The Great Terror

The regime owed its legitimacy to its descent from Stalin and was committed to the correctness of Stalin’s line as against both the Left and the Right oppositions of the 1920s and 1930s, and hence to his correctness on basic policy matters. At the XXIInd Party Congress in 1961, Khrushchev was indeed able to say publicly what had been “secret” in 1956, and Stalin’s body was removed from Lenin’s tomb; though even in 1989 it still lay in a fairly honorable position under the Kremlin wall, among the bodies of important “positive” figures of the second rank—and, perhaps significantly, next to that of Felix Dzerzhinsky, founder of the Secret Police.

Many of Stalin’s personal group died in good odor after their patron’s own death—Shkiryatov in 1954, Vyshinsky in 1955. Men like Kaganovich and Malenkov, though publicly accused by the Prosecutor-General of the USSR of “criminal violations of Socialist legality,”¹¹⁰ also remained at liberty. The fall of Beria entailed the trials of a series of police officials of the old regime. In all, thirty-eight Security generals were deprived of their military ranks.¹¹¹

But others survived, such as Serov, who was Head of Army Intelligence until 1964. General Gorbatov, writing in the early 1960s, speaks quite naturally of his torturer, Stolbunsky—“I don’t know where he is now”—and mentions meeting the despicable Commissar Fominykh, who had organized his removal, in a group of senior officers in 1962.

More basically, there was no serious attempt to deal with the Terror as a whole. The great plot ostensibly headed by Trotsky, backed by the Nazis, involving politicians, generals, engineers, doctors, and ordinary citizens by the thousand, was not explicitly denounced as a fabrication. Statements were made that demolished the authenticity of some of the main public accusations. Several of those named as conspirators in the 1938 Trial were rehabilitated. One major crime of the 1937 accused—the “attempt” on the life of Molotov—was openly described at the XXIInd Party Congress in 1961 as a frame-up. On the centerpiece of the whole Purge story (and the main crime of the 1936 accused in particular), the Kirov murder, we have seen that the official line was already rejected as unsatisfactory by Khrushchev in his Secret Speech of February 1956, and again, publicly, in his report to the 1961 Congress—each time with strong hints that Stalin had been the real organizer of the assassination. So, although the full truth was being extracted with painful slowness, enough had already been said to concede the total falsehood of the original Stalinist version.

We now know that the Tukhachevsky group were legally rehabilitated by the Supreme Court on 31 January 1957, and posthumously restored to Party membership on 27 February 1957. This and similar decisions were not published. It simply became plain from their reappearance in a favorable light in books and articles that they were now cleared of the charges. In this and the other cases, the published formalities were merely a note at the end of the encyclopedia entries: “Illegally repressed. Posthumously rehabilitated.” Similarly, the executed Stalinists—Rudzutak, Chubar, Postyshev, Eikhe, Kossior, and the others—were seen to be in good odor, as were such men as Yenukidze and Karakhan.

One distractive ploy by the forces of obstruction was to give to the rehabilitated death dates differing from the true ones. This was done in part, Nadezhda Mandelshtam tells us, to transfer purge victims to the war period, and thus distance them from the Purges. Marshal Yegorov, Army Commander Fedko, and Vlas Chubar were among those given wartime deaths. And others were spaced out, if not so far; for example, Postyshev’s was for twenty years dated to 1940.

No one was cleared from the Zinoviev or Pyatakov Trials. And in the Bukharin Trial, a fantastic situation persisted for years in which some of the accused were fully rehabilitated, and others not. Ilcramov, Khodzhayev, Krestinsky, Zelensky, and Grinko were now in favor. But to rehabilitate, for example, Krestinsky without rehabilitating Rosengolts was to rehabilitate Burke while leaving Hare accused.