The Great Terror

With the January 1935 trial of the Leningrad NKVD chiefs, the Kirov Case was wound up—for the time being. The old Zinoviev oppositionists were all in prison. Leningrad had been taken from independent hands and put under Stalin’s devoted satrap, Zhdanov. A terror expressed mainly in mass deportations, but partly in mass executions, had struck the city and—to a lesser extent—the country as a whole. Among the victims brought to book in this aftermath, Nikolayev’s wife, Milda Draule, together with Olga Draule (her sister) and another relative, were tried by the Military Collegium and were shot on 10 March 1935.⁶²

The murder of Kirov was indeed the key moment in Stalin’s road to absolute power and extreme terror. Eugenia Ginzburg starts her Journey into the Whirlwind with the sentence “The year 1937 began, to all intents and purposes, at the end of 1934—to be exact, on the first of December.” As a recent Soviet article puts it, “It marked a turning point”: prior to 1 December there was a chance of better things and the scales of history trembled, but “Stalin threw Nikolayev’s smoking gun into the scales.”

⁶³ Another, in a more formal analysis, agrees, while adding that of course this does not mean that Stalin’s action was unpremeditated or that he was now to carry out his whole program immediately.⁶⁴ In fact, much remained to be done to crush his opponents entirely and to overcome the resistance of his less enthusiastic allies. The coup de grace

had not been given. And meanwhile hostility to his actions was once again arising in the lower levels of the Party.

In the Komsomol, for example, there was surprisingly frank resistance to Stalinism as late as 1935. The Secret Archive⁶⁵ from Smolensk province reveals the extent of this feeling. In a Komsomol discussion on the Kirov assassination, one member is quoted as saying, “When Kirov was killed they allowed free trade in bread; when Stalin is killed, all the kolkhozes will be divided up.” A Komsomol school director, serving as a propagandist, declared, “Lenin wrote in his will that Stalin could not serve as leader of the Party.” Another teacher accused Stalin of having transformed the Party into a gendarmerie over the people. A nine-year-old Pioneer was reported to have shouted, “Down with Soviet Power! When I grow up, I am going to kill Stalin.” An eleven-year-old schoolboy was overheard saying, “Under Lenin we lived well, but under Stalin we live badly.” And a sixteen-year-old student was said to have declared, “They killed Kirov; now let them kill Stalin.” There were even occasional expressions of sympathy for the opposition. A worker Komsomol was quoted as saying, “They have slandered Zinoviev enough; he did a great deal for the Revolution.” A Komsomol propagandist in answer to a question denied that Zinoviev had had any hand in the Kirov affair and described him as an “honored leader and cultivated man.” An instructor of a district Komsomol committee “came out in open support of the views of Zinoviev.”

In fact, there was much to do before a situation satisfactory to Stalin could be established.

3

ARCHITECT OF TERROR

A Prince must possess the nature of both beast and man

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Machiavelli

The events of December 1934 and January 1935, so horrible, but above all so extraordinary, lead to the question of the mind behind them. The nature of the whole Purge depends in the last analysis on the personal and political drives of Stalin.

If we have put off any consideration of his personality until after we have seen him in characteristic action, it is because we can recount what he did (and, later, describe the results of the State he brought into being) more easily than we can describe him as an individual. He was not one of those figures whose real intentions were ever openly declared, or whose real motives can readily be deduced. If Stalin’s personal drives were the motive force of the Purge, it is also true that his ability to conceal his real nature was the rock on which all resistance to the Purge foundered. His opponents could not believe that he would either wish to, or be able to, do what he did.

Stalin was now fifty-five. Until the age of thirty-seven he had been a not particularly prominent member of a small revolutionary party whose prospects of coming to power in his lifetime even Lenin had doubted as late as 1916.