The Great Terror

The next day, Yezhov announced that the NKVD had evidence of Pyatnitsky having been an agent of the Tsarist police. Krupskaya defended his character on the grounds that Lenin had regarded him as one of the best Bolsheviks. Yezhov proposed a vote of censure against Pyatnitsky. Kaminsky and Krupskaya voted against. Stalin asked why Pyatnitsky did not say what he thought about this. Pyatnitsky then said that if he was not needed he would go, and left. On 7 July, he was arrested.¹³⁴ (As Molotov had foreseen, Pyatnitsky’s wife was arrested and not seen again. His son Igor spent many years in labor camp, and his younger son was placed first with foster parents and then in an NKVD children’s home.)¹³⁵ Kaminsky also spoke against the purges. Among other things, he attacked Beria, denouncing him as a former agent of the Azerbaijan nationalist intelligence service.

¹³⁶ Kaminsky, who had joined the Bolshevik Party as a medical student some years before the Revolution, was arrested that day and was later shot.”¹³⁷ His wife was only jailed for two years, and survived.¹³⁸

In the midst of the swing into total terror, yet another diversion was provided by Russian airmen. In June, Chkalov and his crew flew their ANT-25 over the North Pole to Falkland, Oregon, and in July Gromov flew another to San Jacinto, California, setting a world distance record. The two flights, both fine achievements, were the occasion for a further great press campaign: pages and pages of newspapers filled with greetings, meetings, lives of the airmen, photographs, and so on. When Chkalov finally crashed on 15 December 1938, Belyakin, Head of the Main Administration of the Aircraft Industry, Usachev, Director of the plant where the plane had been built, and Tomashevich, the designer, were shot for sabotage.¹³⁹

The papers continued to carry general calls to vigilance and accounts of various methods used by the enemy. Pravda drew attention to misprints in the local press which amounted to sabotage—for example, a reference to the

bedy (sorrows) rather than the pobedy (victories) of Socialism. And local trials were frequently reported. But the great blow was that now being delivered against the leading cadres of the regime, which was to ravage the old Central Committee and destroy the next level of the Party command in their thousands.

For it was now, starting in May 1937, that the flower of Stalin’s long-nurtured administrative and political machine began to go. After Rudzutak, no member or candidate member of the Politburo was to be arrested during the year, and several officials only just junior to them hung on until a specially mounted top-level operation in November and December took them. But for the moment, there was a broad sweep of their subordinates, running as high as men like Antipov,¹⁴⁰

Vice Chairman of the Council of People’s Commissars, Party member since 1902, several times arrested under Tsarism, and organizer of underground printing plants, who had been among the half-dozen appearing with the Politburo on the May Day platform.

In the Central Committee apparatus, Malenkov’s Department of Leading Party Organs was overseeing a thorough “renewal.” Another figure who was to be named though not produced as one of the most important links in the Bukharin plot was Ya. A. Yakovlev, former People’s Commissar for Agriculture, and now Head of the Agricultural Department of the Central Committee. He figured prominently in the press over June, and was the rapporteur to the June plenum on its sole published item of discussion, vegetables. In the autumn, he fades out until his extraordinary transmogrification into a Rightist in March 1938—an odd appellation for the man who had been a chief operator in the collectivization field.

Another head of a Central Committee department now to disappear had at one time almost reached the summits of power—K. Ya. Bauman, Head of the Central Committee’s Scientific Department. He had been Secretary of the Central Committee and candidate member of the Politburo (as Uglanov’s replacement) for a few months in 1929 and 1930. An enthusiastic Stalinist, he had been the scapegoat for the first excesses of collectivization, but he had remained on the Central Committee. Bauman’s wife was also arrested, and his fourteen-year-old son, Volik, sent away to a home.¹⁴¹ Bauman was shot on 14 October 1937. With him went most of the staff of his department. The Head of the parallel, but more important, Agitation and Propaganda Department, Stetsky, an old economist who had held the post since 1929, was also arrested about this time.