰⁸ Although Trotsky had “insisted … particularly strongly” on committing a number of terrorist acts “more or less simultaneously,” only the one against Molotov had come to anything. It is true (even officially) that Molotov was only rather shaken. But still, none of the proposed victims of Prigozhin or Golubenko, or the other professional assassins, was even shaken.

And now the court found the difficulty of mixing fact with fiction. Since there really had been an accident, which it was decided to inflate into an assassination attempt, the assassin was not a picked NKVD agent provocateur but the chauffeur actually involved. This proved to be a mistake. Instead of an Olberg or a Berman-Yurin, chosen and groomed for the occasion, the court was faced with a man who was wholly unsuited to the part that chance had called on him to play.

At the evening session of 26 January, Vyshinsky came to the examination of Arnold, the driver who had allegedly, under orders from the Siberian conspirators, made the attempt. The whole exchange was a ludicrous interlude. Vyshinsky for once seemed to lose control of the situation.¹⁰⁹

Arnold said that he had lost his nerve and only produced a slight accident. But it was perfectly clear that no conspirator could ever have expected a man of his type to sacrifice himself, as the plan allegedly intended. In fact, his final remark completely contradicted the idea that he would be dead after the accident, since he explained his motives in becoming a Trotskyite as being based on the Trotskyites’ promise that when they came to power “I would not be among the last people then.”

In the exchange (which goes on for thirty pages in the transcript), Vyshinsky no longer faced a more or less intellectual collaborator, but a small-time lumpen-proletarian crook and adventurer. It took five or ten minutes to straighten out Arnold’s real name from his various aliases, and even then this was not properly settled and caused further trouble later on.

Owing to the loose family life prevailing in the slums of Petrograd, he had already accumulated “three surnames by the age of seven,” Vyshinsky remarked. He had wandered to Finland, then to Germany and Holland, while still in his early teens, with yet another surname, and then, during the First World War, to Norway and England. On his return, he was conscripted, but deserted and was then jailed for six months. There are pages of this sort of interrogation, and now Vyshinsky again became entangled in the names, and also in a complicated muddle about the various regiments Arnold had joined and deserted from in the war and the ranks he had held as compared with those he had gained by simply sewing a stripe on. What he said, moreover, contradicted the story he had given during the investigation. The President had to call him to order, but still little progress was made. He had managed to steal some railway passes and got to Vladivostok and, finally, under yet another name, to New York, where he joined the U.S. Army, though he could not then speak English. In America, he was jailed for five or six months—though here Vyshinsky got bogged down in a further exchange about how many times he had been jailed (apparently twice). There was also confusion about whether he had or had not joined the U.S. Army twice or never. He claimed he had got to France with the U.S. Army, and a visit to South America also comes up. He had also enrolled as a Freemason in America, and at the same time as a member of the Communist Party of the United States. Twenty-three pages of evidence contain this extraordinary farrago, in which the only incriminating point established is the Freemasonry, which Arnold had concealed from the Party. He seems finally to have got himself shipped to Russia with a group of American specialists being sent to Kemerovo, and there joined the Russian Communist Party. In West Siberia, he had been an office manager, then in charge of water transport, then in a commercial department, and then in charge of a “telephone system,” in big enterprises in Kemerovo and Kuznetsk. In 1932, he finally got in touch with the Trotskyites, being recruited by Shestov. Arnold had already been dismissed from some job for anti-Soviet remarks, and Shestov had something more on him, having discovered two of his names—though to establish this latter point, Vyshinsky again became involved in a long argument about how many there were in all. The only relevant evidence is contained in about a page and a half.

This indicated that Shestov and Cherepukhin, the local Party Secretary, had ordered Arnold to have an accident with Ordzhonikidze, Eikhe, and Rukhimovich in the car. But he lost his nerve.

When Molotov came, the plan was the same. But the “ditch” had now become not a “gully,” but a “bank”:

Arnold:

… On this curve there is not a gully, as Shestov called it, but what we call an embankment, the edge of the road, about eight or ten metres deep, a drop of nearly ninety degrees. When I came to the station, Molotov, Kurganov, Secretary of the District Committee of the Party, and Gryadinsky, Chairman of the Territory Executive Committee, got into the car …

However, he again funked it, and only turned just off the road when another lorry, evidently hired by the conspirators, drove at him. No one was hurt.

He was reprimanded for negligent driving, got a job in Tashkent, returned to Novosibirsk, and became assistant manager in a supply department and, finally, manager of a garage. And that was all.

After Arnold came Assistant People’s Commissar of Railways Livshits, and the other railway plotters. This section of the trial was evidently Kaganovich’s private preserve. In their final speeches, both Livshits and Knyazev were to speak of the forfeit of Kaganovich’s trust as a particularly heinous side of their offenses. Livshits remarked:

Citizen Judges! The charge advanced against me by the State Prosecutor is still further aggravated by the fact that I was raised by the Party from the ranks to a high position in state administration—to that of Assistant People’s Commissar of Railways. I enjoyed the confidence of the Party, I enjoyed the confidence of Stalin’s comrade-inarms, Kaganovich.¹¹⁰

while Knyazev mourned:

… I always experienced a dreadful feeling of pain when Lazar Moiseyevich [Kaganovich] said to me ‘I know you as a railway worker who knows the railways both from the theoretical and from the practical side. But why do I not feel in you that wide range of activity which I have a right to demand of you?’¹¹¹

Livshits, as a senior figure, was also involved in various assassination schemes, but the main evidence of the railway accused was of wrecking trains and conducting espionage for Japan. The extent of the “hostile” ring in the railways bears all the marks of Kaganovich’s root-and-branch style. All the accused named whole lists of wreckers, pervading entire railway systems. Vyshinsky was particularly concerned to pin the killing of innocent citizens on the saboteurs:

Vyshinsky:

You do not remember if these twenty-nine Red Army men were badly mutilated?

Knyazev:

About fifteen were badly mutilated.

Vyshinsky:

But what sort of serious injuries were there?

Knyazev:

They had arms broken, heads pierced ….

Vyshinsky:

Heads pierced, arms broken, ribs broken, legs broken?

Knyazev:

Yes, that is so.

Vyshinsky:

This happened by the grace of you and your accomplices?

¹¹²

But the extent of the criminal ring was equally well developed, as can be seen from the list of those involved in a single act of sabotage:

Vyshinsky:

… But why was such a violation of railway service regulations possible? Was it not because the administration of the station was in league with the Trotskyites?

Knyazev:

Quite right.

Vyshinsky:

Name these persons.

Knyazev:

Markevich, the station master, Rykov, the acting station master, Vaganov, assistant station master, Rodionov, assistant station master, Kolesnikov, head switchman.

Vyshinsky:

Five.

Knyazev:

Switchman Bezgin.

Vyshinsky:

Six.

Knyazev:

And then there was also the permanent way manager of that section, Brodovikov.

Vyshinsky:

Yes, and the chief of the railroad, himself.

¹¹³

On his single line, the South Urals Railway, Knyazev now implicated a long series of accomplices, in a way which adumbrates the extraordinary scope of the purge among railwaymen throughout the Soviet lines. Leading figures at his own headquarters were supplemented by the permanent-way managers of the various sections; the traffic managers; the traffic inspectors; the heads of traction departments; locomotive foremen; depot engineers; and station masters, assistant stationmasters, drivers, switchmen. He named thirty-three men in all as the “cadres of my Trotskyite organization on the South Urals Railway.”¹¹⁴

Knyazev went on to say:

From thirteen to fifteen train wrecks were organized directly by us. I remember in 1934 there were altogether about 1,500 train wrecks and accidents.

Powerful locomotives of the F.D. type were introduced in the Kurgan depot. Taking advantage of the fact that not much was known about them in this depot, the management deliberately slackened the supervision of current repairs, frequently compelled the engine-drivers to leave before repairs were completed. Almost all the water gauges were reduced to a ruinous condition. As a result of this neglect, a boiler burst in January 1936 on the Rosa–Vargashi stretch….

Vyshinsky:

… The train wreck on 7 February 1936, on the Yedinover–Berdyaush section, was carried out on your instructions?

