The Great Terror

8

THE PARTY CRUSHED

You have made of liberty a weapon for the executioner.

Lermontov

IN THE PROVINCES

April 1937 saw the beginning of intra-Party elections, the occasion for a great campaign in the press against those elements interfering, like Postyshev, with Party democracy, who were found everywhere. Some failures in this respect were dealt with harshly in the set-piece article which launched the campaign, “Internal Party Democracy and Bolshevik Discipline.”¹ The author was Boris Ponomarev, still a member of the Central Committee of the Communist Party in 1988.

Among the first Central Committee members to be arrested were those from Leningrad. Outside Moscow, it was only in the northern capital, where Zhdanov ruled, and in Transcaucasia, under Beria, that local First Secretaries ready to purge without limit were already in control.

As a result of the Kirov murder,

the Leningrad Party organization suffered particularly large losses.… For a period of four years there was an uninterrupted wave of repressions in Leningrad against honest and completely innocent people. Promotion to a responsible post often amounted to a step toward the brink of a precipice. Many people were annihilated without a trial and investigation on the basis of false, hastily fabricated charges. Not only officials themselves, but also their families were subjected to repressions, even absolutely innocent children, whose lives were thus broken from the very beginning.… The repressions … were carried out either on Stalin’s direct instructions or with his knowledge and approval.²

But in fact the first waves of terror had struck at non-Party people and the mass of minor functionaries. Zhdanov had pursued the Stalin method. He had weakened the old Kirov cadre from below, replacing many of its junior veterans at the District Committee level. But he had not yet driven all Kirov’s leading supporters, a number of them members or candidate members of the Central Committee itself, from the higher posts they held in the city and the province. In 1936, he had, indeed, removed and demoted Mikhail Chudov, Kirov’s Second Secretary. A printer by trade, a Bolshevik since 1913, Chudov had been imported into Leningrad to reinforce Kirov in 1928. A full member of the Central Committee, he had been on the Presidium of the XVIIth Congress. In 1934, he had made Leningrad’s funeral speech on Kirov and been on the Kirov Burial Commission. More than anyone, he represented the Kirov tradition in the city. Kirov’s other closest associate, Kodatsky, was still in position.

The old Party leaders at this level were to prove unacceptable to Stalin throughout the country. But the Leningrad men were particularly unsatisfactory. First, they had been closely associated with Kirov and his platform, both of which had been the special objects of Stalin’s hostility. And second, they were the very men who, on that December afternoon over two years before, had rushed into the corridor when they heard the shot that killed Kirov, and must have noticed—indeed, we are now told, did notice—the absence of guards and other suspicious signs.

The Leningrad purge had already been violent even by Soviet standards. In the ensuing period, as it affected the entire political and industrial leadership, it was worse than those almost anywhere else in the country—though this meant a matter of a nearly 100 percent destruction, compared with 80 or 90 percent elsewhere.fn1 We happen to have fuller information about it than about the lesser provincial massacres which succeeded it, and it shows the sort of operation that now involved Party and population alike.

Zhdanov reported back from the plenum on 20 March 1937, at a Party meeting notable for attacks on various District Committees in the city. Zakovsky, Commissar of State Security, First Rank, spoke of “enemies still active” in the organization.³

Zakovsky was Zhdanov’s right hand in the ensuing assault. His left—indeed, his only trusted aide at an executive level—was the infamous A. S. Shcherbakov, who had served with him from 1924 to 1930 in the Nizhni-Novgorod (Gorky) province, becoming local chief of agitation and propaganda. Shcherbakov, a figure more personally disliked even than Zhdanov, was a plump man with glasses and Western-style hair, combed back. He had gone on from Gorky province to the Central Committee apparatus, and had then been appointed, in 1934, Secretary of the Union of Soviet Writers! After a year (1936–1937) in Leningrad, he went on as a mobile purger to various reluctant provinces, apart from being briefly Head of the Political Department of Transbaikal Military District. During 1938 alone, he was to serve in fewer than four of these posts. Leaving Irkutsk completely crushed, he held two First Secretaryships in the Ukrainian provinces left empty by Khrushchev’s purges, and then arrived in Moscow in the winter as the city’s First Secretary. During the Second World War, he was to take over political control of the Army and to become Secretary of the Central Committee and candidate member of the Politburo. He died in 1945, allegedly at the hands of doctor-poisoners. A typical Zhdanovite career.

This group soon set to work. In May 1937, Zhdanov assembled the executive workers of the Provincial Committee and announced: “Two enemies—Chudov and Kodatsky—have been exposed in our ranks, in the Leningrad organization. They have been arrested in Moscow.” No one spoke: “it was as if our tongues were frozen.” A woman Old Bolshevik, later to spend seventeen years in a labor camp, went up to Zhdanov and said to him:

Comrade Zhdanov, I don’t know Chudov. He hasn’t been in our Leningrad organization long. But I vouch for Kodatsky. He has been a Party member since 1913. I have known him for many years. He is an honest member of the Party. He fought all the oppositionists. This is incredible! It must be verified.

Zhdanov looked at her “with his cruel eyes” and said, “Lazurkina, stop this talk, otherwise it will end badly for you.”⁴

This conference of the Party organization “uncovered and expelled from its ranks the Anti-Soviet Rightist-Trotskyite-double-dealers—the Japanese–German diversionists and spies.”⁵ (Expulsion was the extreme measure of Party discipline proper. In these circumstances it almost invariably meant “relaxation to the secular arm” of the NKVD, followed by arrest.) And this was only the first step: of the sixty-five members of the new City Committee elected on 29 May, only two were reelected on 4 June 1938 (while five others were transferred to posts outside the city).⁶

The long days of summer had set in in the northern capital, presenting a minor technical difficulty to Zakovsky’s men. As the wave of arrests reached the top of the local Party, then swept downward again, involving those promoted to Party positions in the past year or two, and then out beyond them to the already stricken masses of the population, operations could no longer be conducted under the decent cover of night. For Leningrad is easily the most northerly of the great cities of the world, on the same latitude as the Shetland Islands and northern Labrador. In winter, daytime is extremely short, but in summer, as Pushkin says, one can read all night in one’s room by the “Transparent dusk and moonless glitter.” The rumbling and halting of police cars in the bright but deserted streets of the subarctic summer nights is said to have been particularly disturbing.

A man named Rozenblum, a Party member since 1906, had been arrested in connection with another case—that of the prominent Old Bolshevik Nikolai Komarov.

With the defeat of the Zinovievites in 1926, Komarov had taken over Zinoviev’s own post as Head of the Leningrad Soviet. In 1929, he became unsatisfactory to Stalin: without actually supporting Bukharin, he had shown no enthusiasm in the struggle against him. Bukharin had told Kamenev in July 1928 that the higher functionaries in Leningrad “are mentally with us, but they are terrified when we speak of removing Stalin,” so that they vacillated without being able to make up their minds. “Stalin,” we are told elsewhere, “had met with a set-back in attempting to win the Leningrad people over to his cause, Komarov and the others, the successors of Zinoviev.”⁷ Komarov was removed and transferred to a post on the Council of National Economy in Moscow. In 1934, he was no longer a full member of the Central Committee, but remained a candidate member.

This and other transfers left Leningrad in the hands of men wholly loyal to the Party line. Yet most are perhaps best thought of as Stalinists with a slight Rightist tinge, a position to which Kirov himself to some extent evolved.⁸

Komarov remained a link to them. He was to be named later as an important figure in “the Leningrad group” of terrorists.⁹ And through Rozenblum, the Komarov Case was somehow linked with Chudov’s. But the latter was designed as a far more important affair, a public trial with all the trimmings. Rozenblum, who had already been subjected to “terrible torture,”¹⁰ was brought before Zakovsky,

who offered him freedom on condition that he make before the court a false confession fabricated in 1937 by the NKVD concerning “sabotage, espionage and diversion in a terroristic center in Leningrad.” With unbelievable cynicism Zakovsky told about the vile “mechanism” for the crafty creation of fabricated “anti-Soviet plots.”

“In order to illustrate it to me,” stated Rozenblum, “Zakovsky gave me several possible variants of the organization of this center and of its branches. After he detailed the organization to me, Zakovsky told me that the NKVD would prepare the case of this center, remarking that the trial would be public.”

“… You yourself,” said Zakovsky, “will not need to invent anything. The NKVD will prepare for you a ready outline for every branch of the center; you will have to study it carefully and to remember well all the questions and answers which the court might ask. This case will be ready in four or five months or perhaps half a year. During all this time you will be preparing yourself so that you will not compromise the investigation and yourself. Your future will depend on how the trial goes and on its results. If you begin to lie and to testify falsely, blame yourself. If you manage to endure it, you will save your head and we will feed and clothe you at the Government’s cost until your death.”¹¹

The trial, Zakovsky told Rozenblum, would involve Chudov, Chudov’s wife, Lyudmila Shaposhnikova,fn2 and three other Secretaries of the City and Provincial Committees: Boris Pozern, Party member since 1903; A. I. Ugarov; and Pyotr Smorodin—all candidate members of the Party’s Central Committee.

As so often, we may note that the ground had been well prepared. Already, in August 1936, it had been alleged that several members of the group associated with Nikolayev had “enjoyed the confidence of a number of leading Party workers and officials of Soviet organizations in Leningrad”; it was this which had “ensured them every possibility of pursuing their preparations for a terroristic act against Kirov without the least fear of being discovered.”¹²

As to political complexion, it seems clear that the Leningraders were to be treated as “Rightists.” There was some truth in this, and their end represented the final crushing of the Kirov line.

The Leningrad Center Trial planned by Zakovsky never took place (in fact, announced trials of importance were held only in Moscow and Georgia). We do not know why.

The fate of Zakovsky’s list of victims presents some peculiar features. Chudov and Kodatsky were executed on 30 October 1937. But Pozern, Smorodin, and A. I. Ugarov were still at large in mid-1938—Ugarov promoted to be First Secretary in Moscow—all three being shot only on 26 February 1939 (see here). This certainly shows that, as Zakovsky said, variants must have existed, some of them implicating men with whom he was sitting daily in the Provincial Bureau.

The Leningrad purge is the provincial one of which we are best informed, and it is illuminating to look at its scope. Those arrested included all the seven Leningrad members and candidate members of the Central Committee (Chudov, Kodatsky, Alexeyev, Smorodin, Pozern, Ugarov, and P. I. Struppe, Chairman of the Provincial Executive Committee). Other victims were A. N. Petrovsky, who had headed the Executive Committee and was later a Secretary of the Provincial Committee, and I. S. Vayshlya, Secretary of the Leningrad Komsomol. In addition, most of the other members of the Bureau, and “hundreds of the most active Party workers,” including many Secretaries of District Committees in the city, perished. The purge also struck at the fighting service commands with Dybenko (G.O.C. Leningrad District and ex officio member of the Provincial Bureau) and the Commander of the Baltic Fleet, A. K. Sivkov. At the same time, the leading industrialists fell: the heads of all the great enterprises—“Lenenergo,” the Kirov Works, the “Metallic” Factory—and many others.¹³

Of the 154 Leningrad delegates to the XVIIth Congress, only 2 were reelected to the XVIIIth Congress: Andreyev and Shkiryatov, whose Leningrad affiliations were purely honorary. Of the sixty-five members even of the Leningrad Provincial Committee elected on 17 June 1937, only nine reappear a year later (four others had been transferred to positions outside the city).¹⁴ As a survivor from among the lower officials in the Committee’s apparatus was later to comment, “In 1937 I was to share the lot of many. I had an executive post in the Leningrad Province Party Committee and, of course, was also arrested.”¹⁵

As the old cadres were annihilated, Zhdanov promoted his own men. Some of them (like Voznesensky, who became chairman of the local Planning Commission and then deputy chairman of the town Soviet before transfer to the central Government and eventual membership of the Politburo; A. A. Kuznetsov, promoted through District Secretaryships to Second and later First Secretary of the Provincial Committee, and later to become Secretary of the Central Committee; and Popkov, later also First Secretary of the Leningrad Committee) were shot in 1950 in a later “Leningrad Case.”

These Leningrad events were repeated in the Provincial Committees throughout the country, with the amendment that (except in Beria’s Caucasian fief and under Khrushchev in Moscow) the local First Secretaries could not be trusted, as Zhdanov was, to conduct their own purges.

So Kaganovich was sent to Ivanovo, Smolensk, and elsewhere; Malenkov to Byelorussia, Armenia, and so on; Zhdanov to Orenburg, Bashkiria, and other provinces; Shkiryatov to the North Caucasus. Everywhere they destroyed the old leaderships. As long as the Provincial Secretaries had to countersign orders for the arrest of prominent “Trotskyites” (which Eikhe mentions as one of his prerogatives as First Secretary in West Siberia),¹⁶ they were, at the earlier stages, able and willing to block action—or, anyhow, to block the type of action now required by Stalin and Yezhov. In most cases, Moscow itself had to destroy the local leaderships. (The other method used by the Secretariat was to intrude, under the reluctant First Secretaries, Second Secretaries from the purging faction, as N. G. Ignatov was to be sent to undermine Postyshev.)

And so, we are told,

The investigative materials of that time show that in almost all territories, provinces and republics there supposedly existed “Rightist–Trotskyite, espionage-terror and diversionary-sabotage organizations and centers” and that the head of such organizations as a rule—for no known reason—were First Secretaries of Provincial Party Committees or Republic Central Committees.¹⁷

When Kaganovich went to Ivanovo on 3 August, immediately on arrival he telegraphed Stalin: “First acquaintance with the material shows that Provincial Secretary Yepanechnikov must be arrested at once. It is also necessary to arrest Mikhailov, head of the Provincial Committee’s Propaganda Department.” Soon he was sending another telegram: “Acquaintance with the situation shows that Right–Trotskyist sabotage has assumed wide scope here—in industry, agriculture, supply, trade, public health services, education and Party political work. The apparatus of provincial institutions and the Provincial Party Committee are deeply infected.”¹⁸ His three-day visit to the city became known as “the black tornado”:

He accused the entire Party organization, which had great revolutionary traditions, of supposedly standing aloof, of being off to the side of the high road. At a plenary session of the Provincial Committee he pinned the label “enemy of the people” on the majority of executive officials without any grounds.¹⁹

When one of the city Secretaries, A. A. Vasilev, began to express doubt about enemy activity, Kaganovich had him expelled from the Party and arrested on the spot.²⁰ The local First Secretary, I. P. Nosov, followed, together with a whole list of other officials. Kaganovich was in frequent telephone contact with Stalin, who told him “not to be too liberal” and to make the operation larger and more ruthless—instructions he repeated to the local NKVD chief, Radzivilovsky, who was already “beating and torturing” officials to give testimony against more and more of their colleagues. (He was soon instructed to shoot 1,500 of them.)²¹

A Soviet account, in fictional form but evidently based on personal experience, describes the sort of scene which often occurred at the Provincial Committees.²² On 23 July 1937 a member arrives at a meeting of one of these. It has been called at a few hours’ notice and no agenda announced. When he arrives, the atmosphere is tense and silent. Everyone, as far as possible, sits in the back rows.

The first man to appear

was then very powerful, both a People’s Commissar and a Secretary of the Central Committee, virtually one man with seven faces. The hall was quiet. The People’s Commissar frowned and was evidently displeased at how he had been greeted, being used to a triumphal reception. Some bright lad came to his senses and started clapping. Other people joined in and things took their proper course.

After that the Bureau members of our Provincial Committee, headed by the First Secretary, appeared. They too were given a round of clapping, though a more feeble one….

The report on agitation and propaganda work in the countryside ought to have been delivered by the Propaganda Secretary, but it was Kostyukov, the head of the provincial agricultural land administration, who got up to speak. He was a great one for making speeches, especially when it came to plans, hectares and fertilizers, but this time you could see his lips moving but nothing was audible. Some bolder spirit in the hall shouted: “Louder!”

Kostyukov raised his eyes from his notes and I felt ill—his eyes had the glassy look of a corpse….

We heard him say:

“Two days ago Comrade Kazakov, Chairman of the Provincial Executive Committee, and I paid a visit to the Budenny Collective Farm….”

The People’s Commissar put his hands on his hips and in a curious way, whether expressing astonishment or derision, asked the speaker: “With whom? Who did you visit the collective farm with?”

“With Comrade Kazakov …”

It was only then that I noticed the absence of Kazakov from the Presidium. “How’s that?” I thought to myself. “After all he is on the Bureau!”

The People’s Commissar continued in the same incomprehensible tone: “So that therefore, if I understand you correctly, you consider Kazakov a Comrade? Answer me!”

Kostyukov went white and started stuttering …“Of course … if that is the case … Why shouldn’t he be regarded … ?”

The People’s Commissar looked at his wrist-watch, then glanced at the wings and some person there, not one of ours, immediately rushed over to him. The People’s Commissar heard out this person’s brief, momentary report and then declared … “I don’t understand how you can conduct yourself in this way. I simply refuse to understand…. “He looked again at his wrist-watch and added, “The enemy of the people, Kazakov, was arrested twenty minutes ago….”

… One of those sitting in the Presidium started applauding. The others backed him up, at first timidly, and then more energetically. A deep bass voice cried out: “Hurrah for our glorious NKVD!”

And I, too, cried “Hurrah!”

Kostyukov completely collapsed and, mumbling a few more words, left the rostrum to the sound of his own heels clicking on the floorboards. He was seen no more—he disappeared into the wings for good.

The People’s Commissar again looked at his watch and in the same incomprehensible tone of voice addressed the Secretary for Propaganda: “Perhaps you can do duty for the last inadequate speaker?”

The Secretary walked across to the rostrum, as white as a sheet, gave a little cough, and started off relatively confidently:

“… As the previous speaker already stated, we must complete the harvesting in a shorter period…. At the same time, Comrade Kostyukov failed to point out that …”

At these last words the People’s Commissar again put his hands to his hips and inquired sneeringly: “Is Kostyukov your Comrade? Curious, very curious….” Again a glance at his watch and the pole-axing words:

“The accomplice of the enemy of the people Kazakov, his henchman Kostyukov, was arrested fifteen minutes ago….”

Within forty minutes the entire bureau of the Provincial Committee and the entire Presidium of the Provincial Executive Committee had been swept into oblivion.

At the end of June, Kaganovich appeared before a specially summoned meeting of the Smolensk Provincial Committee and announced that First Secretary Rumyantsev, who had held the area for Stalin since 1929, Second Secretary Shulman, and a large group of the old leadership were “traitors, spies of German and Japanese fascism and members of the Rightist—Trotskyite gang.”²³ They disappeared without trace.

In Smolensk, we chance to be able to trace the impact of the Purge at the local Party level. Belyi was a moderate-sized town and administrative area in the Smolensk province. The Provincial Committee, itself already in trouble following the February—March plenum, began to take it out on its subordinate bodies in March 1937. The Belyi First Secretary, Kovalev, was put up in a four-day ceremony, to be abused and denounced by his local subordinates. Various speakers attacked him for having lived with a Trotskyite in 1921, having behaved like a local dictator, having been a deserter from the Red Army, and so forth. There were more than 200 Communists present, accounting for a large section of the local Party membership, and it is clear that a number of them had not yet grasped the tone of the new-style Party. Questions from the floor pointed out that everyone approved of Kovalev at the time and asked why they had not said anything earlier. But one of Kovalev’s more sophisticated accusers claimed that he had been silent because Kovalev had, for four years, forbidden him to speak!

The representative of the Provincial Committee, while arranging the removal of Kovalev, spoke more moderately than some of the rank-and-file delators, saying, “I do not have sufficient basis to call Kovalev a Trotskyite,” but that the matter would be investigated.

When, in June, the Provincial Committee was itself unmasked, a hysteria of arrest and accusation seized Belyi. On 26 and 27 June, a further meeting there saw violent denunciation of Kovalev and all the other members of the local leadership of his time. The whole of the Kovalev leadership fell, and on 18 and 19 September a plenum of the District Committee was held to destroy those who had succeeded them. The new local Secretary, Karpovsky, was accused of having been an agent of Rumyantsev’s, of having once belonged to a bandit gang, of having relatives abroad, of maintaining connections with a sister who had married a former merchant. Karpovsky defended himself, saying that he not only had not been a bandit, but had killed several bandits. He had received a letter from an aunt in Romania, but had not seen her since she left Russia in 1908. Both his sister and her former merchant husband were now employed in useful work. A friend who had fought with Karpovsky testified that the two of them had fought against bandits. But speaker after speaker attacked the Secretary in the most violent terms, and even this friend finally said weakly that he had just not been aware of Karpovsky’s membership in a bandit gang. All Karpovsky’s associates fell with him or shortly afterward. By the end of the year, a completely new team, all strangers to Belyi, was in charge. The Party membership, which had been 367 on 1 September 1934, had gone down to less than 200.²⁴

Almost as striking as the calls for terror from above was this hysterical lynching mood of what now became a dominant section of the lowest Party organizations. For while the upper and middle levels of the Party were being wiped out, Moscow’s envoys everywhere found denouncers, like Nikolayenko in Kiev, to give them “evidence” against those they wished to destroy.

A Soviet article of the Khrushchev period entitled “The Dossier of a Provocateur”²⁵ describes how a Party member in Azerbaijan made his career during the purges by denouncing prominent Party colleagues to the NKVD. Among those he denounced were three Secretaries of the Azerbaijan Central Committee and the former Chairman of the local Council of People’s Commissars. The “provocateur,” I. Ya. Myachin, was until these revelations a well-known and well-liked local Communist whom “Communists for forty years had known simply as ‘Vanya.’” At one time, he had held the post of Deputy People’s Commissar for the Azerbaijan textile industry.

His belated undoing was the fact that he typed two copies of all his denunciations, sending one “to the NKVD, addressed to Bagirov’s underlings,” and the other, which he signed, to the archives, where it was added to a file which lay on a shelf “for a quarter of a century” until an archivist discovered it. It covered Myachin’s activities for the period February to November 1937, and contained material “compromising” fourteen Party, Soviet, and economic leaders. A typical victim was accused of attempting “to give instructions to counterrevolutionaries to keep their mouths shut” because once on a bus he advised against talking about sabotage. In justification of his activities, Myachin said, “We thought this was what we had to do…. Everybody was writing….” He was, of course, by his standards, quite right.

And, by such means, the Purge struck everywhere. In the Urals, in the newest industrial area, a “Ural Uprising Staff” was discovered, headed as was customary by the First Secretary, Kabakov, of the Sverdlovsk Provincial Committee, full member of the Central Committee. It was a “bloc of Rights and Trotskyites” and also included Social Revolutionaries and Church leaders.²⁶

All the many industrial trusts in the area suffered as well; the Heads of Uralmash, Uralmed’rud, Levikhostroi, Sevkabel’, and others, and their leading engineers, were of course arrested. Other institutions purged included the Bacteriological Institute, which lost “almost all” its staff, including its director, Professor Kuteyshchildiov, who committed suicide in jail. The Institute was closed down, its building being taken over by the NKVD, which certainly needed the space. One cell alone in the local prison now held twenty-seven wives of arrested officials.²⁷

Malenkov went to Kazan in August 1937 to a plenum of the Tatar ASSR Provincial Committee, at or after which the First Secretary, Lepa, and most other high officials were arrested. At the same time, railway officials of the area were arrested on Kaganovich’s orders.²⁸

Zhdanov oversaw similar operations in various provinces and republics. In Karelia, he violently attacked the leadership—Irglis, Gylling, Rovio, and others, all of whom were arrested as Finnish spies. All the ten Finnish-language newspapers were closed down.²⁹ At a meeting of the Bashkir Provincial Committee on 4 to 6 October 1937, Zhdanov announced that the leading posts were held by “bourgeois nationalists, Trotskyites, fascist diversionists, spies and murderers.” Ya. B. Bykin, the local First Secretary, was “an old spy.” He and almost all the local Party and Government leadership were arrested, including all the members of the Party Bureau and heads of departments. The local prison was not large enough for such an operation, and the victims were shot in “ravines and quarries,” Bykin’s pregnant wife among them.³⁰

In Novosibirsk, the daughter of the head of the West Siberian medical department, Maxim Thallmann, tells us, in a recent Soviet article, how on 16 Au gust 1937 her father was arrested with most of the local leadership. Her mother, sister of the former Central Committee member Vladimir Milyutin, followed on 3 September, and then all the leaders’ wives and children over sixteen (only a few of the arrested survived). The daughter, aged seventeen, was one of 250 then held in a local NKVD children’s home, and this was only one of several such homes.³¹

There were some special cases. Yosif Vareikis, who had been very much in Stalin’s confidence, and had served as First Secretary in Voronezh and Stalingrad, was now First Secretary of the Far Eastern Territory. He telephoned Stalin in September 1937 with a query about the reasons for the arrest of certain Communists.³² In the conversation he put some question about the arrest of Tukhachevsky. He had served with him in the Civil War, when the two had at one time been seized by Social Revolutionary mutineers, whom they had eventually suppressed.

Stalin shouted, “That is not your business. Don’t interfere in what doesn’t concern you. The NKVD knows what it’s doing.” He then went on to say, “Only an enemy would defend Tukhachevsky,” and threw down the telephone. Vareikis was deeply shaken. He told his wife that he could hardly believe it was Stalin.

