The Great Terror

6 Last Stand

fn1

Kossior, Voroshilov, Kalinin, Chubar, Kaganovich, Ordzhonikidze, Andreyev, and Postyshev (Pravda, 28 August 1936).

fn2

In the January 1937 Trial itself, there was to be a curious reflection of this attitude: an engineer formerly sentenced in connection with the Shakhty Trial, Boyarshchinov, was referred to as having become an honest Soviet engineer, killed by the conspirators because he was exposing their wrongful methods of work.

fn3

For example, in

Pravda

of 6 January 1937, a Ukrainian public report is made to all four bodies: to the Central Committee in Moscow, it simply goes to Stalin; to the Central Committee in Kiev, to both Kossior and Postyshev. All this was later to be censured as a personality cult, reflecting years of complacency on the part of Postyshev and his entourage, who as a result had “let in enemies” (

Pravda

, 29 May 1937).

fn4

An early adumbration of the line to be used in the Korean War in the 1950s.

fn5

One difference between Byng’s situation and that of the Soviet industrialists 200 years later is that on his tomb in Southill, Bedfordshire, it was possible at once for his family to erect a monument, with the famous inscription beginning “To the Perpetual Disgrace of Public Justice …”

fn6

Which was by no means a foregone conclusion. Yezhov had given Ulrikh instructions on the sentencing on 28 January: all the accused were to be shot. Stalin must have changed his mind (as he had about the names for trial—Livshits and Turok being added at the last moment) (

lzvestiya TsK KPSS

, no. 9 [1989]).

fn7

Although we may note that the Secretary of the Azov-Black Sea Committee, Malinov, and the head of his Party Organs Department were to be denounced as Trotskyite conspirators (

Pravda

, 5 June 1937).