Knyazev:

Yes.… Railwaymen have a notion that if a rail splits no one on the road is to blame.

Vyshinsky:

That

is to say, they attribute it to objective causes?

Knyazev:

They did not find the culprits.

¹¹⁵

Last of all came the chemical criminals. The familiar charges recurred in a slightly different context. Rataichak made a slight attempt to defend himself:

Rataichak:

… No, but I had to do that, Citizen Prosecutor, because if we had not taken this measure of precaution there was a danger that the lives of hundreds of workers might have been lost. That is why I myself directed the clearance work on the spot.

Vyshinsky:

You directed it in such a way that 17 workers were killed and 15 wounded. Is that so?

Rataichak:

(Remains silent.)

Vyshinsky:

You directed the clearance operations in such a way that 17 workers were killed and 15 injured.

Rataichak:

That is true, but it was the only thing to do.

¹¹⁶

The prosecution ended with the reports of various Commissions of Expert Witnesses, who blamed all the explosions and pit fires on the accused. But Stroilov commented shrewdly that the excavating system the wreckers were accused of bringing in for their own purposes had in fact been in use for some time previously.

On 28 January at 4:00 P.M., Vyshinsky started on his speech for the prosecution:

This is the abyss of degradation!

This is the limit, the last boundary of moral and political decay!

This is the diabolical infinitude of crime!¹¹⁷

These were, he exclaimed, the sentiments with which every honest man had condemned the Zinovievites. And now the cry should be raised again. For “the conversion of the Trotskyite groups into groups of diversionists and murderers operating as the instruments of foreign secret services and of General Staffs of aggressors merely crowns the struggle Trotskyism has been waging against the working class and the Party, against Lenin and Leninism, for decades.”¹¹⁸

This was “not a political party. It is a gang of criminals, merely the agency of foreign intelligence services.”¹¹⁹ In fact, they were worse than the Whites; “they sank lower than the worst Denikinites or Kolchakites. The worst Denikinites or Kolchakites were superior to these traitors. The Denikinites, Kolchakites, Milyukovites, did not sink as low as these Trotskyite Judases….”¹²⁰

Rataichak was cited as a typical conspirator. Vyshinsky remarked, in a rather unbalanced fashion, “Whether he is a German or a Polish spy is not clear, but that he is a spy there cannot be any doubt; and as is appropriate to his profession, a liar, a swindler and a rascal.”¹²¹

Such analyses, which may be translated as defining anti-Stalinism as criminal Fascism, naturally fitted in with Stalin’s own predictions, now reinforced by Stalin’s own court:

… Comrade Stalin’s forecast has fully come true. Trotskyism has indeed become the central rallying point of all the forces hostile to socialism, the gang of mere bandits, spies and murderers who placed themselves entirely at the disposal of foreign secret services, became finally and irrevocably transformed into lackeys of capitalism, into restorers of capitalism in our country.¹²²

More interesting than the direct assaults in Vyshinsky’s speech were the preparations for further action. He said pointedly:

I would like to remind you of how, in the case of the united Trotskyite–Zinoviev centre, say, certain of the accused vowed, right here, in this very dock, during their last pleas, some begging, others not begging for clemency, that they had spoken the whole truth, that they had said everything, that in their hearts no opposition whatever remained against the working class, against our people, against our country. And later, when the revolting skein of monstrous crimes committed by these people became more and more unravelled, we found that at every step these people had lied and deceived when they already had one foot in the grave.

… I think that all these circumstances enable me to say that if there is any shortcoming in the present trial, it is not that the accused have said what they have done, but that, after all, the accused have not really told us all they have done, all the crimes they have committed against the Soviet State.¹²³

The further charges to be made against Bukharin the following year were implicit in a particularly sinister passage:

Vyshinsky:

… It was Pyatakov and Co. who in 1918, in a period of extreme danger for the land of Soviets, carried on negotiations with the Socialist-Revolutionaries with a view to bringing about a counter-revolutionary

coup d’état

and arresting Lenin so that Pyatakov might occupy the post of head of government, of chairman of the Council of People’s Commissars. It was through the arrest of Lenin, through a

coup d’état

, that these political adventurers wanted to lay for themselves the road to power.

¹²⁴

Finally, he quoted Sokolnikov, on the essential unity of all the oppositions, based on the Ryutin program:

As for the lines of the programme, as far back as 1932 the Trotskyites, the Zinovievites and the Rights all agreed in the main on a programme which was characterized as the programme of the Rights. This was the so-called Ryutin platform; to a large extent, as far back as 1932 it expressed the programme policy common to all three groups.¹²⁵

Further personnel for new trials had already been adumbrated. In addition to Bukharin and Rykov, Rakovsky was implicated (by Drobnis).¹²⁶ Mdivani in Georgia was now incriminated by name.¹²⁷

The present case had, Vyshinsky pointed out, been proved with a rigor not demanded in bourgeois courts:

With the assistance of the experts, we verified the evidence of the accused, and although we know that according to the laws of certain European countries the confession of an accused person is regarded as sufficient proof of guilt and the court does not consider itself obliged to call corroborating evidence, we, however, in order to observe strict impartiality, notwithstanding the confessions of the criminals themselves, verified their statements once again from the technical side and obtained a categorical reply concerning the explosion of 11 November, the fires in the Prokopyevsk mine, and the fires and explosions at the Kemerovo plant. Malicious intent was established without any possibility of doubt.¹²⁸

Certain of the objections to the Zinoviev Trial were dealt with. For example, on the absence of documentary proof Vyshinsky now remarked:

The accused committed the deeds attributed to them…. But what proof have we in our arsenal from the point of view of judicial procedure? … The question can be put this way: a conspiracy, you say, but where are the documents? … I am bold enough to assert, in keeping with the fundamental requirements of the science of criminal procedure, that in cases of conspiracy such demands cannot be put.¹²⁹

(On this point, one of the defense lawyers, inadequately briefed, was to refer approvingly to “documents available in the case.”)¹³⁰

The popular rage line was heavily played:

They blow up mines, they burn down workshops, they wreck trains, they mutilate and kill hundreds of our best people, sons of our country. Eight hundred workers in the Gorlovka Nitrate Fertilizer Works, through Pravda, communicated the names of the best Stakhanovites in those works who died by the treacherous hand of the diversionists. Here is the list of these victims: Lunev—Stakhanovite, born 1902. Yudin—a talented engineer, born 1913. Kurkin—a member of the Young Communist League, Stakhanovite, 23 years of age. Strelnikova—girl shock brigade worker, born 1913. Moisets—shock brigade worker, also born 1913. These were killed, over a dozen were injured. Maximenko, a Staldianovite who fulfilled his norm of 125 to 150 per cent, was killed. Nemikhin—one of the best shock brigade workers—sacrificed his ten days’ leave to go down the Tsentralnaya Pit, and there somebody waited for him and killed him. Shot-firer Yurev—one of the men who took part in the fighting against the White Chinese—was killed. Lanin, an old miner, a participant in the Civil War, was killed. And so on and so forth.¹³¹

As a result, Vyshinsky felt justified in shouting, as he perorated,

I do not stand here alone! The victims may be in their graves, but I feel that they are standing here beside me, pointing at the dock, at you, accused, with their mutilated arms, which have mouldered in the graves to which you sent them!

I am not the only accuser! I am joined in my accusation by the whole of our people! I accuse these heinous criminals who deserve only one punishment—death by shooting!¹³²

Unlike the defendants in the Zinoviev Trial, some of the junior accused this time had defense counsel. These took a different view of their duties from those in bourgeois courts. Braude started by saying, in a locus classicus for Stalinist defense lawyers:

Comrade Judges, I will not conceal from you the exceptionally difficult, the unprecedentedly difficult position in which the Defence finds itself in this case. First of all, Comrade Judges, the Counsel for Defence is a son of his country. He, too, is a citizen of the great Soviet Union, and the great indignation, anger and horror which is now felt by the whole population of our country, old and young, the feeling which the Prosecutor so strikingly expressed in his speech, cannot but be shared by Counsel….

