The Great Terror

Why the age limit of twelve was chosen is uncertain. Presumably, there were oppositionists whose children were just within that limit. On the other hand, it might be suggested that Stalin had a rough precedent to which the opposition had made no objection. The youngest member of the Tsar’s family, executed in the cellar at Ekaterinburg on 16 July 1918, was the Tsarevich Alexis, aged thirteen.

As to the precise timing, while it is true that Stalin often showed great foresight in his maneuvers, it seems that we must associate this decree with another case that was just coming up.

Almost nothing was published on the matter. But in effect, it was an attempt to link the opposition with an alleged plot against the life of Stalin in the library of the Central Executive Committee, by a young woman.²³ Starting in January 1935, there were scores of arrests: eventually, according to a recent Soviet account, 110 in all. Nine cleaners, a porter, a twenty-year-old telephone girl, eighteen librarians, six persons working in the Secretariat of the Presidium of the Central Executive Committee, sixteen from the Kremlin Commandant’s administration, and other army men. In fact, there were two main “terrorist groups,” one in the library, the other in the Commandant’s headquarters, linked by the fact that one of the librarians was the sister of the leading victim from the Komendatura; and a “White Guard” counter-revolutionary group of five, all from non-Kremlin jobs, was thrown in for good measure.

The rest had various personal connections with the Kremlin accused, though they also included Trotsky’s son Sergei Sedov, and five of Kamenev’s relatives, his ex-wife, Tatiana Glebova, among them.²⁴

For once again, Stalin determined to involve the opposition. Kamenev had a brother, the painter Nikolai Rosenfeld, whose Armenian ex-wife, Nina, worked in the Kremlin library. The case was first referred to in Soviet articles in 1988 and 1989, which describe it as the “Kremlin Affair.” Rosenfeld, after interrogation, implicated Kamenev. Others giving such evidence (though not charged) included Pikel, Zinoviev’s secretary; the prominent Zinovievite S. M. Zaks-Gladnev; and Zinoviev himself.²⁵ Yezhov, as Chairman of the Control Commission, demanded the death penalty. Opposition remained strong. Gorky was particularly outspoken.

Yenukidze’s job as Secretary of the Central Executive Committee included general supervision of the Kremlin. It was easy to accuse him of negligence in the plot formed in the old palace. Moreover, he had long been giving a certain amount of protection to minor nonpolitical survivors from the pre-Revolutionary classes—with, of course, Stalin’s concurrence. This, too, was now turned against him. He seems to have been removed from his posts as early as March, with the promise of an important position in the Caucasus, which never materialized.

Another prominent Kremlin figure and confidant of Yenukidze also went. The Latvian Peterson, who had commanded Trotsky’s train²⁶—the celebrated mobile G.H.Q. of the Civil War—was Commandant of the Kremlin. He was not arrested, but was transferred in September 1935 to a post in the Kiev Military District, which he held until 1937, when he was liquidated.²⁷ He was later (in 1938) to be named as one of the military conspirators who had been thinking in terms of a Kremlin coup, having allegedly been selected for the purpose by Yenukidze.²⁸

Yenukidze was not the only Party veteran who had experienced qualms at the fierceness of the assault on the opposition. The Society of Old Bolsheviks, and the equally distinguished Society of Former Political Prisoners, had been collecting signatures in influential circles for a petition to the Politburo against the death penalty for the opposition.²⁹ This was now treated as factional activity. On 25 May, a brief decree by the Central Committee abolished the Society of Old Bolsheviks and appointed, to deal with its dissolution, a commission headed by Shkiryatov and consisting mainly of Stalin’s young adherents, including Malenkov .³⁰

The Society had its own publishing house, which printed the memoirs of its members and certain theoretical works. It was almost impossible that these, particularly the memoirs, should not have been offensive to the new regime. In fact, Stalin was, as usual, combining a political move with the settlement of a personal grudge. Starting at the end of July, Pravda itself prominently serialized an example of what was now to be the only right sort of record of the Party’s past, a “History” of pre-Revolutionary Bolshevism in the Caucasus by Beria, which is simply Stalinist hagiography. The facts had previously been distorted, with hostile intent, it was said, by Yenukidze and Orakhelashvili. They had not given due prominence to Stalin, though in their time their works had appeared to strain facts in his favor rather than not: standards of adulation were changing.