The Great Terror

At a local Party Congress held in mid-June, Sharangovich warmly celebrated the purge then in progress. His own fall came at a Byelorussian Central Committee plenum in August, when Ya. A. Yakovlev, sent there from Moscow, denounced him in turn.⁴⁰ The resolutions referred to “the Polish spies, Goloded, Sharangovich, Benek, Chervyakov and other wreckers and diversionists.” Sharangovich’s fate is typical of a significant phenomenon. The new generation of Stalinist careerists, who had adapted themselves completely to the new system, still found themselves arrested. This is particularly the case among the first and most energetic batch who had worked up to high positions. They were succeeded by younger but similar characters, who again often fell quickly. The shortness of their tenure has been explained as follows:

People of their type tended, in their unscrupulousness and zeal, to carry the Party line to absurd extremes, with the result that their actions had later to be explained away as deviations. People of this type were also inclined by nature to corruption and the exploitation of their positions for personal advantage. They thus roused the hatred and envy of their juniors. This further contributed to the shortness of their stay in office.⁴¹

Stalin’s idea, announced at the February–March plenum, of having two stand-ins for every post, showed foresight, but did not go far enough. In many cases, it was only the fourth or fifth nominee who was to keep the post through the ensuing years.

Apart from politicians and engineers, the Byelorussian purge struck most heavily at the cultural leadership—and at the Linguistic Institute and the Commissariat of Education, in particular, where the principle of the separate Byelorussian nationality had been concentrated. Byelorussians, almost invariably, were ex officio Polish spies, owing to the geographical position of the Republic.⁴² On 29 and 30 October 1937 there was a mass execution of Byelorussian cultural and political figures: M. M. Dzenishkevich, Byelorussian Second Secretary, and at least eleven others, including the poets Yu. A. Taubin and M. S. Kulbyak, together with such other writers as I. D. Kharik, A. Volny, and V. P. Kaval.⁴³

The Byelorussian case is interesting in that it seems to show a rather more stubborn opposition than that offered in the Provincial Committees, perhaps owing to some reliance on local feeling. This was to be far more noticeable in the Ukraine, where a large concentration of high officials made final subjugation a more difficult matter.

In Georgia (where in 1919 the Mensheviks had won 105 out of the 130 seats in the National Assembly),fn3 there was by now no need of a purge at the top. The thin-face, pince-nezed Beria, the old OGPU operative Stalin had infiltrated into the Transcaucasian First Secretaryship in 1931, was in full control, and had already been purging enthusiastically. As early as 11 August 1936 he had even shot, in his own office, the Armenian First Secretary, Khandzhyan.⁴⁴

So Georgia’s intra-Party purge was violent but routine. No emissary of the Central Committee was required to enforce it. But the Republic was the scene of several publicly announced trials, though these were not actually held in public.

The most important came on 10 to 12 July 1937. Men as prominent—on the narrower stage of Georgian Bolshevism—as the leading victims of the Moscow Trials were brought to trial. It was evidently intended, originally, to make this, too, a show trial. For all the men involved were old enemies of Stalin’s. Chief among them was Budu Mdivani, former Premier of Soviet Georgia, whose defense against Stalin Lenin had undertaken just before his death—whose case, indeed, had been Lenin’s final reason for wishing to remove Stalin from the General Secretaryship. With him were the Old Bolshevik Okudzhava and others.

Their trial is said to have been decided on at the February–March plenum.⁴⁵

But they had long since been incriminated. Mdivani had been denounced as long ago as 1929 for illegal Trotskyite activity,⁴⁶ but had become reconciled to the Party because, as he said, he felt too old to start another. At the Zinoviev Trial, though Mdivani’s name was not mentioned, the “Georgian deviationists” were, as we saw, specially noted as having had an attitude which “as is well known was terroristic from 1928 onwards.” At the time of the Zinoviev Trial, this was a record: no other group had then been charged with terrorist plans before the 1930s. At the Pyatakov Trial, Mdivani was accused of having planned a terrorist act against Yezhov, and another against Beria.⁴⁷ And after his death, at the Bukharin Trial of 1938, he was described as a British agent.⁴⁸