In this case, Comrade Judges, there is no dispute about the facts. Comrade Prosecutor was quite right when he said that from all points of view, from the point of view of documents available in the case, from the point of view of the examination of the witnesses who were summoned here, and cross-examination of the accused, all this has deprived us of all possibility of disputing the evidence. All the facts have been proved, and in this sphere the Defence does not intend to enter into any controversy with the Procurator. Nor can there by any controversy with the Procurator concerning the appraisal of the political and moral aspects of the case. Here, too, the case is so clear, the political appraisal made here by the Procurator is so clear, that the Defence cannot but wholly and entirely associate itself with that part of his speech.¹³³

When the “defense” had finished, the last pleas followed. Pyatakov ended his, with downcast eyes:

In a few hours you will pass your sentence. And here I stand before you in filth, crushed by my own crimes, bereft of everything through my own fault, a man who has lost his Party, who has no friends, who has lost his family, who has lost his very self.¹³⁴

Radek’s most useful contribution was to make the point that there were still “semi-Trotskyites, quarter-Trotskyites, one-eighth-Trotskyites, people who helped us, not knowing of the terrorist organization but sympathizing with us, people who from liberalism, from a Fronde against the Party, gave us this help….” This was in fact a charter for disposing of any critics of the Purge, even if “seveneighths-Stalinist.”

Yet while both abject and cogent in his presentation of the charges against Trotsky and the accused, he managed to make a few two-edged remarks. He continued to dissociate himself and his co-defendants from the direct German connection:

But when I read about Olberg and asked others whether they had known of the existence of Olberg, and none of them had heard about him, it became clear to me that in addition to the cadres who had passed through his school, Trotsky was organizing agents who had passed through the school of German Fascism.¹³⁵

And finally he repeated the fact that it was only on his word, and Pyatakov’s, that the entire case was erected:

What proofs are there in support of this fact? In support of this fact there is the evidence of two people—the testimony of myself, who received the directives and the letters from Trotsky (which, unfortunately, I burned), and the testimony of Pyatakov, who spoke to Trotsky. All the testimony of the other accused rests on our testimony. If you are dealing with mere criminals and spies, on what can you base your conviction that what we have said is the truth, the firm truth?¹³⁶

The others took the more usual line. Drobnis, Muralov, and Boguslavsky referred to their splendid records and proletarian origins. Sokolnikov spoke at length, and Serebryakov very briefly. All the politicals, though to very different degrees, attacked Trotsky in person. Arnold pleaded “weak, low political development,” as well he might.

At 3:00 A.M. on 30 January, the verdict was pronounced. Death to all except Sokolnikov and Radek (as not “directly participating in the organization and execution” of the various crimes) and Arnold, who got ten years each, and Stroilov, who got eight. A story circulating in NKVD circles has it that Stalin was asked for Radek’s life to be spared by Lion Feuchtwanger, as the price for his agreeing to write his book (Moscow 1937) justifying the trials, which Stalin was particularly anxious to have written to counter the effect of André Gide’s Retour de L’URSS.¹³⁷ The sentence on Arnold, supposed actually to have carried out a terrorist act, contrasts extraordinarily with those of the previous failed assassins like Fritz David. It has been suggested that Stalin had been so entertained by his evidence that, when he drafted the sentences he indulged the caprice of showing special clemency.

When Radek heard the verdict, his face showed relief. He turned to his fellow accused with a shrug and a guilty smile, as though unable to explain his luck.fn6¹³⁸ He is said to have been later retried on a charge of suppressing evidence against Tukhachevsky and sentenced to death but reprieved. A recent official account has him “killed in jail, 19 May 1939.” There have long been reports that he was murdered by a criminal prisoner, acting on orders,¹³⁹ and it is now confirmed that both he and Sokolnikov were “killed in prison by cell mates in May 1939.” Stroilov and Arnold were shot in 1941.¹⁴⁰

The relations of several prisoners are identified in camps or jail. Radek’s daughter got eight years.¹⁴¹ Drobnis’s wife was seen in 1936 in the Krasnoyarsk isolator. She had become almost completely deaf as the result of treatment in the Lubyanka.¹⁴² Muralov’s brother was shot; his sixteen-year-old son was sentenced to labor camp, and died of dystrophy in Dalstroy in 1943; and a number of other relatives, including his niece Yelka, were also imprisoned.¹⁴³ Galina Serebryakova, who spent nearly twenty years in Siberia from this time, had been married to two leading victims, Serebryakov and Sokolnikov. Through all this, she retained her Party-mindedness, and after her rehabilitation spoke up warmly at writers’ meetings in 1962 and 1963 against the liberalizing trends. During the early months of 1963, when heavy pressure was being put on the “liberal” writers, Khrushchev was able to point to her as an example, comparing her with Ilya Ehrenburg, who during Stalin’s lifetime had praised him warmly and lived comfortably, but was now departing from Party principles.¹⁴⁴

There had been a progressive increase in the incredibility of the trials. At first (1936) the Party was only asked to accept the idea that Zinoviev and Kamenev, together with some genuine Trotskyites, had plotted to murder the leadership and had in fact been responsible for Kirov’s death. Although the execution of Zinoviev and the rest aroused a great revulsion, there were other factors. First of all, though it seems unlikely that many members of the Central Committee could have believed the charges literally, or taken the confessions at face value (and there were certainly rumors circulating about the true role of the NKVD in the Kirov killing), still the Zinoviev opposition had really fought Stalin by all the means at its disposal, in a political fight in which almost all the present Committee had been on Stalin’s side. They had compromised themselves by lying their way back into the Party, as was quite evident. And it was at least possible that the assassination of Kirov was “objectively” Zinoviev’s responsibility.

As to the more obvious falsehoods of the trial itself, the Party was quite used to falsehood for Party reasons, and, if it came to that, to fake trials designed to impress the public. Stalin was, it might have been felt, getting rid of irreconcilable enemies.

None of this applied to Pyatakov and his fellow defendants. And, at the same time, the case produced all the anomalies and oddities of the previous one, in fact in an exaggerated form.

As with the Zinoviev group, it was alleged that Pyatakov and his fellow defendants had organized a vast underground of assassins. Radek referred, perhaps ironically, in his evidence to “scores of wandering terrorist groups waiting for the chance to assassinate some leader of the Party.”¹⁴⁵ At least fourteen separate groups or individuals are named who had the task of assassinating Stalin (several of them), Kaganovich, Molotov, Voroshilov, Ordzhonikidze, Kossior, Postyshev, Eikhe, Yezhov, and Beria. Again, in spite of the protection and complicity of high officials everywhere, they had been unable to carry out any overt act, successfully or unsuccessfully, with the sole exception of the attempt to murder Molotov, and even this did not sound very professional. Indeed, the sentencing of Arnold to only ten years’ imprisonment was virtually an admission that he was not a political enthusiast. Why, when the conspiracy brimmed with fanatical Trotskyites, they should have entrusted this suicide operation to such a figure was not explained.

And the plotters were not even able to assassinate Kaganovich, though several of the men closest to him in his governmental post, like Livshits, Serebryakov, and Knyazev, were members of the conspiracy.

Vyshinsky had to deal with the fact that Zinoviev and his colleagues, who had supposedly made full confessions, had (as it now appeared) concealed much of the story. He said flatly, as we saw, that they “lied and deceived when they already had one foot in the grave.”¹⁴⁶ But in that case, while their confessions of fact might have been limited to what they could not deny, their abject expressions of guilt must have been insincere; that is, everything they said in their final speeches was retrospectively canceled. People who believed in the trials, however, had no difficulty in reconciling, or rather ignoring, these contradictory versions.

A minor anomaly is, as we have seen, that the accused now admitted that they had plotted with Zinoviev and Kamenev to kill Molotov as well as the other leaders. Zinoviev and Kamenev had not confessed to this crime, since they had not been required to do so.

Once again, important plotters were mentioned and not produced. When the Old Bolshevik Byeloborodov, who had ordered the execution of the Royal Family, was implicated in a fashion which could not be cleared up properly, Vyshinsky remarked, “So now it will be necessary to ask Byeloborodov himself?”¹⁴⁷ But Byeloborodov was not produced, then or ever. And the same applies, of course, to Smilga, Preobrazhensky, Uglanov, and other important links, who were simply omitted without explanation.

