The Great Terror

The plenum appointed a commission of thirty-six members, with Mikoyan in the chair (and not voting), to report on the question.¹⁹⁸ Twenty spoke. Yezhov, supported by five others, proposed the expulsion of Bukharin and Rykov from the Central Committee and the Party, trial before the Military Collegium, and execution. Postyshev, supported by seven others, including Petrovsky and Kossior, proposed the same, without the application of execution. Stalin, supported by five others, proposed merely sending them to the NKVD for further investigation.¹⁹⁹ Stalin’s proposal was eventually accepted unanimously.²⁰⁰

A subcommittee, consisting of Stalin, Molotov, Voroshilov, Kaganovich, Mikoyan, and Yezhov, then prepared a resolution. It asserted that “as a minimum” the NKVD had established that Bukharin and Rykov were aware of the counter-revolutionary activity of the Trotskyite Center, and of other Rightists of their own circle. It also accused Bukharin of slandering the NKVD. And it accepted Stalin’s formulation of expulsion and handing over to the investigative organs. The resolution then passed, Bukharin and Rykov dissenting.²⁰¹ The two men were arrested on the spot and dragged off to the Lubyanka.

The search of Bukharin’s apartment, unlike those of Zinoviev and Kamenev in 1934, was rigorous, including personal searches of his wife, his father, and the other occupants, though the baby’s cot was not disturbed. Boris Berman, now head of an NKVD Department, supervised a group of twelve or thirteen male and female officers. When they finished, at midnight, they made a convivial supper in the Bukharins’ dining room.²⁰²

The plenum continued, with Zhdanov’s organizational report. He took the opportunity to criticize sharply the situation in Kiev under Postyshev for “incorrect leadership” and “gross breaches of the Party constitution and the principles of democratic centralism”—the main point being that the Kiev and other organizations had been resorting to co-option instead of election, and that this was extremely undemocratic.²⁰³

During the weeks since January, the indirect attacks on Postyshev’s position had continued. On 1 February, his close supporter Karpov was denounced as “an enemy of the Party, a loathsome Trotskyite.”²⁰⁴

Over the following weeks, about sixty expulsions of his old nominees from the Kiev Party were announced. These lesser figures were more easily removable. They had no Old Bolshevik past, and even if their record as Stalinists was a sound one, it was not so widely known throughout the Party as to make charges against them sound unbelievable. In attacking men like Karpov, Stalin was undermining Postyshev without having the assault made directly. But at the same time, establishing the “Trotskyism” of the second- and third-rank Stalinists in the entourages of men he wished to remove, Stalin was setting up precedents which, as resistance weakened, gave him a freer and freer hand to deal with more important men with perfect records.

On 8 February came attacks on faults that had been found in the Kiev, Azov-Black Sea, and Kursk provinces.²⁰⁵ On the following day, “lordly and immodest” actions that had come to light in the Party leaderships in Kiev and Rostov provinces were described.²⁰⁶ The concentration on Kiev was obvious enough.fn7

These attacks had not so far cowed Postyshev, and he held himself ready to put his viewpoint. There seems to have been no intention of removing Stalin, but only of curbing him and getting him to abandon Yezhov and the Purge. There were precedents in Russian history, but they were not encouraging ones. The boyar, Prince Michael Repnin, had called on Ivan the Terrible to rid himself of his Secret Police:

“To our misfortune, you have surrounded your throne with the oprichnina….

Perish the oprichnina!” he said, making the Sign of the Cross;

“May he live for ever, our orthodox Tsar!

May he rule over men as he ruled them of old!

May he spurn, as treason, the voice of shameless flattery! …”

The declaration of loyalty to the ruler and hostility to his Secret Police was unsuccessful, and Repnin was killed, a lesson to all who undertake such half-measures.

Stalin seems to have learned of Postyshev’s plan in advance. Speaking first, he anticipated and refuted the arguments to be brought against him, and made an appeal for unity and responsibility in the Communist leadership.

Postyshev then went to the platform. In his “dry, hoarse and unpleasant voice,” he began to read his text. After a careful preamble, he spoke of the excesses of the Purge: