The Great Terror

On 4 December it was announced that Medved had been dismissed (and replaced by Agranov) and that he and seven of his subordinates would be brought before a court for their failure to protect Kirov; Zaporozhets’s name was not among them. A long list of those arrested in connection with the case in Moscow and Leningrad, all “White Guards,” was given at the same time. Within a few days, “trials” of these, under the new decree, were announced. In Leningrad, the Stalinist judge I. 0. Matulevich chaired a circuit court of the Military Collegium which, on 5 December, sentenced thirty-seven named “White Guards” to death for “preparation and organization of terrorist acts against officials of the Soviet regime,” and in Moscow a similar session under the even more notorious V. V. Ulrikh did the same for thirty-three others.²³

On 13 December, Ulrikh went down to Kiev to preside over the sentencing to death of twenty-eight Ukrainians. They too were charged with “organizing acts of terror against officials of the Soviet Government,” and it was also said that most of them had been “apprehended with revolvers and hand grenades.”²⁴

In this Ukrainian case we chance to know more about those concerned than we do about the victims in Leningrad and Moscow. Although the accused in all three cases were charged with having, in their majority, crossed the frontier from abroad for their terrorist purposes, we find that these Ukrainians were almost all well-known writers and cultural and social workers. Apart from one minor diplomat, and a poet who had visited Germany, they had been living in the Ukraine for years.²⁵ There was later a brief attack on one of them, the deaf poet Vlyzko.²⁶

These official executions were supplemented by scores of others performed with less formality. Throughout the country, a great wave of arrests swept in thousands of those listed in the NKVD records as in one way or another politically suspect. The period of comparative relaxation was now at an end.

The last great assassination and attempted assassination had been in August 1918, when Socialist Revolutionaries killed Uritsky and wounded Lenin. Following that, Sverdlov had issued a hysterical call for “merciless mass terror,” adding that there was no doubt that the assassins would turn out to be “hirelings of the English and French.” In the event, hundreds of prisoners were shot as reprisals. Few Bolsheviks (apart from the brave Olminsky) made any protest. Now that a similar case had arisen, how could they object to the slaughter of a few score “White Guards” from Leningrad and elsewhere?

There was one typical distinction between the two terrors. Stalin implied that the victims of his terror decree were actually associated with the crime, while in Lenin’s time those shot had quite frankly been no more than class hostages.

Amid this orgy of shootings, the Soviet press was launched into one of those campaigns replete with calls for vigilance and ruthlessness towards the hidden enemy which were to appear at intervals throughout Stalin’s life. An atmosphere was created, in fact, in which no voice of even comparative reason or moderation could raise itself. The mutual denunciation sessions in which Communists fought for their Party membership, and indeed for their lives, by panicky and sycophantic accusations against their own accusers had died down to some considerable extent since 1933; they now revived. The “moderate” line toward the rank-and-file opposition was reversed. Thousands who had been readmitted to the Party were expelled.

In December 1934 a secret letter from the Central Committee, entitled “Lessons of the Events Connected with the Evil Murder of Comrade Kirov,” was sent to all Party Committees. It amounted to a call to them to hunt down, expel, and arrest all former oppositionists who remained in the Party organizations and was followed by a storm of indiscriminate denunciations. At this early phase in the Purge, however, some discrimination was still shown in the action taken on these. Friendship with an exposed “Trotskyite” usually received a severe reprimand rather than expulsion: “only a few years later,” Merle Fainsod comments, “such mild punishment would come to be regarded not merely as extreme liberalism, but as clear indication of the complicity of the judges in counter-revolutionary activity.”²⁷ Throughout the month the press attacked Trotskyites discovered in various parts of the Union, censured Party organizations for “rotten liberalism,” and called for vigilance. Mass deportations to Siberia and the Arctic took place. Within a few months 30,000 to 40,000 Leningraders had already been taken.²⁸