The Great Terror

Stalin’s own personal group was also, of course, fully represented, with Mekhlis, Shkiryatov, Poskrebyshev, Shchadenko, and Vyshinsky.

In the Politburo, the losses had been less great than at the lower level. But they were still remarkable. Kirov had been assassinated, and Kuibyshev had died or been poisoned. Ordzhonikidze had been either murdered or forced into a suicide which was scarcely different from murder. Rudzutak had been shot eight months earlier; Kossior, Chubar, and Postyshev, just before the Congress. Petrov-sky had been removed, and was in Moscow, uncertain of his fate and begging for a menial post. Of the four who had been brought in between the Congresses, Khrushchev and Zhdanov were balanced by Eikhe, in prison awaiting execution, and the doomed Yezhov. Of four of the fallen leaders, it has now been specifically said that they were tortured (Rudzutak, Eikhe, Kossior, and Chubar).

On 22 March 1939, four promotions were made in and to the Politburo, of those who had served Stalin most satisfactorily during the recent period. Zhdanov and Khrushchev were raised to full membership; Beria became a candidate member, as did Shvernik, who after Tomsky’s removal in June 1929 had been appointed head of the unions. He had adequately transformed them into organizations for mobilizing and disciplining labor.

There is a notable difference in Stalin’s treatment of the more senior generation of his supporters on the Politburo and those promoted later. If we take the members of that body who supported him against the oppositions: of the eleven promoted to it up to July 1926, six survived right through the Purges, two were physically destroyed by informal means (Kirov and Ordzhonikidze), one died in doubtful circumstances (Kuibyshev), one, though removed from his posts, survived until after Stalin’s own death (Petrovsky), and only one was “tried” and shot (Rudzutak). But of the eight promoted from July 1926 until the end of 1937, only one (Zhdanov) survived. All the others were executed.

This distinction should perhaps be interpreted as follows: in the earlier period, it was not a question of Stalin simply nominating rapidly promoted figures from the second rank of the Party. He was bound to rely on men who had reached high position to some extent on their reputations, and who in any case were widely enough known to the leading circles of the Party and had good enough Party records for their presence not to appear absurd on a body still containing distinguished and widely known oppositionists.

They were men who, in however minor a way compared with the Trotskys and Bukharins, yet represented a continuity with Lenin’s leading cadre. Some of them, like Kaganovich, were eager supporters of the Great Terror. Others, like Molotov, may have had qualms but became enthusiastic accomplices, whether through fear or from other motives. More reluctant figures, like Kalinin, remained useful figureheads. In disposing of them, Stalin inclined to roundabout and concealed methods. But the Eikhes and Postyshevs carried little more Party prestige than the other members of the Central Committee, and they were as readily expendable if they failed to satisfy.

The new leadership, Stalinist in every sense, made the Congress a triumphal celebration. At the same time, dissociating themselves from Yezhovism, the most notorious Purge operators deplored more strongly than ever the excesses of the Purge.

Shkiryatov quoted at length an incident of a man in Archangel wrongly removed from his job, arrested, and restored as a result of an appeal to the Central Committee. Zhdanov referred to a man who had written 142 denunciations, all false, and raised a number of cases in which individual Party members had been wrongly expelled, including such incidents as one in Tambov province, where the expulsion and wrongful arrest of one man led to the expulsion from the Party of his wife and seven other members, and from the Komsomol of twenty-eight Young Communists, while ten non-Party teachers lost their jobs.

Khrushchev’s ally Serdyuk expressed horror at a denunciation of a large number of enemies of the people in the Party apparatus in Kiev which had turned out on investigation to be signed by someone using a false name, and to be in the handwriting of the Head of the Cultural Section of one of the District Committees. Another case, also in Kiev, was of a woman teacher who in 1936 and 1937 had denounced a large number of innocent people, and also obtained by blackmail and threats 5,000 rubles from various organizations and three free trips to a resort; Serdyuk explained to the disgusted delegates that her slanders had been written at the dictation of “enemies of the people since unmasked,” and that she herself had been sentenced to five years.