The Great Terror

But on the whole, the Army received more and more friendly attention, and less and less persecution. Its prestige began to be built up in a variety of ways. The principle of shared responsibility between the commander and the political commissar was abolished in March 1934, leaving the commander in full control, with the commissar simply as his political adviser. The old military ranks up to, but not including, general, were restored on 22 September 1935. The same decree gave all except junior commanders the privilege of immunity from arrest by the civil organs without a special authorization from the People’s Commissar of Defense. At the same time, the first five Marshals of the Soviet Union were named: Tukhachevsky, Blyukher, and Yegorov of the genuine military, plus Stalin’s nominees Voroshilov and Budenny.

At his trial in 1938, Bukharin was to speak vaguely of the “military men” among his fellow plotters. When Vyshinsky asked, “Which military men?” he answered, “The Right conspirators.” Vyshinsky, accepting this, asked for the names in the particular context, and was given those of Tukhachevsky and Kork.⁹ In his speaking of them as not simply members of the far-flung “bloc” but as actual Rightists, we can perhaps find a clue to part of the reason for Stalin’s resentment of the military. They had not been Rightists in the sense that Bukharin was. But it is more than likely that they had shown Rightism, in the sense that Rudzutak, Chubar, and so on had done—that is, in failing to show enthusiasm for the increasing tempo of the purge during the final phase, from September 1936 to February 1937.

Not that we can so simply exhaust Stalin’s motives. Former grudges and present nuisance value certainly played a part. But there are more general, and more powerful, considerations.

Despotism enforced by a terrorist and terrorized bureaucracy may be in a general way extremely strong. But it presents certain points of vulnerability. There is a brittleness in the strength. Even the most rigorous precautions can never entirely rule out the possibility of assassination. There is no real evidence of any serious attempt on Stalin’s life. There are a few vague reports of genuine plots, usually among young Communists, discovered before they came to fruition. And there are one or two individual incidents, such as that reported during the Second World War of a soldier who shot at random at a car emerging from the Kremlin which chanced to contain Mikoyan.¹⁰

The other vulnerability was to a military coup. Even a few dozen determined men might conceivably have seized the Kremlin and the persons of the leadership. And in those circumstances, the type of machine Stalin built can crack very easily. Even the farcical attempt by General Malet to overthrow Napoleon in 1812, by sheer bluff, had an almost incredible measure of preliminary success. The best chance of getting rid of Stalin would have been a coup by Tukhachevsky in alliance with the surviving oppositionists, just as the best chance of blocking Hitler in 1933 would have been a coup by Schleicher backed by the Social Democratic Party.

But just as the German Social Democrats were hobbled by their notions of constitutionality (and just as, later, most of Hitler’s generals were hamstrung by their formal allegiance to Hitler as Head of State), the Soviet Marshals, like the civilian oppositionists, seem to have been mesmerized by the notion that the Stalin leadership, with all its faults, had inherited the Party legitimacy.

For there is no evidence that any conspiracy really existed. Isaac Deutscher has indeed written that “all non-Stalinist versions concur in the following: the Generals did indeed plan a coup d’ état.”¹¹ In reality, there is virtual unanimity that this was not the case. The leading defector information (including that deriving from NKVD officers in prison who discussed the matter with cell mates who eventually came West)¹² and later Soviet revelations all agree on the nonexistence of any plot. The Nazi secret archives contain no evidence of anything of the kind. Admittedly, one cannot prove a negative, and we must not formally exclude the possibility of evidence one day turning up to show that some of the military were seriously considering action.fn4 But it seems unlikely, to say the least. The curious thing is that the legend of a real conspiracy long persisted, though the “conspiracies” alleged at the three great political trials either were rejected from the start or have long since been seen through.