On 30 September, he got a telegram summoning him to the capital on official business. On 9 October, he was arrested a few stations out of Moscow. His wife was arrested four days later. He was mentioned as a plotter in the Buldiarin Tria1,³³ and was later shot. It seems very probable from the context that the conversation must have had something to do with the position of Marshal Blyukher, who commanded in the Far East, and that Stalin’s lapse into open rage may have reflected a real anxiety about trouble from the Far Eastern Army.

IN THE REPUBLICS

In the Republics, things went in the same way as in the provinces of Russia proper. In the Byelorussian Republic, the “verification” of Party cards ordered in 1935 and 1936 was used by Yezhov to expel, in connection with an alleged anti-Soviet underground, “more than half of the entire membership,”³⁴ The local officials opposed these actions, which amounted to the first phase in the destruction of the old Party and the rebuilding of another on its ruins. After the February—March plenum, on 17 March 1937, V. F. Sharangovich, as an emissary of the center, was sent to take over the Byelorussian First Secretaryship.

The resistance was widespread at the highest level in the Republic. M. M. Goloded, Chairman of its Council of People’s Commissars, “cast doubt upon the results of the verification” at a meeting of the local Central Committee.³⁵ This was made the occasion for the dispatch of Malenkov, in June 1937, to destroy the leadership.

A plenum of the Byelorussian Central Committee was summoned. Violent accusations of espionage were made.³⁶

Chervyakov, Chairman of the Byelorussian Supreme Soviet—that is, “Head of State” of the “sovereign republic”—committed suicide. Goloded was charged with “bourgeois nationalism,”³⁷ arrested on the way to Moscow, and shot.³⁸ Almost the entire leadership of the Republic, “including the Central Committee secretaries … the People’s Commissars, and many leaders of local Party and Soviet bodies and representatives of the creative intelligentsia were expelled from the party and many of them were arrested.”³⁹ Throughout the summer and autumn, the purge spread down to the local and mass level.

At a local Party Congress held in mid-June, Sharangovich warmly celebrated the purge then in progress. His own fall came at a Byelorussian Central Committee plenum in August, when Ya. A. Yakovlev, sent there from Moscow, denounced him in turn.⁴⁰ The resolutions referred to “the Polish spies, Goloded, Sharangovich, Benek, Chervyakov and other wreckers and diversionists.” Sharangovich’s fate is typical of a significant phenomenon. The new generation of Stalinist careerists, who had adapted themselves completely to the new system, still found themselves arrested. This is particularly the case among the first and most energetic batch who had worked up to high positions. They were succeeded by younger but similar characters, who again often fell quickly. The shortness of their tenure has been explained as follows:

People of their type tended, in their unscrupulousness and zeal, to carry the Party line to absurd extremes, with the result that their actions had later to be explained away as deviations. People of this type were also inclined by nature to corruption and the exploitation of their positions for personal advantage. They thus roused the hatred and envy of their juniors. This further contributed to the shortness of their stay in office.⁴¹

Stalin’s idea, announced at the February–March plenum, of having two stand-ins for every post, showed foresight, but did not go far enough. In many cases, it was only the fourth or fifth nominee who was to keep the post through the ensuing years.

Apart from politicians and engineers, the Byelorussian purge struck most heavily at the cultural leadership—and at the Linguistic Institute and the Commissariat of Education, in particular, where the principle of the separate Byelorussian nationality had been concentrated. Byelorussians, almost invariably, were ex officio Polish spies, owing to the geographical position of the Republic.⁴² On 29 and 30 October 1937 there was a mass execution of Byelorussian cultural and political figures: M. M. Dzenishkevich, Byelorussian Second Secretary, and at least eleven others, including the poets Yu. A. Taubin and M. S. Kulbyak, together with such other writers as I. D. Kharik, A. Volny, and V. P. Kaval.⁴³

The Byelorussian case is interesting in that it seems to show a rather more stubborn opposition than that offered in the Provincial Committees, perhaps owing to some reliance on local feeling. This was to be far more noticeable in the Ukraine, where a large concentration of high officials made final subjugation a more difficult matter.

In Georgia (where in 1919 the Mensheviks had won 105 out of the 130 seats in the National Assembly),fn3 there was by now no need of a purge at the top. The thin-face, pince-nezed Beria, the old OGPU operative Stalin had infiltrated into the Transcaucasian First Secretaryship in 1931, was in full control, and had already been purging enthusiastically. As early as 11 August 1936 he had even shot, in his own office, the Armenian First Secretary, Khandzhyan.⁴⁴

So Georgia’s intra-Party purge was violent but routine. No emissary of the Central Committee was required to enforce it. But the Republic was the scene of several publicly announced trials, though these were not actually held in public.

The most important came on 10 to 12 July 1937. Men as prominent—on the narrower stage of Georgian Bolshevism—as the leading victims of the Moscow Trials were brought to trial. It was evidently intended, originally, to make this, too, a show trial. For all the men involved were old enemies of Stalin’s. Chief among them was Budu Mdivani, former Premier of Soviet Georgia, whose defense against Stalin Lenin had undertaken just before his death—whose case, indeed, had been Lenin’s final reason for wishing to remove Stalin from the General Secretaryship. With him were the Old Bolshevik Okudzhava and others.

Their trial is said to have been decided on at the February–March plenum.⁴⁵ But they had long since been incriminated. Mdivani had been denounced as long ago as 1929 for illegal Trotskyite activity,⁴⁶ but had become reconciled to the Party because, as he said, he felt too old to start another. At the Zinoviev Trial, though Mdivani’s name was not mentioned, the “Georgian deviationists” were, as we saw, specially noted as having had an attitude which “as is well known was terroristic from 1928 onwards.” At the time of the Zinoviev Trial, this was a record: no other group had then been charged with terrorist plans before the 1930s. At the Pyatakov Trial, Mdivani was accused of having planned a terrorist act against Yezhov, and another against Beria.⁴⁷ And after his death, at the Bukharin Trial of 1938, he was described as a British agent.⁴⁸

He was arrested in early October 1936. To the first attempts to get him to confess, he is said to have answered, “You are telling me that Stalin has promised to spare the lives of Old Bolsheviks! I have known Stalin for thirty years. Stalin won’t rest until he had butchered all of us, beginning with the unweaned baby and ending with the blind great-grandmother!”⁴⁹ He was then “cruelly beaten” and held in “hot” and “cold” cells: from the former, where he spent several days, he was taken out in half-dead condition, with his pulse barely detectable. He was also threatened with the death of his children, and was told that his wife had already been buried in the prison grounds. (The wife, their four sons, and their daughter all perished, though one daughter-in-law survived imprisonment.) On 15 January 1937, he finally confessed.⁵⁰ At the trial, however (where they were accused of terrorism, espionage, and links with émigré Georgian Mensheviks), he and Okudzhava are reported as having “fiercely denied their guilt.”⁵¹ The Georgian Supreme Court sentenced them to death, and they were shot.

Two parallel trials in the two Autonomous Republics within Georgia—Adzharia and Abkhazia—removed the equivalent veterans there on 29 September and 29 October, respectively. In the former, the Old Bolshevik Nestor Lakoba, who had died on 28 December 1936 as a result (it is now said) of some intrigue of Beria’s,⁵² was posthumously accused of a plot on Stalin’s life.⁵³ Lakoba’s wife was tortured for evidence against her husband. The interrogators threatened to shoot her fourteen-year-old son if she did not testify, but she refused. She died as a result of the torture, and the son was shot.⁵⁴

Meanwhile, a fresh assault on the new generation of second-line leaders was mounted. The dates of arrest of a number of Georgian and Transcaucasian Communists rehabilitated in 1964 and 1965 are given as 1 to 3 September 1937. A general terror operation without the publicity of the oppositionist trials was starting. Over 1937 and 1938, 4,238 promotions to senior Georgian Party, State, and economic posts were made—that is, to leadership posts.⁵⁵ The total Party membership had been 34,000 at the XVIIth Congress, and the implication is that virtually the whole leading cadre was destroyed.

The Armenian Party had been under general attack since May. “Suspicious people” were found to be in the Party apparatus.⁵⁶ During the summer, TerGabrielian, who had been Chairman of the Council of People’s Commissars in 1935, was interrogated for seven hours in the office of the head of the local NKVD about alleged embezzlement on the railways, and killed on the spot. Stalin then sent a letter to the Armenian Central Committee alleging that Ter-Gabrielian had been a plotter liquidated by his accomplices to cover their traces.⁵⁷

On 15 September 1937 a plenum of the Armenian Central Committee was held in Yerevan, and the decisive blow was struck. The All-Union Central Committee was represented by Mikoyan, supported by Beria and Malenkov. Under the New Constitution, Armenia no longer formed part of the old “Transcaucasian Socialist Federal Soviet Republic” ruled by Beria. It still came under his aegis in a general way, but in this case it was not thought to be an intrusion when Malenkov was sent “on Stalin’s direct instructions”⁵⁸ to carry out the operation. Malenkov stopped off at Tbilisi on his way to Yerevan to concoct a story about the death of Khandzhyan, whom Beria had shot, to their mutual satisfaction. The rest of the Armenian leadership was now to be blamed for the crime.⁵⁹

The First Secretary, Amatouni, is said to have put up a stout resistance and to have shouted back, “You lie!” He was, however, arrested, together with the Second Secretary, the Chairman of the Council of People’s Commissars, the President of the Republic, and the head of the NKVD, and was denounced as an enemy of the people on 23 September.⁶⁰ Almost the entire leadership of Armenia’s Central Committee and Council of People’s Commissars was illegally arrested. Malenkov personally interrogated the prisoners, “using proscribed methods” in the process.

In this third week of September 1937, there was a wave of mass arrests throughout the Republic. Of the Bureau of sixteen members and candidate members elected in June 1935, none were left at the end of September 1937. Of those who formed the new Bureau in 1937, only two remained in 1940. Of the Central Committee of fifty-five elected in June 1937, only fifteen were reelected just a year later in June 1938, and they included the nonlocal names of Stalin, Beria, and Mikoyan. About thirty of those removed can be traced as having been expelled from the Party and probably arrested.

As in Georgia, the whole second level of the Party went too. “Over 3,500 responsible Party, Soviet, economic, military, and Komsomol officials were arrested … in a few months of 1937 alone. Many of them were shot without a trial and the requisite investigation.”⁶¹ On the last day of the year, the execution of eight leading Armenian officials was announced, together with—ironically enough—the posthumous disgrace of Khandzhyan.⁶²

The launching of mass arrests in both Georgia and Armenia in September was not a coincidence. A general decision to destroy the old Parties in the national Republics seems to have been taken. By midsummer, the entire Government of the Tatar Republic was under arrest.⁶³ September saw the sudden start of a press campaign conducted in more violent terms than ever, on a threat about which not much had been heard for some time: bourgeois nationalism. Such articles as “The Rotten Position of the Daghestan Provincial Committee” became common. From about 8 September, the Parties in the minority areas were subjected, under heavy headlines, to a continual stream of abuse. In Uzbekistan, Kirghizia, Kazakhstan, Bashkiria, Karelia, everywhere, large groups of traitors were found in the leaderships—in fact, constituting the leaderships. (The most prominent of these—the Uzbek—we will deal with in connection with the Bukharin Trial; see here.)

The pattern that emerges in the Purge in the Republics and provinces is a striking one. It amounts to this: an operation planned in Moscow and carried into effect by missions from the center almost everywhere destroyed the old Party, raising up instead from the rank and file a special selection of enthusiasts for a new organization of terrorists and denouncers. What requires the most emphasis is the sheer extent of the changes, the completeness of the liquidation of the hierarchy. At the center, Stalin had already created his own cadres, and infiltrated them into high position. In the coming months, the ravages were to be very great in Moscow too, but there was a continuity provided by a handful of men at the top and a group of Stalin’s junior nominees in the instruments of power. In the provinces, the “black tornado” really uprooted the old “Party-line” Stalinists, the veterans who represented a continuity, however tenuous, with the old Party of the underground, of 1917, and of the Civil War. This amounted to a revolution as complete as, though more disguised than, any previous changes in Russia.

We may incidentally note a lesser point: whereas previously the Party Secretary had been the most powerful man in any area, it was now the NKVD chief who counted. Over the next year or two, the new Party executives were to regain a good deal of their power. But for the moment, the police—themselves purged and purged again—were the direct agents of the center and executors of its main missions.

DEVASTATED AREA: THE UKRAINE

And Kiev groaned with sorrow.

The Armament of Igor

Stalin’s victory over the Party was assured when he crushed moderate hopes at the February–March plenum. All that was left to do was to set the machinery of the purges in motion. There was to be one last flicker of resistance—in the Ukraine.

