The Great Terror

When, in June, the Provincial Committee was itself unmasked, a hysteria of arrest and accusation seized Belyi. On 26 and 27 June, a further meeting there saw violent denunciation of Kovalev and all the other members of the local leadership of his time. The whole of the Kovalev leadership fell, and on 18 and 19 September a plenum of the District Committee was held to destroy those who had succeeded them. The new local Secretary, Karpovsky, was accused of having been an agent of Rumyantsev’s, of having once belonged to a bandit gang, of having relatives abroad, of maintaining connections with a sister who had married a former merchant. Karpovsky defended himself, saying that he not only had not been a bandit, but had killed several bandits. He had received a letter from an aunt in Romania, but had not seen her since she left Russia in 1908. Both his sister and her former merchant husband were now employed in useful work. A friend who had fought with Karpovsky testified that the two of them had fought against bandits. But speaker after speaker attacked the Secretary in the most violent terms, and even this friend finally said weakly that he had just not been aware of Karpovsky’s membership in a bandit gang. All Karpovsky’s associates fell with him or shortly afterward. By the end of the year, a completely new team, all strangers to Belyi, was in charge. The Party membership, which had been 367 on 1 September 1934, had gone down to less than 200.²⁴

Almost as striking as the calls for terror from above was this hysterical lynching mood of what now became a dominant section of the lowest Party organizations. For while the upper and middle levels of the Party were being wiped out, Moscow’s envoys everywhere found denouncers, like Nikolayenko in Kiev, to give them “evidence” against those they wished to destroy.

A Soviet article of the Khrushchev period entitled “The Dossier of a Provocateur”²⁵

describes how a Party member in Azerbaijan made his career during the purges by denouncing prominent Party colleagues to the NKVD. Among those he denounced were three Secretaries of the Azerbaijan Central Committee and the former Chairman of the local Council of People’s Commissars. The “provocateur,” I. Ya. Myachin, was until these revelations a well-known and well-liked local Communist whom “Communists for forty years had known simply as ‘Vanya.’” At one time, he had held the post of Deputy People’s Commissar for the Azerbaijan textile industry.

His belated undoing was the fact that he typed two copies of all his denunciations, sending one “to the NKVD, addressed to Bagirov’s underlings,” and the other, which he signed, to the archives, where it was added to a file which lay on a shelf “for a quarter of a century” until an archivist discovered it. It covered Myachin’s activities for the period February to November 1937, and contained material “compromising” fourteen Party, Soviet, and economic leaders. A typical victim was accused of attempting “to give instructions to counterrevolutionaries to keep their mouths shut” because once on a bus he advised against talking about sabotage. In justification of his activities, Myachin said, “We thought this was what we had to do…. Everybody was writing….” He was, of course, by his standards, quite right.

And, by such means, the Purge struck everywhere. In the Urals, in the newest industrial area, a “Ural Uprising Staff” was discovered, headed as was customary by the First Secretary, Kabakov, of the Sverdlovsk Provincial Committee, full member of the Central Committee. It was a “bloc of Rights and Trotskyites” and also included Social Revolutionaries and Church leaders.²⁶

All the many industrial trusts in the area suffered as well; the Heads of Uralmash, Uralmed’rud, Levikhostroi, Sevkabel’, and others, and their leading engineers, were of course arrested. Other institutions purged included the Bacteriological Institute, which lost “almost all” its staff, including its director, Professor Kuteyshchildiov, who committed suicide in jail. The Institute was closed down, its building being taken over by the NKVD, which certainly needed the space. One cell alone in the local prison now held twenty-seven wives of arrested officials.²⁷

Malenkov went to Kazan in August 1937 to a plenum of the Tatar ASSR Provincial Committee, at or after which the First Secretary, Lepa, and most other high officials were arrested. At the same time, railway officials of the area were arrested on Kaganovich’s orders.²⁸