The Great Terror

The leading Party organs elected by the Congress were not to be the only bodies to play important roles in the forthcoming period. While the overt political struggle of the past decade had been going on, more sinister developments were taking place in what might be called the technical side of despotic rule. The Secret Police, founded in 1917, had become a large and highly organized body, and had gained great experience in arbitrary arrest, repression, and violence. None of the oppositionists had objected to it; Bukharin in particular had been effusively enthusiastic about its role.

In July 1934 the OGPU was abolished, or rather subsumed into a new All-Union NKVD. The thin-faced terror veteran Genrikh Yagoda was placed at the head of the new organization. His First Deputy was an old adherent and friend of Stalin, Ya. D. Agranov, who had been in charge of the brutal “investigation” of the Kronstadt rebels.⁴²

The new body was to be efficiently deployed over the following years. Its increasingly privileged and powerful officers were to make its emblem—a serpent being struck down by a sword—prevail everywhere against the hammer and sickle of the Party membership. From Politburo members down, no one was to be exempt from their attentions. They themselves were to remain under the careful control of the supreme political authority, Stalin. In addition to police organization proper, a number of key measures date from this period. After the announcement in January 1933 of the forthcoming purge of the Party, a central Purge Commission was formed (on 29 April) which included Yezhov and M. F. Shkiryatov.

It is at this time, too, that what was to be, in many respects, the most important body of all came to the surface: the “Special Sector” of the Central Committee,⁴³ headed by Poslcrebyshev. It was in effect Stalin’s private secretariat, the immediate organ for carrying out his will. It has been compared with Nicholas I’s Personal Chancellery of His Imperial Majesty. All sensitive issues were effectively handled through this channel—for example, the assassination of Trotsky.⁴⁴

In connection with this personal secretariat, a special State Security Committee appears to have been organized; the main figures are believed to have been Poskrebyshev, Shkiryatov, Agranov, and Yezhov, at that time head of the Records and Assignment Department of the Central Committee.⁴⁵ Shkiryatov’s key role is implied in an official description of his being “representative of the Central Control Commission to the Politburo and the Orgburo.”⁴⁶

On 20 June 1933 a Prosecutor-Generalship of the USSR was established. Andrei Vyshinsky, though at first ranking only as First Deputy Prosecutor-General, was the most important figure. Links with the OGPU, the “legality and regularity” of whose acts the Prosecutors were supposed to check, were provided for.

Another major element in the Stalinist State had already emerged: the show trial. In 1922, a trial expressly designed by Lenin to crush the Social Revolutionary Party had been presided over, ironically enough, by Pyatakov. Although there was an important element of falsification, in that many of the supposed prisoners were agents provocateurs, the genuine Social Revolutionaries were given reasonable freedom of defense. And death sentences (much to Lenin’s anger) were abandoned under heavy pressure from the Socialist parties of Western Europe. In 1928 came the first trial in a newer mode—that of the Shakhty engineers, presided over by Vyshinsky. This was the first testing ground of the more recent technique of founding a case on false confessions extracted by terror. Over the following years came three similar great set pieces: the so-called Industrial Party of 1930, the Mensheviks in 1931, and the Metro-Vic engineers in 1933. The oppositionists, including Trotsky in exile, made no public objection to these horrible farces.

Thus a positive machinery of despotism had been created outside of and independent of the official political organs. Everywhere, in fact, the potential mechanisms for further terror were in existence, and manned for Stalin not by allies who might balk, but by accomplices who could be relied on against enemies, or friends, inside or outside the Party.

Meanwhile, the official leadership retained its power. The Stalinist writer Alexander Fadeyev commented on the Politburo, “They are bound together by the manly, principled, iron, gay friendship of the bogalyrs.”⁴⁷ Half were to meet death or disgrace in the next four years. Kirov was the first to go.