The Great Terror

Postyshev, still described as “Comrade,” was replaced as candidate member of the Politburo by Khrushchev.¹⁸¹ (This was the last occasion on which a removal from Politburo was officially announced. Henceforth, names simply disappeared from lists and photographs.) Pravda’s leader of the same day denounced the heads of certain Party organizations, giving that of Kuibyshev as an example, for having around them “sworn enemies of the people,” while expelling honest elements. The Central Committee resolution menacingly noted that the NKVD had had to intervene to save slandered Party members expelled in the province.¹⁸²

Postyshev had also in fact received a confidential Party censure while in Kuibyshev for “protecting enemies of the people.”¹⁸³ Stalin had now suggested that Postyshev might be removed from the Politburo, remaining a member of the Central Committee, and this was voted unanimously. However, his case was referred to the Control Commission, which reported that he had known of and worked with the Right—Trotskyite organization, and he was expelled from the Party.¹⁸⁴ But he was not arrested for a few days. He had a small flat in Moscow, where he was visited after this by his fighter-pilot son.¹⁸⁵

There he seems to have remained until his arrest on 21 February.

Kossior, in Kiev among the crumbled remnants of his power, had had a bad year. His brother I. V. Kossior, also a member of the Central Committee, had died in apparent good odor on 3 July, though it was later revealed that his death was, in reality, a suicide like Ordzhonikidze’s.¹⁸⁶ Another brother, V. V. Kossior, an old oppositionist, had been given ten years in 1934 and been implicated again in the Pyatakov Trial;¹⁸⁷ during the summer, he had been one of a batch of oppositionists brought from Vorkuta to Moscow and shot. Kossior and Petrovsky went to Kiev on 26 January 1938 and were welcomed at the station by the supposititious Ukrainian Central Committee. On 27 January, its “plenum” released Kossior from his post.¹⁸⁸

The First Secretaryship of the Ukraine was transferred, as we have seen, to the coming man, Nikita Khrushchev.¹⁸⁹ But far from falling into immediate oblivion, Kossior was appointed instead Vice Chairman of the USSR Council of People’s Commissars and President of the Soviet Control Commission.

In fact, the new Government presented by Molotov to the Supreme Soviet on 19 January 1938 had as its three Vice Premiers S. V. Kossior, Chubar, and Mikoyan, while Eikhe was People’s Commissar for Agriculture.¹⁹⁰

The Vice Chairmen of the Council of People’s Commissars cannot indeed seriously have thought of themselves as holding powerful positions. Both Voroshilov and Kaganovich, in charge of important departments and invariably ranking senior to them in Party listings, were not at this time Vice Premiers—an adequate demonstration of the post’s comparatively decorative significance.

Even so, we have the extraordinary spectacle of Molotov taking the chair at a meeting of the Council of People’s Commissars, the official order for the trial and arrest of several of whose members he had already signed. At meetings of Molotov and the Vice Premiers, two out of the three supposedly contributing to policy discussions were actually no more than dead men talking, whose opinions were by now quite meaningless.

During the Khrushchev period, it was customary to speak of the January 1938 plenum as marking a return to legality, it being thought suitable for such a turn of events to mark Khrushchev’s promotion to the highest levels. Indeed, the resolution of the plenum as ever speaks strongly against unjust expulsions from the Party, and this, with the attacks on Provincial Committees for the same error, which were to continue throughout the year, gave that impression to those who wished to receive it. But there was no sign of any real improvement. A Soviet account given in April 1964 managed to satisfy the demands both of Khrushchev and of truth by saying, “The January 1938 plenum of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party somewhat improved the situation. However, repressions did not cease.”¹⁹¹

It was Yezhov himself who made some of the most critical remarks about the wickedness of expelling members wrongly. Throughout the Terror, the leadership had constantly spoken against unfair expulsions—with the aim, however, of destroying its subordinates. For example, as we have seen, in the 1937 attack on Postyshev, the real motive of which was to remove an objection to the Terror, the official line was condemnation of inadequate Party democracy. In fact, this can be traced even in the Central Committee’s key letter of the summer of 1936, which spoke strongly against unprincipled expulsions.¹⁹²