The Great Terror

More important was the third and last of the saboteur groups—that devoted to wrecking the railways. Its three leaders were Yakov Livshits, an Old Bolshevik and reformed Trotskyite, who was now Kaganovich’s Deputy People’s Commissar of Communications, and the lesser figures of Knyazev, Assistant Chief of the Central Traffic Department in the Commissariat, who had formerly been Head of the South Urals Railway, and Turok, Assistant Head of the Traffic Department of the Perm Railway.

Livshits’s dismissal was announced on 14 November, and Knyazev was giving evidence in mid-December, later than the other main figures, so it seems that the railway theme was the last to be brought in. It implicated in particular Serebryakov, who had run the Commissariat in the 1920s, and it linked up with Boguslavsky, who was responsible for railway wrecking in the West Siberian set-up.

The charge of sabotage was a serious one. But, ironically enough, it could have been represented to the Central Committee as a sign of possible clemency. Professor Ramzin, the main “saboteur” in the “Industrial Party” Case, not only had been amnestied a couple of years after sentence and repentance, but had been restored to office and to favor, and even awarded an Order.fn2

Stalin is reported back in Moscow, from his holiday, at a reception for a Mongolian delegation on 4 November. With him were several members of the Politburo, including Mikoyan and, of course, Yezhov. At the 7 November Parade, all the Politburo members based in Moscow were on the stand.

The slogans for this nineteenth anniversary of the Revolution included a violent attack on the Trotskyite—Zinovievite spies. There was no reference to the Right deviation, which presumably shows that the issue was still in abeyance. But the cat-and-mouse game with Bukharin continued. At the Red Square celebrations, he and his wife were on one of the minor stands. A soldier came over with Stalin’s invitation to join him on the Lenin mausoleum.⁴⁵ Soon after, Bukharin was served with an eviction order from his Kremlin apartment. Stalin telephoned, and on being told of this said angrily that the evictors must get out immediately, and they did so.⁴⁶

And now Stalin, perhaps looking ahead from the purge of the ex-oppositionists to the completer sweep he was to make of the Party, made his first move against one of his own followers.

Postyshev had served in Kiev from 1923, becoming a Secretary of the Kiev Committee in 1924, and from 1926 to 1930 had been a member of the Ukrainian Politburo, before going to Moscow to be a Secretary of the Central Committee. He had been again intruded on the Ukrainian apparatus in January 1933 to toughen it in its difficult struggle with the peasantry and Ukrainian national feeling. Although Kossior and his group were not displaced, as much power and prestige attached to Postyshev as to his theoretical superior. In addition to his Ukrainian Second Secretaryship, he held the First Secretaryship of the Kiev Provincial Committee of the Party.

During the whole period, it became customary to give Postyshev what, on the face of it, looked like an anomalous seniority. When greetings were sent to the Soviet Government, to the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party, or to the Ukrainian Government, in each case only the single leading figure was named as the recipient. But when it came to the Ukrainian Central Committee, both Kossior and Postyshev were conventionally named.fn3

A younger and better-looking man than most of the others, with a clipped moustache and high hair swept back over his oval head, Postyshev was in fact an irreproachable Stalinist. His reputation for fair-mindedness (within the limits of the system) was fairly good. It is said that he had been among the opponents of the proposal to shoot Ryutin, and had redeemed himself in Kiev. Opposition from such a source could, as with Kirov’s, have been a real threat.

Postyshev had been interpreting the Central Committee circulars on expelling Party members in the wrong fashion. He was expelling provocateurs and slanderers and retaining their victims. One of these delators was a woman called Nikolayenko, who had been particularly troublesome for a year.⁴⁷ Postyshev had expelled her from the Kiev Party organization.