In addition there were, of course, the factual mistakes, and particularly the Oslo visit. Yet in a summary published in England under the sponsorship of the Anglo-Russian Parliamentary Committee, a preface by the Moscow correspondent of the Daily Herald, R. T. Miller, could say “They confessed because the State’s collection of evidence forced them to. No other explanation fits the facts.” Neil Maclean, Labour M.P. for Govan and Chairman of this committee, noted in a foreword: “Practically every foreign correspondent present at the Trial—with the exception of course of the Japanese and German—have expressed themselves as very much impressed by the weight of evidence presented by the Prosecution and the sincerity of the confessions of the accused.” This is an interesting (though untrue) smear on correspondents who thought otherwise. They were clearly in the same boat as the minority of committed fascists, excluded from the company of all decent folk. (This is not the earliest or the only use of this polemical method.) Even when the trial was in progress, Pravda published a long article about how a British lawyer, Dudley Collard, had described it (in the Daily Herald) as judicially unexceptionable).¹⁴⁸

On 27 January 1937, three days before the verdict was handed down, Pravda had printed a more suitable item: an idealized portrait of Yezhov with the information that he had been promoted to be General Commissar of State Security. In general, the press and “public” had mounted the usual violent campaign. When the verdict was announced, a crowd of 200,000 assembled in the Red Square, in a temperature of – 27° Celsius, to be harangued by Khrushchev and Shvernik, and to demonstrate spontaneously against the accused.¹⁴⁹ They carried banners demanding the immediate carrying-out of the death sentences—a demand readily acceded to by the authorities. The victims were fully rehabilitated just over fifty years later.

THE ORDZHONIKIDZE SUICIDE

Once again, the executions shocked the inner circles of the Party. This time, Stalin had to face an immediate threat of firm opposition from a colleague who could not easily be dismissed—Sergo Ordzhonikidze. He had been double-crossed. Personally involved in the negotiations before the Pyatakov Case, he had had Stalin’s assurance that Pyatakov would not be executed. According to a recent Soviet writer, Ordzhonikidze had already been shaken by the “Hotel Bristol” matter; Stalin had given him a promise to check such evidence. When Pyatakov was arrested, Stalin told Ordzhonikidze, “Pyatakov will not be executed.” After the trial, Yezhov told him, “Pyatalcov is alive”; Ordzhonikidze demanded a meeting with him, and this was promised. Yezhov then told him that Pyatakov was in a state of shock after the “trick played by the Norwegians.” But Ordzhonikidze can hardly have been put off for long.¹⁵⁰ He saw in all this a fatal precedent. It became clear that he would now carry on the fight against the Purge by every means at his disposal.

One account describes his behavior when he learned of the arrest of the head of one of the big trusts under his authority. He rang up Yezhov, called him a “filthy lickspittle,” and demanded the documents in the case instantly. He then phoned Stalin on the direct circuit. By this time he was trembling, and his eyes were bloodshot. He shouted, “Koba, why do you let the NKVD arrest my men without informing me?” After some reply from Stalin, he interrupted: “I demand that this authoritarianism cease! I am still a member of the Politburo! I am going to raise hell, Koba, if it’s the last thing I do before I die!”¹⁵¹

As usual, Stalin was not caught unprepared. In fact, though we usually think of the dispute between the two men about Pyatakov as a matter of Stalin wanting to get rid of Pyatakov and being willing to put up with trouble from Ordzhonikidze in the process, it seems equally plausible that Stalin fully intended the destruction of Pyatakov as a blow against Ordzhonikidze too and that the destruction of Ordzhonikidze was not simply a by-product of the Pyatakov Case, but something planned from the start. (As we have suggested, it was perhaps as a political signal of some sort that at that trial Muralov, while freely admitting plans to kill Molotov and others, firmly denied any plans against Ordzhonikidze.)¹⁵² Ordzhonikidze’s elder brother, Papuliya, had already been arrested in November 1936, and was “shot after being tortured” on 9 or 10 February.¹⁵³ Stalin must therefore have been preparing to strike at his old colleague, but to have shown his hand only a short time before his final move.

Meanwhile in the Transcaucasus, NKVD operatives were working “to compel arrested people to give false testimonies against S. Ordzhonikidze.” This would have been meaningless after Ordzhonikidze’s death, and shows that Stalin was already preparing a dossier against his old friend. Similarly, former NKVD officers tried in November 1955 were charged with “collecting slanderous material” against him, and later of terrorist acts against members of his family and close friends in responsible posts.¹⁵⁴

It is also the case that most of Ordzhonikidze’s associates fell before or after his death, and that this is a reasonable indication of Stalin’s feelings. Among them was Gvaldiaria, Ordzhonikidze’s nephew, the head of the great Makeyevka iron foundry. The leaders of Soviet heavy industry followed: Gurevich (a leading figure in the metallurgical industries), Tochinsky, and many others. The top directors and industrialists, the men who had actually, under Pyatakov, created Stalin’s one real achievement, disappeared.

Ordzhonikidze himself was being increasingly harassed. Police officers

arrived at Ordzhonikidze’s flat with a search warrant. Humiliated and frantic with rage, Sergo spent the rest of the night trying to get through to Stalin on the telephone. As morning came he finally got through and heard the answer: “It is the sort of organ that is even liable to search my place. That is nothing extraordinary….”¹⁵⁵

On 17 February, he had a conversation with Stalin lasting several hours. Stalin seems to have accused him of having earlier sympathized with the kulaks and now showing weakness and not enough “real proletarian principledness.”¹⁵⁶ He made “a last attempt to explain to Stalin, a friend of many years’ standing, that dark forces were currently profiting from his pathological lifelong suspiciousness and that the Party was being deprived of its best cadres.”¹⁵⁷ So far, the “cadres” the party was being “deprived of” were practically all oppositionists or ex-oppositionists, and Ordzhonikidze’s formulation seems well suited to Pyatakov, and perhaps—in anticipation—Bukharin and Rykov. The talk of “dark forces” is quite clearly an attack on Yezhov, and perhaps Kaganovich and others as well.

Ordzhonikidze worked in his People’s Commissariat until 2:00 A.M. the next day, 18 February. When he got home, he had another equally fruitless conversation with Stalin on the telephone. At 5:30 in the afternoon, he was dead.

We are now definitely told in a recent Soviet article that he died of a gunshot wound.¹⁵⁸

His wife, Zinaida, rang Stalin, who soon appeared. He “didn’t ask a single question, but merely expressed astonishment: ‘Heavens, what a tricky illness! The chap lay down to have a rest and the result was a fit and a heart attack,’”¹⁵⁹ thus establishing the official view, confirmed in the medical report, which ran as follows:

Comrade Ordzhonikidze suffered from sclerosis accompanied by serious sclerotic transformations of the cardiac muscle and cardiac vessels, and also from a chronic affection of the right kidney, the only one he possessed after the removal in 1929 of the left kidney owing to tuberculosis.

For two years Ordzhonikidze, from time to time, suffered from attacks of stenocardia (angina pectoris) and cardiac asthma. The last such attack, which was a very serious one, occurred at the beginning of November 1936.

On the morning of 18 February Ordzhonikidze made no complaint about his health, but at 17.30, while he was having his afternoon rest, he suddenly felt ill and a few minutes later died of paralysis of the heart.

G. Kaminsky, People’s Commissar for Health, U.S.S.R.

I. Khodorovsky, Head of the Kremlin Medical-Sanitary Administration

L. Levin, Consultant to the Kremlin Medical-Sanitary Administration

S. Mets, Duty Medical Officer of the Kremlin Clinic.¹⁶⁰

Of the four signatories, Kaminsky (who, we are told, was “very unwilling”¹⁶¹ to sign) was shot later in the year, Khodorovsky was referred to as a plotter in the Bukharin Trial, and Levin actually appeared as a defendant at that trial and was shot afterwards. What happened to the more obscure Mets is unknown.

