The Great Terror

14

CLIMAX

Each day too slew its thousands six or seven.

Byron

After the Bukharin Trial, Stalin and Yezhov turned their attention to the remnant of opposition at the top.

This final wave of the Purge in the inner Party, directed against his own supporters, was well defined by a circular put out under Stalin’s instructions, in April 1938, calling for a “liquidation of the consequences of wrecking” in which the “’silent’ politically spineless people should also not be forgotten.”¹

Various loose ends were tied up; for example, the First Secretary in Kazakhstan, L. I. Mirzoyan, whom Stalin had attacked at the January plenum, was arrested “on Stalin’s personal orders.”²

There remained bigger game. Postyshev’s arrest was not immediately followed up. Eikhe, Kossior, and Chubar, the doomed members of the Politburo, still featured, though not regularly, with the other members in formal listings, telegrams from the Soviet expedition at the North Pole, and so forth.

Eikhe and Kossior, appearing in good standing until the last week in April, went first. Eikhe was arrested on 29 April, and Kossior (mentioned in an electoral list as late as 28 April) at about the same time³—inaccordance with the NKVD custom of arresting people just before holidays, during which no attempt could be made to trace them.

Stalin was now wholly ignoring the formalities. We are told that there was no “exchange of opinions or Political Bureau decisions” about the arrest of Kossior—or in any “other case of this type.”⁴

No announcement was made, then or ever, though his arrest must have become known immediately to those interested, for Kiev Radio just ceased to announce itself as Radio Kossior, as it had done for some years.⁵ The press had other matters to think of. For most of May and June, the new election campaign built up in newspapers, meetings, and any other feasible fashion, on the lines of the fanfares of the previous winter. (When the elections finally took place on 26 June, it was to the accompaniment of another exploit by “Stalinist falcons’—a nonstop flight to Khabarovsk in the Far East by Kokkinaki.)

The absence of both men from the 1 May demonstrations was noted. Chubar was still there. He can be traced as receiving official greetings as late as 9 June. By 1 July, he was no longer listed.

Chubar was later said to have been concerned with shortcomings in industry, and to have had qualms about the new agricultural system. He had been closely associated with Ordzhonikidze and was not pleased with the development of the cult of personality. In the period before his own removal, he is reported as “deeply indignant” about the facts he had learned about illegal repressions. He did not believe that people he had known and worked with for years were really spies. His views on this became known to those in charge of the Purge. On his removal from membership in the Politburo and Vice Chairmanship of the Council of People’s Commissars, he was sent for the moment to work at Solikamsk in the Urals. But he remained there for only “a few months … soon he was arrested.”⁶

Meanwhile Eikhe, in the new torture center for top officials at Sukhanovka, was being interrogated by the notorious Z. M. Ushakov. Soon his ribs were broken, and he was confessing to being leader of a “reserve net supposedly created by Bukharin in 1935.”⁷

This was presumably what was mentioned at the Bukharin Trial as “another reserve centre,” allegedly existing at the end of 1935 or the beginning of 1936, when Rykov was supposed to have urged Chernov to get in touch with it “through Lyubimov.”⁸ It was “another” reserve center because there was also reference to “the parallel group of Rights” allegedly led by Antipov.

There is at least some slight logic in this representation of the latest victims as “Rightists.” They had had no connection whatever with the Trotsky or Zinoviev oppositions, and though they had equally opposed the Bukharinites in 1929–1930, they had been in favor of a lessening of the Terror and reconciliation with Bukharin .

The plan for the next trial was, in any case, changed. Eikhe was instructed to remove his name as reserve center leader and substitute Mezhlauk’s.⁹

This left a number of ready victims for the first trial planned wholly against Stalinists, leaving the more recently arrested Politburo members and some others in reserve for future use.

On 28 July, Yezhov sent Stalin a list of 138 names, asking for permission to execute them. Stalin and Molotov signed, “Shoot all 138.”¹⁰ Thereupon, on 27 to 29 July, and after the weekend on 1 August, there took place in secret by far the largest massacre of the leadership in the whole period. We have already noted the twenty-four known military victims (see here). In addition, at least twenty-two leading political, diplomatic, and cultural names can be identified. They included Rudzutak, formerly full member and more recently candidate member of the Politburo; V. I. Mezhlauk; Pyatnitsky; Rukhimovich; Knorin; Stetsky; M. I. Frumkin, who had been the leading Rightist spokesman in the late 1920s; Ya. A. Yakovlev; and Krylenlco. V. M. Kirshon, a playwright with strong political connections, was among the other victims. In every case we can trace, they were “tried” by the Military Collegium. How the military and political elements in the supposed plot were melded is not clear, but (for example) the civilian Rudzutak was directly linked to the Army figure Berzin, as a Latvian spy, as was Army Commander Alksnis, who was “savagely beaten” by a special team.¹¹

Rudzutak pleaded his innocence. He had made a confession, but now retracted it and asked that

the Party Central Committee be informed that there is in the NKVD an as yet not liquidated center which is craftily manufacturing cases, which forces innocent persons to confess; there is no opportunity to prove one’s non-participation in crimes to which the confessions of various persons testify. The investigative methods are such that they force people to lie and to slander entirely innocent persons in addition to those who already stand accused. He asks the court that he be allowed to inform the Party Central Committee of all this in writing. He assures the court that he personally never had any evil designs in regard to the policy of our Party because he had always agreed with the Party policy pertaining to all spheres of economic and cultural activity.¹²

However, “sentence was pronounced on him in twenty minutes and he was shot.” The charges included espionage for Germany.¹³

Krylenko’s trial also lasted twenty minutes, and the protocol ran to nineteen lines only.¹⁴ Twenty minutes was also the time taken by the trial of M. E. Mikhailov, Provincial Secretary of Voronezh.¹⁵ Pyatnitsky (who had been severely beaten by the NKVD officer Langfang, undergoing eighteen torture sessions and suffering broken ribs, internal injuries, and a lacerated face)¹⁶ was accused of espionage for Japan and other countries in addition to having been a Tsarist police agent.¹⁷

We can trace a few relatives of the accused: Rudzutak’s wife was sent to labor camp;¹⁸ his brother is reported to have emigrated to America and taken the name Rogers, but to have returned in the early 1930s at the invitation of his then-powerful relation; he and his wife are reported shot, and their nineteen-year-old daughter, Senta, arrested and sentenced to death for espionage for the United States, but reprieved and sent to the Vorkuta camps.¹⁹ Yakovlev’s wife is reported sentenced to death.²⁰ Rukhimovich’s young daughter Elena was jailed in 1939 (together with the daughters of Shlyapnikov’s ally, Medvedev; of Lomov; of Smilga; and of Krestinsky) for having formed an “anti-Soviet group.”²¹ Unshlikht’s sister, Stefanie Brun, got eight years;²² Mezhlauk’s first wife also got an eight-year sentence and died of dysentery in a transit camp in the Far East.²³

This case marks a turning point in the Purge. There were to be no more public trials of Party figures. But it is also interesting because it comes at the moment when Stalin was beginning to show distrust of Yezhov.

Yezhov had been appointed People’s Commissar for Water Transport (in addition to his NKVD Commissariat, Secretaryship of the Central Committee, and membership on the Executive Committee of the Comintern) on 8 April 1938. This is often thought of as the beginning of his decline. But in fact his new Commissariat’s main component was the Soviet Merchant Marine, an important Secret Police area from both the security and the intelligence points of view. He seldom went to the Water Transport Commissariat, leaving the NKVD veteran E. G. Evdokimov in charge. Others from the NKVD now ran the Timber Industry and Communications Commissariats. And on the same day as Yezhov’s new appointment, Kaganovich took over Railways in addition to Heavy Industry; but one of Yezhov’s Deputy Commissars in the NKVD, L. N. Bel’ski, became First Deputy People’s Commissar of Railways, with the Head of the NKVD Transport Department, M. A. Volkov, as another Deputy Commissar, and other NKVD officers in posts there. In addition, several NKVD men now took over as Provincial Party Secretaries. All in all, Yezhov’s power seemed strongly on the increase.

