The Great Terror

The spring of 1937, in part in connection with Yagoda’s fall, saw the end of the former Russian Association of Proletarian Writers (RAPP), which had bullied the writing community from an extreme Marxist position in the early 1930s before being repudiated by Stalin in 1932 in favor of Socialist Realism. L. L. Averbakh, its leading figure, was a relative of Yagoda by marriage and was denounced as a Trotskyite and arrested in mid-April,⁴¹’ together with the playwright V. Kirshon⁴² (a delegate to the XVIIth Party Congress), who was eventually shot in the political–military massacre at the end of July 1938. Dmitry Mirsky, a prince who had fought in the White Army, had been converted to Communism while in exile in England, and had returned to the USSR, was now referred to by

Literaturnaya gazeta as “that filthy Wrangelist and White Guard officer.”⁴³ The leading Polish Communist poet, Bruno Jasienski, was also denounced in connection with the RAPPists. At his first interrogation in the Lefortovo, the examiners seized him by his shoulders and stamped on his feet.⁴⁴

He was, of course, accused as a Polish spy—in connection with the case of T. F. Dombal (shot on 4 December 1938). He was given a fifteen-year sentence as such, but also as a French spy. A friend met him in the Vtoraya Rechka camp near Vladivostok, now barely recognizable from sickness, hunger, and exhaustion, but denied entry to the hospital, though he was apparently admitted before he died in 1939.⁴⁵

There were certain definite grudges to be paid off. Isaak Babel, Russia’s finest short-story writer, had served in Budenny’s Cavalry Army in the Civil War and the Polish Campaign, and in 1924 published his extraordinary collection of Civil War stories, Konarmiia. Budenny had protested vigorously as each vignette forming the book came out. He regarded the ruthlessly clear-eyed stories as a slander, preferring the hack heroics of the ordinary correspondents. Gorky, recognizing Babel’s very different talent, had protected him.

Babel wrote of the Revolution, “It’s eaten with gunpowder and the very best blood is poured over it.” It was Babel who at the Writers’ Congress of 1934 had spoken of the “heroism of silence,” a phrase and an activity to be condemned bitterly as a sign of alienation from the regime. Babel knew Yezhov’s wife. Although he knew it was unwise, he sometimes went to see her to “find a key to the puzzle.” He gathered that whatever Yezhov’s role, it was not at the bottom of it.⁴⁶ He ceased to be published in 1937 and at the end of May 1939 was arrested in his dacha at the writers’ settlement at Peredelkino. He is said to have resisted arrest and was shot on 27 January 1940, a week before Meyerhold, whose case was connected with his.⁴⁷

Babel, in addition to offending a minor figure like Budenny and bringing into disrepute the First Cavalry Army, from which Stalin was now drawing an inadequate substitute for a High Command, is said to have made a rash joke about the General Secretary. But his offense was small compared with that of Boris Pilnyak, another talent to have arisen from the Revolution. His Naked Year

, about a provincial town in 1919, is a most extraordinary representation, in which the struggle for bare existence brings out the excess, the eccentricity, of the range of Russian character.

As early as the 1920s, Pilnyak had become involved in one of the most obscure and doubtful crimes attributed to Stalin. In the spring of 1924, Frunze was appointed Deputy Commissar for War—and in practice took over control of the Army, with little resistance from Trotsky, before Trotsky’s actual removal in 1925. He seems to have sympathized mainly with the Zinoviev–Kamenev group. In the late summer of 1925, he fell ill, and died on 31 October of that year. The rumor in Moscow was that he had been ordered by the Central Committee—that is, in effect, by Stalin—to undergo an operation which in fact killed him. If Frunze had died in 1936 or 1937, the existence of such a rumor would have been perfectly natural. The significant thing is that it circulated at so early a date—at a time, that is, when Stalin had not given any precedents.

Later Soviet books on Frunze have been notably touchy on the point. One biography⁴⁸ elaborates at some length about doctors who said that an operation was really necessary, and who tended him through his last illness. This is a book by one of those military historians who have elsewhere been so frankly hostile to Stalin’s acts against the generals. Unless (as is, of course, quite possible) other interventions took place on its publication, one tends to think that exculpation from such a source shows that Stalin is really believed not guilty by some of those who would be anxious to know.