The Great Terror

Negotiations were afoot with the imprisoned opposition leaders to get them to assume the entire guilt for reasons of Party discipline, but these were unproductive. On the other hand, they began to feel that it was in their own interests to do all they could to discourage terrorism, which could only lead to worse repressions against themselves and their followers. So they finally agreed to accept “moral responsibility” for the murder—in that the assassin could conceivably have been encouraged to his act by their political attitudes.

On 15 and 16 January, Zinoviev, Kamenev, Evdokimov, Bakayev, Kuklin, and fourteen others were brought to trial in Leningrad as the “Moscow Center.” Ulrikh again presided, and Vyshinsky prosecuted. The line taken was that, knowing the terrorist inclination of Kotolynov’s “Leningrad Center,” those now accused had given it political encouragement.

The new trial was not, however, reported fully. Only a three-quarter-page summary appeared in the press, with a few quotations from the evidence of Zinoviev and others admitting their partial guilt. The group was said to have been “exposed” by Bakayev and by Safarov, who was not on trial.⁴⁹ Bakayev, who had been under interrogation for over a month, seems to have made the fullest confession. Zinoviev was reported as saying in court, “The former activity of the former opposition could not, by the force of objective circumstances, but stimulate the degeneration of those criminals.”⁵⁰

He took full responsibility for those he had misled, and summed up by remarking that

the task that I see confronting me on this subject is to repent fully, frankly and sincerely, before the court of the working class, for what I understand to be a mistake and a crime, and to say it in such a way that it should all end, once and for all, for this group.⁵¹

But though this general acceptance of the moral responsibility of the opposition was made, charges of more sinister involvement were rejected. Kamenev expressed his lack of trust in the “witness” Safarov; he also stated flatly that he did not know of the existence of the “Moscow Center,” of which it now turned out he was an active member, though insofar as it existed he took responsibility for it.⁵²

Zinoviev, too, said that many of those in the dock were unknown to him,⁵³ and added that he learned of Kotolynov’s role only from the indictment in the “Leningrad Center” Case.⁵⁴

In spite of the partial surrender of the oppositionists, it is clear that their stand was not fully satisfactory to Stalin and that a public trial would not have been a success.

On 16 January 1935 Zinoviev was sentenced to ten years’ imprisonment, Evdokimov to eight, Bakayev to eight, and Kamenev to five. The other sentences ranged from ten years to five. At the same time, it was announced that the NKVD Special Board had sentenced forty-nine people, including Zalutsky, to “confinement to concentration camps for a period of four to five years,” while twenty-nine others, including Safarov, had been sentenced to exile. The length of the sentences was in any case to prove unimportant, as there is no known instance of any of these figures, major or minor, ever being released. Two days after the trial (18 January 1935) a further secret circular on vigilance was issued by the Central Committee—an official call to all branches to start rooting out “enemies” which significantly condemned lack of vigilance as “a re-echoing of the Right deviation.”⁵⁵ A fresh wave of arrests, running into tens of thousands, now struck all the former opposition and other suspects at local levels.

There was still one batch of prisoners from the Kirov Case left to be dealt with—the Leningrad NKVD leadership, whose forthcoming trial had been announced on 4 December. On 23 January they finally came before a court under, as ever, Ulrikh. Instead of the nine originally charged, there were now twelve—and Zaporozhets was among them. Medved and Zaporozhets were charged with failure to observe the basic requirements of State security, in that “having received information about the preparations for the attempt on S. M. Kirov … they failed to take the necessary measures to prevent the assassination … although they had every possible means of arresting it.”

The sentences were extremely light. One official, Baltsevich, got ten years for—in addition to the main charge—unspecified wrongful acts during the investigation. Medved got three years, and the others either two or three. The sentences were specifically to be served in a kontslager (concentration camp), a word soon to fall into disuse.