The Great Terror

Over the next year, the whole of the local Politburo, Orgburo, and Secretariat were arrested, with the exception of Petrovsky. Of the 102 members and candidate members of the Ukrainian Central Committee, 3 survived. All 17 members of the Ukrainian Government were arrested. All the Provincial Secretaries in the Ukraine fell.

The Purge swept through every sort of establishment in the Republic. The State industrial enterprises, the municipal councils, the educational and scientific bodies—all lost their leaders by the hundred. The Ukrainian Union of Writers was practically annihilated.

Violent attacks on Ukrainian institutions started to appear. The Kiev and Kharkov radio stations were accused of having broadcast funeral marches after the announcement of the verdict in the first two trials, while the Kiev station had actually gone off the air while the verdict on the generals was being transmitted. This was the result of “an enemy organization” which the Ukrainian Central Committee had failed to understand.⁸⁹

The educational system was attacked as being riddled with nationalists.⁹⁰ The museums were also full of spies concerned only to stress anti-Russian Ukrainianism.⁹¹ The Republic had even failed to celebrate Peter the Great’s victory at Poltava.⁹²

The oppositionists in the three Great Trials were traitors, Trotskyites, spies, and accomplices of the fascists. But they were not shown as actually describing themselves as fascists pure and simple. In the Ukraine, though, it was not a “Bloc of Rights and Trotskyites” that was revealed, but nothing less than a “National Fascist Organization” headed by Lyubchenko, leader of the Soviet Government of the Republic, and including Grinko, People’s Commissar of Finance in Moscow, Balitsky, Zatonsky, Yakir, and a variety of leading figures in the Ukrainian Government and Central Committee, and such cultural lights as Yanovsky.

For the moment, however, Kossior was spared. At a meeting of the Kiev Party organization on 15 and 16 September 1937, he delivered another attack on “the band of bourgeois nationalists uncovered in the Ukraine.” Zatonsky was “severely blamed” and in reply “could not say anything.”⁹³ Zatonsky was refused entry to the October 1937 plenum of the Central Committee in Moscow; on 3 November, he was called out of a university meeting in Kiev and arrested.⁹⁴

The turnover was equally rapid at the local level. Kudryavtsev, who had replaced Postyshev in his lesser post as Secretary of the Kiev Provincial Committee of the Party and made some of the most violent attacks on Lyubchenko in August, was removed at the end of 1937, to be denounced as an “enemy of the people,”⁹⁵ and his successor, D. M. Evtushenko, followed on 17 April 1938. They were later linked as the centers of a hostile leadership which had subverted most of the District Secretaries of the province.⁹⁶

Lyubchenko was succeeded as Premier by a young Communist, M. I. Bondarenko. He, too, was arrested within two months,⁹⁷

and for a time there was no Premier at all. Instead, the names of unknown subordinates of Petrovsky appeared on decrees.

Then another Premier, N. M. Marchak, was appointed. He was demoted to Deputy Premier by February 1938,⁹⁸ and was soon afterward under arrest. He is said to have been drinking heavily with Leplevsky one night, and to have exchanged with him some remarks skeptical of Tukhachevsky’s guilt, a point on which Leplevsky was particularly well informed. The next morning, Marchak remembered this and thought that Leplevsky might have been acting as a provocateur. He rang Yezhov and denounced Leplevsky, who was arrested. Leplevsky, in turn, implicated Marchak, and both confessed to conspiracy, terrorism, and espionage.⁹⁹ Leplevsky’s replacement, the third Ukraine NKVD Commissar to be appointed within a year, was Uspensky, himself to fall within months.

The Purge was so complete and so quick that legal authority virtually disintegrated. There was no longer a genuine quorum of the Ukrainian Central Committee or a body capable of appointing a Government. People’s Commissars, irregularly appointed, emerged for days or weeks and then themselves disappeared. The unprecedented sweep of the political leadership marked the effective destruction of the Ukrainian Party. The Republic became little more than an NKVD fief, where even the formalities of Party and Soviet activity were barely gone through.