The Great Terror

On 3 November 1937 a poster for the Republican elections, consisting of portraits of the Politburo, was put out. It contained all the full members, including Kossior and Chubar, but of the candidate members only Zhdanov and Yezhov were shown. Eilche, Postyshev, and Petrovsky were thus demonstratively snubbed. In fact, throughout this period, signs of degradation were visited on the candidate members of the Politburo who were later to fall. They were omitted from honorary Presidiums. Large numbers of lists of nominations for the December election of the Supreme Soviet starting in late October usually left them out (and often omitted Kossior too).fn5 But they were included in the conventional letter of important figures refusing multiple nomination on instructions of the Central Committee.¹⁷⁰ And all (Kossior, Postyshev, Eikhe, Chubar, and Petrovsky) were returned in the elections which followed.

For the best part of two months, until the actual voting of 12 December and afterward, these elections were given intense prominence and publicity. Every day, articles, photographs, lists of places where Politburo members would speak, the addresses of meetings to their candidates, and a vast apparatus of joyful expectancy reigned on paper. Mass resolutions were printed under such headings as “With Joy We Vote for Nikolai Ivanovich Yezhov”; poems, such as one by Stalin’s Kazakh hack bard Dzhambul, “People’s Commissar Yezhov,” gave a view of the police chief which would have been thought excessively rosy if applied to a ruler like Good King Wenceslas.

Throughout December, articles and statements on the elections continued to appear. There were many reports from abroad of, for example, “The Great Impression Made in England.” And so the days drew on. As the election publicity gradually petered out, there were other themes for the public—for example, the centenary of the Georgian poet Rustaveli—eked out with much Stakhanovite conferencing.

But the year was not to end without a demonstrative killing. Only five months had separated the Zinoviev and Pyatakov Trials. Since then, eleven had passed, and the Bukharin Case was still not ready. As an interim measure, a group of men who were not prepared to confess was tried in camera under the 14 September law.

On 20 December 1937 the papers ran page after page to celebrate the twentieth anniversary of the VCHEKA–OGPU–NKVD, with pictures of Dzerzhinsky and Yezhov. That body’s vigilance had been demonstrated the previous day by the announcement of a purge in the bread-distribution organizations. Workers’ meetings sent applause, and poems about the splendid role of the Secret Police appeared in profusion. Pravda carried a long article by Frinovsky, and also a long list of awards, including the Order of Lenin to Boris Berman. Among this feast of laudatory generalization, a short announcement drew attention to the more practical side of the work of Yezhov’s men. It said that on 16 December, Yenukidze, with Karaldian, Sheboldayev, Oraldielashvili, and others, had been tried before the Military Collegium of the Supreme Court as spies, bourgeois nationalists, and terrorists, had confessed, and had been executed.¹⁷¹

In the Bukharin Trial, Yenukidze was to be made the central villain of terrorist activity, held responsible for the organization of the murder of Kirov, and said to have instructed Yagoda to tell Zaporozhets not to hinder the act.¹⁷² He was also to be responsible for plotting the murder of Gorky.¹⁷³ Orakhelashvili, who had been Secretary of the Georgian Central Committee, had for the past five years acted as Deputy Director of the Marx-Engels-Lenin Institute in Moscow. He is now said to have lost his life as a result of objecting to Beria’s book on the Bolshevik movement in the Caucasus, which was heavily faked to give Stalin a major role.