The Great Terror

Petrovsky survived Stalin, only dying in 1958. In fact, he was the first figure to be restored to favor after Stalin’s death. A decree of 28 April 1953¹²⁹ awarded him the Order of the Red Banner of Labor in connection with his seventy-fifth birthday and “his services to the Soviet State.” His real birthday was on 4 February, at a time when Stalin was still alive, when nothing had been said of it. So the incident was quite plainly a conscious political demonstration, made during Beria’s attack on the Stalin heritage.

During the Purge period, Petrovsky had certainly suffered, if less than many. Yet it would perhaps not be inappropriate to recall that, when Commissar of Internal Affairs in 1918, he had ordered the unconditional shooting of all engaged in any sort of “White Guard” activity.¹³⁰

At the same time as the February 1939 executions came an event which caused little stir. One last ex-oppositionist remained. Krupskaya had been able to do little during these years, though Stalin had allowed her to save from death one or two figures like I. D. Chigurin, arrested in 1937—even though, his health ruined and not fully rehabilitated, he had to live in poverty thereafter. Although still a member of the Central Committee, Krupskaya had only the minor job of Assistant People’s Commissar for Education, and even there was “deprived of the possibility of influencing decisions in education.”¹³¹

She died on 28 February, and Stalin himself carried the urn with her ashes at her funeral.

Nadezhda Krupskaya will no more protect

The innocent, the dying, those executed like rats¹³²

even to the slight extent that she had done so. The very next day, the head of the Commissariat of Education’s publishing house ordered his subordinates, “Don’t print another word about Krupskaya.” A part of her works was sent off to the “special store” sections of libraries; part was buried in oblivion and not republished.¹³³

One Soviet account has it that she was poisoned, but others deny it.¹³⁴

THE XVIIITH CONGRESS

The XVIIIth Party Congress on 10 to 21 March 1939, which saw Yezhov’s fall, was the scene of the complete consolidation of all Stalin had striven for since that of 1934. The changes were extraordinary.

Of the 1,966 delegates to the previous Congress, 1,108 had been arrested for counter-revolutionary crimes.¹³⁵ Even of the residue lucky enough to survive, only 59 now appeared as delegates. Of these, 24 were old Central Committee members, leaving only 35 of the 1,827 rank-and-file delegates of five years previously—less than 2 percent! This is an indication of how literally we may take the thesis that Stalin created an entirely new Party in this period.

The list of the Central Committee membership now elected shows that 55 of the 71 who had been full members in 1934 had gone, and 60 of the 68 candidate members. Of the 115 names no longer appearing, which included some natural and some possibly natural deaths, 98 had been shot, as Khrushchev later stated in the 1956 Secret Speech. The most recent official account gives the total sooner or later killed by an executioner, by a murderer (Kirov), or by their own hand as 107.¹³⁶ The discrepancy is due to the inclusion or otherwise of suicides, assassinations and so on, and of those shot at a later date, such as Lozovsky.

In the new Committee one can note the groupings—no longer political factions, as in the pre-Stalin period, but personal followings—which were to contend for Stalin’s favor over the next fourteen years, and for power thereafter.

Zhdanov and his group are well represented, with himself, Shcherbakov, Kosygin, and A. A. Kuznetsov as full members, and Popkov and Rodionov as candidate members. The first two were to be the alleged victims of the later Doctors’ Plot, and three of the other four were to be shot in the “Leningrad Case” of 1949–1950.

Another group was associated with Malenkov: he and V. M. Andrianov in the Central Committee; Pervukhin, Ponomarenko, Pegov, Tevosyan, and Malyshev as candidate members—together with Shatalin, Malenkov’s closest associate, on the Revision Commission.

Beria was better represented still. With himself, Bagirov, and V. N. Merkulov on the Central Committee, and Gvishiani, Goglidze, Kobulov, Dekanozov, Arutinov, Bakradze, and Charkviani as candidate members (plus Tsanava on the Revision Commission), we see his control in the Secret Police and in the political mechanism in the Caucasus. (There were four other NKVD representatives—Nikishov, Head of Dalstroy; V. P. Zhuravliev; Kruglov; and Maslennikov as candidate members—a total of ten secret police on the Central Committee, by far the highest number yet.)

Khrushchev, too, had his band—four full members of the Committee from his own selection in the Ukraine.