In the Central Committee, the great cities, the provincial capitals, the smaller Republics, those who had opposed the Purge were isolated figures impotently awaiting their fate. In the Ukraine alone, most of the old leadership, based on its local Central Committee, remained in control. The demotion and removal of Postyshev had removed one hostile leader. But Petrovsky at least was one of the doubters. Postyshev’s place was taken by his predecessor in the post, Khatayevich, a full member of the All-Union Central Committee, who had been on the Ukrainian Politburo since 1933. A considerable purge in the lower ranks took place under an order from the All-Union Central Committee in the weeks following the February–March plenum; nearly one-fifth of Ukrainian Party members were expelled,⁶⁴ and two-thirds of the provincial and one-third of the local leaderships were changed.⁶⁵ But in the main, the old leadership was reelected at the Ukrainian Party Congress in May–June.

This Congress passed resolutions condemning errors in all ideological fields—the press, the Marx-Lenin Institute, the Institute of Red Professors, and elsewhere—and made strong attacks on Postyshev and the old Kiev leadership. Kossior, who had been comparatively mild at the time of Postyshev’s demotion, now spoke of lack of vigilance at the top which had allowed Trotskyites to penetrate the Kiev Provincial Committee.⁶⁶ A day or two later, he denounced Postyshev by name for “co-opting numerous enemies” into the provincial apparatus.⁶⁷ It was presumably the unfortunate Karpov who was meanwhile referred to by a Moscow Party periodical in a denunciation of “a former secretary of the Central Committee” of the Ukraine, who had refused to believe accusations that one of his staff was a Trotskyite and had left him in a post in which, until his arrest, he had access to secret documents.⁶⁸

The Ukrainian Party had a special history. Lenin had underestimated Ukrainian national feeling. The 1917 vote in the Ukraine for the Constituent Assembly was 77 percent to the Social Revolutionary parties, 10 percent to the Bolsheviks. The local Soviets were usually under anti-Bolshevik control. From 1917 to 1920, Ukrainian nationalist regimes of various types were in existence, and Bolshevik rule was imposed and reimposed vary largely from outside.

Unlike the situation in Russia proper, an important section of the Ukrainian Communist Party itself had originally come from the Left Social Revolutionaries. Their main body in the Ukraine had turned nationalist, under the name Borotbist. This party was dissolved early in 1920, and several thousand of its members, including Lyubchenko and Grinko, entered the Communist Party.

Time and time again, Bolshevik leaders sent to the Ukraine with strong centralizing views modified them over the years. The attempt to rule solely as agents of a foreign power, through a handful of Quislings, was seen as in the long run nonviable. It was a problem of the type which repeated itself in Hungary and elsewhere after the Second World War.

Chubar, who was to be moderate on this issue, became Premier of the Ukraine in July 1923. But in 1925, Kaganovich was sent to Kiev as First Secretary. His centralizing policy was unpopular in the local Party, which otherwise had no quarrel with Stalin. Stalin himself writes of a demand from the Ukraine in 1926 that Kaganovich be replaced by Grinko and Chubar.⁶⁹ Stalin, involved in his great struggle at the center, did not wish for a quarrel with the more moderate faction in the Ukraine simply on this local issue. When, in July 1928, Kaganovich was removed from the Republic, Stalin, as Bukharin put it, “bought the Ukrainians by withdrawing Kaganovich from the Ukraine.”⁷⁰ He was replaced by Stanislav Kossior, a short, bald, bullet-headed Pole who backed Stalin unreservedly right up to the Yezhov period.

In the years of dispute with the Left and Right oppositions, Stalin’s calculations proved correct. The Ukrainian Party gave no trouble. There seems to have been very little Trotskyism in it. And in fact, the national minorities in general disliked Trotsky more than Stalin. Even after experience of Stalin’s rule, an Ossetian Communist believed that while Trotsky’s intended method of rule was in general identical with Stalin’s, on the nationality question Trotsky was “even more reactionary.”⁷¹

And the Ukrainian experience with the oppositionists had not been reassuring. Pyatakov, who had briefly ruled in Kiev during the Civil War, had put the view that the Ukraine must submit to Russia very bluntly: “Can we declare that the form of existence of proletarian-peasant Ukraine can be determined solely and absolutely by the working masses of the Ukraine? Of course not!”⁷²

In the early 1930s, the collectivization campaign had turned the Ukraine, more than anywhere else, into a battlefield between the Party and the population, and Party solidarity was the decisive criterion. Non-Communist nationalism remained powerful. The trial of forty-five leading cultural figures as a “Union for the Liberation of the Ukraine” in March and April 1930, and the similar trials which followed it, were directed against a real resistance.

This extreme and rigorous purge erased the old Ukrainian intellectuals and left the Old Bolshevik Skrypnik, in the Commissariat of Education, as the protector of only a residue of Ukrainian culture. This, however, he determined to defend.

There is no doubt that Skrypnik and his genuine feeling of resistance to Moscow represented a powerful trend among the rank and file of the Party. But the rest of the leadership were in a different position. Stalin’s war on the peasantry had truly placed them in a position in which, in Lenin’s phrase, “who-whom?” was the only immediate question. Whatever their hidden reservations and whatever they may have thought of the plans which had led to the crisis, they could no more be expected to indulge them than a general fighting a desperate battle can spend time arguing about the strategic errors of the High Command.

But still, they seem to have become shaken and exhausted by the loyal fulfillment of Stalin’s collectivization orders.

On 24 January 1933 a resolution of the All-Union Central Committee attacked the Ukrainian Party: “The Party organs in the Ukraine have not succeeded in carrying out the Party charges entrusted to them in the areas of organization of grain storage and completion of the plan for grain collection.”

This heralded the climax of the fearful terror-famine which reached its peak in March and April 1933, leaving millions dead in the Ukraine.⁷³ Three of the seven Provincial Secretaries were censured and removed, together with three members of the local Politburo and Secretariat. And Postyshev, hitherto Secretary of the All-Union Central Committee, was sent to the Republic as Second Secretary, with plenary powers. Throughout 1933, non-Ukrainian Party workers of more unquestionable loyalty were transferred into the Republic from Russia. (It is estimated that there were some 5,000 of these.)⁷⁴

From 8 to 11 June 1933 Skrypnik was strongly attacked. He refused to recant, and was violently rebuked by Postyshev for his attitude. Other attacks followed in the press, and on 7 July he committed suicide. His example may have been the Ukrainian writer Khvylovy, who had just done the same when accused of excessive Ukrainian feeling.

Skrypnik had been one of the three representatives of underground organizations who had gone to the conference of Bolshevik leaders in Paris in 1909. The day after Skrypnik’s suicide, Pravda described it as “an act of cowardice”: Skrypnik, “an unworthy member of the Central Committee,” had fallen prey to bourgeois–nationalist mistakes. And, as Petrovsky said, “It was not easy for us to ward off these nationalist attacks, since the chief aggressor was an Old Bolshevik, Slcrypnik.”⁷⁵ However, Petrovsky added, Moscow had helped “by sending well-known Party members to aid us.”

Skrypnik’s supporters were disposed of by the unmasking of a “Ukrainian Military Organization” consisting mainly of the post-1930 generation of academic leaders in the Institute of Linguistics, the State Publishing House, the School of Marxist Philosophy, and the Shevchenko Institute of Literary Scholarship. Many further trials of intellectuals followed. But after Skrypnik’s death, there were no major attacks on the Party cadres of the Ukraine until Postyshev’s fall in early 1937. When Chubar was called to Moscow to be All-Union Vice Premier, he was replaced as Chairman of the Ukrainian Council of People’s Commissars by Panas Lyubchenko, a former Borotbist, who shared his views—a slight and light-bearded figure with a sensitive, intellectual face, who had given satisfaction by his firmness in the collectivization struggle.

But there were long-standing feuds and factions in the Ukrainian Party. By the time the purges started, Postyshev and the Head of the Ukrainian NKVD, Balitsky, were working against Lyubchenko. They were later joined by M. M. Popov, Third Secretary of the Ukrainian Central Committee, who around the end of 1936 fabricated a “case” and went to Stalin and Kossior to demand Lyubchenko’s dismissal and arrest as a “Borotbist” plotter.⁷⁶

But Stalin, as we have seen, was now turning against Postyshev. And after the February–March plenum not only Postyshev, but also Balitsky and Popov were transferred from the Ukrainian Party, and a purge swept the Party officials at the provincial and local level. With the defeat of the Postyshev-Balitsky-Popov group, it looked as though Lyubchenko and the remainder of the leadership were in a strong position. But, in fact, both factions were destined to destruction.

A Politburo commission from Moscow, which included Molotov and Yezhov, is reported in Kiev about this time, seeking further changes but meeting with some resistance.⁷⁷ At any rate, a new offensive was soon prepared, and a new NKVD People’s Commissar for the Ukraine was named: I. M. Leplevsky, fresh from his triumphs in the Tukhachevsky investigation. He brought with him a large force of new NKVD men.⁷⁸ And Kossior, who had earlier shown some signs of resistance to the purge, was now put under strong pressure, and saved himself temporarily by accepting and implementing Moscow’s directives.

When Army Commander Yakir was arrested, his interrogators had “sought an admission that Balitsky was a member of the military conspiracy.” On 7 June 1937, Yakir testified that Balitsky had done good work, but had falsified certain cases, including the one against Lyubchenko, and that Balitsky and Postyshev had falsely attacked Ukrainian nationalists, again meaning Lyubchenko and his circle.⁷⁹

Lyubchenko’s great detractor M. M. Popov, arrested on 17 June 1937, by 22 June was confessing to a “military fascist organization” aiming to kill Stalin and overthrow the Soviet regime. But now not only Balitsky, but also Lyubchenko (and Postyshev’s replacement as Ukrainian Second Secretary, M. M. Khatayevich) were implicated. At the same time, Popov testified more vaguely to the Polish “connections” of Kossior, Postyshev, and Lyubchenko.⁸⁰

Balitsky (who had just assumed his new post as Head of the Far Eastern NKVD) was arrested on 7 July. By 26 July, he had implicated many of his NKVD juniors in the Ukraine.

Signs began to accumulate of pressure being put on the Ukrainian leaders. When greetings were sent to Chkalov and his aircrew on 20 June 1937, those from Moscow were signed with the names of the leaders, but that from the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Ukraine was anonymous, contrary to previous practice. On 15 July, “leading organs” in the Republic were attacked, in particular for the transfer of Postyshev’s “Trotskyites” from Kiev to other posts throughout the Ukraine. On 21 July, the Ukrainian Radio came under heavy attack.⁸² At the same time, the Ukrainian Komsomol was severely criticized, and one of its Secretaries, Klinkov, denounced as an enemy of the people;⁸³ and the Central Committee of the Ukrainian Party was criticized as such for “tolerating the subversive work of the enemy among the youth.”⁸⁴

In “glorious, royal Kiev city,” commanding the great plain from the cliffs of the Dnieper, everything appeared normal to the uninformed observer. In the tranquil Ukrainian summer, the concerts went on regularly in the cypress-walled outdoor auditorium. But even the musicians were under pressure, with all the other cultural agencies, and the Director of the Ukrainian State Opera, Yanovsky, was soon to be among those denounced as fascists.

A plenum of the new Ukrainian Central Committee met on 29 August. Kossior, with the new NKVD Commissar, Leplevsky, ran it in the harshest Stalinist spirit. The agenda was “1. On the discovery of the nationalist anti-Soviet organization. 2. Other matters.”

First it was proposed that a number of enemies of the people who had already been arrested should be expelled from the Committee: Khatayevich, Sarkisov (Donets Provincial Secretary), and at least twenty others named. Kossior then announced that he had received a document from Yezhov with the confession of A. A. Khvylia, Head of the Ukrainian Arts Administration, implicating Lyubchenko.

Khvylia, also a former Borotbist, had been the subject of an NKVD accusation in the autumn of 1936, accused of being a nationalist and counter-revolutionary. Lyubchenko and Kossior had vouched for him and others in a “confrontation” in Stalin’s presence. However, he had been rearrested on 13 August 1937, with other former Borotbists, and he eventually confessed. By 23 August, evidence of a plot by former Borotbists was in Yezhov’s hands. And with this document as his text, Kossior denounced the new “bourgeois nationalist” organization just uncovered, which had had close contacts with “the previously unmasked anti-Soviet organization” headed by Yakir, Balitsky, and Popov. Lyubchenko was the leader of this new conspiracy.⁸⁵

At 11:00 A.M. on 30 August, Lyubchenko rose to defend himself, but was shouted down by Leplevsky and others. Zatonsky, a former physics teacher, now Ukrainian Commissar for Education, and one of the most prominent Ukrainian Old Bolsheviks, more vaguely implicated, tried to cover himself by allegations that not only Lyubchenko but also his wife were members of the nationalist organization. Many violently attacked Lyubchenko, though Petrovsky and a few others remained silent. Kossior then proposed the expulsion and arrest of Lyubchenko, and this was carried. The case of Zatonsky was referred to the Politburo.⁸⁶

Lyubchenko, still not under arrest, went back to his house and shot himself and his wife. Pravda (omitting reference to his wife), announcing his suicide on 2 September, attributed it to his “being entangled in anti-Soviet connections.” (But a recent Soviet analysis of the affair tends to the view that NKVD men came to arrest him, he resisted and was shot, and they then disposed of his wife as an inconvenient witness.)⁸⁷ Grinko, USSR People’s Commissar of Finance, the other major ex-Borotbist, was arrested in Moscow on the same day.⁸⁸

Over the next year, the whole of the local Politburo, Orgburo, and Secretariat were arrested, with the exception of Petrovsky. Of the 102 members and candidate members of the Ukrainian Central Committee, 3 survived. All 17 members of the Ukrainian Government were arrested. All the Provincial Secretaries in the Ukraine fell.

