The Great Terror

Over the next four years, he carried out a revolution which completely transformed the Party and the whole of society. Far more than the Bolshevik Revolution itself, this period marks the major gulf between modem Russia and the past. It was also the deepest trauma of all those which had shaken the population in the turbulent decades since 1905. It is true that only against the peculiar background of the Soviet past, and the extraordinary traditions of the All-Union Communist Party, could so radical a turn be put through. The totalitarian machinery, already in existence, was the fulcrum without which the world could not be moved. But the revolution of the Purges still remains, however we judge it, above all Stalin’s personal achievement. If his character is to some degree impenetrable to direct investigation, we shall see it adequately displayed in his actions over the following years, and in the State he thus created and found good.

4

OLD BOLSHEVIKS CONFESS

“In what did his fascism show itself?

”

“His fascism showed itself when he said that in a situation like the present we must resort to the use of every possible means.”

Exchange between Vyshinsky and Zinoviev at the August 1936 Trial

The six months following the Medved—Zaporozhets Trial is one of the most obscure periods of the Purge. It starts with the death, in circumstances which are still unknown, of another member of the Politburo, and ends with another trial, of which even the charges were only made public in 1989, of Kamenev and others. But the pattern is clear, and much of the detail can now be reconstructed.

After the first wave of terror following the Kirov murder, the “moderate” faction in the Politburo continued to urge the policy of relaxation. It could, after all, equally well be argued that the assassination was the sign of tensions which might best be dealt with by a more popular policy, as the opposite, that it indicated the need for further terror.

In the Politburo, Valerian Kuibyshev, Head of the State Planning Commission (Gosplan), is believed to have been particularly active along Kirov’s line, and is said to have opposed the January Zinoviev—Kamenev Trial.¹ Outside, the influence of Maxim Gorky and of Lenin’s widow, Nadezhda Krupskaya, was of importance. The Society of Old Bolsheviks, which had long acted as a sort of Party conscience, strongly opposed the idea of death sentences for the opposition. Among Stalin’s immediate entourage, Abel Yenukidze, who was Secretary of the Central Executive Committee and (among other duties) responsible for the administration of the Kremlin, urged the same view.

Yenukidze was the first target of Stalin’s counter-measures. As if to emphasize the connection, he was required on 16 January 1935, the very day Zinoviev and his adherents were sentenced, to perform a significant though minor act of self-denunciation--on the always thorny theme of the origins of Georgian Bolshevism. In a half-page of Pravda, he wrote of his errors in articles in the encyclopedias and elsewhere, where he had attributed too big a role to himself.² This marked the beginning of his rapid decline.