In St Petersburg, I was shown around a rather splendid five-room apartment in the central Petrogradsky district of the city. My guide was a local history enthusiast, and the flat was striking. The large entrance hall with its fine parquet floor leads into an enfilade of high-ceilinged rooms, including a voluminous library with leather-bound books in mahogany cabinets and hunting trophies on the wall. But the teak wireless set gives it away: the place has been suspended in time, preserved exactly as it was when the last inhabitants walked out of the door many decades ago. So luxurious are the furnishings and fittings that the first thought is of a noble family or a rich merchant living here in pre-revolutionary days. But why are there portraits of Stalin and Lenin hanging on the walls?
The answer lies in one of the great stories of Communist history. This was indeed the home of a pre-revolutionary millionaire, but in 1917 it was appropriated by the new Bolshevik government for a very important purpose. In an era when most families counted themselves lucky if they had a single room to themselves, this spacious apartment was allocated to just one man. Sergei Kirov was the Leningrad party boss, a politburo member and a key figure in the Soviet leadership. The elite group to which Kirov belonged enjoyed luxuries and privileges that the rest of the population could only dream of. Their cosseted lives were far removed from the everyday struggles of Soviet existence – as well as the comfortable apartments, they had access to private restaurants, health resorts and special shops filled with produce and goods.
But party membership was to be no protection for Kirov. In the middle of the 1930s, when he had been living in his grand apartment for a little over eight years, the revolution began to consume its own. The party elite would discover that losing the trust of Stalin could mean losing their jobs, their flats and very often their lives.
Kirov had been a loyal ally of Stalin in the 1920s. During the civil war, he had organised the Bolshevik campaign in the northern Caucasus, gaining a reputation for ferocity in his suppression of White resistance. He was rewarded in 1926 with the appointment to run Leningrad, as St Petersburg was now known. He gained a reputation for his efficiency as an administrator, winning genuine popularity among ordinary Leningraders for his work in tackling food shortages. As his popularity grew, Kirov became a rallying point for independent opinion in the party leadership, admired for his apparent willingness to stand up to the increasingly authoritarian Stalin.
Independence, though, was a mixed blessing and Kirov’s position was put to the test at the Seventeenth Party Congress in January and February 1934. Although dubbed the ‘Congress of the Victors’ in honour of the putative successes of industrialisation and collectivisation, the proceedings were overshadowed by urban and rural unrest. Stalin had become increasingly morose and quarrelsome since the death of his wife Nadezhda Alliluyeva 15 months earlier. She had shot herself in her Kremlin bedroom after storming out of a dinner party where she and Stalin had had a very public row. Although the official version was that Nadezhda had died of appendicitis, persistent rumours pinned the blame for her death directly or indirectly on her husband.
His personal problems and the misfortunes plaguing the country seemed to affect Stalin deeply. His colleagues spoke of his increased suspicion of those around him, his more frequent use of alcohol and readiness to fly into a rage at the least provocation. His obsessive determination not to loosen his grip on power was tinged with growing paranoia.
Stalin warned in his Congress speech that this was no time for the party to rest on its laurels. He pointed the finger at those in the leadership who were advocating moderation in the fight against bourgeois elements and reconciliation with those who had questioned the supremacy of the party line.
There is a danger1 that certain of our comrades, having become intoxicated with success, will get swollen heads and begin to lull themselves with boastful songs, thinking that victory is easy and all threats have been overcome. There is nothing more dangerous than sentiments of this kind, for they weaken the party and disarm its ranks. If such sentiments gain the upper hand in our party, we may be faced with the danger of all our successes being wrecked. There will be difficulties and we must continue to struggle. We must not lull the party, but sharpen its vigilance; we must not sing it to sleep, but sharpen it for action; not disarm it, but arm it; not demobilise it, but keep it in a state of constant readiness …
When he rose to speak, Kirov took a different tack. A small, powerfully built man with a flair for public oratory, he addressed the Congress with a confidence that bordered on swagger. While praising Stalin in his opening remarks, he claimed that the time had come for more sensitivity in the way the country was governed. ‘The main difficulties are already behind us,’ he told his audience, in an apparent rebuff to the leader’s speech. He appealed for a more tolerant approach to dissenting voices in the politburo, even extending an olive branch to opposition movements within the party.
