The Great Terror

While announcements of local Party trials and death sentences continued, they were now for a time rarer, and they were not given front-page treatment. The great propaganda campaign receded. The press began to fill with the preparations for elections to the Supreme Soviet. Every type of electoral article appropriate to a democracy began to appear—“Women Voters, a Powerful Force,” for example. And following them, the nominations of all the leaders in good odor, and page after page of enthusiastic meetings all around the Union, filled the papers day after day through October.

But Stalin was preparing for action against his unsatisfactory followers. A document (still in existence) was signed by Stalin, Molotov, and Kaganovich in November, to sanction “the arraignment… before a court of the Military Collegium of a large number of comrades from the ranks of prominent Party, State and military workers.”¹⁶¹ The 1961 speaker who gave this information went on to say, “Most of them were shot. Those innocently shot and posthumously rehabilitated include such prominent Party and State figures as Comrades Postyshev, Kossior, Eikhe, Rudzutak and Chubar; People’s Commissar of Justice Krylenko; Unshlikht, Secretary of the U.S.S.R. Central Executive Committee; People’s Commissar of Education Bubnov, and others.”

This strongly implies (though it does not actually assert) that these men were on the list referred to. Some, indeed, were already under arrest, but under the old procedure were presumably still being interrogated with the intention of any formal “arraigning” being postponed until the confessions had been obtained. What is more extraordinary is that some of the arrests now authorized were not carried out for weeks or months—that the accused remained in high posts for longish periods.

The procedure with regard to ordinary Party members seems to have been that just before an arrest, the NKVD would inform the local Party committee or, in the case of important members, the Central Committee that a warrant had been issued. The member was then expelled from the Party in secret session and was not informed of the expulsion until arrested. Sometimes the period between these clandestine expulsions and the arrests was quite long. A case is reported of a District Party Secretary in the Ukraine who was secretly expelled by the Ukrainian Central Committee in March 1938 and not arrested until July, meanwhile carrying on as usual and even expelling other members.¹⁶² (Again, a foreign Communist arrested on 19 June 1938 was shown the order for her arrest dated 15 October 1937.)¹⁶³

Needless to say, the procedure was contrary to Party statutes.

Who the “prominent … military workers” referred to were has not been made explicit, but they were now falling, or about to fall, in numbers, as we have seen. The “others” must include the important figure of V. I. Mezhlauk, who now held the Commissariat of Heavy Industry, and had since the spring been appearing on platforms with the Politburo itself.¹⁶⁴ Mezhlauk, plumply square, balding, with glasses, was arrested in December 1937.¹⁶⁵

Unshlikht, a Pole in the Dzerzhinsky tradition, had been a pro-Bolshevik member of the Polish Social Democratic Party since 1900. A member of the Petrograd Revolutionary Committee, he had served in the Civil War with Tukhachevsky, in the Sixteenth Army, and had been wounded. He had later been Vice Chairman of the All-Russian Cheka. Trotsky had thought him “an ambitious but talentless intriguer.” By the end of the year, he too had been arrested.¹⁶⁶

Meanwhile, Postyshev still held his post in Kuibyshev and was still a candidate member of the Politburo. Kossior was still First Secretary of the Ukraine and a full member of the Politburo; Chubar, Vice Chairman of the Council of People’s Commissars and a full member of the Politburo; and the others in their relevant posts.

Even Postyshev, in spite of demotion, was still not proceeded against. He is now said to have had a last conversation with Stalin, after he had been transferred to Kuibyshev, and to have frankly denounced the Purge, at least as it applied to loyal Party members.¹⁶⁷

However, in June, he had been given reasonable headlines for his speech to the Party conference in his new fief at Kuibyshev: it was a call, extreme even by the standards then prevailing, for the vigilant uprooting of Trotskyites.

Eikhe, a large, serious-looking man, smooth-moustached, with a reputation for ruthlessness, a Party member since 1905, was made People’s Commissar for Agriculture in Chernov’s place on 30 October.¹⁶⁸ In the West Siberian Territory, which had hitherto been his satrapy, Vyshinsky had alleged¹⁶⁹ an inadequate number of prosecutions for counter-revolutionary activity in 1937, a fact which may well have been due to Eikhe’s attitude or at least have figured in the later charges against him.