The Great Terror

April 1937 saw the beginning of intra-Party elections, the occasion for a great campaign in the press against those elements interfering, like Postyshev, with Party democracy, who were found everywhere. Some failures in this respect were dealt with harshly in the set-piece article which launched the campaign, “Internal Party Democracy and Bolshevik Discipline.”¹ The author was Boris Ponomarev, still a member of the Central Committee of the Communist Party in 1988.

Among the first Central Committee members to be arrested were those from Leningrad. Outside Moscow, it was only in the northern capital, where Zhdanov ruled, and in Transcaucasia, under Beria, that local First Secretaries ready to purge without limit were already in control.

As a result of the Kirov murder,

the Leningrad Party organization suffered particularly large losses.… For a period of four years there was an uninterrupted wave of repressions in Leningrad against honest and completely innocent people. Promotion to a responsible post often amounted to a step toward the brink of a precipice. Many people were annihilated without a trial and investigation on the basis of false, hastily fabricated charges. Not only officials themselves, but also their families were subjected to repressions, even absolutely innocent children, whose lives were thus broken from the very beginning.… The repressions … were carried out either on Stalin’s direct instructions or with his knowledge and approval.²

But in fact the first waves of terror had struck at non-Party people and the mass of minor functionaries. Zhdanov had pursued the Stalin method. He had weakened the old Kirov cadre from below, replacing many of its junior veterans at the District Committee level. But he had not yet driven all Kirov’s leading supporters, a number of them members or candidate members of the Central Committee itself, from the higher posts they held in the city and the province. In 1936, he had, indeed, removed and demoted Mikhail Chudov, Kirov’s Second Secretary. A printer by trade, a Bolshevik since 1913, Chudov had been imported into Leningrad to reinforce Kirov in 1928. A full member of the Central Committee, he had been on the Presidium of the XVIIth Congress. In 1934, he had made Leningrad’s funeral speech on Kirov and been on the Kirov Burial Commission. More than anyone, he represented the Kirov tradition in the city. Kirov’s other closest associate, Kodatsky, was still in position.

The old Party leaders at this level were to prove unacceptable to Stalin throughout the country. But the Leningrad men were particularly unsatisfactory. First, they had been closely associated with Kirov and his platform, both of which had been the special objects of Stalin’s hostility. And second, they were the very men who, on that December afternoon over two years before, had rushed into the corridor when they heard the shot that killed Kirov, and must have noticed—indeed, we are now told, did

notice—the absence of guards and other suspicious signs.

The Leningrad purge had already been violent even by Soviet standards. In the ensuing period, as it affected the entire political and industrial leadership, it was worse than those almost anywhere else in the country—though this meant a matter of a nearly 100 percent destruction, compared with 80 or 90 percent elsewhere.fn1 We happen to have fuller information about it than about the lesser provincial massacres which succeeded it, and it shows the sort of operation that now involved Party and population alike.

Zhdanov reported back from the plenum on 20 March 1937, at a Party meeting notable for attacks on various District Committees in the city. Zakovsky, Commissar of State Security, First Rank, spoke of “enemies still active” in the organization.³