However, this now began to change.

One Party organization had remained not indeed exempt from purging, but only carrying out such purging as benefited its own leader—that of Georgia under Beria. It seems very out of character for Yezhov not to have attempted the destruction of the leading cadres in Tbilisi, and there are indeed reports that he was maneuvering to do this in 1938.²⁴ It is said that Beria was to be arrested,²⁵ but successfully appealed, being supported by Molotov and others.²⁶

Beria’s appointment on about 20 July 1938 to be Deputy Head of the NKVD can only be interpreted as the beginning of Yezhov’s decline. It was a post that had previously been held by men like M. Berman and Agranov—that is, not one suitable for an important Party figure. In fact, Beria was clearly being prepared as a possible successor. He moved into the dacha just vacated by Chubar.²⁷

There is a report that Yezhov and Kaganovich had clashed, not on any question of the desirability of the Great Purge, but on a more direct issue of power. Kaganovich himself supervised the purging of his Commissariats and other organs under his own control, but resented NKVD intrusion except for the technical purposes of arrest, shooting, and so on. According to one account, Yezhov began to implicate Kaganovich himself, and had already forced Bondarenko, Head of the Kharkov Tractor Works, to make statements compromising him.²⁸

On one view, the immediate reason why Stalin listened to the voices being raised against Yezhov is that he had failed to set up further public trials, in particular that of the Rightist “reserve center,” plus a second Military Trial.²⁹

It is quite conceivable that Yezhov had been charged with setting up a fourth great trial, and had failed in the assignment. If this were so, the coincidence of Beria’s appointment and the immediately following secret trial or trials would signify the winding up of an unsatisfactory project by the new management.

But Stalin had for some time been shooting prominent Central Committee members without such formality, and it is difficult to see what further benefits he could now gain from another public trial. Every possible lesson had been rubbed in in the Bukharin Trial. As far as a second Military Trial was concerned, the first had not taken place in public, and the second could have been announced in precisely the same way. Indeed, the mere fact that the new batch of military conspirators was dispatched without public announcement seems to show that Stalin no longer felt the need for such.

Whatever plans Stalin may have had for the future, it was, anyhow, at this point that he abandoned public trials of oppositionists. None of the figures still under arrest was brought before public courts, though almost all seem to have had confessions tortured out of them and to have been brought before these twenty-minute sessions of the Military Collegium.

It seems to have been difficult to extract reliable and durable confessions from the new Stalinist prisoners. Rudzutak (and Eikhe after him) would not repeat before the secret courts which eventually tried them the confessions they had made under torture. This had been true of a number of those who had fallen in the earlier phase of the Purge, but there had been an adequate residuum of confessors. None of the new victims, though, had anything whatever to reproach themselves for from the point of view of having collaborated in any of the oppositions, and could hardly be asked to “disarm.” This had been true only of one or two second-rank prisoners in the Bukharin Trial.

Some of the difficulty may have resided in the fact that those in this middle generation were still rather more than personal nominees or members of Stalin’s extremist entourage. They were still men following their political convictions, attached to Stalin as a leader, but not committed to the idea of his leadership as a matter of ideological dogma. Unlike the men Stalin had assembled from the earlier generation, and against many of whom he was able to exert something like blackmail, almost all the younger cadres were secure in the consciousness of their general and political innocence (if not from our point of view, at least from their own).

Through the autumn, the NKVD Commissar continued to appear with his old prominence; in fact, he was often named higher than his official standing in the Politburo—sometimes before Mikoyan, Andreyev, and Zhdanov.

And he continued his policies. The Purge had grown in size, until finally it had reached such monstrous proportions that even Stalin seems to have seen that the time had come to ease off. This was a matter of major policy: the midsummer changes were perhaps no more than the first moves towards an alternative, based more on particular failures than on the realization that a dead end was being reached in the entire Terror.

DIPLOMATS

Meanwhile, another rumored trial failed to take place. After the Bukharin Trial, it had been rumored that a special trial of diplomats, centering on AntonovOvseenko, would be held. But in fact they were dealt with seriatim.

Soviet diplomats had already suffered severely. For example, Tairov, Ambassador to Mongolia, had been shot in June 1937. Both Krestinsky and Sokolnikov had served as Deputy People’s Commissars for Foreign Affairs. Karakhan had been Ambassador in Berlin. Various lesser figures had been involved in the trials—for example, Chlenov,³⁰ of whom it was said in the Bukharin Trial indictment that his case would be subject to special proceedings. Others implicated in the Bukharin Trial were Yurenev, Ambassador to Berlin; Bogomolov, Ambassador to China; and Sabanin, Director of the Legal Department of the People’s Commissariat of Foreign Affairs.³¹ (Yurenev and Bekzadian, Ambassador to Hungary, were among the victims of the July 1938 massacre.)

At the Foreign Commissariat, an NKVD officer, Vasily Korzhenko, was appointed Chief of Personne1,³² and he and his family moved into Krestinsky’s Moscow house.³³ The treatment of the Commissariat’s staff for comparatively minor offenses was interestingly described in a Soviet article of the Khrushchev period.

V. N. Barkov had long been Head of the Protocol Department:

On one occasion, on the instructions of Dekanozov, who was at the time a Deputy People’s of the most active members of the Beria gang, Barkov had to meet a foreign correspondent. Under the regulations in force, on the day of his talk with the correspondent, Barkov had to see Dekanozov without fail, but Dekanozov was nowhere to be found. Obeying the orders he had received, Barkov saw the correspondent.

On the following day Dekanozov summoned him.

“Who gave you direct permission for the interview?”

“I could not find you anywhere.”

“You could not have tried very hard.”

The dressing down went on for a long time. Barkov lost his temper and said:

“But on that day you could not be found!”

“Oh! It’s like that is it?” said Dekanozov menacingly, and closed the interview.

On that day Barkov never returned home. His relations only saw him eighteen years later.³⁴

The People’s Commissar himself, Litvinov, beginning in 1937, and for the rest of his life, kept a revolver to hand, “so that if the bell rang in the night, he would not have to live through the consequences.”³⁵ His Deputy People’s Cornmissar, V. S. Stomonyakov, attempted suicide on arrest, to die in the prison hospita1.³⁶

Diplomats disappeared by the dozen. They had, indeed, had genuine contacts with foreigners, so that the presumption of their guilt was, by Yezhov’s standards, overwhelming. They were recalled and shot; in his memoirs, Ehrenburg says that few survived.³⁷ He names nine that he knew personally whom Stalin liquidated.

But no trial took place. In particular, Antonov-Ovseenko simply went through a routine processing. He had been a Menshevik until 1917. He had led two local rebellions in 1905 and 1906 and had been sentenced to death in 1906. He had been arrested several times for underground activity afterward. (This record shows, incidentally, how mistaken is the notion that the Mensheviks were politically inactive because their views on party organization differed from Lenin’s.) Joining the Bolsheviks in 1917, he had led the attack on the Winter Palace which overthrew the Provisional Government.

It was he who had burst into the Government room, announcing, “In the name of the Military Revolutionary Committee, I declare you arrested.” He commanded on the Ukrainian front in the Civil War and later became Head of the Political Administration of the Army.³⁸ Here he had supported Trotsky and was removed in favor of Bubnov. He remained a Trotskyite until 1928, when he submitted, like other oppositionists. He had since been employed in State and diplomatic posts, latterly in Spain.