Curiously enough, it was never alleged against the doctors, or anyone else, that Ordzhonikidze had been a victim of a murder plot by the opposition. It is true that at Ordzhonikidze’s funeral a few days later, Khrushchev was to remark,

It was they who struck a blow to thy noble heart. Pyatakov—the spy, the murderer, the enemy of the working people—is caught red-handed, caught and condemned, crushed like a reptile by the working class, but it was his counter-revolutionary work which hastened the death of our dear Sergo.¹⁶²

And, indeed, the authoritative article on him in the Large Soviet Encyclopedia, describing him as “the favorite comrade-in-arms of the great Stalin” and saying that he “died at his post as a warrior of the Lenin-Stalin Party,” added that “the Trotskyite–Bukharinite degenerates of Fascism hated Ordzhonikidze with a bitter hatred. They wanted to kill Ordzhonikidze. In this the Fascist agents did not succeed. But the sabotage activity and monstrous treachery of the despicable Right–Trotskyite hirelings of Japanese–German Fascism greatly hastened the death of Ordzhonikidze.”¹⁶³

But nevertheless, no one was ever charged with murdering him. This shows a curious restraint on Stalin’s part (though, of course, he may have been saving the case for one of the post-Bukharin trials which never occurred, at least in public). One of Ordzhonikidze’s deputies, Vannikov, was indeed summoned by Yezhov a few days after his death, to report on “wrecking” activities by Ordzhonikidze. It looks as though there was or had been some notion of posthumously attacking him, as Tomsky and Gamarnik had been attacked after their suicides. If so, this too was not pursued.¹⁶⁴

It is now no longer disputed that Stalin did in fact procure Ordzhonikidze’s death. But the details are still debatable. And the way in which the original official version lost credence, first in the defector literature, and finally in the Soviet Union itself, is an interesting demonstration of the relative worth of the sources.

Soon after Ordzhonikidze’s death, rumors began to come out of Russia. These varied as to detail, some saying that he had been forced to kill himself under threat of immediate arrest as a Trotskyite, others that he had actually been shot, or poisoned under the supervision of Poskrebyshev, Stalin’s secretary.¹⁶⁵ For example, Kravchenko, in his book published a decade before Khrushchev’s revelations at the XXth Party Congress, says that some believed that he committed suicide, others that he was killed.¹⁶⁶ But no one had any doubt that he died by violence, that his end was not “natural.”

Khrushchev said in 1961 that he had believed what was said about Ordzhonikidze’s heart attack, and only “much later, after the war, I learned quite by chance that he had committed suicide.”¹⁶⁷ But we know from Soviet sources that the suicide story had circulated widely in the Party. Amirdzhanov, a “worker of the Baku Soviet”—scarcely a very senior position—was “repressed” in 1937 because when “a certain section of the Party aktiv” had—already—learned of the suicide story, he had passed it on to “an intimate circle of comrades.”¹⁶⁸ It was circulating in Kazan prison by April 1937.¹⁶⁹ Again, we are told that Nazaretyan, “one of the first” to learn the truth about Ordzhonikidze’s death, was arrested in June 1937 and had already learned it by then.¹⁷⁰ In the NKVD, too, rumors circulated to the same effect.¹⁷¹

In the USSR, the natural-death version remained official until in February 1956 Khrushchev remarked in his Secret Speech:

Beria also cruelly treated the family of Comrade Ordzhonikidze. Why? Because Ordzhonikidze had tried to prevent Beria from realizing his shameful plans. Beria had cleared from his way all persons who could possibly interfere with him. Ordzhonikidze was always an opponent of Beria, which he told Stalin. Instead of examining this matter and taking appropriate steps, Stalin permitted the liquidation of Ordzhonikidze’s brother and brought Ordzhonikidze himself to such a state that he was forced to shoot himself.

This account is clearly misleading. Khrushchev represents Ordzhonikidze’s death as simply due to the failure of an attempt to hamper Beria, as a result of which Stalin turned against him. But at this time, Beria was in the Caucasus, and though he was certainly influential he played little part in the great affairs of state going on at Politburo level in Moscow. The interest of the 1956 version is elsewhere, in the “he was forced to shoot himself.”

Indeed, Khrushchev himself, when he raised the matter for the first time in a nonsecret speech, omitted the Beria angle, which by 1961 was no longer a “must.” He said:

Comrade Ordzhonikidze saw that he could no longer work with Stalin, although previously he had been one of his closest friends … circumstances had become such that Ordzhonikidze could no longer work normally, and in order to avoid clashing with Stalin and sharing the responsibility for his abuse of power, he decided to take his life.¹⁷²

This version has not since been amended or contradicted. It may be worth examining the other possibilities. There are, in effect, three stories (now that natural death has been eliminated): suicide out of despair—a voluntary act, straight murder, and suicide as the result of a threat of worse alternatives by Stalin. Khrushchev implies the first. But it seems reasonable to think that, at most, he is making the best of a forced suicide—just as, in the Kirov Case, he could not quite, in a public speech, bring himself to accuse Stalin directly of murder.

A close friend of Ordzhonikidze’s widow relates that she thought he had been killed by others, and had seen men running across the lawn away from the house at the time of his death.¹⁷³ A Caucasian Party official who was in Moscow at the time says that Stalin sent several secret policemen to Ordzhonikidze, offered him the alternative of arrest or suicide, and gave him a revolver.¹⁷⁴ This account fits in with the fact that a dossier against Ordzhonikidze had been accumulated. It does not, of course, give any guarantee that the fatal shot was fired by Ordzhonikidze himself. In fact, there seems no real point in making him shoot himself, when the NKVD men could do that equally easily. One recent Soviet account has it that the first guard on the spot after his death noted that Ordzhonikidze’s revolver had no signs of having been fired, and so reported (being soon shot himself).¹⁷⁵

The stories associating Poskrebyshev with the death would be probable, in such circumstances. Ordzhonikidze could scarcely have been expected to accept a political ultimatum or, indeed, to commit suicide at all, on a threat from a lesser NKVD officer; the presence of Stalin’s personal representative is a reasonable idea. Ordzhonikidze’s own NKVD guards must, of course, have been given suitable orders.

There was one obvious motive for at least pretending suicide. If the doctors, or any of them, had seen the body and been told it was suicide, it is of course understandable that they could have been induced to hush up the scandal in the interests of Party and State. Kaminsky, at least, was to prove a brave critic of the new Terror over the months that were left to him; it may perhaps have been his direct connection with the Ordzhonikidze case which brought him to his moral decision. Hushed up or not, and even taking it as suicide and not murder, at his political level (as candidate member of the Central Committee) he might have guessed what a suicide in those circumstances signified. But if it had obviously been murder, he might well have taken a stronger line.

The decisive argument against any but a forced suicide (or murder) is different. If Ordzhonikidze had felt “unable to share responsibility,” if he “did not want to play the scoundrel” as an accomplice in Stalin’s plans, it is quite untrue that “the only thing to do was to depart,” as a Soviet account of the 1960s has it.¹⁷⁶ On the contrary, the Central Committee was to meet the next day.¹⁷⁷ When, after a postponement, the full plenum met on 23 February, some attempt was made to block the Purge. The natural, in fact the “only” thing for Ordzhonikidze to do was to throw himself into the struggle. Suicide at this moment was pointless.

Ordzhonikidze had been asked to prepare a report for the impending Central Committee plenum. This is still in the archives, and a Soviet historian describes Ordzhonikidze’s draft being returned by Stalin with coarse and hostile comments. This led to “stormy” exchanges.¹⁷⁸ Another recent Soviet publication suggests that Ordzhonikidze indeed planned to make a stand against the purges at the February–March plenum, hoping for the support of “Postyshev, Chubar, perhaps Kalinin.”¹⁷⁹ But from Stalin’s point of view, the opposite consideration prevailed. An opposition led by an angry Ordzhonikidze was likely to prove much more difficult to handle than one lacking his support. Voluntary suicide was pointless; but forced suicide (or murder) was logically indicated. A recent article by a Soviet historian tells us that those who saw him on the last day of his life reported him energetic, with no signs of depression, making appointments for the next day—as confirmed by his papers, still in the archives.¹⁸⁰

It is not uninteresting that Vyshinsky described the death of Zinoviev’s secretary, Bogdan, who had allegedly been forced to commit suicide under the terms “Kill yourself or else we will kill you,” as “really murder.”¹⁸¹ In this sense, even accepting a forced suicide, we can in any case certainly speak of the murder of Ordzhonikidze. As I write, the question of whose hand held the gun must be left as recently put by a Soviet historian—that “Ordzhonikidze killed himself (or was shot).”¹⁸²

On 19 February 1937,¹⁸³ the first photographs of Ordzhonilcidze’s corpse show, grouped around it, his wife and Stalin’s own cabal: Stalin himself, Yezhov, Molotov, Zhdanov, Kaganovich, Mikoyan, and Voroshilov. They all appear overcome with comradely sorrow.

