The Great Terror

We are told in a recent article in Izvestiya that those now sentenced were “taken directly to the cellars,” and that “it was all done in such haste that a man had scarcely been shot when others sentenced to death were coming down the corridor.”¹¹⁰

Kossior’s two surviving brothers, Kazimir and Mikhail, perished too, as did his wife, Elizaveta, put on “List 4” and shot;¹¹¹ and the wife of one brother is reported attempting suicide on receiving a ten-year sentence.¹¹² Postyshev’s oldest son, Valentin, was shot, and his other children were sent to labor camps.

¹¹³ His wife, Tamara, was viciously tortured night after night in the Lefortovo, often being returned to her cell bleeding all over her back and unable to walk.¹¹⁴ She is reported shot. Chubar’s wife was also executed.¹¹⁵ Kosarev’s wife and his seventeen-year-old daughter were sentenced to ten years, and his father-in-law, the Rector of the Trade Academy, was shot.¹¹⁶

There remained one Politburo figure who, though in bad odor, was not under arrest—Petrovsky. His position had now been extremely difficult for two years.

Among the Leningraders arrested in 1937 was his elder son, Peter, who had edited the local Leningradskaya pravda. Petrovsky, candidate member of the Politburo and Head of State of the Ukrainian Republic, was unable to get news of him. He met a “stone wall of silence.” Friends, “high officials in the Party and State,” made several attempts to find out the facts. Finally they had to give up. The strictest instructions had been given to prevent anyone from discovering what went on “behind the walls of the Lubyanka.” Young Petrovsky never emerged alive.¹¹⁷ Another son, Corps Commander L. G. Petrovsky, was expelled from the Party and Army, but though arrested was later released.¹¹⁸

Meanwhile, in July 1937, when various illegalities were being perpetrated in the Ukraine without the consent of the leadership, Petrovsky had written to Kalinin, his titular superior, complaining that the principles of Party democracy were being overborne.¹¹⁹ This is consistent with his failure to join in the denunciations at the Ukrainian plenum that month.

He had, it is said, “become critical of the personality cult.”¹²⁰ But on 4 February 1938 he was awarded the Order of Lenin for his sixtieth birthday. And he remained theoretically Chairman of the Ukrainian Supreme Soviet throughout the fall of all his colleagues. After a conversation with Stalin which he described as “short and painful,” he was removed, in June 1938, from his Ukrainian posts.¹²¹ This was, it was pointed out in Khrushchev’s time, done “unconstitutionally.”¹²² At the 7 November Parade, he did not appear with the leadership, and was henceforth not to be named in the listings.

A political case was concocted against Petrovsky in the usual way. The caretaker of a villa near Kiev which had been used by the Ukrainian leaders made, after beatings, a confession incriminating him. Petrovsky’s secretary is also reported under arrest in the same circumstances.¹²³ A brother of Petrovsky is reported in the Butyrka in 1938.¹²⁴

In March 1939, during the XVIIIth Congress, charges were made as a result of which he was not elected to the new Central Committee: he was accused of friendship with K. V. Sukhomlin, Ukrainian Politburo member since exposed as a Japanese spy; of having failed to report his knowledge of S. V. Kossior’s connections with foreign counter-revolutionary organizations; and of having (presumably in the 1920s) opposed Kaganovich’s nomination as Ukrainian First Secretary.¹²⁵

In fact, there is no doubt that a case against him, long prepared, was now to be launched. But Stalin held his hand. Petrovsky was relieved of his membership in the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet (his last and titular appointment) on 31 May 1939 in a public fashion and with the title “Comrade”—an indication that his name was not yet unsayable.

He had been unable to get any employment for some months, living on whatever his wife could earn. Finally, in June 1939, he was allowed to take up the post of Assistant Director of the Museum of the Revolution, offered him by another former Duma member, Fedor Samoilov, which he held until Stalin’s death.¹²⁶ His name disappeared from reference books, and most foreigners imagined that he had been executed. But it continued to appear in one single list, that of former Bolshevik members of the Duma. Stalin shot none of them;¹²⁷ the others, all third-rate figures, survived to die natural deaths. Since I first noted this, an account has appeared from the Petrovsky family archives, in which Stalin shouts at Petrovsky that his former membership in the Duma would not save him.¹²⁸ But it did, or something did.