The Great Terror

The heavy pressure exerted by Stalin over the summer had to some degree advanced his plans for a purge. The dissolution of the Society uniting the Old Bolsheviks, the campaign against the “rotten liberalism” of Yenukidze, and the fresh sentence on Kamenev had taken things a step further. Nevertheless, the going had been hard, and it had been impossible to produce a public trial or even a death sentence for Kamenev. Further and more thorough preparation was evidently necessary. The next months were spent in consolidating the gains achieved and laying the groundwork for an NKVD set piece to crush the opposition.

THE NKVD PREPARES A TRIAL

From the point of view of the purges, the period from July 1935 to August 1936 was to all outward appearances something of an idyllic interlude. In the sense that nations without any history are the happiest, it seemed a greatly improved time. There were no deaths of Politburo members, no trials of important oppositionists, no removals of leading political figures. The harvest, too, was reasonably good.

A plenum of the Central Committee held in December 1935 passed a long resolution on checking Party documents, which was later to be the organizational basis of the Purge at the grass roots. But in itself, it appeared harmless. Moreover, it was announced at the same time that the purge of the Party ordered in 1933 was now complete.

The draft of a new Constitution had been occupying the minds of Bukharin and Radek, as the active members of a Commission set up for the purpose in February 1935.⁴¹ It was ready in June 1936, and Bukharin, in particular, thought of it as a document which would make it impossible for the people any longer to be “pushed aside.”⁴²

It was indeed a model document, giving, for example, guarantees of freedom from arbitrary arrest (Article 127), the inviolability of the home and secrecy of correspondence (Article 128), and indeed freedom of speech, of the press, of meetings, and of demonstrations (Article 125). That Bukharin, who was mainly responsible for it, thought that it might be implemented shows that even he now imagined that a genuine relaxation was taking place.

Bukharin’s view of the Communists at this time was “They are all good people, ready for any sacrifice. If they are acting badly now, it is not because they are bad, but because the situation is bad. They must be persuaded that the country is not against them, but only that a change of policy is necessary.” He had come around to the view that Bolshevism needed humanizing, and had looked to the intellectuals—in particular, Ivan Pavlov and Gorky—to help him. Pavlov, the great physiologist, was strongly opposed to the Communists. When Bukharin’s name was put up for election to the Academy of Sciences in the mid-1920s, Pavlov spoke against him as “a person who is up to his knees in blood.” Eventually, however, the two men had become friendly. Pavlov himself was indeed now dead. But Bukharin is even quoted as wanting the intelligentsia to put up candidates under the New Constitution as a sort of “second party,⁴³

not to oppose the regime, but to give constructive criticism.

In reality, Stalin had simply changed his tactics. Under the calm façade, there was furious activity. He had ready all the ingredients which he was to bring together into the set pieces of the Great Purge. First, he had developed direct control of the Secret Police and had set up other mechanisms of power responsible to himself alone and capable, given careful tactics, of overcoming the official hierarchy of Party and State. Second, the tradition of faked trials for political purposes had been established and not objected to in the Party, whose tradition of maintaining flat untruths for political purposes was in any case of still longer standing. Third, the former oppositionists had, under the particular pressures available in Communist life, already been induced to make admissions of error which they did not sincerely believe to be correct, in what they took to be the Party’s interest. Fourth, his operatives were accustomed to the use of torture, blackmail, and falsification—if as yet mainly on non-Party figures.

If his technical arrangements were complete, the same was evidently not so of his political preparations. It was still quite possible that he might have met with formidable opposition if he had set about the problem in the same way again. He chose a different method. The case was to be prepared in secret—not too difficult a matter, as the doomed Zinovievites and Trotskyites were already under arrest. It would take its course during the summer vacation, and in the absence of Stalin in particular. The death sentences would not be mentioned until they were pronounced, and even then every indication would be given that they would be commuted. But they would, on the contrary, be carried out without discussion.