The Purge swept through every sort of establishment in the Republic. The State industrial enterprises, the municipal councils, the educational and scientific bodies—all lost their leaders by the hundred. The Ukrainian Union of Writers was practically annihilated.

Violent attacks on Ukrainian institutions started to appear. The Kiev and Kharkov radio stations were accused of having broadcast funeral marches after the announcement of the verdict in the first two trials, while the Kiev station had actually gone off the air while the verdict on the generals was being transmitted. This was the result of “an enemy organization” which the Ukrainian Central Committee had failed to understand.⁸⁹ The educational system was attacked as being riddled with nationalists.⁹⁰ The museums were also full of spies concerned only to stress anti-Russian Ukrainianism.⁹¹ The Republic had even failed to celebrate Peter the Great’s victory at Poltava.⁹²

The oppositionists in the three Great Trials were traitors, Trotskyites, spies, and accomplices of the fascists. But they were not shown as actually describing themselves as fascists pure and simple. In the Ukraine, though, it was not a “Bloc of Rights and Trotskyites” that was revealed, but nothing less than a “National Fascist Organization” headed by Lyubchenko, leader of the Soviet Government of the Republic, and including Grinko, People’s Commissar of Finance in Moscow, Balitsky, Zatonsky, Yakir, and a variety of leading figures in the Ukrainian Government and Central Committee, and such cultural lights as Yanovsky.

For the moment, however, Kossior was spared. At a meeting of the Kiev Party organization on 15 and 16 September 1937, he delivered another attack on “the band of bourgeois nationalists uncovered in the Ukraine.” Zatonsky was “severely blamed” and in reply “could not say anything.”⁹³ Zatonsky was refused entry to the October 1937 plenum of the Central Committee in Moscow; on 3 November, he was called out of a university meeting in Kiev and arrested.⁹⁴

The turnover was equally rapid at the local level. Kudryavtsev, who had replaced Postyshev in his lesser post as Secretary of the Kiev Provincial Committee of the Party and made some of the most violent attacks on Lyubchenko in August, was removed at the end of 1937, to be denounced as an “enemy of the people,”⁹⁵ and his successor, D. M. Evtushenko, followed on 17 April 1938. They were later linked as the centers of a hostile leadership which had subverted most of the District Secretaries of the province.⁹⁶

Lyubchenko was succeeded as Premier by a young Communist, M. I. Bondarenko. He, too, was arrested within two months,⁹⁷ and for a time there was no Premier at all. Instead, the names of unknown subordinates of Petrovsky appeared on decrees.

Then another Premier, N. M. Marchak, was appointed. He was demoted to Deputy Premier by February 1938,⁹⁸ and was soon afterward under arrest. He is said to have been drinking heavily with Leplevsky one night, and to have exchanged with him some remarks skeptical of Tukhachevsky’s guilt, a point on which Leplevsky was particularly well informed. The next morning, Marchak remembered this and thought that Leplevsky might have been acting as a provocateur. He rang Yezhov and denounced Leplevsky, who was arrested. Leplevsky, in turn, implicated Marchak, and both confessed to conspiracy, terrorism, and espionage.⁹⁹ Leplevsky’s replacement, the third Ukraine NKVD Commissar to be appointed within a year, was Uspensky, himself to fall within months.

The Purge was so complete and so quick that legal authority virtually disintegrated. There was no longer a genuine quorum of the Ukrainian Central Committee or a body capable of appointing a Government. People’s Commissars, irregularly appointed, emerged for days or weeks and then themselves disappeared. The unprecedented sweep of the political leadership marked the effective destruction of the Ukrainian Party. The Republic became little more than an NKVD fief, where even the formalities of Party and Soviet activity were barely gone through.

Finally, in January 1938, a presumably spurious plenum of the Ukrainian Central Committee elected Khrushchev First Secretary.¹⁰⁰ Khrushchev brought with him from Moscow a new Second Secretary, Burmistenko, who had served in the Cheka for many years in the 1920s and later worked closely with Stalin’s personal secretariat. As Chairman of the Council of People’s Commissars, he brought Demyan Korotchenko (or Korotchenkov; in 1939, in the Stenographic Report of the XVIllth Congress, his name is actually given with its Ukrainian spelling in the list of the new Central Committee, and with its Russian spelling in the list of delegates to the Congress).

In May and June 1938, the entire Ukrainian Government was again replaced. Between February and June, all twelve new Provincial Secretaries were again removed, together with most of their Second Secretaries.¹⁰¹ At the XIVth Congress of the Ukrainian Party in June 1938, the new Central Committee had, among its eight-six members and candidates, only three survivors from the previous year—all nonpolitical or honorary figures. The continuity of rule had for the first time been completely destroyed. Not one member of the new Politburo, Orgburo, or Secretariat had previously served.

The Politburo was a farcical rump with only six members: Khrushchev, Burmistenko, and Korotchenko; the Commander of the Military District, Timoshenko; the latest NKVD chief of the Republic, Uspensky; and the ubiquitous Shcherbakov, who was in the Republic for a few months to purge a couple of Provincial Committees.

They reconstructed the Party from the ground up. In 1938, 1,600 Party members were raised to be Secretaries of District and City Committees in the Ukraine.¹⁰² Among those who benefited was the young Leonid Brezhnev. He had been raised to Deputy Mayor of Dneprodzerzhinsk in May 1937. In 1938, under the Khrushchev regime, he was promoted to be head of a department of the Dneprodzerzhinsk Provincial Committee, and by the following year was a Secretary of that Committee. He never looked back. (Few were so lucky. Between 1938 and the next Republican Party Congress in 1940, attrition remained high, if not so high. Of the 119 elected in 1940, 73 were new members.)

Stalin and Khrushchev had succeeded in destroying the old Party cadres in the Ukraine, and replacing them with men distinguished only by disciplined acquiescence in, or enthusiasm for, the new method of rule. This did not solve the problem of the Ukrainian people. Stalin was to tell Roosevelt at Yalta that “his position in the Ukraine was difficult and insecure.”¹⁰³ And he later regretted that it was impracticable to deport the entire nation, as he had done with the smaller Chechens and Kalmyks.¹⁰⁴

AT THE CENTER

While the punitive expeditions sent out by Stalin and Yezhov harried the provinces, Moscow remained the storm center. Of the seventy-one full members of the Central Committee, about two-thirds were normally stationed in the capital: all the full members of the Politburo except Kossior; the People’s Commissars; the heads of Central Committee departments, of the Komsomol, of the trade unions; the Comintern’s managers—all the concentration of power of a highly centralized machine.

Over this major sector of the Purge, Stalin and Yezhov themselves presided. They received valuable help from Molotov and Voroshilov when required, but on the whole Stalin kept an extremely tight personal grip on proceedings, working through Yezhov alone.

In 1937 and 1938, Yezhov sent in to Stalin 383 lists, containing thousands of names of figures important enough to require his personal approval for their execution.¹⁰⁵ As Yezhov was only in power for just over two years—and, in fact, his effective working period was rather less—this means that Stalin got such a list rather more often than every other day of “persons whose cases were under the jurisdiction of the Military Collegium.” A samizdat historian of the 1970s indicated that the lists included 40,000 names.¹⁰⁶ However, a Soviet periodical now tells us that at a recent plenum of the Central Committee, the total number shot, whose names appeared on lists signed by “Stalin, Molotov, Kaganovich, and Malenkov,” though perhaps over a longer period, was given as 230,000.¹⁰⁷ At any rate, we can envisage Stalin, on arrival at his office, as often as not finding in his in-tray a list of a few hundred names for death, looking through, and approving them, as part of the ordinary routine of a Kremlin day. We are told in recent Soviet articles that on 12 December 1937 alone, Stalin and Molotov sanctioned 3,167 death sentences, and then went to the cinema.¹⁰⁸

The lists were in the following form:

Comrade Stalin,

I am sending for your approval four lists of people to be tried by the

Military Collegium:

List No. I (General)

List No. 2 (Former military personnel)

List No. 3 (Former personnel of the N.K.V.D.)

List No. 4 (Wives of enemies of the people)fn4

I request sanction to convict all in the first degree.

Yezhov

The post-Stalin speaker who quotes this adds that “first degree” conviction meant death by shooting. The lists were examined by Stalin and Molotov, and on each of them is the notation:

Approved—J. Stalin

V. Molotov.¹⁰⁹

We learn that in one such set of lists (on 20 August 1938) of 736 names, 200 were of military men and 15 were of wives. The 12 December 1937 list cited above included, with a smaller list of 239 shot on 3 December, 49 members of the Central Committee.¹¹⁰

As to the executions not requiring approval at quite so high a level, on 18 October 1937 alone, Yezhov and Vyshinsky, acting as a “troika,” considered 551 names, sentencing every one of them to be shot. It will be seen that in a sixteen-hour working day, this would give them less than two minutes per case.¹¹¹ That their speed was not up to Stalin and Molotov’s best effort is probably due to the fact that they had to initial each name, rather than just read them through and sign the list.

Decisions to make an arrest, and even warrants, were often signed months before the arrest was carried out. And, in the same way, leading figures were sometimes decorated with high Orders on the very day of their arrest.¹¹² The reason given by an NKVD officer is that the police informed only their immediate superior about the progress of their investigations, and Yezhov informed only Stalin.¹¹³

When Yezhov once sent a list of names to Stalin with a note “For eventual arrest: to be verified,” Stalin wrote on it, “don’t verify. Arrest.”¹¹⁴ Ulrikh and Vyshinsky reported regularly to Stalin (and sometimes to Molotov and Yezhov) about the trials and sentences. “Ulrikh presented every month a report on the general number of people sentenced for ‘espionage, terrorist and diversionary activity.’ Stalin read all the reports: on the state of the crop, coal production and, dreadful to say, of the number of people deprived of life.”¹¹⁵

Molotov is named as suggesting sentencing “by lists,” rather than by consideration of individual cases. It is certainly true that orders went out to arrest categories rather than individual suspects. A former Chairman of the Byelorussian Council of People’s Commissars tells of being present when the local NKVD chief, Boris Berman, complained to the local First Secretary, A. A. Volkov, “Yezhov has sent again an order to arrest old Communists. But where shall I find them? There are none left.”¹¹⁶

As in the rest of the country, the new offensive had started in May 1937.

Fitzroy Maclean, watching Stalin on the Red Square reviewing stand on 1 May, was already struck by the rest of the Politburo, who “grinned nervously and moved uneasily from one foot to the other, forgetting the parade and the high office they held and everything else in their mingled joy and terror at being spoken to by him.” Stalin’s own expression varied between “benignity and bored inscrutability.”¹¹⁷

They might well feel alarm, for one of their members was absent. His colleagues had perhaps already “discussed” his case, in the same way that Zhdanov’s Leningrad Committee was to “discuss” Chudov’s. Yan Rudzutak, member of the Party since 1905, who had spent ten years in Tsarist prisons and exile, a former full member of the Politburo and now a candidate member, was not among his old comrades. His arrest had apparently just taken place.¹¹⁸ He was seized at a supper party after the theater. The NKVD arrested everyone present. Four women among them are reported in the Butyrka, still in bedraggled evening dress, three months later.¹¹⁹ His dacha was taken over by Zhdanov.¹²⁰

Rudzutak was arrested as allegedly a Rightist, leader of a “reserve center” ready to take over if Bukharin’s was exposed, because “nobody had ever known of any difference between him and the Party.”¹²¹ This is, in fact, an admission that Stalinists of long standing were now, for the first time, being arrested—especially (but not only) if they showed any signs of opposing the Purge. Rudzutak, in particular, had one very black mark against him: his failure to recommend the death penalty for Ryutin when Head of the Control Commission in 1932.

