The Great Terror

The next great blow to moderation was the death of Kuibyshev on 26 January. Most of his subordinates in Gosplan, including his deputy, Professor Osadchy, had been purged for opposing ill-prepared crash programs in the first years of the decade. Although Kuibyshev’s death was at first described as being from natural causes, it was later to be alleged that he was murdered by willful medical mistreatment on the orders of Yagoda. It is still difficult to be certain about the Kuibyshev case. Common sense gets us nowhere. There are, in fact, two different “commonsensical” ways of looking at it. The first would say that what appears to be a natural death should be taken as such if there is no absolutely firm evidence to the contrary. After all, Kuibyshev had to be ill in the first place if he was being treated medically; people do die naturally, and we should not strain to fit every death into a preconceived pattern. The other view is that Kuibyshev had, as is now officially said, been one of three Politburo members who had blocked Stalin; that of this group one had been shot just before Kuibyshev’s death and the other was to perish later of a faked heart attack; and that, moreover, Stalin was making moves against other advocates of moderation, such as Gorky and Yenukidze, at precisely this time. Against a member of the Politburo, at once more dangerous and less vulnerable, what sanction was left except the one that had succeeded with Kirov? At any rate a certain amount of suspicion seems reasonable when we consider that all the other nine Politburo members (and ten ex-Politburo members) to die in the years 1934 to 1940 were victims of Stalin; that

all those of his own supporters who opposed him on the Purge perished; and, perhaps most important, that the others of his own Politburo supporters who died before 1938 were disposed of by him, but in ways not easily attributable to his own actions.

Kuibyshev was photographed at a meeting of the Council of People’s Commissars on 22 January.³

On 26 January, his death was announced—of heart disease. The signatories to the medical bulletin included Kaminsky, Khodorovsky, and Levin, all of whom were to sign the certificate of Ordzhonikidze’s equally sudden death from the same cause, which is known to be a fake.

Kuibyshev seems to have had a bad heart, and to have been under treatment at least since August 1934. An attack of tonsillitis and an operation weakened him still further. But he was not at this stage particularly ill, and was still at work within an hour or two of his death.⁴

The account of his death given at the Bukharin Trial was that he had some sort of angina pectoris attack while at his office at the Council of People’s Commissars, was allowed to go home unaccompanied, and climbed to his flat on the third floor. There chanced to be a maid at home who telephoned his secretary and the doctor on duty, but by the time they arrived Kuibyshev was dead.⁵

It was alleged that it was the purposely incorrect treatment which had been given him which caused his death, and that the doctors should anyhow have insisted on his being in bed.⁶

The doctors (and Kuibyshev’s secretary Maximov) were later accused of working under Yagoda’s orders. They were rehabilitated in 1988, and are thus clearly innocent. If Kuibyshev did not die naturally, he was killed in some other way than that stated—perhaps by another member of the Council of People’s Commissars dropping in from a nearby office with a glass of non-medicine. If so, it is possible that the true facts were known only to a few now dead, and that they are no longer available even to investigators in Russia. However, the most recent Soviet references stress his heart condition.

Among those actively opposed to the persecution of oppositionists throughout this period, another of the most forceful was Maxim Gorky. Moreover, his great ambition was to assist in a reconciliation between the Party and the intelligentsia—to lead the Soviet regime, of which he had originally disapproved, into the socialist humanism he believed it capable of. It was partly for this reason that he had compromised himself by returning from Italy in 1928 and defending the regime against its external critics.

Gorky is said to have personally worked to reconcile Stalin with Kamenev and to have apparently succeeded in doing this early in 1934,⁷ even securing a friendly personal meeting. Kamenev was given a job in the Akademia publishing house.