The Whisperers

* There is no record of Piatnitsky’s speech, and no surviving stenographic record of the June plenum, although there is evidence which suggests that whatever Piatnitsky had said was erased from the corrected stenogram (a common practice in the archives of the Central Committee) where it might encourage other dissidents. Before closing the last plenum session on 29 June, Stalin announced: ‘As far as Piatnitsky is concerned, the investigation is ongoing. It should be completed in the next few days.’ At the bottom of the page there is a handwritten note by one of Stalin’s secretaries: ‘This communication was crossed out by comrade Stalin because it should not go into the stenogram’ (RGASPI, f. 17, op. 2, d. 622, l. 220). There may be other records of the alleged incident in closed archives (such as the Presidential Archive in the Kremlin). Until that evidence becomes available, the only record of Piatnitsky’s stand against the mass arrests of the Old Bolsheviks comes from his son Vladimir, who claims to have reconstructed the events of the June plenum from his father’s personal file in the FSB archive, fragmentary evidence in other archives and the alleged reminiscences of Kaganovich, as related to him by Samuil Guberman, the head of Kaganovich’s secretariat (Zagovor, pp. 59–70; interviews with Vladimir Piatnitsky, St Petersburg, September 2005. See also, in support of the Piatnitsky version of events, B. Starkov, ‘Ar’ergardnye boi staroi partiinoi gvardii’, in Oni ne molchali (Moscow, 1991), pp. 215–25).