The Great Terror

Finally, in January 1938, a presumably spurious plenum of the Ukrainian Central Committee elected Khrushchev First Secretary.¹⁰⁰ Khrushchev brought with him from Moscow a new Second Secretary, Burmistenko, who had served in the Cheka for many years in the 1920s and later worked closely with Stalin’s personal secretariat. As Chairman of the Council of People’s Commissars, he brought Demyan Korotchenko (or Korotchenkov; in 1939, in the Stenographic Report of the XVIllth Congress, his name is actually given with its Ukrainian spelling in the list of the new Central Committee, and with its Russian spelling in the list of delegates to the Congress).

In May and June 1938, the entire Ukrainian Government was again replaced. Between February and June, all twelve new Provincial Secretaries were again removed, together with most of their Second Secretaries.¹⁰¹ At the XIVth Congress of the Ukrainian Party in June 1938, the new Central Committee had, among its eight-six members and candidates, only three survivors from the previous year—all nonpolitical or honorary figures. The continuity of rule had for the first time been completely destroyed. Not one member of the new Politburo, Orgburo, or Secretariat had previously served.

The Politburo was a farcical rump with only six members: Khrushchev, Burmistenko, and Korotchenko; the Commander of the Military District, Timoshenko; the latest NKVD chief of the Republic, Uspensky; and the ubiquitous Shcherbakov, who was in the Republic for a few months to purge a couple of Provincial Committees.

They reconstructed the Party from the ground up. In 1938, 1,600 Party members were raised to be Secretaries of District and City Committees in the Ukraine.¹⁰² Among those who benefited was the young Leonid Brezhnev. He had been raised to Deputy Mayor of Dneprodzerzhinsk in May 1937. In 1938, under the Khrushchev regime, he was promoted to be head of a department of the Dneprodzerzhinsk Provincial Committee, and by the following year was a Secretary of that Committee. He never looked back. (Few were so lucky. Between 1938 and the next Republican Party Congress in 1940, attrition remained high, if not so high. Of the 119 elected in 1940, 73 were new members.)

Stalin and Khrushchev had succeeded in destroying the old Party cadres in the Ukraine, and replacing them with men distinguished only by disciplined acquiescence in, or enthusiasm for, the new method of rule. This did not solve the problem of the Ukrainian people. Stalin was to tell Roosevelt at Yalta that “his position in the Ukraine was difficult and insecure.”¹⁰³ And he later regretted that it was impracticable to deport the entire nation, as he had done with the smaller Chechens and Kalmyks.¹⁰⁴

AT THE CENTER

While the punitive expeditions sent out by Stalin and Yezhov harried the provinces, Moscow remained the storm center. Of the seventy-one full members of the Central Committee, about two-thirds were normally stationed in the capital: all the full members of the Politburo except Kossior; the People’s Commissars; the heads of Central Committee departments, of the Komsomol, of the trade unions; the Comintern’s managers—all the concentration of power of a highly centralized machine.

Over this major sector of the Purge, Stalin and Yezhov themselves presided. They received valuable help from Molotov and Voroshilov when required, but on the whole Stalin kept an extremely tight personal grip on proceedings, working through Yezhov alone.

In 1937 and 1938, Yezhov sent in to Stalin 383 lists, containing thousands of names of figures important enough to require his personal approval for their execution.¹⁰⁵ As Yezhov was only in power for just over two years—and, in fact, his effective working period was rather less—this means that Stalin got such a list rather more often than every other day of “persons whose cases were under the jurisdiction of the Military Collegium.” A samizdat historian of the 1970s indicated that the lists included 40,000 names.¹⁰⁶ However, a Soviet periodical now tells us that at a recent plenum of the Central Committee, the total number shot, whose names appeared on lists signed by “Stalin, Molotov, Kaganovich, and Malenkov,” though perhaps over a longer period, was given as 230,000.¹⁰⁷ At any rate, we can envisage Stalin, on arrival at his office, as often as not finding in his in-tray a list of a few hundred names for death, looking through, and approving them, as part of the ordinary routine of a Kremlin day. We are told in recent Soviet articles that on 12 December 1937 alone, Stalin and Molotov sanctioned 3,167 death sentences, and then went to the cinema.

¹⁰⁸

The lists were in the following form:

Comrade Stalin,

I am sending for your approval four lists of people to be tried by the

Military Collegium:

List No. I (General)

List No. 2 (Former military personnel)

List No. 3 (Former personnel of the N.K.V.D.)