The Great Terror

In this atmosphere, any failure, or any accident, in the economic sphere automatically became sabotage. In the absence of genuine opposition acts, any breakdown had to be made to serve, just as Molotov’s accident at Prokopyevsk had had to be inflated into an assassination attempt in the absence of any genuine one. And already at the Pyatakov Trial, railway accidents had been put to the account of the accused, with Vyshinsky graphically recounting the sufferings of the murdered passengers. In the Bukharin Trial, livestock deaths were attributed to the conscious activities of the plotters. Sharangovich said in evidence, “In 1932 we took measures to spread plague among pigs”; and later, speaking of horses, “In 1936 we caused a wide outbreak of anemia.” Sharangovich also mentions a number of particular plants—a cement works, a flax mill, a pipe foundry, a power station—in Byelorussia (where he was First Secretary) as having been sabotaged under his instructions. Failures in the grossly overextended first Five-Year Plan were very widespread indeed. But even if the local First Secretary was usually responsible, in every case subordinates were involved.

On the economic side, Soviet statistical and planning methods led to an endless strain on skilled management. The planning figures were always unrealistic. To admit failure meant instant arrest, so the directors concealed it as best they could. This led to a vicious circle with doubly erroneous figures in the ensuing period. When the gap grew so large that it could not be concealed, a scapegoat had to be found, and “then there is a crisis and the Chief Director and a number of officials are sent to camps, but those who take their place have to employ the same methods all over again; the system as it stands leaves them no option.¹⁶²

The directors who organized the new works faced appalling tasks. Lykhachev, of the Stalin Automobile Works in Moscow, had to try to direct 25,000 men, with crises about administration, raw material, or simple negligence arising almost hourly. At the Gorky Works in Gorky, an even larger factory wore out the director, Diakonov, even before his arrest. The head of the automobile industry, Dybets, and his assistant were arrested in 1938. In the same year, in the metallurgical factury in Sverdlovsk, the Old Bolshevik director, Semion Magrilov, shot himself in his office, leaving a long letter attacking the Terror. All those suspected of having read it were arrested and disappeared.¹⁶³

By the beginning of 1940, this factory had 2 engineers and 31 technicians with the right qualifications, and 270 without. Magnitogorsk had 8 engineers and 16 technicians with diplomas, and 364 without. In general, as a Soviet legal journal tells us, “hundreds of thousands with no qualifications” now took over the engineering and technical work, with disastrous results.¹⁶⁴ Production, stagnant in 1937 and 1938, actually went down in 1939.

¹⁶⁵

The railways were subjected to particularly Draconian laws. The Criminal Codex of the RSFSR, in its Article 59, covered “crimes against the system of government,” including various offenses on the railways which “lead, or might lead, to the breakdown of State transport plans” and of which some examples given are the accumulation of empty trucks and the dispatch of trains off schedule. The prescribed punishment was up to ten years or, if done with malicious intent, the death sentence.

Kaganovich also devised the so-called theory of counter-revolutionary limit-setting on output, with the help of which he organized the mass destruction of engineering and technical cadres. “In a short period of time most of the directors of railroads and of the railroads’ political departments and many executive officials of the central apparatus and lines were dismissed from their jobs and later arrested.”¹⁶⁶

As to “sabotage” itself, on the Soviet railways at this time there was an accident of some sort every five minutes. As we have seen in dealing with the Pyatakov Trial, this led to the slaughter of the railway cadres. Kaganovich had made a tour of the railways of the Far East early in 1936. Following this, the Military Collegium went on tour and handed down five death sentences and ten long jail terms in Krasnoyarsk and Tomsk in March, for wrecking for “foreign intelligence services.” This was only a beginning:

In his speech at a meeting of railway activists on 10 March 1937, Kaganovich said: “I cannot name a single road or a single system where there has not been Trotyskyite—Japanese sabotage. Not only that, there is not a single branch of railway transport in which these saboteurs have not turned up….” Under Kaganovich arrests of railway officials were made by lists. His deputies, nearly all road chiefs and political section chiefs, and other executive officials in transport were arrested without any grounds whatever.¹⁶⁷