The Great Terror

Stalin seems to have been impressed by the 30 June 1934 Purge in Nazi Germany. But he did not himself proceed in the same way. The one principle firmly established in the Nazi Party, that the will of the leader is the highest law, had no equivalent in the Communist Party. Even when, later on, Stalin was in practice able to destroy his critics at least as freely as Hitler, it was always either done in the form of some sort of trial accompanied by some sort of justification or carried out in complete secrecy. The only case in which Stalin struck with a simulacrum of the urgency of Hitler’s June Purge was when he destroyed the generals in June 1937. It is true that Hitler really had some fear of Roehm and the S.A. as a rival power center, against which no other method could be risked, and something of the same sort of argument seemed at least plausible as regards the Soviet High Command. (Stalin could have learned another point from Hitler’s June Purge, though there is no reason to suppose him incapable of discovering the same tactics for himself. When destroying one group of enemies, it is helpful to throw in, and accuse of the same plot, a variety of other hostile figures in no way connected with them.)fn1

During the Zinoviev Trial, the planning of the Kirov murder was said to have taken place in the summer of 1934.² Of course, the form in which this wa_•

s put was untrue, but the date was do doubt thought plausible because it was around this time that Stalin himself, as we have suggested, had actually started to organize the murder. It was in August that he had spoken with Kirov about his future, and in the interim Kirov was in Central Asia, only returning to Leningrad on 1 October.³ By that time the plot was already in preparation.

According to one account, Stalin’s original plan involved replacing Filip Medved, the head of the Leningrad NKVD, with his own crony E. G. Evdokimov, the old Secret Policeman of Shakhty fame, who was on cool terms with the rest of the NKVD officers. However, this transfer was blocked by Kirov,⁴ who protested against such moves being made without the permission of the Leningrad Provincial Committee, and it had to be countermanded.

Stalin could only approach Yagoda. But, even as a second choice, it is an extraordinary idea that the head of the NKVD could be approached with an order to procure the death of a Politburo member. One plausible explanation would be that Stalin had some special hold over him. This would be quite in accord with Stalin’s style. There are a number of cases in which Stalin seems to have secured support by blackmail of this type (for example, Voroshilov, whose conduct in 1928 convinced Bukharin that this was true in his case). The rumor in Russia was that Stalin had discovered some discreditable incident in Yagoda’s pre-Revolutionary career, involving acting in some way for the Tsarist police. In the NKVD, it was said that in 1930 Yagoda’s then deputy Trilisser made an investigation of Yagoda’s past and found that he had almost entirely falsified his pre-Revolutionary record. When Trilisser reported this to Stalin, Stalin merely censured and dismissed Trilisser. But Stalin was in fact glad to have the information, and to keep on as effective head of the police a man he had something against.⁵

Yagoda selected a suitable NKVD man in Leningrad. This was Medved’s assistant Ivan Zaporozhets. Zaporozhets would naturally not accept such an assignment just at Yagoda’s orders, so he had to receive instructions from Stalin. For the junior man in particular (in Yagoda’s case, ambition must have played a more important role) the idea of Party discipline must already have been corrupted into something unrecognizable.

When Yagoda himself came to trial with the “Bloc of Rights and Trotskyites” in 1938, he testified that he had been instructed by Yenukidze “to assist in the murder of Kirov.” Although he objected, he said, “Yenulcidze insisted.” If anyone in Soviet political life was totally unqualified to insist on anything, it was Yenukidze, a far less powerful figure than Yagoda himself. If we were to substitute for him the name of a man who was in a position to insist, we should not have to look far. Yagoda went on, “Owing to this, I was compelled to instruct Zaporozhets, who occupied the post of Assistant Chief of the Regional Administration of the People’s Commissariat of Internal Affairs, not to place any obstacles in the way of the terrorist act against Kirov.”⁶