The Great Terror

We can trace the fate of a few of the relatives of the accused, apart from Smirnov’s, with whom we have already dealt. Evdokimov’s son was shot.¹⁶¹ Kamenev’s wife had been arrested on 19 March 1935 and sentenced to exile by the Special Board. She was retried in January 1938 and shot in the autumn of 1941. As for the sons Kamenev had tried to save, the elder, Alexander, was arrested in August 1936, sentenced in May 1937, and shot in July 1939; the younger was sent to an NKVD children’s home, and his name was changed to Glebov.¹⁶²

Zinoviev’s sister, F. A. Radomislskaya, a doctor, is reported in the Vorkuta camps and was shot there later. Three other sisters were sent to labor camp, together with two nephews, a niece, a brother-in-law, and a cousin. Three brothers and another nephew were shot. Zinoviev’s son Stefan, for whom he had made a special appeal to Stalin, was also shot in 1937, as were Bakayev’s wife and TerVaganyan’s brother.¹⁶³ Dreitzer’s wife, Sonia, was also sent to Vorkuta, and is also reported shot there.¹⁶⁴

Olberg’s wife, Betty, was sent to labor camp. In prison, very ill and thin, she had made an attempt to commit suicide by throwing herself over some banisters. She was sent back to Germany with the Communists handed over to the Gestapo by Stalin in 1940.¹⁶⁵

The executions took place when many Party leaders were on holiday. Stalin himself had left for the Caucasus, and only a quorum of the formal State body, the Central Executive Committee, was available to hear appeals, which their general instructions were to reject unless ordered to the contrary by the Politburo. Yezhov had remained in Moscow to see that nothing could interfere with the processes Stalin had set in motion.¹⁶⁶

Nothing did.

THE CREDIBILITY OF THE TRIAL

The trial had on the whole been a success for Stalin. The Communists and the Soviet people could make no overt objection to his version. And the outside world, whose representatives he had allowed in to authenticate it, as it were, was at least inclined not to reject it outright, from the start, as a fabrication. There was very considerable uneasiness about the confessions. But even if they had been obtained by unwarrantable methods, that did not in itself prove that they were untrue. In fact, the one phenomenon which was difficult to reconcile with the complete innocence of the accused was precisely their confessions. Thus to a considerable degree, the confession method justified itself politically.

The case itself must come as something of an anticlimax to us today, who know the falsehood of the charges and something of the ways in which the whole thing was prepared. At the time, to the world, and to the Party itself, it appeared differently—as a terrible public event. The allegations were examined in detail. They were found convincing by various British lawyers, Western journalists, and so forth, and were thought incredible by others. As so often, this appears to be a case in which alleged facts were accepted or rejected in accordance with preconceived opinion. Most people felt either that it was incredible that old revolutionaries should commit such actions, or that it was incredible that a Socialist State should make false accusations. But neither position is really tenable. It was by no means absolutely inconceivable that the opposition might have planned the assassination of the political leadership. There are various reasons for thinking it was out of character and contrary to their previous views, but that is a much weaker argument.

Some Western commentators, applying “commonsensical” criteria to the situation, argued that the oppositionists should logically have seen that the removal of Stalin was the only way of securing their own lives and a tolerable future, from their point of view, for the Party and the State. So it was, yet history gives many examples of inadequate common sense.

But in any case, it seems perfectly clear that the opposition, up to the actual execution of the Zinoviev–Kamenev group, never expected that Stalin would really kill off the old leadership. The whole of their maneuvers up to that point had been designed to keep themselves alive and, if possible, in the Party, until such time as Stalin’s failures and excesses would swing Party feeling back in their favor and give them another chance. After the first executions, no oppositionists of any standing were in a position to attempt assassination whether they thought it suitable or not. The only people with any chance of getting rid of the General Secretary were those close to him.