Antonov-Ovseenko was held in a cell on the third floor of the Butyrka prison. He was ill and (as is often reported of the undernourished and overinterrogated) had swollen legs. But he bore himself boldly and entertained his cell mates with stories of Lenin, the October Revolution, and the Spanish Civil War. One of them was Yuri Tomsky (youngest son of Mikhail Tomsky), who has given an account of Antonov’s last days.³⁹ At the interrogation, Antonov refused to sign anything, though the protocols of the interrogation ran finally to 300 pages. One day when they were being gone through, there happened to be a radio on in the investigator’s office. The NKVD man, I. I. Shneyderman, called Antonov an “enemy of the people.” The prisoner retorted, “You are an enemy of the people. You are a regular Fascist.” The radio started to broadcast a mass meeting. “Listen! Listen to how the people celebrate us. They trust us in everything, and you will be annihilated. There,” the NKVD official added, “I have had a medal on your account” (an Order of the Red Star, in the 19 December 1937 Honors List).⁴⁰

Antonov-Ovseenko was sentenced to ten years with the group executed on 8 to 10 February 1938, but was in fact shot. When he was taken from his cell to execution, he took off his overcoat, shoes, and jacket and distributed them to the other prisoners, and then remarked (young Tomsky tells us), “I beg anyone who gets to freedom to tell the people that Antonov-Ovseenko was a Bolshevik and remained a Bolshevik till his last day.” The chief warders then led him away.

Antonov had himself served as State Prosecutor in the early 1930s. He had to wait twenty-five years for his message to be published to the Russian people. All the same, he was lucky. The Mensheviks who died in camps after the 1931 Trial or the Social Revolutionaries like Spiridonova were not similarly vindicated.

Meanwhile, other diplomats were being recalled for execution. The Soviet Minister in Bucharest, Ostrovsky, hesitated to return to Moscow, but went back when Voroshilov, with whom he had served in the Civil War, gave him a personal assurance of his safety. He was arrested on reaching the frontier,⁴¹ though only sent to labor camp.⁴² Others who disappeared included the Soviet envoys to Warsaw, Kaunas, Helsinki, Kabul, Copenhagen, and Riga.⁴³

The veteran of the Baltic Fleet Mikhail Raskolnikov was Soviet Ambassador to Bulgaria, where the NKVD officer sent to purge the legation implicated everyone from the chauffeur, Kazakov, to the Military Attaché, Colonel Sukhorukov.⁴⁴ Raskolnikov himself refused to return to Russia when recalled in April 1939. He was nevertheless rehabilitated in Khrushchev’s time (later restored to the category of traitor, he was more definitively rehabilitated in 1987). This must partly have been due to his particularly fine record in the Revolution and the Civil War, his total lack of involvement in any opposition, and his death within a few months (September 1939). Even Ehrenburg in his published memoirs mentioned having met him at the time when he was deciding to stay abroad and having sympathized with his position. Raskolnikov wrote an offensive letter to Stalin, which was published in the émigré Novaya Rossiya on 1 October 1939 after his death, and also a more moderate statement which appeared in another émigré journal, Poslednie Novosti, on 26 June 1939. In the latter, he says firmly to Stalin, “You yourself know that Pyatakov did not fly to Oslo”—showing that a good deal was known, and discussed, in Party circles.

KOMSOMOL

One major organization remained under its original Stalinist leadership—the Komsomol.

Kosarev had been sent by Stalin to purge the Leningrad Komsomol after the defeat of Zinoviev at the XIVth Party Congress in December 1925. In 1926, the opposition bloc had made a powerful attempt to secure the support of the young and of the students. Most of the “Trotskyist” protest groups were composed of young intellectuals, who attacked Party control over the Komsomol. Half the members of the Leningrad Komsomol Committee were expelled.

Kosarev had been boldly denounced by Kotolynov, then a leading Zinovievite in that body, for tactics of sheer bullying. He went on to practice these in Moscow, becoming a secretary of the Central Committee of the Komsomol in 1927 and its General Secretary in 1929.

Thenceforward, the organization had been a willing tool of the General Secretary, a sort of “Stalinjugend.” Even this was not adequate, as Stalin held that “the very first task of all Komsomol education work was the necessity to seek out and recognize the enemy, who had then to be removed forcibly, by methods of economic pressure, organizational-political isolation, and methods of physical destruction.”⁴⁵ In fact, he wanted the organization to become a youth auxiliary of the NKVD.

On 21 July 1937 Kosarev was summoned by Stalin and Yezhov and harangued for an hour and a half about the inadequate role played by the youth organization in vigilance and denunciation.⁴⁶ He did his best to satisfy their demands.

A trial now took place of some members of the Central Committee of the Komsomol: Lukyanov, Secretary of the Moscow Komsomol; Saltanov, editor of Komsomolskaya pravda; and others.⁴⁷ In the Ukraine, the youth leadership had already been purged in January, apparently in connection with Postyshev’s offenses. On 22–25 July, the Ukrainian Komsomol Central Committee was simply dissolved: its counter-revolutionary organization had been headed by its First Secretary, S. Andreev,⁴⁸ who was shot in the mass execution of 27 November 1937.

At the provincial level, when the Smolensk Komsomol was cleaned up in October 1937, it was charged that “Fascists, penetrating even into the Central Committee of the Komsomol, had now been exposed.” On 11 October 1937 the new local First Secretary, Manayev, reported that his predecessors, “the enemies of the people Kogan and Prikhodko,” had undermined 700 kolkhoz Komsomol organizations. The Pedagogical Institutes, the Tecluiicum, the intermediate schools had been “filled” with hostile people, as were the Pioneer organizations. Local secretary after local secretary was listed as a criminal. Already, from one-half to two-thirds of the members of committees and secretaries of organizations had been replaced.

However, Manayev himself was criticized for giving money for medical treatment to enemies of the people under arrest and for “criminal slowness” in uprooting enemies. The representative from Moscow said that the bad work of the provincial organization was possibly due to the fact that there were enemies in it yet to be unmasked.

The discussion consisted of a new torrent of denunciation. The Vyazma delegate, mentioning in passing that his district had lost five secretaries in the past few years, attacked the current holder of that office as “completely corrupt” and “a polygamist.” Although a number of hostile people had been expelled, so far they had only scratched the surface. As to teachers, another delegate claimed that out of 402 in his district, 180 were alien elements.⁴⁹

As the denouncers came to the fore, Kosarev found that there were some more enthusiastic than himself.

A young woman called Mishakova from the Komsomol apparat, put up to it (it was later said) by Malenkov, made an attempt to compromise and destroy the leadership of Kosarev’s appointees in the Komsomol organizations in the Chuvash Republic. Kosarev intervened directly, prevented the proposed purge, and removed her. Mishakova wrote to Stalin on 7 October 1938. Two or three days later, she was invited to see Shkiryatov, whom Stalin had detailed to examine the case.

The whole incident, which had doubtless been arranged beforehand for that purpose, was used to complete the ruin of the last small power group which had gone through the Yezhov period unscathed. As late as 6 November, a speech of Kosarev’s to a ceremonial Komsomol plenum was promptly reported in Pravda. But on 19 to 22 November, a plenum of the Young Communist Central Committee was held. Stalin, Molotov, and Malenkov attended. Stalin strongly defended Mishakova and turned the occasion into a violent attack on the Kosarev leadership. A few days later, the majority of that Central Committee were arrested. Beria in person came for Kosarev, the first time he had done such a thing.⁵⁰ This is almost certainly significant, as is the absence of Yezhov’s name from the entire investigation. For the Police Commissar was about to fall. According to one NKVD source, Kosarev was accused of plotting with him.⁵¹

By 1939, Mishakova was a secretary of the Komsomol, in which capacity she was able to tell this story, accompanied by references to the “Kosarev gang,” to the XVIIIth Congress, as a tribute to Stalin’s sense of justice. By that time Kosarev, after torture at the hands of the NKVD interrogator Shvartsman, had been shot.

