The Great Terror

For the moment, we may consider one last case in more detail—that of the naturally sensitive Commissariat of Foreign Trade. Its head, Rosengolts, was removed on 15 June for “other work.” Both his assistants, Eliava and Loganovsky, disappeared—Eliava to be shot during the year.¹⁵⁰

Rosengolts, broad-shouldered, strong-minded, and Jewish, was an excellent administrator. He had in the past few years accommodated himself to the new style of rule. He had been brought up in a revolutionary family. When only ten years old, “My hand, the hand of a child, was used to hide illegal literature during the night and to recover it in the morning from a place where the hand of a grown-up could not reach.”¹⁵¹ He joined the Bolshevik Party at fifteen or sixteen and was first arrested when sixteen years old. At the age of seventeen, he was nominated as a delegate to the Party Congress. During the Revolution, he fought in Moscow, and in the Civil War was prominent at various fronts. He had ruled the Donbas in a ruthless fashion. After a brief flirtation with the Trotsky opposition, he was appointed to the London Embassy. In 1928, he returned and had since worked in the Government, holding his present post since 1930.

Rosengolts was still referred to as “Comrade” in the June decree releasing him from his post, and for some time no further move was made against him. This was in accordance with a common practice of Stalin’s. Arrest was decided on; the dismissal occurred; and then for months the victim was left in some minor post, never knowing when the blow would fall. An American resident in Moscow in August 1937 describes a high official seen, day after day, on a balcony opposite waiting to be arrested. “Waiting was killing him. He waited three more weeks while the G.P.U. watched and while his wife wasted away. Then the G.P.U. came.”¹⁵² Some survivors have described this as psychologically more wearing and destructive even than the eventual imprisonment and interrogation, and they add that the state to which a man was reduced made the process of interrogation a fairly easy one for the NKVD. In fact, some of its work had been done for it already without its officers having to move a finger, a useful saving of energy in a hard-worked organization.

Rosengolts was left to sweat it out for many weeks. He was still at large in August, when he made several desperate efforts to get an interview with Stalin—later to be interpreted as an assassination attempt.¹⁵³ On his wife, “a jolly, red-haired girl, very imperfectly educated and brought up in a religious household,”¹⁵⁴ the weeks and months of anxiety must have been frightful. She did all she could think of.

When her husband was finally arrested, the routine NKVD search revealed, sewn into his hip pocket, a small piece of dry bread wrapped in a strip of cloth. Inside the bread was a piece of paper on which she had written, as a charm against evil fortune, eight verses from Psalms 68 and 91, ancient cries of the helpless against their oppressors:

LX VIII

Let God arise, and let his enemies be scattered: let them also that hate him, flee before him.

Like as the smoke vanisheth, so shalt thou drive them away: and like as wax melteth at the fire, so let the ungodly perish at the presence of God….

XCI

Whoso dwelleth under the defence of the most High: shall abide under the shadow of the Almighty.

I will say unto the Lord, Thou art my hope, and my stronghold: my God, in him will I trust.

For he shall deliver thee from the snare of the hunter: and from the noisome pestilence.

He shall defend thee under his wings and thou shalt be safe under his feathers: his faithfulness and truth shall be thy shield and buckler.

Thou shalt not be afraid for any terror by night: nor for the arrow that flieth by day;

For the pestilence that walketh in darkness: nor for the sickness that destroyeth in the noon-day.…¹⁵⁵

CLOSING IN ON THE POLITBURO

As the tempo of the public side of the Purge eased somewhat in the autumn of 1937, Stalin began to prepare the next phase. A number of figures, including Bukharin and Rykov themselves, were under interrogation with a view to public trial. A number of unsatisfactory Stalinists like Rudzutak and Antipov, though they were still perhaps resisting, lay ready as a possible reserve for the Bukharin Case, or alternatively as the central figures of a later trial. But much remained to be done.