The Great Terror

Zakovsky was Zhdanov’s right hand in the ensuing assault. His left—indeed, his only trusted aide at an executive level—was the infamous A. S. Shcherbakov, who had served with him from 1924 to 1930 in the Nizhni-Novgorod (Gorky) province, becoming local chief of agitation and propaganda. Shcherbakov, a figure more personally disliked even than Zhdanov, was a plump man with glasses and Western-style hair, combed back. He had gone on from Gorky province to the Central Committee apparatus, and had then been appointed, in 1934, Secretary of the Union of Soviet Writers! After a year (1936–1937) in Leningrad, he went on as a mobile purger to various reluctant provinces, apart from being briefly Head of the Political Department of Transbaikal Military District. During 1938 alone, he was to serve in fewer than four of these posts. Leaving Irkutsk completely crushed, he held two First Secretaryships in the Ukrainian provinces left empty by Khrushchev’s purges, and then arrived in Moscow in the winter as the city’s First Secretary. During the Second World War, he was to take over political control of the Army and to become Secretary of the Central Committee and candidate member of the Politburo. He died in 1945, allegedly at the hands of doctor-poisoners. A typical Zhdanovite career.

This group soon set to work. In May 1937, Zhdanov assembled the executive workers of the Provincial Committee and announced: “Two enemies—Chudov and Kodatsky—have been exposed in our ranks, in the Leningrad organization. They have been arrested in Moscow.” No one spoke: “it was as if our tongues were frozen.” A woman Old Bolshevik, later to spend seventeen years in a labor camp, went up to Zhdanov and said to him:

Comrade Zhdanov, I don’t know Chudov. He hasn’t been in our Leningrad organization long. But I vouch for Kodatsky. He has been a Party member since 1913. I have known him for many years. He is an honest member of the Party. He fought all the oppositionists. This is incredible! It must be verified.

Zhdanov looked at her “with his cruel eyes” and said, “Lazurkina, stop this talk, otherwise it will end badly for you.”⁴

This conference of the Party organization “uncovered and expelled from its ranks the Anti-Soviet Rightist-Trotskyite-double-dealers—the Japanese–German diversionists and spies.”⁵ (Expulsion was the extreme measure of Party discipline proper. In these circumstances it almost invariably meant “relaxation to the secular arm” of the NKVD, followed by arrest.) And this was only the first step: of the sixty-five members of the new City Committee elected on 29 May, only two were reelected on 4 June 1938 (while five others were transferred to posts outside the city).⁶

The long days of summer had set in in the northern capital, presenting a minor technical difficulty to Zakovsky’s men. As the wave of arrests reached the top of the local Party, then swept downward again, involving those promoted to Party positions in the past year or two, and then out beyond them to the already stricken masses of the population, operations could no longer be conducted under the decent cover of night. For Leningrad is easily the most northerly of the great cities of the world, on the same latitude as the Shetland Islands and northern Labrador. In winter, daytime is extremely short, but in summer, as Pushkin says, one can read all night in one’s room by the “Transparent dusk and moonless glitter.” The rumbling and halting of police cars in the bright but deserted streets of the subarctic summer nights is said to have been particularly disturbing.

A man named Rozenblum, a Party member since 1906, had been arrested in connection with another case—that of the prominent Old Bolshevik Nikolai Komarov.

With the defeat of the Zinovievites in 1926, Komarov had taken over Zinoviev’s own post as Head of the Leningrad Soviet. In 1929, he became unsatisfactory to Stalin: without actually supporting Bukharin, he had shown no enthusiasm in the struggle against him. Bukharin had told Kamenev in July 1928 that the higher functionaries in Leningrad “are mentally with us, but they are terrified when we speak of removing Stalin,” so that they vacillated without being able to make up their minds. “Stalin,” we are told elsewhere, “had met with a set-back in attempting to win the Leningrad people over to his cause, Komarov and the others, the successors of Zinoviev.”⁷ Komarov was removed and transferred to a post on the Council of National Economy in Moscow. In 1934, he was no longer a full member of the Central Committee, but remained a candidate member.

This and other transfers left Leningrad in the hands of men wholly loyal to the Party line. Yet most are perhaps best thought of as Stalinists with a slight Rightist tinge, a position to which Kirov himself to some extent evolved.⁸