The purge of the Kosarev leadership, in its social aspect, has been interpreted as the removal of a genuine, if Stalinist, youth cadre in favor of a new conformity and anti-egalitarianism associated with the sons of the new bureaucracy.⁵²

As with their seniors, the Komsomol Central Committee was devastated: of 93 full members elected in 1936, 72 were arrested; of 35 candidate members, 21 were arrested; 319 of the organization’s 385 provincial secretaries were “repressed,” as were 2,210 of the 2,750 district secretaries.⁵³

The pre-Kosarev leaders of the Komsomol had naturally fared badly, too. The original First Secretary, E. V. Tsetlin, had been expelled from the Party as a Rightist in 1933 and arrested, but was released and returned to membership; rearrested on 16 April 1937, he was sentenced on 2 June 1937 to ten years by the Military Collegium, and to death by the local NKVD Troika at Ivanovo on 16 September 1937. His successor, 0. L. Ryvkin, was sentenced to death by the Military Collegium on 7 August 1937. The third, L. A. Shatsky, was sentenced to five years by the Special Board in March 1935, and (as we have seen) to death by the Military Collegium on 10 January 1937. P. I. Smorodin, the next, whom we have already met in his later Leningrad career, was shot on 22 February 1939. The fifth, N. P. Chaplin, was “repressed” and died 25 September 1938. The next, A. I. Milchakov, only served sixteen years in labor camp and survived.⁵⁴

A LAST BLOW AT THE ARMY

The Far Eastern Army had not been treated quite as the rest of the forces had. For strategic reasons, it had been organized as something like an independent entity.

It was the only great body of troops commanded by a Marshal—the tough, competent, and practically experienced Blyukher.

Blyukher, though his name suggests a German origin, was in fact of pure Russian descent. His peasant grandfather had had the name given to him by some whim of his landlord during the days of serfdom.⁵⁵ Ironically enough, there was something of the German stance to him. Dark and grizzled, he had a square, bull-like face with a large close-clipped moustache in the feldwebel manner covering his large upper lip. He was now forty-eight.

He had been a worker in a wagon factory and had served a thirty-two-month sentence for leading a strike while still twenty years old. He first came to prominence when, with V. V. Kuibyshev, he had established an isolated Bolshevik enclave amid a sea of White Armies, in the Samara area. In the distinguished Civil War career which followed, he had been one of the first to be given the Order of the Red Banner. Later, under the pseudonym Galen, he had acted as chief military adviser to Chiang Kai-shek. He is said, back in the early 1930s, to have opposed collectivization in the Far East on military grounds and, with Voroshilov’s support, to have obtained a certain exemption there; and there was also talk of some connection with Syrtsov.⁵⁶

While Blyukher was still in Moscow in June 1937 in connection with the Tukhachevsky “Trial,” the NKVD struck at his Army. His new Chief of Staff, Sangursky, is said to have become involved (with the Party Secretary of the Far Eastern Territory, Kutev) in what Stalin felt to be some sort of political intrigue against the leadership.⁵⁷ He was now arrested and tortured. Another account has him implicating literally hundreds of officers and in 1938 repudiating his confession and claiming that saboteurs in the NKVD were attempting to weaken the Army.⁵⁸ Sangursky is reported as still alive in Irkutsk jail in 1939,⁵⁹ full of remorse for having, under torture, given away so many officers as fellow conspirators. He was then facing a further charge—conspiracy with Yezhov to wreck the Army!

With Sangursky went the Deputy Chief of Staff, the Chief of Combat Training, and the Chief of Intelligence. In the autumn of 1937, Ingaunis, commanding the Far Eastern Air Force, was also in the Butyrka, having been severely tortured in the Lefortovo and confessing to espionage. The NKVD noncommissioned officer who tore off his insignia and Orders in the Lubyanka remarked, “Well, they certainly handed out medals to all sorts of counter-revolutionary swine!”⁶⁰ The Head of the Army’s Political Administration was arrested, too. At the same time, most of the political leadership in the eastern provinces were seized.

Even so, as far as the Army is concerned, this phase only lasted about five weeks, and was not so intense or on such a mass scale as in the other military districts. It ended with Blyukher’s return to his post.

For meanwhile, an even more important consideration had arisen: on 30 June, some patrol fighting had broken out between Soviet and Japanese troops on the Amur, and on 6 July the Japanese had seized Bolshoi Island in that stream. In spite of protests, the Russians made no attempt to dislodge them. There is no doubt that this was a probing action by Japanese military elements, who took the view that the local Soviet capacity to fight had been largely paralyzed by the Purge.

Blyukher at once started to repair as far as possible the disorganization that had already set in. Tukhachevsky’s execution, followed by the arrests in the Far Eastern Army, had left him deeply depressed.⁶¹ But in the face of the military threat, Stalin made no further move against him for the time being.

During the winter, various arrests were carried out. Corps Commander Rokossovsky had been beaten senseless and dragged off to prison, together with a number of other officers of his unit. When Rokossovsky came before a “court,” its president said that it had the evidence of one of his fellow conspirators, Adolf Kazimirovich Yushkevich, who had confessed that he and Rokossovsky had belonged to a counter-revolutionary center and had had certain instructions and tasks.

“Can the dead give evidence?” Rokossovsky asked, when he was allowed to comment.

“What do you mean, the dead?”

“Well, Adolf Kazimirovich Yushkevich was killed in 1920 at Perekop. I mentioned to the investigator that Yushkevich served in the Cavalry Group, but I accidentally forgot to mention his loss.”⁶²

Rokossovsky was merely imprisoned, and was one of those lucky enough to be released when the pressure had died down.

Meanwhile, things were to get worse.

Corps Commander Khakanian, Head of the Political Administration of the Far Eastern Army, was arrested on 1 February 1938. And at the end of June 1938, when every other part of the Army, and of the country, had been dealt with, Mekhlis arrived in Khabarovsk with a group of new political commissars. At the same time, the sinister Frinovsky steamed in, in a special train, with a large NKVD staff. The great purge of the Far Eastern Army, of which they had been cheated in 1937, was now at hand.⁶³

Mekhlis and Frinovsky first destroyed their own representatives. Mekhlis replaced the officers of the political administration; the “Gamarnik–Bulin gang” was later said to have been particularly active in the Far East.⁶⁴ Frinovsky arrested and shot the sixteen leading NKVD officials of the area. He was balked of one major figure. The Far Eastern NKVD Chief was G. Lyushkov, who had been Deputy Head of the Secret Political Department under Molchanov in the days of the Zinoviev Trial. One of the few of such a rank still left over from the Yagoda regime, he had been so far spared because of his friendly relations with Yezhov. He had now decided it was time to push his luck no further, and on 13 June he had slipped across the Manchurian border with a vast amount of intelligence information for the Japanese.⁶⁵

Having prepared the police and political striking forces, Stalin’s emissaries turned on the Army proper. Blyukher’s new staff and commanders were arrested wholesale. His Deputy Commander, his new Chief of Staff, his new Air Commander, Pumpur—who had served in Spain—and his leading Army Commander, Levandovsky, recently transferred from the Caucasus, all disappeared. (Pumpur was later released, but was rearrested and shot in 1942.) But now it was not only a matter of a few seniors. Forty percent of the commanders up to regimental level, 70 percent of divisional and corps staffs, and over 80 percent of the front staff were seized, as NKVD lorries raided the officers’ quarters night after night. Blyukher was soon “standing amidst the shambles of what had been his command.”⁶⁶

Once again he was reprieved, and for the same reason as before. The Japanese had seen their chance. On 6 July 1938 they launched a probing attack with limited objectives on Lake Hassan.

Fortunately, there were still a few competent officers who had survived or been transferred to the area—in particular, Corps Commander Shtern, who had recently been Chief Military Adviser in Spain and was now given command of one of the armies into which Blyukher’s front had been reorganized. He was to have time to fight his battle and report on it to the next Party Congress and even to be elected to the new Central Committee before he, too, disappeared.

After five weeks of intermittent fighting, the Far Eastern troops first contained the Japanese and then pressed them back. By 11 August, the battle was over. A week later, on 18 August, Blyukher was recalled to Moscow.⁶⁷

The “Stalin air route,” pioneered with such panache at the time of the Zinoviev Trial, was being put to typical use by the General Secretary. A special pilot, Alexander Golovanov, later to rise to be Chief Marshal of the Soviet Air Force until his removal after Stalin’s death in 1953, had been allotted by the NKVD for urgent travel by members of the Central Committee and Government. In 1935 and 1936, he had served in the labor-camp administration in Siberia. Now he was provided with a special multi-engined aircraft, and in 1937 and 1938 this was used to transport arrested officials from the Far East and elsewhere.⁶⁸ He had lately carried most of Blyukher’s subordinates and their NKVD escorts back to Moscow.

