The Great Terror

On 17 February, he had a conversation with Stalin lasting several hours. Stalin seems to have accused him of having earlier sympathized with the kulaks and now showing weakness and not enough “real proletarian principledness.”¹⁵⁶ He made “a last attempt to explain to Stalin, a friend of many years’ standing, that dark forces were currently profiting from his pathological lifelong suspiciousness and that the Party was being deprived of its best cadres.”¹⁵⁷ So far, the “cadres” the party was being “deprived of” were practically all oppositionists or ex-oppositionists, and Ordzhonikidze’s formulation seems well suited to Pyatakov, and perhaps—in anticipation—Bukharin and Rykov. The talk of “dark forces” is quite clearly an attack on Yezhov, and perhaps Kaganovich and others as well.

Ordzhonikidze worked in his People’s Commissariat until 2:00 A.M. the next day, 18 February. When he got home, he had another equally fruitless conversation with Stalin on the telephone. At 5:30 in the afternoon, he was dead.

We are now definitely told in a recent Soviet article that he died of a gunshot wound.¹⁵⁸

His wife, Zinaida, rang Stalin, who soon appeared. He “didn’t ask a single question, but merely expressed astonishment: ‘Heavens, what a tricky illness! The chap lay down to have a rest and the result was a fit and a heart attack,’”¹⁵⁹ thus establishing the official view, confirmed in the medical report, which ran as follows:

Comrade Ordzhonikidze suffered from sclerosis accompanied by serious sclerotic transformations of the cardiac muscle and cardiac vessels, and also from a chronic affection of the right kidney, the only one he possessed after the removal in 1929 of the left kidney owing to tuberculosis.

For two years Ordzhonikidze, from time to time, suffered from attacks of stenocardia (angina pectoris)

and cardiac asthma. The last such attack, which was a very serious one, occurred at the beginning of November 1936.

On the morning of 18 February Ordzhonikidze made no complaint about his health, but at 17.30, while he was having his afternoon rest, he suddenly felt ill and a few minutes later died of paralysis of the heart.

G. Kaminsky, People’s Commissar for Health, U.S.S.R.

I. Khodorovsky, Head of the Kremlin Medical-Sanitary Administration

L. Levin, Consultant to the Kremlin Medical-Sanitary Administration

S. Mets, Duty Medical Officer of the Kremlin Clinic.¹⁶⁰

Of the four signatories, Kaminsky (who, we are told, was “very unwilling”¹⁶¹ to sign) was shot later in the year, Khodorovsky was referred to as a plotter in the Bukharin Trial, and Levin actually appeared as a defendant at that trial and was shot afterwards. What happened to the more obscure Mets is unknown.

Curiously enough, it was never alleged against the doctors, or anyone else, that Ordzhonikidze had been a victim of a murder plot by the opposition. It is true that at Ordzhonikidze’s funeral a few days later, Khrushchev was to remark,

It was they who struck a blow to thy noble heart. Pyatakov—the spy, the murderer, the enemy of the working people—is caught red-handed, caught and condemned, crushed like a reptile by the working class, but it was his counter-revolutionary work which hastened the death of our dear Sergo.¹⁶²

And, indeed, the authoritative article on him in the Large Soviet Encyclopedia, describing him as “the favorite comrade-in-arms of the great Stalin” and saying that he “died at his post as a warrior of the Lenin-Stalin Party,” added that “the Trotskyite–Bukharinite degenerates of Fascism hated Ordzhonikidze with a bitter hatred. They wanted to kill Ordzhonikidze. In this the Fascist agents did not succeed. But the sabotage activity and monstrous treachery of the despicable Right–Trotskyite hirelings of Japanese–German Fascism greatly hastened the death of Ordzhonikidze.”¹⁶³

But nevertheless, no one was ever charged with murdering him. This shows a curious restraint on Stalin’s part (though, of course, he may have been saving the case for one of the post-Bukharin trials which never occurred, at least in public). One of Ordzhonikidze’s deputies, Vannikov, was indeed summoned by Yezhov a few days after his death, to report on “wrecking” activities by Ordzhonikidze. It looks as though there was or had been some notion of posthumously attacking him, as Tomsky and Gamarnik had been attacked after their suicides. If so, this too was not pursued.¹⁶⁴

It is now no longer disputed that Stalin did in fact procure Ordzhonikidze’s death. But the details are still debatable. And the way in which the original official version lost credence, first in the defector literature, and finally in the Soviet Union itself, is an interesting demonstration of the relative worth of the sources.