A Central Committee announcement the same day spoke of him as “an irreproachably pure and staunch Party man, a Bolshevik.”¹⁸⁴ And Ordzhonikidze continued to be honored by Stalin, just as Kirov did. There is one curious public sign of the dictator’s animus. Seven years later, in 1942, the main towns that had been named after Ordzhonikidze were quietly rechristened: Ordzhonikidzegrad (formerly Bezhitsa), Ordzhonikidze (formerly Yenakiyevo), and Sergo (formerly Kadiyevka) reverted to their earlier names, while Ordzhonikidze in the Caucasus (formerly Vladikavkaz), was given a new Ossetian name, Dzaudzhikau. Such action, in the Stalinist protocol, had hitherto invariably been a sign of disgrace (and was to be so in future under his successor as well, when the town of Molotov reverted to Perm, and so on).

As to Ordzhonikidze’s relatives (though without publicity), Papuliya Ordzhonikidze’s wife, Nina, was sentenced to ten years on 29 March 1938, and to death on 14 June 1938. Two other Ordzhonikidze brothers and a sister-in-law were jailed from 1939 through 1941; two other relatives were shot in 1937 and 1938; and another was imprisoned.¹⁸⁵ Yet no further public degradation was inflicted.

Five days after Ordzhonikidze’s death, the Central Committee assembled. In the last trial of strength which now took place, his presence was to be sorely missed among the elements attempting to halt the Purge.

THE FEBRUARY – MARCH PLENUM

The agenda of the plenum as first circulated consisted of two items:

The question of N. I. Bukharin and A.I. Rykov

Organizational questions

Bukharin had already begun to think of suicide, and several times toyed with a revolver long ago presented to him, with ammunition, by Voroshilov. Another of Bukharin’s revolvers (as his wife was told in 1939 by Yezhov’s secretary Ryzhova, her cell mate in the Lubyanka) had been fixed so that it could not fire, presumably by the NKVD, which would perhaps have taken the same precaution with this one.

Bukharin now went on a hunger strike.

Just before the plenum opened, on 23 February, a new agenda was circulated:

The question of the anti-Party action of Bukharin in connection with his declaring a hunger strike to the Plenum

The question of N. Bukharin and A. Rykov

Organizational questions¹⁸⁶

Livshits’s last words, as he was being led to execution, had been a cry of “What for?” Or so a story went that now circulated in the upper levels of the Party. Army Commander Yakir, a full member of the Central Committee, commented privately when he heard it that the question was a good one, as the men were quite clearly innocent.¹⁸⁷ This appears to have been the mood among some members of the Central Committee as the “February–March plenum” opened.

The atmosphere was extremely tense. Stalin, though, was determined finally to overcome the hesitations and qualms which had for so long held him up and forced him to mark time. The struggle at the plenum is another of the cases in which long-standing rumor was, after decades of official silence, more or less confirmed by Khrushchev in 1956 and 1961.

The session was, of course, “managed” by Stalin’s men; the official rapporteurs were Yezhov, Zhdanov, Molotov, and Stalin himself. Formally speaking, they dealt with different subjects—Yezhov with police affairs, Zhdanov with Party organization, Molotov with the economic side, while Stalin made the political report. But in practice, all the reports centered on the Purge theme, from Yezhov’s “Lessons Emerging from the Harmful Activity, Diversion and Espionage of the Japanese-German-Trotskyite Agents,”¹⁸⁸ through Zhdanov’s condemnation of wrongful methods of expelling Party members and Molotov’s “report on wrecking and sabotage,”¹⁸⁹ to Stalin’s “Deficiencies of Party Work and Methods for the Liquidation of the Trotskyites and other Two-faced People.”

In fact there was, in reality, only one item on the agenda—the fate of Bukharin and Rykov.

Even now, one or two old colleagues, perhaps still hoping for successful resistance at the plenum, had the courage to show their feelings. Akulov said to Bukharin, “Play the man, Nikolai Ivanovich”; Uborevich pressed his hand.¹⁹⁰

When Bukharin saw Stalin, Stalin told him to apologize to the plenum for his hunger strike and assured him that he would not be expelled. Bukharin then started proceedings by making the appropriate apology, and was then once again violently attacked by Yezhov, Molotov, Kaganovich, and later Kalinin.¹⁹¹

Yezhov in his report charged Bukharin and Rykov with all the available anti-Soviet crimes: implication in the conspiracies of Zinoviev and Pyatakov, planning the return of capitalism through fascist interventionists, organizing peasant rebellions, inspiring the Ryutin Platform, and plotting the murder of Stalin and the overthrow of the Soviet Government. Kossior then attacked Bukharin for having helped draft the Ryutin document. Bukharin retorted that he had been in the Pamirs at the time to which Kossior referred, and Kossior replied, “Nevertheless we must believe Yezhov.”¹⁹² Bukharin rejected this and all the other charges, and both he and Rykov bitterly protested their innocence: “They did not take the road of repentance.”¹⁹³ Every point raised against them they denied “many times.”¹⁹⁴

On 26 February, they made their final defense. Both again denied all the charges.

Bukharin is said to have made a strong and emotional speech, agreeing that a conspiracy existed but claiming that its leaders were Stalin and Yezhov, who were plotting to install an NKVD regime giving Stalin unlimited personal power.¹⁹⁵ The two men were hotly abused and shouted down with cries of “to jail!” Voroshilov cursed Bukharin. Molotov shouted that Bukharin was proving his fascist affiliations by casting doubt on earlier confessions, and thus supporting anti-Soviet propaganda.¹⁹⁶ Stalin interrupted him, saying that he was behaving in a manner unbecoming to a revolutionary, and he could prove his innocence in a prison cell.¹⁹⁷ Bukharin finally took his seat, saying that even in jail he would not change what he was saying.

The plenum appointed a commission of thirty-six members, with Mikoyan in the chair (and not voting), to report on the question.¹⁹⁸ Twenty spoke. Yezhov, supported by five others, proposed the expulsion of Bukharin and Rykov from the Central Committee and the Party, trial before the Military Collegium, and execution. Postyshev, supported by seven others, including Petrovsky and Kossior, proposed the same, without the application of execution. Stalin, supported by five others, proposed merely sending them to the NKVD for further investigation.¹⁹⁹ Stalin’s proposal was eventually accepted unanimously.²⁰⁰

A subcommittee, consisting of Stalin, Molotov, Voroshilov, Kaganovich, Mikoyan, and Yezhov, then prepared a resolution. It asserted that “as a minimum” the NKVD had established that Bukharin and Rykov were aware of the counter-revolutionary activity of the Trotskyite Center, and of other Rightists of their own circle. It also accused Bukharin of slandering the NKVD. And it accepted Stalin’s formulation of expulsion and handing over to the investigative organs. The resolution then passed, Bukharin and Rykov dissenting.²⁰¹ The two men were arrested on the spot and dragged off to the Lubyanka.

