The Great Terror

List No. 4 (Wives of enemies of the people)fn4

I request sanction to convict all in the first degree.

Yezhov

The post-Stalin speaker who quotes this adds that “first degree” conviction meant death by shooting. The lists were examined by Stalin and Molotov, and on each of them is the notation:

Approved—J. Stalin

V. Molotov.¹⁰⁹

We learn that in one such set of lists (on 20 August 1938) of 736 names, 200 were of military men and 15 were of wives. The 12 December 1937 list cited above included, with a smaller list of 239 shot on 3 December, 49 members of the Central Committee.¹¹⁰

As to the executions not requiring approval at quite so high a level, on 18 October 1937 alone, Yezhov and Vyshinsky, acting as a “troika,” considered 551 names, sentencing every one of them to be shot. It will be seen that in a sixteen-hour working day, this would give them less than two minutes per case.¹¹¹

That their speed was not up to Stalin and Molotov’s best effort is probably due to the fact that they had to initial each name, rather than just read them through and sign the list.

Decisions to make an arrest, and even warrants, were often signed months before the arrest was carried out. And, in the same way, leading figures were sometimes decorated with high Orders on the very day of their arrest.¹¹² The reason given by an NKVD officer is that the police informed only their immediate superior about the progress of their investigations, and Yezhov informed only Stalin.¹¹³

When Yezhov once sent a list of names to Stalin with a note “For eventual arrest: to be verified,” Stalin wrote on it, “don’t verify. Arrest.”¹¹⁴ Ulrikh and Vyshinsky reported regularly to Stalin (and sometimes to Molotov and Yezhov) about the trials and sentences. “Ulrikh presented every month a report on the general number of people sentenced for ‘espionage, terrorist and diversionary activity.’ Stalin read all the reports: on the state of the crop, coal production and, dreadful to say, of the number of people deprived of life.”¹¹⁵

Molotov is named as suggesting sentencing “by lists,” rather than by consideration of individual cases. It is certainly true that orders went out to arrest categories rather than individual suspects. A former Chairman of the Byelorussian Council of People’s Commissars tells of being present when the local NKVD chief, Boris Berman, complained to the local First Secretary, A. A. Volkov, “Yezhov has sent again an order to arrest old Communists. But where shall I find them? There are none left.”¹¹⁶

As in the rest of the country, the new offensive had started in May 1937.

Fitzroy Maclean, watching Stalin on the Red Square reviewing stand on 1 May, was already struck by the rest of the Politburo, who “grinned nervously and moved uneasily from one foot to the other, forgetting the parade and the high office they held and everything else in their mingled joy and terror at being spoken to by him.” Stalin’s own expression varied between “benignity and bored inscrutability.”¹¹⁷

They might well feel alarm, for one of their members was absent. His colleagues had perhaps already “discussed” his case, in the same way that Zhdanov’s Leningrad Committee was to “discuss” Chudov’s. Yan Rudzutak, member of the Party since 1905, who had spent ten years in Tsarist prisons and exile, a former full member of the Politburo and now a candidate member, was not among his old comrades. His arrest had apparently just taken place.¹¹⁸

He was seized at a supper party after the theater. The NKVD arrested everyone present. Four women among them are reported in the Butyrka, still in bedraggled evening dress, three months later.¹¹⁹ His dacha was taken over by Zhdanov.¹²⁰

Rudzutak was arrested as allegedly a Rightist, leader of a “reserve center” ready to take over if Bukharin’s was exposed, because “nobody had ever known of any difference between him and the Party.”¹²¹ This is, in fact, an admission that Stalinists of long standing were now, for the first time, being arrested—especially (but not only) if they showed any signs of opposing the Purge. Rudzutak, in particular, had one very black mark against him: his failure to recommend the death penalty for Ryutin when Head of the Control Commission in 1932.

Through May, another great heroic diversion, parallel to the exploits of the aviators of the previous year, was spread in the papers day after day. This was the landing, under the direction of 0. Shmidt, of Papanin’s group at the North Pole, a fine exploit. The officers of the airlift that took them in and set them up were welcomed by the Party leaders, decorated, and publicized round the usual celebrations. At the same time, the camp on the ice drifted through the months, from time to time sending loyal greetings from—and receiving thanks at—the farthest-flung outpost of the Party and State.