Through May, another great heroic diversion, parallel to the exploits of the aviators of the previous year, was spread in the papers day after day. This was the landing, under the direction of 0. Shmidt, of Papanin’s group at the North Pole, a fine exploit. The officers of the airlift that took them in and set them up were welcomed by the Party leaders, decorated, and publicized round the usual celebrations. At the same time, the camp on the ice drifted through the months, from time to time sending loyal greetings from—and receiving thanks at—the farthest-flung outpost of the Party and State.

Through the spring and early summer, the other great nonpolitical news was a series of plays and ballets attended by the leaders of the Party and the announcement of long lists of awards to People’s Artists in these fields.

Meanwhile, as a particularly fine summer lay on the great plain, the arrests went on. Former oppositionists continued to fall. Nilcolai Krestinsky, former member of the Politburo and Secretary of the Central Committee, had been removed from the Foreign Commissariat to be Assistant People’s Commissar of Justice of the RSFSR in March.¹²² On his transfer, he spoke approvingly of his removal to the Party cell, saying that even ex-oppositionists should not, in present circumstances, work in the Foreign Commissariat, where leading figures should have the absolute confidence of the leadership and a spotless past.¹²³

At the end of May, he was arrested. After a week-long interrogation,¹²⁴ he started to confess on about 5 June.¹²⁵ He had been severely tortured, and is described in a recent Soviet article as being in the Butyrka prison hospital for some days with his whole back like a single wound.¹²⁶ Bukharin, with whom he was to appear in court as a fellow conspirator nine months later, had just begun his evidence.¹²⁷

The way in which any sort of connection with the arrested oppositionists was made a crime can be seen in the case of the veteran Lomov, Party member since 1903, who, representing the Moscow Bureau of the Bolshevik Party, had (after Trotsky) been Lenin’s most enthusiastic supporter in the Central Committee in pressing for the seizure of power in November 1917.

In June 1937, an official of the U.S.S.R. State Planning Commission sent a letter to Stalin alleging that G. I. Lomov (Oppokov) a member of the Bureau of the U.S.S.R. Council of People’s Commissars’ Soviet Control Commission, had been on friendly terms with Rykov and Bukharin. Stalin wrote on this letter the instructions: “To Comrade Molotov. What to do?” Molotov wrote: “I’m for arresting this scum Lomov immediately, V. Molotov.” A few days later Lomov was arrested, charged with membership in a Right Opportunist organization, and shot.¹²⁸

Lomov was to be mentioned at the Bukharin Trial as a fellow conspirator with Bukharin against Lenin.¹²⁹

But even now, opposition was not entirely crushed. In the last week of June, another plenum of the Central Committee was held—ostensibly to discuss vegetable production. It was the scene of mutual denunciations and disappearances on the spot. Nazaretyan (not, indeed, a member of the Central Committee, but of the lesser Central Revision Commission), whom Ordzhonikidze had saved in the early 1930s, was arrested while actually on his way to the Kremlin to attend the plenum.¹³⁰ In a few months, Stalin had progressed far in his ability to loose the Secret Police, without attention to political protocol, on to his opponents. His speech is said to have been in ruthless style, demanding, for example, less “coddling” of prisoners.¹³¹

In the meeting hall, many faces were already missing—Bukharin’s and Rykov’s, Rudzutak’s and Chudov’s, Gamarnik’s and Yakir’s, Yagoda’s and a dozen others. But the spirit of resistance had not yet been entirely quelled. “After the February plenum of the Central Committee a campaign was raised in the conspirators’ circles against Yezhov … an attempt was made to discredit Yezhov and the work he was doing in the Party, to slander him.”¹³² Even as late as this June plenum, there was an attempt to block the terror. Pyatnitsky, Kaminsky, and others had met for what came to be called “the cup of tea” to discuss resistance. Filatov, Mayor of Moscow, was among those present and appears to have given them away (he himself was shot later).¹³³

At the plenum, when it was proposed to grant extraordinary powers to Yezhov and the NKVD, Pyatnitsky spoke strongly against it, and said that, on the contrary, the NKVD was now out of hand and should be more tightly controlled. During the break, several members of the Central Committee advised him to withdraw his statement, and Molotov suggested that he should think of his wife and family. However, he stuck to his guns.

The next day, Yezhov announced that the NKVD had evidence of Pyatnitsky having been an agent of the Tsarist police. Krupskaya defended his character on the grounds that Lenin had regarded him as one of the best Bolsheviks. Yezhov proposed a vote of censure against Pyatnitsky. Kaminsky and Krupskaya voted against. Stalin asked why Pyatnitsky did not say what he thought about this. Pyatnitsky then said that if he was not needed he would go, and left. On 7 July, he was arrested.¹³⁴ (As Molotov had foreseen, Pyatnitsky’s wife was arrested and not seen again. His son Igor spent many years in labor camp, and his younger son was placed first with foster parents and then in an NKVD children’s home.)¹³⁵ Kaminsky also spoke against the purges. Among other things, he attacked Beria, denouncing him as a former agent of the Azerbaijan nationalist intelligence service.¹³⁶ Kaminsky, who had joined the Bolshevik Party as a medical student some years before the Revolution, was arrested that day and was later shot.”¹³⁷ His wife was only jailed for two years, and survived.¹³⁸

In the midst of the swing into total terror, yet another diversion was provided by Russian airmen. In June, Chkalov and his crew flew their ANT-25 over the North Pole to Falkland, Oregon, and in July Gromov flew another to San Jacinto, California, setting a world distance record. The two flights, both fine achievements, were the occasion for a further great press campaign: pages and pages of newspapers filled with greetings, meetings, lives of the airmen, photographs, and so on. When Chkalov finally crashed on 15 December 1938, Belyakin, Head of the Main Administration of the Aircraft Industry, Usachev, Director of the plant where the plane had been built, and Tomashevich, the designer, were shot for sabotage.¹³⁹

The papers continued to carry general calls to vigilance and accounts of various methods used by the enemy. Pravda drew attention to misprints in the local press which amounted to sabotage—for example, a reference to the bedy (sorrows) rather than the pobedy (victories) of Socialism. And local trials were frequently reported. But the great blow was that now being delivered against the leading cadres of the regime, which was to ravage the old Central Committee and destroy the next level of the Party command in their thousands.

For it was now, starting in May 1937, that the flower of Stalin’s long-nurtured administrative and political machine began to go. After Rudzutak, no member or candidate member of the Politburo was to be arrested during the year, and several officials only just junior to them hung on until a specially mounted top-level operation in November and December took them. But for the moment, there was a broad sweep of their subordinates, running as high as men like Antipov,¹⁴⁰ Vice Chairman of the Council of People’s Commissars, Party member since 1902, several times arrested under Tsarism, and organizer of underground printing plants, who had been among the half-dozen appearing with the Politburo on the May Day platform.

In the Central Committee apparatus, Malenkov’s Department of Leading Party Organs was overseeing a thorough “renewal.” Another figure who was to be named though not produced as one of the most important links in the Bukharin plot was Ya. A. Yakovlev, former People’s Commissar for Agriculture, and now Head of the Agricultural Department of the Central Committee. He figured prominently in the press over June, and was the rapporteur to the June plenum on its sole published item of discussion, vegetables. In the autumn, he fades out until his extraordinary transmogrification into a Rightist in March 1938—an odd appellation for the man who had been a chief operator in the collectivization field.

Another head of a Central Committee department now to disappear had at one time almost reached the summits of power—K. Ya. Bauman, Head of the Central Committee’s Scientific Department. He had been Secretary of the Central Committee and candidate member of the Politburo (as Uglanov’s replacement) for a few months in 1929 and 1930. An enthusiastic Stalinist, he had been the scapegoat for the first excesses of collectivization, but he had remained on the Central Committee. Bauman’s wife was also arrested, and his fourteen-year-old son, Volik, sent away to a home.¹⁴¹ Bauman was shot on 14 October 1937. With him went most of the staff of his department. The Head of the parallel, but more important, Agitation and Propaganda Department, Stetsky, an old economist who had held the post since 1929, was also arrested about this time.

Cynicism prevailed as well as terror. A senior Army officer in prison mentioned that he was once cheerfully greeted at a reception by Molotov’s wife, with the words “Ah, Sasha, whatever’s this? Why haven’t you been arrested yet?”¹⁴² She had become Head of the Cosmetics Trust (a post she was to hold for some years) through the elimination of her boss, Chekalov, who was sent to the Vorkuta railway camps,¹⁴³ and she was to be a member of the 1939 Central Committee, which replaced the men now disappearing. Her own arrest came in 1948.

An atmosphere of fear hung over the Party and Government offices. People’s Commissars were arrested on their way to their jobs in the morning. Every day, another Central Committee member or Vice Chairman of a People’s Commissariat or one of their more important underlings was disappearing. In one sphere alone, for the moment, joy prevailed. Yezhov was awarded the Order of Lenin on 18 July, an occasion for photographs, leading articles, and general celebrations. Vyshinsky received the same award on 21 July, though with less panache.

Orders were now also handed out to many leading police officials. On the completion of the Mdivani Case, the Georgian NKVD men received their reward. One notes among them the names of men who a year later were to replace the current operators in Moscow and elsewhere, and who were only to perish at the end of the Beria epoch, in 1953 to 1955: Goglidze, Kobulov, Rapava, and their like.¹⁴⁴ Other awards went to a group of Yezhov’s men, including the dreadful Ushakov, Frinovsky, and, as a junior, the long-surviving L. E. Vlodzimirsky, who was to serve Beria and be brought back by him in 1953 to be Head of the Section for Investigating Specially Important Cases, and be shot in December of that year.

Yezhov himself was now to get the highest accolade, a town named for him. On 22 July, Kaganovich’s protégé, the ex-OGPU man Bulganin, was appointed Chairman of the Council of People’s Commissars of the Russian Republic. The fall of his predecessor, Sulimov, involved a change in the name of the town of Sulimov, capital of the Cherkess Autonomous Province, which was now suitably renamed Yezhovo-Cherkessk.

Bulganin’s later colleague and rival Ithrushchev was conducting his own purge in the local machine of the city and province to the satisfaction of the authorities. He had started in late March, as in Leningrad.¹⁴⁵ Now, at a meeting of the Moscow Provincial Committee on 23 August, he made a series of attacks on local leaders like Filatov, which presaged his disappearance, with many others. Ukhanov, Khrushchev’s Chairman of the Moscow Soviet until recently, was now filling one of the ministerial vacancies as People’s Commissar for Local Industry, and it was from there that he was seized. Like Antipov, Yakovlev, Stetsky, and Sulimov, he was a full member of the Central Committee.

August saw one of the biggest tourist influxes ever to reach Russia. The visitors noted no public gloom. Once again, a great Soviet flight was being celebrated—that of Levanevsky and his N-209 around the Union. The papers were full of celebrations, though they had time also, towards the end of the month, to announce the award of Orders of Lenin to the hard-worked Military Jurists, including Ulrikh, Matulevich, and Nikitchenko¹⁴⁶ (the last two described as Vice Presidents of the Military Collegium), and to Prosecutors like Roginsky.¹⁴⁷

Meanwhile, the Commissars and Vice Commissars of the economic Commissariats went the way of Ukhanov. Some—like Chernov, Commissar for Agriculture, removed on 30 October; Grinko, Commissar for Finance; and Ivanov, Commissar of the Timber Industry—were to appear in the next great trial. Others, like M. Rukhimovich, Commissar for the Defense Industry, who had been appearing with the highest leadership for a few months and lost his post in October 1937¹⁴⁸ (being replaced by Kaganovich’s brother, M. M. Kaganovich), were to be tried in secret. Rukhimovich had supported Stalin against all the oppositionists; earlier he had been one of Stalin’s and Voroshilov’s closest accomplices in the intrigues against Trotsky in Tsaritsyn in the Civil War. In the same category comes Lyubimov, People’s Commissar for Light Industry, who was removed, with both his Assistant Commissars, on 7 September.¹⁴⁹

By the end of the year, few Commissars apart from Voroshilov and Kaganovich remained. In addition to those already named, the Commissars for Communications (Khalepsky), for Internal Trade (Veitser), for Heavy Industry (Mezhlauk), for Education (Bubnov), for Justice (Krylenko), and for Sea and River Transport (Yanson) were arrested, together with successive heads of the National Bank and their subordinates.

For the moment, we may consider one last case in more detail—that of the naturally sensitive Commissariat of Foreign Trade. Its head, Rosengolts, was removed on 15 June for “other work.” Both his assistants, Eliava and Loganovsky, disappeared—Eliava to be shot during the year.¹⁵⁰

Rosengolts, broad-shouldered, strong-minded, and Jewish, was an excellent administrator. He had in the past few years accommodated himself to the new style of rule. He had been brought up in a revolutionary family. When only ten years old, “My hand, the hand of a child, was used to hide illegal literature during the night and to recover it in the morning from a place where the hand of a grown-up could not reach.”¹⁵¹ He joined the Bolshevik Party at fifteen or sixteen and was first arrested when sixteen years old. At the age of seventeen, he was nominated as a delegate to the Party Congress. During the Revolution, he fought in Moscow, and in the Civil War was prominent at various fronts. He had ruled the Donbas in a ruthless fashion. After a brief flirtation with the Trotsky opposition, he was appointed to the London Embassy. In 1928, he returned and had since worked in the Government, holding his present post since 1930.

