The Great Terror

Komarov remained a link to them. He was to be named later as an important figure in “the Leningrad group” of terrorists.⁹ And through Rozenblum, the Komarov Case was somehow linked with Chudov’s. But the latter was designed as a far more important affair, a public trial with all the trimmings. Rozenblum, who had already been subjected to “terrible torture,”¹⁰ was brought before Zakovsky,

who offered him freedom on condition that he make before the court a false confession fabricated in 1937 by the NKVD concerning “sabotage, espionage and diversion in a terroristic center in Leningrad.” With unbelievable cynicism Zakovsky told about the vile “mechanism” for the crafty creation of fabricated “anti-Soviet plots.”

“In order to illustrate it to me,” stated Rozenblum, “Zakovsky gave me several possible variants of the organization of this center and of its branches. After he detailed the organization to me, Zakovsky told me that the NKVD would prepare the case of this center, remarking that the trial would be public.”

“… You yourself,” said Zakovsky, “will not need to invent anything. The NKVD will prepare for you a ready outline for every branch of the center; you will have to study it carefully and to remember well all the questions and answers which the court might ask. This case will be ready in four or five months or perhaps half a year. During all this time you will be preparing yourself so that you will not compromise the investigation and yourself. Your future will depend on how the trial goes and on its results. If you begin to lie and to testify falsely, blame yourself. If you manage to endure it, you will save your head and we will feed and clothe you at the Government’s cost until your death.”¹¹

The trial, Zakovsky told Rozenblum, would involve Chudov, Chudov’s wife, Lyudmila Shaposhnikova,fn2 and three other Secretaries of the City and Provincial Committees: Boris Pozern, Party member since 1903; A. I. Ugarov; and Pyotr Smorodin—all candidate members of the Party’s Central Committee.

As so often, we may note that the ground had been well prepared. Already, in August 1936, it had been alleged that several members of the group associated with Nikolayev had “enjoyed the confidence of a number of leading Party workers and officials of Soviet organizations in Leningrad”; it was this which had “ensured them every possibility of pursuing their preparations for a terroristic act against Kirov without the least fear of being discovered.”¹²

As to political complexion, it seems clear that the Leningraders were to be treated as “Rightists.” There was some truth in this, and their end represented the final crushing of the Kirov line.

The Leningrad Center Trial planned by Zakovsky never took place (in fact, announced trials of importance were held only in Moscow and Georgia). We do not know why.

The fate of Zakovsky’s list of victims presents some peculiar features. Chudov and Kodatsky were executed on 30 October 1937. But Pozern, Smorodin, and A. I. Ugarov were still at large in mid-1938—Ugarov promoted to be First Secretary in Moscow—all three being shot only on 26 February 1939 (see here). This certainly shows that, as Zakovsky said, variants must have existed, some of them implicating men with whom he was sitting daily in the Provincial Bureau.

The Leningrad purge is the provincial one of which we are best informed, and it is illuminating to look at its scope. Those arrested included all the seven Leningrad members and candidate members of the Central Committee (Chudov, Kodatsky, Alexeyev, Smorodin, Pozern, Ugarov, and P. I. Struppe, Chairman of the Provincial Executive Committee). Other victims were A. N. Petrovsky, who had headed the Executive Committee and was later a Secretary of the Provincial Committee, and I. S. Vayshlya, Secretary of the Leningrad Komsomol. In addition, most of the other members of the Bureau, and “hundreds of the most active Party workers,” including many Secretaries of District Committees in the city, perished. The purge also struck at the fighting service commands with Dybenko (G.O.C. Leningrad District and ex officio member of the Provincial Bureau) and the Commander of the Baltic Fleet, A. K. Sivkov. At the same time, the leading industrialists fell: the heads of all the great enterprises—“Lenenergo,” the Kirov Works, the “Metallic” Factory—and many others.¹³

Of the 154 Leningrad delegates to the XVIIth Congress, only 2 were reelected to the XVIIIth Congress: Andreyev and Shkiryatov, whose Leningrad affiliations were purely honorary. Of the sixty-five members even of the Leningrad Provincial Committee elected on 17 June 1937, only nine reappear a year later (four others had been transferred to positions outside the city).¹⁴ As a survivor from among the lower officials in the Committee’s apparatus was later to comment, “In 1937 I was to share the lot of many. I had an executive post in the Leningrad Province Party Committee and, of course, was also arrested.”¹⁵