The Great Terror

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

What was there to be said against him?

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

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

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

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

SABOTEURS IN SIBERIA

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

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

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