The Great Terror

Although the charges and the supposed confessions did not impress, there seemed no reason to doubt that such a trial had indeed taken place as stated. It was only in the 1960s that death dates given for the accused made it clear that the whole thing was a complete lie. Karakhan had been shot on 20 September (with several others, including I. A. Teodorovich, Head of the Society of Former Political Prisoners); Yenukidze and Sheboldayev had perished on 30 October (with other leading figures, including thirteen other full members of the Central Committee, such as Chudov, Kodatsky, Rumyantsev, Khatayevich, and Lobov). Sheboldayev’s wife, Lika, a niece of Rudzutak, was severely interrogated, with threats to her newborn baby, and is reported going mad.¹⁷⁴ Nazaretyan was also shot on 30 October. His wife, Klavdia, with her seven-year-old son and five-year-old daughter, were taken to a special prison for women and children, a former church. Later they were sent to camp, but the daughter was eventually retrieved by a “brave aunt.” Klavdia was apparently sentenced to eight years, released in 1946, rearrested, but survived to be rehabilitated.

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Orakhelashvili, indeed, had been executed on 11 December, only five days before his supposed trial; he was not even tried by the Supreme Court, as stated, but by a troika of the Georgian NKVD (his wife had been shot on 17 September).¹⁷⁶

At any rate, none of the supposed leading defendants at the “trial” of 16 December were in fact alive when it took place. Why Stalin played this elaborate farce is unknown.

Another massacre of the 30 October type had taken place on 26–27 November. N. S. Komarov was then shot, as was E. I. Kviring, former secretary of the Bolshevik faction in the Duma; Ya. S. Hanecki, who had secured Lenin’s release from Austrian jail (his daughter was also arrested);¹⁷⁷ N. A. Kubyak, former Secretary of the Central Committee; D. E. Sulimov; Nosov; and at least fourteen other important figures, including M. M. Nemtsov, secretary of the Society of Old Bolsheviks.

On 21 December, there was a grand ceremonial meeting for the NKVD in the Bolshoi Theater in the presence of Kaganovich, Molotov, Voroshilov, Mikoyan, and Khrushchev. The whole of the full membership of the Politburo, including Kossior and Chubar (who were not present), were elected to the honorary Presidium, but only Zhdanov and Yezhov among the candidate members, the remaining places being taken by Khrushchev and Bulganin. Mikoyan was the main speaker, lavishing praise on Yezhov as “a talented faithful pupil of Stalin … beloved by the Soviet people,” and as having “achieved the greatest victory in the history of the Party, a victory we will never forget.” He concluded, “Learn the Stalinist style of work from Comrade Yezhov, as he learned it from Comrade Stalin!”¹⁷⁸

In January came an important plenum of the Central Committee and the presentation of a new Government to the Supreme Soviet. The positions of Postyshev and Kossior were affected.

In Kuibyshev province, Postyshev had tried to make up for his earlier opposition to the purges by extremely harsh action. He was now accused of excesses in this line. Malenkov, reporting, accused him of “by cries of ‘vigilance’ hiding his brutality in connection with the Party.” When Postyshev replied that almost all the Secretaries of District Committees and Executive Committees were in fact hostile elements, Molotov, Mikoyan, and Bulganin accused him of exaggerating, Kaganovich brought up his supposedly similar errors in Kiev the previous year,¹⁷⁹ and Malenkov summed up that his acts, and refusal to admit them, were an obvious “provocation.” (Malenkov was not even a candidate member of the Committee. Only twenty-eight of the seventy-one full members elected four years earlier were now in fact available to constitute the “plenum.”)¹⁸⁰