The Great Terror

Cynicism prevailed as well as terror. A senior Army officer in prison mentioned that he was once cheerfully greeted at a reception by Molotov’s wife, with the words “Ah, Sasha, whatever’s this? Why haven’t you been arrested yet?”¹⁴² She had become Head of the Cosmetics Trust (a post she was to hold for some years) through the elimination of her boss, Chekalov, who was sent to the Vorkuta railway camps,¹⁴³

and she was to be a member of the 1939 Central Committee, which replaced the men now disappearing. Her own arrest came in 1948.

An atmosphere of fear hung over the Party and Government offices. People’s Commissars were arrested on their way to their jobs in the morning. Every day, another Central Committee member or Vice Chairman of a People’s Commissariat or one of their more important underlings was disappearing. In one sphere alone, for the moment, joy prevailed. Yezhov was awarded the Order of Lenin on 18 July, an occasion for photographs, leading articles, and general celebrations. Vyshinsky received the same award on 21 July, though with less panache.

Orders were now also handed out to many leading police officials. On the completion of the Mdivani Case, the Georgian NKVD men received their reward. One notes among them the names of men who a year later were to replace the current operators in Moscow and elsewhere, and who were only to perish at the end of the Beria epoch, in 1953 to 1955: Goglidze, Kobulov, Rapava, and their like.¹⁴⁴

Other awards went to a group of Yezhov’s men, including the dreadful Ushakov, Frinovsky, and, as a junior, the long-surviving L. E. Vlodzimirsky, who was to serve Beria and be brought back by him in 1953 to be Head of the Section for Investigating Specially Important Cases, and be shot in December of that year.

Yezhov himself was now to get the highest accolade, a town named for him. On 22 July, Kaganovich’s protégé, the ex-OGPU man Bulganin, was appointed Chairman of the Council of People’s Commissars of the Russian Republic. The fall of his predecessor, Sulimov, involved a change in the name of the town of Sulimov, capital of the Cherkess Autonomous Province, which was now suitably renamed Yezhovo-Cherkessk.

Bulganin’s later colleague and rival Ithrushchev was conducting his own purge in the local machine of the city and province to the satisfaction of the authorities. He had started in late March, as in Leningrad.¹⁴⁵

Now, at a meeting of the Moscow Provincial Committee on 23 August, he made a series of attacks on local leaders like Filatov, which presaged his disappearance, with many others. Ukhanov, Khrushchev’s Chairman of the Moscow Soviet until recently, was now filling one of the ministerial vacancies as People’s Commissar for Local Industry, and it was from there that he was seized. Like Antipov, Yakovlev, Stetsky, and Sulimov, he was a full member of the Central Committee.

August saw one of the biggest tourist influxes ever to reach Russia. The visitors noted no public gloom. Once again, a great Soviet flight was being celebrated—that of Levanevsky and his N-209 around the Union. The papers were full of celebrations, though they had time also, towards the end of the month, to announce the award of Orders of Lenin to the hard-worked Military Jurists, including Ulrikh, Matulevich, and Nikitchenko¹⁴⁶ (the last two described as Vice Presidents of the Military Collegium), and to Prosecutors like Roginsky.¹⁴⁷

Meanwhile, the Commissars and Vice Commissars of the economic Commissariats went the way of Ukhanov. Some—like Chernov, Commissar for Agriculture, removed on 30 October; Grinko, Commissar for Finance; and Ivanov, Commissar of the Timber Industry—were to appear in the next great trial. Others, like M. Rukhimovich, Commissar for the Defense Industry, who had been appearing with the highest leadership for a few months and lost his post in October 1937¹⁴⁸ (being replaced by Kaganovich’s brother, M. M. Kaganovich), were to be tried in secret. Rukhimovich had supported Stalin against all the oppositionists; earlier he had been one of Stalin’s and Voroshilov’s closest accomplices in the intrigues against Trotsky in Tsaritsyn in the Civil War. In the same category comes Lyubimov, People’s Commissar for Light Industry, who was removed, with both his Assistant Commissars, on 7 September.¹⁴⁹

By the end of the year, few Commissars apart from Voroshilov and Kaganovich remained. In addition to those already named, the Commissars for Communications (Khalepsky), for Internal Trade (Veitser), for Heavy Industry (Mezhlauk), for Education (Bubnov), for Justice (Krylenko), and for Sea and River Transport (Yanson) were arrested, together with successive heads of the National Bank and their subordinates.