But the Marshal himself went by train. He was not yet, however, under arrest. At the end of August, he made a report to the Military Soviet of the People’s Commissariat of Defense. “Criticism was sharp and one-sided.” Voroshilov attacked him, while Stalin, who had always defended him previously, remained silent. Later Voroshilov told him that he was not to return to the Far East, but to remain at the disposal of the Military Revolutionary Soviet “until a post suitable for a Marshal” could be found. Meanwhile, he should go on leave to Sochi, the resort in the Caucasus.⁶⁹

Blyukher telegraphed his wife to return, adding that his health was poor. He put some money aside for her, in case he was arrested. For the chances of this now seemed high. She and the family joined him soon afterwards, together with his brother, Pavel, commander of an Air Force unit in the Far East. By this time, he had learned of the arrest of Army Commander Fedko, Assistant Commissar of Defense, which seems in some way to have been associated with his own. Fedko put up armed resistance and ordered his guard to hold the NKVD men at gunpoint while he telephoned Voroshilov, who told him to yield “temporarily.”⁷⁰

On 22 October, on Stalin’s personal orders,⁷¹ four men in black civilian suits entered Blyukher’s place and arrested all the family. Blyukher and his wife were taken to the Lefortovo, where Beria personally conducted the first examinations. He was then continuously interrogated by other NKVD officers working in shifts. The charge was of having been a Japanese spy since 1921, and of having planned to escape to Japan with the help of his Air Force brother, Pavel (this second charge at least was not totally implausible; after all, Lyushkov had just done precisely that). The Marshal was now told that in addition to the rest of the family, his first wife, Galina, had been arrested in Leningrad. (He had taken the pseudonym Galen from her name.)⁷² Apart from using all these hostages, the NKVD also offered him an inducement: if he confessed, he would get off with a ten-year sentence. However, he refused to sign the protoco1.⁷³

On 28 October 1938, medals were awarded to the heroes of the recent fighting in the Far East, including Shtern. The true victor was now undergoing severe torture by his NKVD interrogators.

There is no evident reason for the NKVD to have practiced or feigned on this occasion the haste with which the May—June 1937 purge of the Tukhachevsky group had been carried out. And unlike the procedure not only in that case, but even in the July 1938 military executions, we learn from a Soviet publication of the Khrushchev period that Blyukher was killed “without court or sentence.”⁷⁴ It was also stated that “uninterrupted interrogation broke down the health of this virile man.”⁷⁵ And we are now told that by 6 November, he had been beaten until “unrecognizable” and died as the result of “inhuman beatings” though without signing any confession.⁷⁶ (Fedko and Khakanian, his presumed associates, were not to be executed until the following February.)

His wife, Glafira, spent seven months in solitary confinement in the Lubyanka,⁷⁷ then eight years in camps, but survived. Their five-year-old daughter was sent to an NKVD orphanage in Kemerovo, where her mother eventually found her, being the first mother ever to appear there.⁷⁸

There have always been rumors that Blyukher, or some of the officers round him, had seriously entertained the idea of a revolt. There is no reliable evidence of this, though Lyushkov gave information to the Japanese about “opposition groupings” in Siberia. Much of this was seen, and transmitted back to Moscow, by the Soviet spy Richard Sorge. And whether it was factual or speculative, it seems from the timing that it may have been used against Blyukher.⁷⁹

The true reasons for proceeding against the Marshal seems to have been that he was a comparatively independent-minded soldier, and (as a candidate member of the Central Committee) a politician, in a position of power and influence. His fall and death mark the end of the last tenuous hope of action against Stalin. By the beginning of November, official listings of the military leadership ran Voroshilov, Mekhlis, Shchadenko, Shaposhnikov, Budenny, Kulik, Timoshenko.⁸⁰ For the first time, the Purge operatives ranked before the surviving soldiery. A few days later, the same order of listing contained an even more insulting and symptomatic insertion: Frinovsky, briefly become People’s Commissar for the Navy, immediately after Voroshilov.⁸¹

THE FALL OF YEZHOV

It was around the end of October that the first overt moves against Yezhov took place. Kaganovich and others persuaded Stalin to appoint a secret Commission of the Central Committee to report on the NKVD. Its members were Molotov, Beria, Vyshinsky, and Malenkov. It reported in mid-November, in terms hostile to Yezhov: two secret resolutions of the Central Committee criticized irregularities in investigative methods, and called for “recruiting honest people” to the security agencies. Over the next few weeks, several of Yezhov’s men were removed from their posts.⁸² Finally, on 8 December 1938, it was announced that his rule, at once pettifogging and bloodthirsty, had come to an end. He was replaced as People’s Commissar for Internal Affairs by Beria, retaining only his Commissariat of Water Transport.

For a time, Beria appeared together with Yezhov on the platforms and in the formal lists. Yezhov had by January dropped back to his former “correct” seniority in these lists, lowest of the candidate members of the Politburo (Khrushchev being absent in Kiev). He is last publicly mentioned on the presidium for the anniversary of Lenin’s death, on 22 January.⁸³

Although not a delegate to the XVIIIth Party Congress, in March, he was present as a member of the outgoing Central Committee. And when the Congress’s “Senioren Konvent,” or informal Council of Elders, met to consider names for the new Central Committee, Yezhov’s went forward. There were no objections until Stalin said he thought him unsuitable, since he was involved in a plot with Frinovsky and others to use Stalin’s own bodyguard to assassinate him. Yezhov answered that it had been he who had exposed this plot. But Stalin retorted that this was only to cover himself; moreover, he had arrested many innocent people while protecting the guilty. Stalin ended by telling those present that in his opinion Yezhov was unfit to serve on the Central Committee, though it was, of course, up to them to decide.⁸⁴

But Yezhov was only arrested in early April, at the Water Transport Commissariat, where he had chaired the Collegium but not taken part in the discussions, keeping silent or making paper airplanes. He is reported as confessing freely, and implicating others as required. He was charged with framing innocent people, with plotting to kill Stalin and seize power,⁸⁵ and with being a British spy since the Civil War.⁸⁶ But he was not shot until the following year.⁸⁷ Frinovsky had remained Commissar for the Navy until removed and arrested in March. Otherwise, Yezhov’s leadership group in the NKVD had almost all been purged by the end of 1938. About 150 of his followers were shot.⁸⁸

By March 1939, Beria’s men were everywhere in power; his own Georgian following held many of the major NKVD posts—in Moscow, Merkulov and Kobulov; in Leningrad, Goglidze; in the Maritime Province, Gvishiani; in Byelorussia, Tsanava.⁸⁹ These were what was later to be characterized as the “Beria gang,” until they all fell together in 1953.

The appointment of Beria is usually taken as a convenient date to mark the end of the Great Purge. Of Beria!—that is, of a man whose name, even in official Soviet circles, is now the very embodiment of terror and torture. And yet there is some sense in the convention.

Yezhov’s removal was a simple piece of Stalinist expediency. The fact that most of his subordinates were executed under Beria was a simple matter of political mechanics. For apart from Yezhov himself and his personal nominees, the leading purgers, Stalin’s own agents, did not suffer. Shkiryatov, who had acted as Yezhov’s assistant, simply returned to Party work, and died, fully honored as Head of the Party Control Committee, a year after Stalin’s own death, in 1954. Mekhlis and Vyshinsky also survived into the 1950s. As for Malenkov, he flourished greatly in the years that followed, together with his rival Zhdanov.

In fact, throughout the Purge, Stalin had largely avoided public responsibility. And now, when the Terror had gone as far as it conceivably could, he could profitably sacrifice the man who had overtly carried out his secret orders, the man the Party and public then blamed most.

It would perhaps be going too far to compare the situation too closely with one common in despotisms—like the Byzantine favorite who “instead of being suffered to possess the reward of guilt was soon afterwards circumvented and destroyed by the more powerful villainy of the Minister himself, who retained sense and spirit enough to abhor the instrument of his own crimes.” Stalin had perhaps no strong liking for Yezhov, who never figures as one of his boon companions. But it would doubtless be Yezhov’s narrow political comprehension, rather than any moral deficiency, that his superior might despise. The comparison is, rather, with the old autocratic tradition of disposing of the executioner who has killed one’s rivals and thereby attracted to himself the main hatred of the survivors—a matter, in fact, of a common historical action which the wretched Yezhov had not the wit to foresee.