Rosengolts was still referred to as “Comrade” in the June decree releasing him from his post, and for some time no further move was made against him. This was in accordance with a common practice of Stalin’s. Arrest was decided on; the dismissal occurred; and then for months the victim was left in some minor post, never knowing when the blow would fall. An American resident in Moscow in August 1937 describes a high official seen, day after day, on a balcony opposite waiting to be arrested. “Waiting was killing him. He waited three more weeks while the G.P.U. watched and while his wife wasted away. Then the G.P.U. came.”¹⁵² Some survivors have described this as psychologically more wearing and destructive even than the eventual imprisonment and interrogation, and they add that the state to which a man was reduced made the process of interrogation a fairly easy one for the NKVD. In fact, some of its work had been done for it already without its officers having to move a finger, a useful saving of energy in a hard-worked organization.

Rosengolts was left to sweat it out for many weeks. He was still at large in August, when he made several desperate efforts to get an interview with Stalin—later to be interpreted as an assassination attempt.¹⁵³ On his wife, “a jolly, red-haired girl, very imperfectly educated and brought up in a religious household,”¹⁵⁴ the weeks and months of anxiety must have been frightful. She did all she could think of.

When her husband was finally arrested, the routine NKVD search revealed, sewn into his hip pocket, a small piece of dry bread wrapped in a strip of cloth. Inside the bread was a piece of paper on which she had written, as a charm against evil fortune, eight verses from Psalms 68 and 91, ancient cries of the helpless against their oppressors:

LX VIII

Let God arise, and let his enemies be scattered: let them also that hate him, flee before him.

Like as the smoke vanisheth, so shalt thou drive them away: and like as wax melteth at the fire, so let the ungodly perish at the presence of God….

XCI

Whoso dwelleth under the defence of the most High: shall abide under the shadow of the Almighty.

I will say unto the Lord, Thou art my hope, and my stronghold: my God, in him will I trust.

For he shall deliver thee from the snare of the hunter: and from the noisome pestilence.

He shall defend thee under his wings and thou shalt be safe under his feathers: his faithfulness and truth shall be thy shield and buckler.

Thou shalt not be afraid for any terror by night: nor for the arrow that flieth by day;

For the pestilence that walketh in darkness: nor for the sickness that destroyeth in the noon-day.…¹⁵⁵

CLOSING IN ON THE POLITBURO

As the tempo of the public side of the Purge eased somewhat in the autumn of 1937, Stalin began to prepare the next phase. A number of figures, including Bukharin and Rykov themselves, were under interrogation with a view to public trial. A number of unsatisfactory Stalinists like Rudzutak and Antipov, though they were still perhaps resisting, lay ready as a possible reserve for the Bukharin Case, or alternatively as the central figures of a later trial. But much remained to be done.

The rank and file of the February–March waverers had been crushed. But the senior figures involved were still in positions in the highest leadership. Until they, and any others who had shown restiveness or independence, could be eradicated, there was a flaw, a weak spot, in the structure of autocracy. They were not, like Zinoviev and Bukharin, men long removed from the centers of power, or even, like Pyatakov, men long relegated to second-rank positions in the Government and Party. It is true that they constituted a minority and that—except for Kossior’s and (previously) Postyshev’s control of the Ukrainian machine—they had little grip on any true instruments of power. They nevertheless represented a higher potential of trouble than their predecessors. The one serious combination which, Stalin may have thought, remained was a combination of a group of “moderate” leaders with the Army. Nor was the striking down of the Army leaders in June 1937 entirely conclusive. Other commanders survived who could conceivably give trouble. In any case, Stalin proceeded with his usual combination of gradualness and ruthlessness.

But first, certain technical moves were called for. Since the decree of August 1936, people had been making a nuisance of themselves by complaining that their snap trials and executions were illegal. At any rate, on 14 September a decree was issued to introduce “simplified trial procedures,” in cases under Articles 58 (vii), 58 (viii), and 58 (ix) of the Criminal Code. It forbade appeals and also petitions for clemency, the right to which had been restored in 1936 with the object of deceiving Zinoviev and Co. More interesting still, the new decree “eliminated publicity in court trials.”¹⁵⁶ There are some obvious anomalies: in the first place, many trials must already have been held without any, or any effective, public attendance; second, the Bukharin Trial, with its vast publicity, was yet to come. Still, however we take the decree, it may perhaps reflect some sort of decision by Stalin to bring public trials to an end as soon as the one then in hand was over. It is sometimes argued that the partial failure of the Bukharin Trial itself led to the dropping of any further court proceedings. This decree shows that the decision may have been taken earlier. It is indeed true that the Bukharin Case seems to have been giving Yezhov a good deal of trouble. While Pyatakov and Radek were ready for open court in four months, nine months had already passed since Bukharin’s and Rykov’s arrest, and they were not to be adequately prepared for another three or four months yet. However, the plans for the Bukharin Trial were now, as we shall see, reaching the stage at which all possible ingredients had been established—assassination, medical murder, industrial and agricultural sabotage, espionage, bourgeois nationalism, and treason. Each trial so far had added crimes to the roster, but after this there would be no further lesson to rub in.

On 2 October came a law increasing the maximum term of imprisonment from ten to twenty-five years.¹⁵⁷ And a short plenum on 11–12 October celebrated the end of overt opposition by electing Yezhov a candidate member of the Politburo. At the same time, twenty-four members and candidates were expelled.¹⁵⁸ This plenum also saw the fall of a prominent figure in circumstances even more high-handed than had previously been noted.

The People’s Commissar for Education, Andrei Bubnov, was one of the most prominent of all Old Bolsheviks. He had been a delegate to the 1907 Congress, a candidate member of the Central Committee in 1912, and a member of the original Political Bureau, which existed for a short time in November 1917. With Pyatakov, he had organized the Communist revolt in the Ukraine in August 1918. A Democratic Centralist in the early days, he had switched to Stalin’s side as early as 1923, rigorously purging faction in the Army, and had served loyally ever since. At the October plenum, he went with his Ukrainian opposite number as Education Commissar, Zatonsky, to the Central Committee building, but, on showing their Central Committee membership cards, they were told by the NKVD officer on duty that they could not be admitted without further documents which had not been issued to them. Bubnov went back to his Ministry and worked late. At midnight, his secretary came in trembling and told him that the radio had just announced his removal for inability to cope with his duties. The next day, he handed over to the transient Tyurkin,¹⁵⁹ and was arrested in December.¹⁶⁰

While announcements of local Party trials and death sentences continued, they were now for a time rarer, and they were not given front-page treatment. The great propaganda campaign receded. The press began to fill with the preparations for elections to the Supreme Soviet. Every type of electoral article appropriate to a democracy began to appear—“Women Voters, a Powerful Force,” for example. And following them, the nominations of all the leaders in good odor, and page after page of enthusiastic meetings all around the Union, filled the papers day after day through October.

But Stalin was preparing for action against his unsatisfactory followers. A document (still in existence) was signed by Stalin, Molotov, and Kaganovich in November, to sanction “the arraignment… before a court of the Military Collegium of a large number of comrades from the ranks of prominent Party, State and military workers.”¹⁶¹ The 1961 speaker who gave this information went on to say, “Most of them were shot. Those innocently shot and posthumously rehabilitated include such prominent Party and State figures as Comrades Postyshev, Kossior, Eikhe, Rudzutak and Chubar; People’s Commissar of Justice Krylenko; Unshlikht, Secretary of the U.S.S.R. Central Executive Committee; People’s Commissar of Education Bubnov, and others.”

This strongly implies (though it does not actually assert) that these men were on the list referred to. Some, indeed, were already under arrest, but under the old procedure were presumably still being interrogated with the intention of any formal “arraigning” being postponed until the confessions had been obtained. What is more extraordinary is that some of the arrests now authorized were not carried out for weeks or months—that the accused remained in high posts for longish periods.

The procedure with regard to ordinary Party members seems to have been that just before an arrest, the NKVD would inform the local Party committee or, in the case of important members, the Central Committee that a warrant had been issued. The member was then expelled from the Party in secret session and was not informed of the expulsion until arrested. Sometimes the period between these clandestine expulsions and the arrests was quite long. A case is reported of a District Party Secretary in the Ukraine who was secretly expelled by the Ukrainian Central Committee in March 1938 and not arrested until July, meanwhile carrying on as usual and even expelling other members.¹⁶² (Again, a foreign Communist arrested on 19 June 1938 was shown the order for her arrest dated 15 October 1937.)¹⁶³ Needless to say, the procedure was contrary to Party statutes.

Who the “prominent … military workers” referred to were has not been made explicit, but they were now falling, or about to fall, in numbers, as we have seen. The “others” must include the important figure of V. I. Mezhlauk, who now held the Commissariat of Heavy Industry, and had since the spring been appearing on platforms with the Politburo itself.¹⁶⁴ Mezhlauk, plumply square, balding, with glasses, was arrested in December 1937.¹⁶⁵

Unshlikht, a Pole in the Dzerzhinsky tradition, had been a pro-Bolshevik member of the Polish Social Democratic Party since 1900. A member of the Petrograd Revolutionary Committee, he had served in the Civil War with Tukhachevsky, in the Sixteenth Army, and had been wounded. He had later been Vice Chairman of the All-Russian Cheka. Trotsky had thought him “an ambitious but talentless intriguer.” By the end of the year, he too had been arrested.¹⁶⁶

Meanwhile, Postyshev still held his post in Kuibyshev and was still a candidate member of the Politburo. Kossior was still First Secretary of the Ukraine and a full member of the Politburo; Chubar, Vice Chairman of the Council of People’s Commissars and a full member of the Politburo; and the others in their relevant posts.

Even Postyshev, in spite of demotion, was still not proceeded against. He is now said to have had a last conversation with Stalin, after he had been transferred to Kuibyshev, and to have frankly denounced the Purge, at least as it applied to loyal Party members.¹⁶⁷ However, in June, he had been given reasonable headlines for his speech to the Party conference in his new fief at Kuibyshev: it was a call, extreme even by the standards then prevailing, for the vigilant uprooting of Trotskyites.

Eikhe, a large, serious-looking man, smooth-moustached, with a reputation for ruthlessness, a Party member since 1905, was made People’s Commissar for Agriculture in Chernov’s place on 30 October.¹⁶⁸ In the West Siberian Territory, which had hitherto been his satrapy, Vyshinsky had alleged¹⁶⁹ an inadequate number of prosecutions for counter-revolutionary activity in 1937, a fact which may well have been due to Eikhe’s attitude or at least have figured in the later charges against him.

On 3 November 1937 a poster for the Republican elections, consisting of portraits of the Politburo, was put out. It contained all the full members, including Kossior and Chubar, but of the candidate members only Zhdanov and Yezhov were shown. Eilche, Postyshev, and Petrovsky were thus demonstratively snubbed. In fact, throughout this period, signs of degradation were visited on the candidate members of the Politburo who were later to fall. They were omitted from honorary Presidiums. Large numbers of lists of nominations for the December election of the Supreme Soviet starting in late October usually left them out (and often omitted Kossior too).fn5 But they were included in the conventional letter of important figures refusing multiple nomination on instructions of the Central Committee.¹⁷⁰ And all (Kossior, Postyshev, Eikhe, Chubar, and Petrovsky) were returned in the elections which followed.

For the best part of two months, until the actual voting of 12 December and afterward, these elections were given intense prominence and publicity. Every day, articles, photographs, lists of places where Politburo members would speak, the addresses of meetings to their candidates, and a vast apparatus of joyful expectancy reigned on paper. Mass resolutions were printed under such headings as “With Joy We Vote for Nikolai Ivanovich Yezhov”; poems, such as one by Stalin’s Kazakh hack bard Dzhambul, “People’s Commissar Yezhov,” gave a view of the police chief which would have been thought excessively rosy if applied to a ruler like Good King Wenceslas.

Throughout December, articles and statements on the elections continued to appear. There were many reports from abroad of, for example, “The Great Impression Made in England.” And so the days drew on. As the election publicity gradually petered out, there were other themes for the public—for example, the centenary of the Georgian poet Rustaveli—eked out with much Stakhanovite conferencing.

But the year was not to end without a demonstrative killing. Only five months had separated the Zinoviev and Pyatakov Trials. Since then, eleven had passed, and the Bukharin Case was still not ready. As an interim measure, a group of men who were not prepared to confess was tried in camera under the 14 September law.

