The Great Terror

Zhdanov oversaw similar operations in various provinces and republics. In Karelia, he violently attacked the leadership—Irglis, Gylling, Rovio, and others, all of whom were arrested as Finnish spies. All the ten Finnish-language newspapers were closed down.²⁹ At a meeting of the Bashkir Provincial Committee on 4 to 6 October 1937, Zhdanov announced that the leading posts were held by “bourgeois nationalists, Trotskyites, fascist diversionists, spies and murderers.” Ya. B. Bykin, the local First Secretary, was “an old spy.” He and almost all the local Party and Government leadership were arrested, including all the members of the Party Bureau and heads of departments. The local prison was not large enough for such an operation, and the victims were shot in “ravines and quarries,” Bykin’s pregnant wife among them.³⁰

In Novosibirsk, the daughter of the head of the West Siberian medical department, Maxim Thallmann, tells us, in a recent Soviet article, how on 16 Au gust 1937 her father was arrested with most of the local leadership. Her mother, sister of the former Central Committee member Vladimir Milyutin, followed on 3 September, and then all the leaders’ wives and children over sixteen (only a few of the arrested survived). The daughter, aged seventeen, was one of 250 then held in a local NKVD children’s home, and this was only one of several such homes.³¹

There were some special cases. Yosif Vareikis, who had been very much in Stalin’s confidence, and had served as First Secretary in Voronezh and Stalingrad, was now First Secretary of the Far Eastern Territory. He telephoned Stalin in September 1937 with a query about the reasons for the arrest of certain Communists.³² In the conversation he put some question about the arrest of Tukhachevsky. He had served with him in the Civil War, when the two had at one time been seized by Social Revolutionary mutineers, whom they had eventually suppressed.

Stalin shouted, “That is not your business. Don’t interfere in what doesn’t concern you. The NKVD knows what it’s doing.” He then went on to say, “Only an enemy would defend Tukhachevsky,” and threw down the telephone. Vareikis was deeply shaken. He told his wife that he could hardly believe it was Stalin.

On 30 September, he got a telegram summoning him to the capital on official business. On 9 October, he was arrested a few stations out of Moscow. His wife was arrested four days later. He was mentioned as a plotter in the Buldiarin Tria1,³³ and was later shot. It seems very probable from the context that the conversation must have had something to do with the position of Marshal Blyukher, who commanded in the Far East, and that Stalin’s lapse into open rage may have reflected a real anxiety about trouble from the Far Eastern Army.

IN THE REPUBLICS

In the Republics, things went in the same way as in the provinces of Russia proper. In the Byelorussian Republic, the “verification” of Party cards ordered in 1935 and 1936 was used by Yezhov to expel, in connection with an alleged anti-Soviet underground, “more than half of the entire membership,”³⁴ The local officials opposed these actions, which amounted to the first phase in the destruction of the old Party and the rebuilding of another on its ruins. After the February—March plenum, on 17 March 1937, V. F. Sharangovich, as an emissary of the center, was sent to take over the Byelorussian First Secretaryship.

The resistance was widespread at the highest level in the Republic. M. M. Goloded, Chairman of its Council of People’s Commissars, “cast doubt upon the results of the verification” at a meeting of the local Central Committee.³⁵ This was made the occasion for the dispatch of Malenkov, in June 1937, to destroy the leadership.

A plenum of the Byelorussian Central Committee was summoned. Violent accusations of espionage were made.³⁶

Chervyakov, Chairman of the Byelorussian Supreme Soviet—that is, “Head of State” of the “sovereign republic”—committed suicide. Goloded was charged with “bourgeois nationalism,”³⁷ arrested on the way to Moscow, and shot.³⁸ Almost the entire leadership of the Republic, “including the Central Committee secretaries … the People’s Commissars, and many leaders of local Party and Soviet bodies and representatives of the creative intelligentsia were expelled from the party and many of them were arrested.”³⁹ Throughout the summer and autumn, the purge spread down to the local and mass level.