As we have said, by mid-1938 the NKVD itself, at the lower, operational level, had already wished to stop the progress of the Purge for obvious reasons. At the rate arrests were going, practically all the urban population would have been implicated within a few months. But it was caught in its own system. It was impossible for it not to arrest a man who had been denounced as an agent of Hitler. And an interrogator who did not demand the names of accomplices from each of his victims would soon himself come under denunciation for lack of vigilance or enthusiasm. By this time, the idea had grown among prisoners that the more denunciations they made the better;

Some even held the strange theory that the more people were jailed the sooner it would be realized that all this was nonsense and harmful to the Party…. My neighbor on the plank bed in the camp at Kolyma had once been head of the political department of a railway. He prided himself on having incriminated some 300 people. He said, as I had often heard in prison in Moscow, “The worse it is the better it is—like that, it will all be cleared up more quickly.”⁹⁰

And, in fact, this was of some effect in the railway context (though no doubt elsewhere as well). The Byelorussian leaders complained that the NKVD had arrested every second railway official and that the system was near paralysis.⁹¹

Weissberg recounts the arrest in the spring of 1938 of the secretary of the Kharkov medical counci1.⁹² A man with an excellent memory, he knew the names of all the doctors in the city and denounced them all, pointing out that he was in an especially good position to have recruited them and that they were in any case largely from hostile social classes. He refused to name any of them as the leader of the plot, claiming that post for himself. The doctor told his cell mates that he had been inspired to take this course by reading about the case of a witch burning in Germany at the time of the Inquisition when a young theologian charged with intelligence with the devil had at once pleaded guilty and named the members of the Inquisition as his accomplices. The interrogators were unable to torture him, as he had confessed, and the case went up to the archbishop, who put an end to the business.

A climax of the mass Purge came in the first half of 1938, and the following months saw something of a diminution of pressure. Whether this was due solely to a simple loss of momentum at the lower, operational level, or to political pressures being put on Yezhov from above, is not clear. Stalin’s discontent with Yezhov certainly began in the early summer, when the plans to bring Beria in must have been laid. But he left Yezhov in office, and veteran prisoners speak of a climax of brutality in September.⁹³ In October, the number of Military Collegium sentences actually increased.⁹⁴

Even before Yezhov’s fall was formalized, a significant case was reported from Omsk, where the Regional Prosecutor and his assistant were tried for abuse of authority, unjustified arrests, and detention of innocent people in prison, sometimes for as long as five months. They were sentenced to two years’ imprisonment.⁹⁵

This sentence seems only a partial triumph for justice. A few shootings of NKVD interrogators for extorting false confessions by violence are reported to symbolize the actual end of the Yezhov period. Captain Shiroky, of the Kiev NKVD, was sentenced after having been made Head of the Moldavian NKVD. One prison mentions him as a “not particularly harsh examining magistrate.”⁹⁶ Five other Moldavian NKVD men were also shot.⁹⁷ There had, indeed, been occasional similar trials before, and speeches throughout the Purge period are full of condemnation of unjust persecutions. But this time, the demonstration was clearly intentional. When certain Party officials became too free with their criticisms of police methods, though, Stalin pulled them up sharply with the telegram of 20 January 1939, explaining that torture was authorized (see here).

At the same time, certain cases which had become more of a nuisance than they were worth were dropped. For example, for the physicist Weissberg an agitation had been raised in the West to which even very left-wing scientists had subscribed. Moreover, papers in his investigation had been inadequate and muddled. It was now abandoned. (Weissberg explains how technical difficulties arose: when it was more or less accepted that the charges against him would be withdrawn, it was found that there were over twenty witnesses who had provided the evidence and it would be necessary to examine them all over again, and by this time they were, of course, scattered in camps throughout the country.)

The gross result of Beria’s assumption of the NKVD was that a proportion of those in prison awaiting trial were released, making a good impression on the populace. Of those already in camp, apart from certain special rehabilitations, like those of some military men in 1940, almost none were freed. An NKVD officer, himself under arrest, predicted this:

‘Some of us will be released just to make it clear there has been a change; the remainder will go off to the camps to serve their sentences just the same.’

‘What will be their criterion?’

‘Chance. People are always trying to explain things by fixed laws. When you’ve looked behind the scenes as I have you know that blind chance rules a man’s life in this country of ours.’⁹⁸

But in the towns and villages of the Soviet Union, the pressure of haphazard mass arrests greatly eased. The country had been broken, and henceforward a limited number of arrests of men who had given some sort of cause for suspicion of disloyalty was sufficient to maintain the habit of submission and silence.

In general, Beria consolidated and institutionalized the system. From the “Yezhovshchina,” he developed, rather than an emergency operation against the people, a permanent method of rule.

STALIN AND BERIA CONSOLIDATE

The imprisoned Politburo members were not among those fortunate enough to benefit by the fall of Yezhov. While Ushakov and Nikolayev were at work on Eikhe, their colleague Rodos was submitting Kossior and Chubar to “long tortures,” receiving “detailed instructions from Beria.”⁹⁹

Rodos was to be described by Khrushchev as “a vile person with the brain of a bird and morally completely degenerate.”¹⁰⁰ Summoned in 1956 before the Central Committee Presidium, he said, “I was told that Kossior and Chubar were enemies of the people and for this reason, I, as an investigative judge, had to make them confess that they were enemies…. I thought I was executing the orders of the Party.”¹⁰¹ Khrushchev expressed great indignation at this answer, but all the same it is the only justification he gives for the activities of himself and his surviving colleagues during the same period.

On 22 to 26 February 1939, Kossior, Chubar, and others came to trial with another group of figures from politics and the Army, who appear to have been called the “Military–Fascist Center.” Corps Commander Khakanian was shot on 22 February, and Marshal Yegorov on 23 February (though we are recently told that Yegorov, reported by Ulrikh to Stalin as “tried” and shot, died under interrogation).¹⁰² On 23 February also came the execution of Kosarev, after a trial which lasted for ten minutes; he had been severely tortured, but had not confessed. The charges included espionage for Poland.¹⁰³ Presumably, the remainder of the Komsomol leadership was tried on the same day.

On 25 February the three survivors of the abortive Leningrad Center that Zakovsky had mounted in 1937 were shot—B. P. Pozern, P. I. Smorodin, and A. I. Ugarov. So were others, including the chairman of the Uzbek Council of People’s Commissars, S. Segizbayev.

On 26 February came the turn of Kossior, Chubar, and Postyshev. Kossior had been produced by Yezhov, before the latter’s fall, at a “confrontation” with Petrovsky in the presence of Stalin. Kossior, completely broken, had admitted that he was a Polish spy and, on another account, to terrorism.¹⁰⁴ Postyshev had also confessed.¹⁰⁵ Others shot that day include Army Commander Fedko. He had confessed to being a German spy when Beria brought Voroshilov to see him in Lefortovo.¹⁰⁶ Mirzoyan, too, was now shot, having confessed to being an agent of Bukharin, and implicating all the other Kazakh leaders.¹⁰⁷

Others shot at this time included several of the most prominent NKVD men, such as Boris Berman (sentenced on 22 February).¹⁰⁸ Among them was Zakovsky (who had been badly tortured). He is said to have been a British spy.¹⁰⁹ Thus by a certain irony, Zakovsky seems to have perished in the same case as the Lenin-graders who had been his intended victims.