On 20 December 1937 the papers ran page after page to celebrate the twentieth anniversary of the VCHEKA–OGPU–NKVD, with pictures of Dzerzhinsky and Yezhov. That body’s vigilance had been demonstrated the previous day by the announcement of a purge in the bread-distribution organizations. Workers’ meetings sent applause, and poems about the splendid role of the Secret Police appeared in profusion. Pravda carried a long article by Frinovsky, and also a long list of awards, including the Order of Lenin to Boris Berman. Among this feast of laudatory generalization, a short announcement drew attention to the more practical side of the work of Yezhov’s men. It said that on 16 December, Yenukidze, with Karaldian, Sheboldayev, Oraldielashvili, and others, had been tried before the Military Collegium of the Supreme Court as spies, bourgeois nationalists, and terrorists, had confessed, and had been executed.¹⁷¹

In the Bukharin Trial, Yenukidze was to be made the central villain of terrorist activity, held responsible for the organization of the murder of Kirov, and said to have instructed Yagoda to tell Zaporozhets not to hinder the act.¹⁷² He was also to be responsible for plotting the murder of Gorky.¹⁷³ Orakhelashvili, who had been Secretary of the Georgian Central Committee, had for the past five years acted as Deputy Director of the Marx-Engels-Lenin Institute in Moscow. He is now said to have lost his life as a result of objecting to Beria’s book on the Bolshevik movement in the Caucasus, which was heavily faked to give Stalin a major role.

Although the charges and the supposed confessions did not impress, there seemed no reason to doubt that such a trial had indeed taken place as stated. It was only in the 1960s that death dates given for the accused made it clear that the whole thing was a complete lie. Karakhan had been shot on 20 September (with several others, including I. A. Teodorovich, Head of the Society of Former Political Prisoners); Yenukidze and Sheboldayev had perished on 30 October (with other leading figures, including thirteen other full members of the Central Committee, such as Chudov, Kodatsky, Rumyantsev, Khatayevich, and Lobov). Sheboldayev’s wife, Lika, a niece of Rudzutak, was severely interrogated, with threats to her newborn baby, and is reported going mad.¹⁷⁴ Nazaretyan was also shot on 30 October. His wife, Klavdia, with her seven-year-old son and five-year-old daughter, were taken to a special prison for women and children, a former church. Later they were sent to camp, but the daughter was eventually retrieved by a “brave aunt.” Klavdia was apparently sentenced to eight years, released in 1946, rearrested, but survived to be rehabilitated.¹⁷⁵

Orakhelashvili, indeed, had been executed on 11 December, only five days before his supposed trial; he was not even tried by the Supreme Court, as stated, but by a troika of the Georgian NKVD (his wife had been shot on 17 September).¹⁷⁶

At any rate, none of the supposed leading defendants at the “trial” of 16 December were in fact alive when it took place. Why Stalin played this elaborate farce is unknown.

Another massacre of the 30 October type had taken place on 26–27 November. N. S. Komarov was then shot, as was E. I. Kviring, former secretary of the Bolshevik faction in the Duma; Ya. S. Hanecki, who had secured Lenin’s release from Austrian jail (his daughter was also arrested);¹⁷⁷ N. A. Kubyak, former Secretary of the Central Committee; D. E. Sulimov; Nosov; and at least fourteen other important figures, including M. M. Nemtsov, secretary of the Society of Old Bolsheviks.

On 21 December, there was a grand ceremonial meeting for the NKVD in the Bolshoi Theater in the presence of Kaganovich, Molotov, Voroshilov, Mikoyan, and Khrushchev. The whole of the full membership of the Politburo, including Kossior and Chubar (who were not present), were elected to the honorary Presidium, but only Zhdanov and Yezhov among the candidate members, the remaining places being taken by Khrushchev and Bulganin. Mikoyan was the main speaker, lavishing praise on Yezhov as “a talented faithful pupil of Stalin … beloved by the Soviet people,” and as having “achieved the greatest victory in the history of the Party, a victory we will never forget.” He concluded, “Learn the Stalinist style of work from Comrade Yezhov, as he learned it from Comrade Stalin!”¹⁷⁸

In January came an important plenum of the Central Committee and the presentation of a new Government to the Supreme Soviet. The positions of Postyshev and Kossior were affected.

In Kuibyshev province, Postyshev had tried to make up for his earlier opposition to the purges by extremely harsh action. He was now accused of excesses in this line. Malenkov, reporting, accused him of “by cries of ‘vigilance’ hiding his brutality in connection with the Party.” When Postyshev replied that almost all the Secretaries of District Committees and Executive Committees were in fact hostile elements, Molotov, Mikoyan, and Bulganin accused him of exaggerating, Kaganovich brought up his supposedly similar errors in Kiev the previous year,¹⁷⁹ and Malenkov summed up that his acts, and refusal to admit them, were an obvious “provocation.” (Malenkov was not even a candidate member of the Committee. Only twenty-eight of the seventy-one full members elected four years earlier were now in fact available to constitute the “plenum.”)¹⁸⁰

Postyshev, still described as “Comrade,” was replaced as candidate member of the Politburo by Khrushchev.¹⁸¹ (This was the last occasion on which a removal from Politburo was officially announced. Henceforth, names simply disappeared from lists and photographs.) Pravda’s leader of the same day denounced the heads of certain Party organizations, giving that of Kuibyshev as an example, for having around them “sworn enemies of the people,” while expelling honest elements. The Central Committee resolution menacingly noted that the NKVD had had to intervene to save slandered Party members expelled in the province.¹⁸² Postyshev had also in fact received a confidential Party censure while in Kuibyshev for “protecting enemies of the people.”¹⁸³ Stalin had now suggested that Postyshev might be removed from the Politburo, remaining a member of the Central Committee, and this was voted unanimously. However, his case was referred to the Control Commission, which reported that he had known of and worked with the Right—Trotskyite organization, and he was expelled from the Party.¹⁸⁴ But he was not arrested for a few days. He had a small flat in Moscow, where he was visited after this by his fighter-pilot son.¹⁸⁵ There he seems to have remained until his arrest on 21 February.

Kossior, in Kiev among the crumbled remnants of his power, had had a bad year. His brother I. V. Kossior, also a member of the Central Committee, had died in apparent good odor on 3 July, though it was later revealed that his death was, in reality, a suicide like Ordzhonikidze’s.¹⁸⁶ Another brother, V. V. Kossior, an old oppositionist, had been given ten years in 1934 and been implicated again in the Pyatakov Trial;¹⁸⁷ during the summer, he had been one of a batch of oppositionists brought from Vorkuta to Moscow and shot. Kossior and Petrovsky went to Kiev on 26 January 1938 and were welcomed at the station by the supposititious Ukrainian Central Committee. On 27 January, its “plenum” released Kossior from his post.¹⁸⁸ The First Secretaryship of the Ukraine was transferred, as we have seen, to the coming man, Nikita Khrushchev.¹⁸⁹ But far from falling into immediate oblivion, Kossior was appointed instead Vice Chairman of the USSR Council of People’s Commissars and President of the Soviet Control Commission.

In fact, the new Government presented by Molotov to the Supreme Soviet on 19 January 1938 had as its three Vice Premiers S. V. Kossior, Chubar, and Mikoyan, while Eikhe was People’s Commissar for Agriculture.¹⁹⁰

The Vice Chairmen of the Council of People’s Commissars cannot indeed seriously have thought of themselves as holding powerful positions. Both Voroshilov and Kaganovich, in charge of important departments and invariably ranking senior to them in Party listings, were not at this time Vice Premiers—an adequate demonstration of the post’s comparatively decorative significance.

Even so, we have the extraordinary spectacle of Molotov taking the chair at a meeting of the Council of People’s Commissars, the official order for the trial and arrest of several of whose members he had already signed. At meetings of Molotov and the Vice Premiers, two out of the three supposedly contributing to policy discussions were actually no more than dead men talking, whose opinions were by now quite meaningless.

During the Khrushchev period, it was customary to speak of the January 1938 plenum as marking a return to legality, it being thought suitable for such a turn of events to mark Khrushchev’s promotion to the highest levels. Indeed, the resolution of the plenum as ever speaks strongly against unjust expulsions from the Party, and this, with the attacks on Provincial Committees for the same error, which were to continue throughout the year, gave that impression to those who wished to receive it. But there was no sign of any real improvement. A Soviet account given in April 1964 managed to satisfy the demands both of Khrushchev and of truth by saying, “The January 1938 plenum of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party somewhat improved the situation. However, repressions did not cease.”¹⁹¹

It was Yezhov himself who made some of the most critical remarks about the wickedness of expelling members wrongly. Throughout the Terror, the leadership had constantly spoken against unfair expulsions—with the aim, however, of destroying its subordinates. For example, as we have seen, in the 1937 attack on Postyshev, the real motive of which was to remove an objection to the Terror, the official line was condemnation of inadequate Party democracy. In fact, this can be traced even in the Central Committee’s key letter of the summer of 1936, which spoke strongly against unprincipled expulsions.¹⁹²

The January 1938 resolution criticizes a large number of local Party organizations in addition to that of Kuibyshev for such practices, blaming officials such as “the former Secretary of the Kiev Provincial Committee of the Communist Party of the Ukraine, the enemy of the people Kudryavtsev,” “the exposed enemy of the people” Shatsky (Head of the Leading Party Organs Administration of the Rostov Provincial Committee), and so on, and telling pathetic tales of honest Bolsheviks, and even their relatives by marriage, who had lost their jobs as a result of incorrect denunciation.

The persistence of this theme is remarkable. Clearly, it was a great advantage to blame Postyshev and others for inhumanity rather than for belated humanity. In this way, the central leadership could, or might think it could, avoid some of the unpopularity arising from its own actions. But we might perhaps go further and see in this a sign that Stalin, right from the start, had determined to put the odium on his instruments and to destroy them when their task was completed. If so, he was to some degree successful. The “Yezhovshchina” remained the popular name for the Reign of Terror, and with the disappearance of Yezhov himself, some of the curse was taken off the surviving leadership.

On 9 and 10 February 1938, as if to mark the continuity of the Purge, a fresh group of fourteen or fifteen significant figures perished. They included A. P. Smirnov, Kaminsky, and Muklevich. M. I. Erbanov, First Secretary of the BuryatMongol ASSR, was among them. Purged with him was his Second Secretary, A. Markizov. Markizov’s daughter, Gelya, was in a famous photograph taken in 1936 in which she is held in Stalin’s arms, which indicated his love of children; and it continued to appear after he had orphaned her. In fact, a sculpture modeled on the photograph was set up in the Stalinskaya Metro station.¹⁹³

Meanwhile, arrests and denunciations continued. N. V. Krylenko, now serving as People’s Commissar for Justice, was attacked in January at the first meeting of the Supreme Soviet, for neglecting his duties in favor of mountain climbing and chess, and was not reappointed. When he had handed over (to Ulrikh’s subordinate, N. M. Rychkov), Stalin personally telephoned him to reassure him about future work. He was, of course, on the list of those to be arrested, and was in fact arrested the same night, 31 January 1938, with some of his family.¹⁹⁴

Krylenko, whom Lenin had appointed Commander in Chief of the Army immediately after the Revolution, had impressed Bruce Lockhart in 1918 as an “epileptic degenerate” and is referred to in 1938 by a fellow prisoner as “notorious and universally despised.”¹⁹⁵ He had conducted the prosecution in such faked trials as the Shakhty Case and the Menshevik Trial. As to his other interests, he had shown farcical dogmatism at a Congress of Chess Players in 1932:

We must finish once and for all with the neutrality of chess. We must condemn once and for all the formula ‘chess for the sake of chess,’ like the formula ‘art for art’s sake.’ We must organize shockbrigades of chess-players, and begin immediate realization of a Five-Year Plan for chess.¹⁹⁶

On his arrest, he is reported being treated with special indignity in the Butyrka “to take the conceit out of him.”¹⁹⁷ But he was soon taken to the Lefortovo for serious interrogation. The original charge was of connections with the Bukharin conspiracy, and the creation of a wrecking organization in the Commissariat of Justice, in which he had personally enlisted thirty people. On 3 March, he confessed that he had belonged to an anti-Soviet organization since 1930. But by 3 April, this was put further back, and he was confessing to having worked against Lenin before the Revolution and having plotted with Bukharin, Pyatakov, and Preobrazhensky after it.¹⁹⁸

In general, secret executions of prominent committee members already arrested, and arrests of many of those still at large, continued.

The Party, as it had existed a year previously, had been broken. From District Secretaries to People’s Commissars, the veterans of Stalin’s first period of rule had fallen to Yezhov’s assault. But further blows were being prepared for the terrified survivors.