The Great Terror

The January 1938 resolution criticizes a large number of local Party organizations in addition to that of Kuibyshev for such practices, blaming officials such as “the former Secretary of the Kiev Provincial Committee of the Communist Party of the Ukraine, the enemy of the people Kudryavtsev,” “the exposed enemy of the people” Shatsky (Head of the Leading Party Organs Administration of the Rostov Provincial Committee), and so on, and telling pathetic tales of honest Bolsheviks, and even their relatives by marriage, who had lost their jobs as a result of incorrect denunciation.

The persistence of this theme is remarkable. Clearly, it was a great advantage to blame Postyshev and others for inhumanity rather than for belated humanity. In this way, the central leadership could, or might think it could, avoid some of the unpopularity arising from its own actions. But we might perhaps go further and see in this a sign that Stalin, right from the start, had determined to put the odium on his instruments and to destroy them when their task was completed. If so, he was to some degree successful. The “Yezhovshchina” remained the popular name for the Reign of Terror, and with the disappearance of Yezhov himself, some of the curse was taken off the surviving leadership.

On 9 and 10 February 1938, as if to mark the continuity of the Purge, a fresh group of fourteen or fifteen significant figures perished. They included A. P. Smirnov, Kaminsky, and Muklevich. M. I. Erbanov, First Secretary of the BuryatMongol ASSR, was among them. Purged with him was his Second Secretary, A. Markizov. Markizov’s daughter, Gelya, was in a famous photograph taken in 1936 in which she is held in Stalin’s arms, which indicated his love of children; and it continued to appear after he had orphaned her. In fact, a sculpture modeled on the photograph was set up in the Stalinskaya Metro station.¹⁹³

Meanwhile, arrests and denunciations continued. N. V. Krylenko, now serving as People’s Commissar for Justice, was attacked in January at the first meeting of the Supreme Soviet, for neglecting his duties in favor of mountain climbing and chess, and was not reappointed. When he had handed over (to Ulrikh’s subordinate, N. M. Rychkov), Stalin personally telephoned him to reassure him about future work. He was, of course, on the list of those to be arrested, and was in fact arrested the same night, 31 January 1938, with some of his family.¹⁹⁴

Krylenko, whom Lenin had appointed Commander in Chief of the Army immediately after the Revolution, had impressed Bruce Lockhart in 1918 as an “epileptic degenerate” and is referred to in 1938 by a fellow prisoner as “notorious and universally despised.”¹⁹⁵

He had conducted the prosecution in such faked trials as the Shakhty Case and the Menshevik Trial. As to his other interests, he had shown farcical dogmatism at a Congress of Chess Players in 1932:

We must finish once and for all with the neutrality of chess. We must condemn once and for all the formula ‘chess for the sake of chess,’ like the formula ‘art for art’s sake.’ We must organize shockbrigades of chess-players, and begin immediate realization of a Five-Year Plan for chess.¹⁹⁶

On his arrest, he is reported being treated with special indignity in the Butyrka “to take the conceit out of him.”¹⁹⁷ But he was soon taken to the Lefortovo for serious interrogation. The original charge was of connections with the Bukharin conspiracy, and the creation of a wrecking organization in the Commissariat of Justice, in which he had personally enlisted thirty people. On 3 March, he confessed that he had belonged to an anti-Soviet organization since 1930. But by 3 April, this was put further back, and he was confessing to having worked against Lenin before the Revolution and having plotted with Bukharin, Pyatakov, and Preobrazhensky after it.

¹⁹⁸

In general, secret executions of prominent committee members already arrested, and arrests of many of those still at large, continued.

The Party, as it had existed a year previously, had been broken. From District Secretaries to People’s Commissars, the veterans of Stalin’s first period of rule had fallen to Yezhov’s assault. But further blows were being prepared for the terrified survivors.

9

NATIONS IN TORMENT

Of all the treasures a State can possess, the human lives of its citizens are for us the most precious.

Stalin