The Great Terror

As in Georgia, the whole second level of the Party went too. “Over 3,500 responsible Party, Soviet, economic, military, and Komsomol officials were arrested … in a few months of 1937 alone. Many of them were shot without a trial and the requisite investigation.”⁶¹ On the last day of the year, the execution of eight leading Armenian officials was announced, together with—ironically enough—the posthumous disgrace of Khandzhyan.⁶²

The launching of mass arrests in both Georgia and Armenia in September was not a coincidence. A general decision to destroy the old Parties in the national Republics seems to have been taken. By midsummer, the entire Government of the Tatar Republic was under arrest.⁶³ September saw the sudden start of a press campaign conducted in more violent terms than ever, on a threat about which not much had been heard for some time: bourgeois nationalism. Such articles as “The Rotten Position of the Daghestan Provincial Committee” became common. From about 8 September, the Parties in the minority areas were subjected, under heavy headlines, to a continual stream of abuse. In Uzbekistan, Kirghizia, Kazakhstan, Bashkiria, Karelia, everywhere, large groups of traitors were found in the leaderships—in fact, constituting the leaderships. (The most prominent of these—the Uzbek—we will deal with in connection with the Bukharin Trial; see here.)

The pattern that emerges in the Purge in the Republics and provinces is a striking one. It amounts to this: an operation planned in Moscow and carried into effect by missions from the center almost everywhere destroyed the old Party, raising up instead from the rank and file a special selection of enthusiasts for a new organization of terrorists and denouncers. What requires the most emphasis is the sheer extent of the changes, the completeness of the liquidation of the hierarchy. At the center, Stalin had already created his own cadres, and infiltrated them into high position. In the coming months, the ravages were to be very great in Moscow too, but there was a continuity provided by a handful of men at the top and a group of Stalin’s junior nominees in the instruments of power. In the provinces, the “black tornado” really uprooted the old “Party-line” Stalinists, the veterans who represented a continuity, however tenuous, with the old Party of the underground, of 1917, and of the Civil War. This amounted to a revolution as complete as, though more disguised than, any previous changes in Russia.

We may incidentally note a lesser point: whereas previously the Party Secretary had been the most powerful man in any area, it was now the NKVD chief who counted. Over the next year or two, the new Party executives were to regain a good deal of their power. But for the moment, the police—themselves purged and purged again—were the direct agents of the center and executors of its main missions.

DEVASTATED AREA: THE UKRAINE

And Kiev groaned with sorrow.

The Armament of Igor

Stalin’s victory over the Party was assured when he crushed moderate hopes at the February–March plenum. All that was left to do was to set the machinery of the purges in motion. There was to be one last flicker of resistance—in the Ukraine.

In the Central Committee, the great cities, the provincial capitals, the smaller Republics, those who had opposed the Purge were isolated figures impotently awaiting their fate. In the Ukraine alone, most of the old leadership, based on its local Central Committee, remained in control. The demotion and removal of Postyshev had removed one hostile leader. But Petrovsky at least was one of the doubters. Postyshev’s place was taken by his predecessor in the post, Khatayevich, a full member of the All-Union Central Committee, who had been on the Ukrainian Politburo since 1933. A considerable purge in the lower ranks took place under an order from the All-Union Central Committee in the weeks following the February–March plenum; nearly one-fifth of Ukrainian Party members were expelled,⁶⁴ and two-thirds of the provincial and one-third of the local leaderships were changed.⁶⁵ But in the main, the old leadership was reelected at the Ukrainian Party Congress in May–June.