The search of Bukharin’s apartment, unlike those of Zinoviev and Kamenev in 1934, was rigorous, including personal searches of his wife, his father, and the other occupants, though the baby’s cot was not disturbed. Boris Berman, now head of an NKVD Department, supervised a group of twelve or thirteen male and female officers. When they finished, at midnight, they made a convivial supper in the Bukharins’ dining room.²⁰²

The plenum continued, with Zhdanov’s organizational report. He took the opportunity to criticize sharply the situation in Kiev under Postyshev for “incorrect leadership” and “gross breaches of the Party constitution and the principles of democratic centralism”—the main point being that the Kiev and other organizations had been resorting to co-option instead of election, and that this was extremely undemocratic.²⁰³

During the weeks since January, the indirect attacks on Postyshev’s position had continued. On 1 February, his close supporter Karpov was denounced as “an enemy of the Party, a loathsome Trotskyite.”²⁰⁴ Over the following weeks, about sixty expulsions of his old nominees from the Kiev Party were announced. These lesser figures were more easily removable. They had no Old Bolshevik past, and even if their record as Stalinists was a sound one, it was not so widely known throughout the Party as to make charges against them sound unbelievable. In attacking men like Karpov, Stalin was undermining Postyshev without having the assault made directly. But at the same time, establishing the “Trotskyism” of the second- and third-rank Stalinists in the entourages of men he wished to remove, Stalin was setting up precedents which, as resistance weakened, gave him a freer and freer hand to deal with more important men with perfect records.

On 8 February came attacks on faults that had been found in the Kiev, Azov-Black Sea, and Kursk provinces.²⁰⁵ On the following day, “lordly and immodest” actions that had come to light in the Party leaderships in Kiev and Rostov provinces were described.²⁰⁶ The concentration on Kiev was obvious enough.fn7

These attacks had not so far cowed Postyshev, and he held himself ready to put his viewpoint. There seems to have been no intention of removing Stalin, but only of curbing him and getting him to abandon Yezhov and the Purge. There were precedents in Russian history, but they were not encouraging ones. The boyar, Prince Michael Repnin, had called on Ivan the Terrible to rid himself of his Secret Police:

“To our misfortune, you have surrounded your throne with the oprichnina….

Perish the oprichnina!” he said, making the Sign of the Cross;

“May he live for ever, our orthodox Tsar!

May he rule over men as he ruled them of old!

May he spurn, as treason, the voice of shameless flattery! …”

The declaration of loyalty to the ruler and hostility to his Secret Police was unsuccessful, and Repnin was killed, a lesson to all who undertake such half-measures.

Stalin seems to have learned of Postyshev’s plan in advance. Speaking first, he anticipated and refuted the arguments to be brought against him, and made an appeal for unity and responsibility in the Communist leadership.

Postyshev then went to the platform. In his “dry, hoarse and unpleasant voice,” he began to read his text. After a careful preamble, he spoke of the excesses of the Purge:

I have philosophized that the severe years of the struggle have passed; Party members who lost their backbone broke down or joined the camp of the enemy, healthy elements fought for the Party. Those were the years of industrialization and collectivization. I never thought it possible that after this severe era had passed Karpov and people like him would find themselves in the camp of the enemy. And now, according to the testimony, it appears that Karpov was recruited in 1934 by the Trotskyites. I personally do not believe that in 1934 an honest Party member who had trod the long road of unrelenting fight against enemies, for the Party and for socialism, would now be in the camp of the enemies. I do not believe it…. I cannot imagine how it would be possible to travel with the Party during the difficult years and then, in 1934, join the Trotskyites. It is an odd thing.…²⁰⁷

Stalin, who was listening without apparent emotion, uttered a loud interjection, which made it clear to everyone that he was aware of what was going on.

This was perhaps the occasion on which Stalin turned to Postyshev and said, “What are you, actually?” to which Postyshev replied, “I am a Bolshevik, Comrade Stalin, a Bolshevik.”²⁰⁸ This reply, in any case, was at first represented in the Party as showing lack of respect for Stalin, and later “it was considered a harmful act and consequently resulted in Postyshev’s annihilation and in his being branded without reason as an enemy of the people”²⁰⁹—an exaggerated and compressed account.

Whatever Stalin said, Postyshev (according to one version)²¹⁰ faltered from the text of his speech and later withdrew his doubts. In any case, it is clear that his forlorn hope of swaying the plenum had failed.

Yezhov made a wide-ranging report. For instance, he complained that over recent months he could not think of a case in which the economic ministries had telephoned him to express suspicions about any of their staff; on the contrary, they had tried to defend them.²¹¹

A resolution on Yezhov’s report was accepted which repeated Stalin’s formulation about the NKVD’s failure under Yagoda to act four years previously—that is, against Ryutin:

The Plenum of the Party Central Committee considers that all facts revealed during the investigation into the matter of an anti-Soviet Trotskyite center and of its followers in the provinces show that the People’s Commissariat of Internal Affairs had fallen behind at least four years in the attempt to unmask these most inexorable enemies of the people.…²¹²

Stalin severely criticized Yagoda.²¹³ This must have been the occasion when Yagoda turned on the applauding members and snarled that six months earlier he could have arrested the lot of them.²¹⁴

Ordzhonikidze’s report to which Stalin had objected had been supposed to cover sabotage in industry. Molotov, taking up Yezhov’s point, now performed this duty, saying that 585 people had been arrested in the People’s Commissariat of Heavy Industry alone, and hundreds in other ministries concerned.²¹⁵ He sneered at those who urged caution “against conjuring up all sorts of conspiracies and sabotage and espionage centers,” and called on the Party to annihilate enemies of the people “hiding behind Party cards.” The present-day subversives and saboteurs were especially dangerous, he said, because they “pretend to be Communists, ardent supporters of the Soviet regime.”²¹⁶

On 3 March, Stalin made his political report, and on 5 March a short “final speech” closing the plenum. These two speeches were printed in full in the press on 29 March in a version believed to differ considerably, chiefly by omission, from what he had actually said. They were later in the year sponsored in England in one volume with a slightly compressed transcript of the Pyatakov Trial. Neil Maclean, M.P., the British commentator we have already quoted, commented in a preface: “These speeches in that simple and clear style of which M. Stalin is such a master form an interesting background and commentary on the Trial.…” They do indeed.

Stalin’s report developed the theoretical justification for the Terror. Quoting the Central Committee letters of 18 January 1935 and 29 July 1936, he propounded his view (to be denounced in the Khrushchev period) that as socialism gets stronger, the class struggle gets sharper.

He pointed out that the fact of there only being a few counter-revolutionaries should not comfort the Party: “Thousands of people are required to build a big railway bridge, but a few people are enough to blow it up. Tens and hundreds of such examples could be quoted….”

But his central theme was in effect a censure of leaders who had failed in their vigilance:

Some of our leading comrades, both in the centre and locally, not only failed to discern the real countenance of these wreckers, diversionists, spies, and murderers, but proved so unconcerned, complacent and naïve, that at times they themselves assisted in promoting the agents of the foreign States to one or other responsible post.²¹⁷

“The espionage-diversionist work of the Trotskyite agents of the Japanese-German secret police,” he added,

was a complete surprise to some of our comrades…. Our Party comrades have not noticed that Trotskyism has ceased to be a political tendency in the working class, that from the political tendency in the working class that it was seven or eight years ago, Trotskyism has become a frenzied and unprincipled band of wreckers, diversionists, spies and murderers, acting on instructions from intelligence service organs of foreign States.²¹⁸

He made a sinister suggestion, which was to prove a fair statement of his plans: “First of all it is necessary to suggest to our Party leaders, from cell secretaries to the secretaries of province and republic Party organizations, to select, within a certain period, two people in each case, two Party workers capable of being their real substitutes.”²¹⁹

His final speech fully implicated Bukharinites as well as Trotskyites:

Two words about wreckers, diversionists, spies, etc. I think it is clear to everybody now that the present-day wreckers and diversionists, no matter what disguise they may adopt, either Trotskyite or Bukharinite, have long ceased to be a political trend in the labour movement, that they have become transformed into a gang of professional wreckers, diversionists, spies and assassins, without principles and without ideals. Of course, these gentlemen must be ruthlessly smashed and uprooted as the enemies of the working class, as betrayers of our country. This is clear and requires no further explanation.²²⁰

The bulk of the speech concentrated on a different matter—the censure, in effect, of his next batch of victims. His theme was incorrect conduct, and unjustified expulsions, by leading Communists still in high positions. Then, after remarking that

we, the leaders, should not be conceited, and should understand that if we are members of the Central Committee or People’s Commissars, this does not yet mean that we possess all the knowledge required to give correct leadership. The rank in itself gives neither knowledge nor experience. Still less so does the title.²²¹

he went on to deal with the unfortunate case of Nikolayenko in Kiev:

Nikolayenko—is a rank and file member of the Party, she is an ordinary ‘little person’. For a whole year she had signalled about a wrong situation in the Party organization in Kiev, exposing the family atmosphere, philistine approach to workers, gagging of self-criticism, high-handed action by the Trotskyite wreckers. She was shunned like a bothersome fly. At last, in order to get rid of her, they expelled her from the Party. Neither the Kiev organization nor the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Ukraine helped her to obtain justice. It was only the intervention of the Central Committee of the Party which helped to disentangle that twisted knot. And what was revealed by an examination of the case? It was revealed that Nikolayenko was right, while the Kiev organization was wrong.²²²

and he added, of the inhuman attitude to such expulsions by some Party bureaucrats, “Only people who are essentially deeply anti-Party can have such an approach to members of the Party.”²²³

With these sinister words ringing in their ears, the defeated “moderates” dispersed to their posts, where worse awaited them.