We are told in a recent article in Izvestiya that those now sentenced were “taken directly to the cellars,” and that “it was all done in such haste that a man had scarcely been shot when others sentenced to death were coming down the corridor.”¹¹⁰

Kossior’s two surviving brothers, Kazimir and Mikhail, perished too, as did his wife, Elizaveta, put on “List 4” and shot;¹¹¹ and the wife of one brother is reported attempting suicide on receiving a ten-year sentence.¹¹² Postyshev’s oldest son, Valentin, was shot, and his other children were sent to labor camps.¹¹³ His wife, Tamara, was viciously tortured night after night in the Lefortovo, often being returned to her cell bleeding all over her back and unable to walk.¹¹⁴ She is reported shot. Chubar’s wife was also executed.¹¹⁵ Kosarev’s wife and his seventeen-year-old daughter were sentenced to ten years, and his father-in-law, the Rector of the Trade Academy, was shot.¹¹⁶

There remained one Politburo figure who, though in bad odor, was not under arrest—Petrovsky. His position had now been extremely difficult for two years.

Among the Leningraders arrested in 1937 was his elder son, Peter, who had edited the local Leningradskaya pravda. Petrovsky, candidate member of the Politburo and Head of State of the Ukrainian Republic, was unable to get news of him. He met a “stone wall of silence.” Friends, “high officials in the Party and State,” made several attempts to find out the facts. Finally they had to give up. The strictest instructions had been given to prevent anyone from discovering what went on “behind the walls of the Lubyanka.” Young Petrovsky never emerged alive.¹¹⁷ Another son, Corps Commander L. G. Petrovsky, was expelled from the Party and Army, but though arrested was later released.¹¹⁸

Meanwhile, in July 1937, when various illegalities were being perpetrated in the Ukraine without the consent of the leadership, Petrovsky had written to Kalinin, his titular superior, complaining that the principles of Party democracy were being overborne.¹¹⁹ This is consistent with his failure to join in the denunciations at the Ukrainian plenum that month.

He had, it is said, “become critical of the personality cult.”¹²⁰ But on 4 February 1938 he was awarded the Order of Lenin for his sixtieth birthday. And he remained theoretically Chairman of the Ukrainian Supreme Soviet throughout the fall of all his colleagues. After a conversation with Stalin which he described as “short and painful,” he was removed, in June 1938, from his Ukrainian posts.¹²¹ This was, it was pointed out in Khrushchev’s time, done “unconstitutionally.”¹²² At the 7 November Parade, he did not appear with the leadership, and was henceforth not to be named in the listings.

A political case was concocted against Petrovsky in the usual way. The caretaker of a villa near Kiev which had been used by the Ukrainian leaders made, after beatings, a confession incriminating him. Petrovsky’s secretary is also reported under arrest in the same circumstances.¹²³ A brother of Petrovsky is reported in the Butyrka in 1938.¹²⁴

In March 1939, during the XVIIIth Congress, charges were made as a result of which he was not elected to the new Central Committee: he was accused of friendship with K. V. Sukhomlin, Ukrainian Politburo member since exposed as a Japanese spy; of having failed to report his knowledge of S. V. Kossior’s connections with foreign counter-revolutionary organizations; and of having (presumably in the 1920s) opposed Kaganovich’s nomination as Ukrainian First Secretary.¹²⁵

In fact, there is no doubt that a case against him, long prepared, was now to be launched. But Stalin held his hand. Petrovsky was relieved of his membership in the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet (his last and titular appointment) on 31 May 1939 in a public fashion and with the title “Comrade”—an indication that his name was not yet unsayable.

He had been unable to get any employment for some months, living on whatever his wife could earn. Finally, in June 1939, he was allowed to take up the post of Assistant Director of the Museum of the Revolution, offered him by another former Duma member, Fedor Samoilov, which he held until Stalin’s death.¹²⁶ His name disappeared from reference books, and most foreigners imagined that he had been executed. But it continued to appear in one single list, that of former Bolshevik members of the Duma. Stalin shot none of them;¹²⁷ the others, all third-rate figures, survived to die natural deaths. Since I first noted this, an account has appeared from the Petrovsky family archives, in which Stalin shouts at Petrovsky that his former membership in the Duma would not save him.¹²⁸ But it did, or something did.

Petrovsky survived Stalin, only dying in 1958. In fact, he was the first figure to be restored to favor after Stalin’s death. A decree of 28 April 1953¹²⁹ awarded him the Order of the Red Banner of Labor in connection with his seventy-fifth birthday and “his services to the Soviet State.” His real birthday was on 4 February, at a time when Stalin was still alive, when nothing had been said of it. So the incident was quite plainly a conscious political demonstration, made during Beria’s attack on the Stalin heritage.

During the Purge period, Petrovsky had certainly suffered, if less than many. Yet it would perhaps not be inappropriate to recall that, when Commissar of Internal Affairs in 1918, he had ordered the unconditional shooting of all engaged in any sort of “White Guard” activity.¹³⁰

At the same time as the February 1939 executions came an event which caused little stir. One last ex-oppositionist remained. Krupskaya had been able to do little during these years, though Stalin had allowed her to save from death one or two figures like I. D. Chigurin, arrested in 1937—even though, his health ruined and not fully rehabilitated, he had to live in poverty thereafter. Although still a member of the Central Committee, Krupskaya had only the minor job of Assistant People’s Commissar for Education, and even there was “deprived of the possibility of influencing decisions in education.”¹³¹

She died on 28 February, and Stalin himself carried the urn with her ashes at her funeral.

Nadezhda Krupskaya will no more protect

The innocent, the dying, those executed like rats¹³²

even to the slight extent that she had done so. The very next day, the head of the Commissariat of Education’s publishing house ordered his subordinates, “Don’t print another word about Krupskaya.” A part of her works was sent off to the “special store” sections of libraries; part was buried in oblivion and not republished.¹³³ One Soviet account has it that she was poisoned, but others deny it.¹³⁴

THE XVIIITH CONGRESS

The XVIIIth Party Congress on 10 to 21 March 1939, which saw Yezhov’s fall, was the scene of the complete consolidation of all Stalin had striven for since that of 1934. The changes were extraordinary.

Of the 1,966 delegates to the previous Congress, 1,108 had been arrested for counter-revolutionary crimes.¹³⁵ Even of the residue lucky enough to survive, only 59 now appeared as delegates. Of these, 24 were old Central Committee members, leaving only 35 of the 1,827 rank-and-file delegates of five years previously—less than 2 percent! This is an indication of how literally we may take the thesis that Stalin created an entirely new Party in this period.

The list of the Central Committee membership now elected shows that 55 of the 71 who had been full members in 1934 had gone, and 60 of the 68 candidate members. Of the 115 names no longer appearing, which included some natural and some possibly natural deaths, 98 had been shot, as Khrushchev later stated in the 1956 Secret Speech. The most recent official account gives the total sooner or later killed by an executioner, by a murderer (Kirov), or by their own hand as 107.¹³⁶ The discrepancy is due to the inclusion or otherwise of suicides, assassinations and so on, and of those shot at a later date, such as Lozovsky.

In the new Committee one can note the groupings—no longer political factions, as in the pre-Stalin period, but personal followings—which were to contend for Stalin’s favor over the next fourteen years, and for power thereafter.

Zhdanov and his group are well represented, with himself, Shcherbakov, Kosygin, and A. A. Kuznetsov as full members, and Popkov and Rodionov as candidate members. The first two were to be the alleged victims of the later Doctors’ Plot, and three of the other four were to be shot in the “Leningrad Case” of 1949–1950.

Another group was associated with Malenkov: he and V. M. Andrianov in the Central Committee; Pervukhin, Ponomarenko, Pegov, Tevosyan, and Malyshev as candidate members—together with Shatalin, Malenkov’s closest associate, on the Revision Commission.

Beria was better represented still. With himself, Bagirov, and V. N. Merkulov on the Central Committee, and Gvishiani, Goglidze, Kobulov, Dekanozov, Arutinov, Bakradze, and Charkviani as candidate members (plus Tsanava on the Revision Commission), we see his control in the Secret Police and in the political mechanism in the Caucasus. (There were four other NKVD representatives—Nikishov, Head of Dalstroy; V. P. Zhuravliev; Kruglov; and Maslennikov as candidate members—a total of ten secret police on the Central Committee, by far the highest number yet.)

Khrushchev, too, had his band—four full members of the Committee from his own selection in the Ukraine.

