The Great Terror

Yenukidze’s fall has been attributed entirely to Stalin’s desire to inflate his own role in the history of Caucasian Bolsheviks, and the responsibility put on “the notorious falsifier of Party history, the provocateur and adventurist, Beria.”³¹ Beria’s role and the whole question of these memoirs can only have been secondary, and this sort of interpretation anyhow takes too superficial a view of Stalin’s motives. But still, this concern with suppressing and transforming the past certainly played its part. In fact, Old Bolshevik memoirs now ceased to be published. Kossior, who had evidently thought of writing some, was told by Petrovsky that Stalin was opposed to this.³²

Early in June, Yenukidze was politically outlawed. He was denounced, in one of the main items of the agenda at a Central Committee meeting held on 5 to 7 June, for “political and personal dissoluteness.³³ Yezhov reported on his errors, and the former Secretary of the Central Executive Committee was expelled from the Central Committee and from the Party.fn2 Over the following weeks, the papers printed violent attacks on him by Stalin’s young Party Secretaries in Leningrad and Moscow, Zhdanov and Khrushchev. He was accused of taking “enemies” under his wing—“former princes, ministers, courtiers, Trotskyites, etc … a counter-revolutionary nest”³⁴—and in general of “rotten liberalism.”

These “former princes” and so on seem to have been represented by a quasi-aristocratic woman who tended the Kremlin antiques³⁵

and who was now inflated into an agent of the class enemy. In one account, the girl alleged to have plotted against Stalin’s life was a countess.³⁶ In any case, the link with the case boiling up in the Kremlin is undoubted. Yenukidze was not put on trial at this time, being presumably charged with negligence only. But he seems to have been under arrest not later than early 1937.³⁷

The next blow was at the Society of Former Political Prisoners, which was dissolved on 25 June, in the same way as the Society of Old Bolsheviks had been. A commission headed by Yezhov was appointed to deal with its effects. A number of its members who had been especially closely involved in the campaign for clemency were already, or were shortly to be, under arrest.

If the old revolutionaries had been offering a certain resistance, the main revulsion from Stalin and his new line was to be found in the very youngest generation of Communists. As we have seen, openly seditious remarks were noted in their ranks by the NKVD. More threatening still, the Kirov murder inspired various groups to talk of, and even to plan, in an amateurish fashion which was no match for the police of the new regime, the killing of Stalin. Either way, such circles were now invariably arrested and shot. But the Komsomol as a whole also needed thorough purging. Its reorganization, with a view to eliminating “enemies of the Party,” was announced at the end of June.³⁸

In general, Stalin’s moves over the past six months had strengthened his position in obvious ways. Even so, they had not broken down the resistance to a death sentence on Kamenev. It was clear that that could only be done by a massive purge of the Stalinist moderates. And for this, the ground had not yet been adequately prepared. For the moment, Stalin abandoned the project.

And so, on 27 July, Kamenev was sentenced, at a secret trial by the Military Collegium of the “Kremlin Case,” to ten years’ imprisonment under Article 58 (viii) of the Criminal Code, dealing with terrorist actions against Soviet officials.³⁹ Two of his fellow accused, A. I. Sinelobov, Secretary for Assignments to the Kremlin Commandant, and M. K. Chernyavsky, head of a sector in the Intelligence Administration of the Red Army, were sentenced to death. The two Rosenfelds and six others got ten years’ imprisonment, and another nineteen various shorter terms. Of those so sentenced, fourteen, including Kamenev, pleaded not guilty; ten pleaded guilty only to “anti-Soviet” talk; and six, including the two Rosenfelds, guilty to terrorist intentions against Stalin.

In addition, the NKVD Special Board sentenced eighty more to imprisonment (forty-two) or exile (thirty-seven), though Olga Kameneva, Party member since 1902, was only forbidden to live in Moscow or Leningrad for five years. Sergei Sedov was among those sent to labor camp for five years.⁴⁰ All concerned have lately been rehabilitated.