In Postyshev’s old fief, a “Ukrainian Trotskyite Center” came to some sort of trial straight away—Kotsiubinsky being shot on 8 March, Golubenko on 9 March, and Musulbas on 10 March, together with O. P. Dzenis of the Ukrainian Institute of Marxism-Leninism. Their accomplice V. F. Loginov (named as a prominent Ukrainian “Trotskyite,” and giving satisfactory evidence as a “witness” at the Pyatakov Trial) was held over and only executed on 11 October 1938.

On 17 March, the Ukrainian Central Committee relieved Postyshev of his post as Second Secretary .²²⁴ He was demoted to be First Secretary in Kuibyshev province. There, though still officially retaining his rank as candidate member of the Politburo, he was to moulder, under constant criticism, for a year. The new post was supposed to be an opportunity to “correct his errors,” it was later to be said,²²⁵ with the verdict that he had failed to measure up.

In Kiev, a resolution was passed saying that as a result of Postyshev’s leadership, and its “un-Bolshevik style of work” which suppressed criticism and formed a solid clique, enemies of the Party had been able to penetrate the organization and sometimes to persecute honest Communists.²²⁶

In the following months, the implications grew. At the Ukrainian Congress in May, Kossior attacked Postyshev. In Kiev more than anywhere, he said, Trotskyites had been able to gain important posts.²²⁷ Other speakers upbraided those in Kiev “who had let in enemies.” Over several years of complacency, the main thing had been a personality cult involving “Greetings to Postyshev!” as the restored and rehabilitated Nikolayenko smugly remarked to the uneasy delegates.²²⁸ He had been, in fact, “intoxicated with success” because of “the noise our press made round his name.”²²⁹

The defeat and demotion of Postyshev was only the beginning. Over the next few years, the great majority (70 percent) of the Central Committee which had just seen his final and fumbling stand was to follow Bukharin and Rykov to the death cells.

For, politically, Stalin’s battle had now been won. The way was at last completely open to the total annihilation of the old oppositionists. At the same time, by his actions against Postyshev, he had made the first moves to undermining and destroying that group of his own followers who had hoped to block him.

But the main change was that the last attempt to preserve some sort of constitutional procedure had been defeated. In future, he was not to observe any such limitations. In six months, the position had changed radically. In the autumn of 1936, Stalin had had to argue and exert pressure to secure the arrest and trial even of potential rivals. Now, he could order the arrest of his closest colleagues without consulting anyone. He could strike when and where he liked, without appeal. The point at which his despotism became an absolute autocracy may be dated as the February–March plenum.

There were still steps to be taken to ensure the irrevocability of the victory. The demoralized and defeated rank and file of the Central Committee, convicted of the most capital of all crimes, ineffective disloyalty, had to be mopped up. The Purge had so far only affected a limited section of the Soviet people, among whom there remained much political indiscipline to be eradicated. And the Army remained—to all appearances wholly obedient, but tyrants have often been misled on this point, and Stalin was soon to insure himself against such a mistake.

But first, the instrument of terror needed retuning. The old NKVD of Yagoda’s time was technically efficient, but in certain respects it lacked the true Stalinist spirit. In any case, its new master could not trust his predecessor’s men.

In March, Yezhov ordered the departmental chiefs of the NKVD to proceed to various parts of the country on a massive inspection. Only Slutsky of the Foreign Department and—for the moment—Pauker were not so assigned. The others, leaving shortly afterward, were arrested at the first stations out of Moscow in their various directions, and brought back to prison. Two days later, the same trick was played on the deputy heads of the departments. At the same time, Yezhov changed the NKVD in all sensitive spots.²³⁰ He had already barricaded himself in a separate wing of the NKVD building, surrounded by a formidable bodyguard and elaborate security precautions.²³¹

On 18 March 1937²³² Yezhov addressed a meeting of senior officers of the NKVD in the Secret Police club room at the Lubyanka. He denounced Yagoda as a former Tsarist police spy and a thief and an embezzler, and went on to speak of “Yagoda’s spies” in the NKVD. He proceeded to clean up the remaining Yagoda cadres. They were arrested in their offices by day or in their homes by night. Chertok, the bullying interrogator of Kamenev, threw himself from his twelfth-floor apartment. Other officers shot themselves, or committed suicide by jumping from their office windows.²³³ Most went passively, Bulanov, arrested at the end of March, among them.²³⁴ Three thousand of Yagoda’s NKVD officers are reported executed in 1937,²³⁵ while over the whole period about 20,000 NKVD men “fell victim.”²³⁶ Of his departmental chiefs, Molchanov, Mironov, and Shanin were to be denounced as Rightist conspirators,²³⁷ organized as such in the OGPU in 1931 and 1932, while Pauker (who disappeared in the summer) and Gay were transmuted to spies,²³⁸ together with Pauker’s deputy Volovich. (Pauker, a Jew, was spoken of as specifically a German spy.)²³⁹

On 3 April it was announced that Yagoda himself had been arrested for “offenses of a criminal nature in connection with his official duties.”²⁴⁰ Next day, an announcement was made of a new People’s Commissar and Assistant People’s Commissar of Communications.²⁴¹ The transfer of the former Assistant People’s Commissar G. E. Prokofiev was also published. Although he was still named as “Comrade,” he was arrested shortly afterward as a Rightist and later attempted suicide in prison.²⁴² The wives of both men were also arrested and were sent to a camp.²⁴³ Yagoda’s dacha was taken over by Molotov.²⁴⁴

Yezhov now had his machine cleared and ready for action. At the same time, the other main element in the Purge mechanism, Vyshinsky’s Prosecutor’s apparatus, was being similarly renovated. A number of the old Prosecutors had attempted to maintain a semblance of legality. For example, the Assistant Chief Prosecutor of Water Transport had put in a memorandum on 26 June 1936 urging this. Similar protests were made by a number of provincial Prosecutors—for example in Bryansk, where two were arrested “for spreading false and defamatory rumors.” Ninety percent of the provincial Prosecutors were removed, and many of them were arrested. “Vyshinsky carried out a mass purge in the organs of the Prosecutor’s office. With his sanction, many prominent workers in the Prosecutor’s Office who had tried in one way or another to mitigate repressive measures and stop the lawlessness and arbitrariness were arrested and subsequently perished.”²⁴⁵ As late as the beginning of 1938, the ironically titled Stalinist law journal Socialist Legality²⁴⁶ called for further work in purging “fascist agents” among the Prosecutors.

The authorities on Soviet law who had inculcated the “formalist” attitude to legality were held to responsibility. The Deputy Commissar for Justice, the Soviet Union’s leading legal theorist, E. Pashukanis, was severely criticized in January 1937²⁴⁷ and shot, and in April was to be linked by Vyshinsky with Bukharin as a wrecker “who has now been exposed.”²⁴⁸ Another unsatisfactory Deputy Commissar for Justice, V. A. Degot, was arrested on 31 July 1937. Sent to camp, he died in 1944.²⁴⁹

By early spring, all the machinery was in good order. The old Communist police and prosecutors, ruthless as they had been, had not proved sufficiently so for the new phase. Russians who had thought that the country was already in the grip of terrorists were now to see what terror really meant.