Stalin’s own personal group was also, of course, fully represented, with Mekhlis, Shkiryatov, Poskrebyshev, Shchadenko, and Vyshinsky.

In the Politburo, the losses had been less great than at the lower level. But they were still remarkable. Kirov had been assassinated, and Kuibyshev had died or been poisoned. Ordzhonikidze had been either murdered or forced into a suicide which was scarcely different from murder. Rudzutak had been shot eight months earlier; Kossior, Chubar, and Postyshev, just before the Congress. Petrov-sky had been removed, and was in Moscow, uncertain of his fate and begging for a menial post. Of the four who had been brought in between the Congresses, Khrushchev and Zhdanov were balanced by Eikhe, in prison awaiting execution, and the doomed Yezhov. Of four of the fallen leaders, it has now been specifically said that they were tortured (Rudzutak, Eikhe, Kossior, and Chubar).

On 22 March 1939, four promotions were made in and to the Politburo, of those who had served Stalin most satisfactorily during the recent period. Zhdanov and Khrushchev were raised to full membership; Beria became a candidate member, as did Shvernik, who after Tomsky’s removal in June 1929 had been appointed head of the unions. He had adequately transformed them into organizations for mobilizing and disciplining labor.

There is a notable difference in Stalin’s treatment of the more senior generation of his supporters on the Politburo and those promoted later. If we take the members of that body who supported him against the oppositions: of the eleven promoted to it up to July 1926, six survived right through the Purges, two were physically destroyed by informal means (Kirov and Ordzhonikidze), one died in doubtful circumstances (Kuibyshev), one, though removed from his posts, survived until after Stalin’s own death (Petrovsky), and only one was “tried” and shot (Rudzutak). But of the eight promoted from July 1926 until the end of 1937, only one (Zhdanov) survived. All the others were executed.

This distinction should perhaps be interpreted as follows: in the earlier period, it was not a question of Stalin simply nominating rapidly promoted figures from the second rank of the Party. He was bound to rely on men who had reached high position to some extent on their reputations, and who in any case were widely enough known to the leading circles of the Party and had good enough Party records for their presence not to appear absurd on a body still containing distinguished and widely known oppositionists.

They were men who, in however minor a way compared with the Trotskys and Bukharins, yet represented a continuity with Lenin’s leading cadre. Some of them, like Kaganovich, were eager supporters of the Great Terror. Others, like Molotov, may have had qualms but became enthusiastic accomplices, whether through fear or from other motives. More reluctant figures, like Kalinin, remained useful figureheads. In disposing of them, Stalin inclined to roundabout and concealed methods. But the Eikhes and Postyshevs carried little more Party prestige than the other members of the Central Committee, and they were as readily expendable if they failed to satisfy.

The new leadership, Stalinist in every sense, made the Congress a triumphal celebration. At the same time, dissociating themselves from Yezhovism, the most notorious Purge operators deplored more strongly than ever the excesses of the Purge.

Shkiryatov quoted at length an incident of a man in Archangel wrongly removed from his job, arrested, and restored as a result of an appeal to the Central Committee. Zhdanov referred to a man who had written 142 denunciations, all false, and raised a number of cases in which individual Party members had been wrongly expelled, including such incidents as one in Tambov province, where the expulsion and wrongful arrest of one man led to the expulsion from the Party of his wife and seven other members, and from the Komsomol of twenty-eight Young Communists, while ten non-Party teachers lost their jobs.

Khrushchev’s ally Serdyuk expressed horror at a denunciation of a large number of enemies of the people in the Party apparatus in Kiev which had turned out on investigation to be signed by someone using a false name, and to be in the handwriting of the Head of the Cultural Section of one of the District Committees. Another case, also in Kiev, was of a woman teacher who in 1936 and 1937 had denounced a large number of innocent people, and also obtained by blackmail and threats 5,000 rubles from various organizations and three free trips to a resort; Serdyuk explained to the disgusted delegates that her slanders had been written at the dictation of “enemies of the people since unmasked,” and that she herself had been sentenced to five years.

Stalin himself summed up: the Purge had been accompanied by “grave mistakes,” indeed “more mistakes than might have been expected.” “Undoubtedly,” he went on, “we shall have no further need of resorting to the method of mass purges. Nevertheless, the Purge of 1933–6 was unavoidable and its results, on the whole, were beneficial.”¹³⁷

The phrase “1933–6” might have struck the layman a little oddly. The fact is that the expulsions from the Party at that time had been constitutionally and publicly authorized, while the later Purge had not ever been formalized, and so could be taken as irrelevant.

Party executions, in fact, continued. Over the next years, Stalin and Beria wound up most of Yezhov’s unfinished business.

In July 1939, the Prosecutor’s sanction for Eikhe’s arrest was at last obtained, to some extent legalizing the position. Eikhe was presented with the charges against him on 25 October 1939, and wrote to Stalin protesting his innocence—and blaming the frame-up in part on Trotskyites he now took credit for having persecuted in West Siberia. Ushakov and Nikolayev-Zhurid, he added, had “utilized the knowledge that my broken ribs have not properly mended and have caused me great pain,” as the result of which he had incriminated himself and others. He asked for an end to “the vile provocation which wound itself like a snake round many persons, in large measure through my meanness and criminal slander.”¹³⁸ There is a story that, temporarily insane by torture in 1938, he had cried out that he confessed his “guilt of belonging to a criminal organization which goes by the name of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party (bolsheviks).”¹³⁹

One of the charges against Eikhe is a trifle mysterious. He was accused of being responsible for certain “resolutions of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party (bolsheviks) and of the Council of People’s Commissars.” He pleaded that the resolutions in question “were not made on my initiative and without my participation,” and were “in any case correct.” Those made without his “participation” can only have been resolutions of the Council of People’s Commissars, to which he did not belong until October 1937. The natural explanation would seem to be that the charge was a general one, made against a number of accused, some of whom had participated.

Eikhe’s letters to Stalin were ignored, though evidently kept on file. On 2 February 1940 he was finally brought before a court, where he withdrew his confessions and again attributed them to torture by the investigator, and was then shot. (His wife was also executed.)¹⁴⁰ It is interesting, in view of the previous association of political and military executions, that Admiral Dushenov, Commander of the Northern Fleet, former sailor on the Aurora, perished on 3 February (though on one in other ways inaccurate fictional account, he died in a labor camp).¹⁴¹ But these executions are chiefly remarkable as being included in a final settlement with the Yezhovites. The operation seems to have taken place in two phases: one around 26 and 27 January, and the other around 2 to 4 February. Frinovsky was shot on 3 February, and NKVD veteran M. A. Trilisser, Soviet representative on the Executive Committee of the Comintern (under the pseudonym Moskvin), on 2 February, together with Mikhail Kol’stov and the producer Meyerhold. Meyerhold’s alleged accomplice in the writers’ conspiracy, Isaak Babel, had been shot on 27 January, charged in addition with links with Yezhov. We now learn that several veteran NKVD men—I. M. Kedrov, L. I. Reykhman, and V. P. Golubev—were shot on 25 to 27 January while others, like Ushakov and Nikolayev-Zhwid, are also given as shot “in January 1940”—so they preceded their victim Eikhe to the grave, if only by days and as part of the same alleged conspiracy. Some recent Soviet sources give 1 April 1940 as Yezhov’s death date, but a more authoritative statement says “January 1940,”¹⁴² so this set of killings seems to mark Stalin’s final winding up of the Yezhovshchina.

None of those liquidated at this time could be considered as anything resembling an alternative political leadership to which the Party or the country might have turned in a crisis of the regime. In fact, few figures of any repute still survived. Bubnov had been shot, or died in prison, on 12 January 1940.fn1 (His daughter Valya was sent to labor camp.)¹⁴³ And the last leading figure of the Stalinist cadres to go was Antipov, who (presumably having been the token non-death sentence in one of the earlier mass killings) was liquidated in Stalin’s elimination during the first German advance of all former such cadres remaining. Stalin’s victory on the political front had been complete. Now, in the disaster arising from his own miscalculation, no move to replace him was possible. Subjected to this very severe test, the Purge proved to have accomplished its object.