In all areas of2 socialist construction, the proper socialist principles are now in force. So did we need to worry about the pronouncements of the former opposition leaders within the party? The Congress has heard their speeches … and I think we need to look at the fate of these people in a more human way. I don’t want to go into the theories they put forward – and they no longer hold their old views … Now they want to join us in the universal triumph of socialism … They sat in the rear while the party was fighting for socialism. But I think that soon they will merge back into our victorious Communist army. The opposition leaders have been defeated, but now they wish to join us in our victory …
Kirov’s remarks were ambiguous. He seemed to be offering reconciliation instead of repression, and his speech drew enthusiastic applause. When the Congress delegates voted to elect the Central Committee, Kirov received only three negative votes, by far the fewest of any candidate. Stalin, by contrast, was opposed by over a hundred delegates (although the true number was never announced: according to the official media, he too was said to have received three votes against).
At the end of the Congress, a group of party members approached Kirov in the hope that he would challenge Stalin for the party leadership. Kirov declined and informed Stalin of the conversation, but the General Secretary had been alerted to a potential rival and his mood was far from forgiving.
On the afternoon of 1 December 1934, Sergei Kirov left his flat to drive to his office in the Smolny Institute, a former convent school in a leafy part of town on the banks of the River Neva. Nowadays, it is a half-hour crawl through traffic jams, but in the 1930s with no private cars on the roads, he arrived in minutes. As Kirov approached his office, a small, thin man walked up to him, drew a Nagant revolver and shot him in the back of the neck. The Leningrad party boss was dead within a minute. The assassin, a young worker named Leonid Nikolaev, had been expelled from the party with the result that he lost his job, and he apparently blamed Kirov.
There is no conclusive evidence that Stalin arranged the murder of his colleague, but rumours have long circulated that he had a hand in the affair. Nikita Khrushchev, speaking in 1956, seemed to lend them credence. Nikolaev, who was known to the NKVD, had gained access to the Smolny a month earlier and a guard had discovered the pistol in his briefcase. Nikolaev was arrested, but after being interrogated, he was released and, inexplicably, allowed to keep his gun. Seemingly on Stalin’s instructions, Kirov’s personal security was subsequently reduced and he was alone with no bodyguard at the moment of his death.
Stalin took the unusual step of travelling to Leningrad to be present during Nikolaev’s questioning. He ensured that the murderer signed a confession admitting he had acted as part of an opposition plot inspired by Stalin’s enemies – Trotsky, Zinoviev and Kamenev – and he arranged for the immediate implementation of the death sentence. An acquaintance of Kirov’s who had been present at the shooting was also killed when the NKVD had him picked him up and allowed him to fall from the lorry in which they were transporting him. The only two witnesses to the murder had been silenced.
Whatever the truth behind Kirov’s assassination, its effect was to unleash years of paranoia, terror and suffering for millions of people across the Soviet Union. Kirov was promptly sanctified as a Soviet martyr; the Leningrad ballet, towns and even battleships were named after him. In his name the Soviet Union was to be made ‘safe’ again. ‘Deviationism’ was now conflated with ‘terrorism’ and Stalin’s comments on his colleague’s murder have a sort of ‘I told you so’ ring to them, a riposte to Kirov’s call for tolerance of diverging political views:
The foul murder3 of Comrade Kirov was proof that the enemies of the people would resort to double-dealing and that they would mask themselves as Bolsheviks, as party members, in order to worm their way into our confidence and gain access to our organisations … The Central Committee emphatically warned party organisations against political complacency and lack of vigilance! Such complacency is fundamentally wrong. It is an echo of those who assured us that our enemies ‘would become real Socialists in the end’. We do not need complacency, but vigilance! Real Bolshevik, revolutionary vigilance! … Every Bolshevik under present conditions must have the ability to discern an enemy of the party and unmask him no matter how well disguised he may be.
Within days, hundreds of people had been arrested and executed without trial. Stalin decreed that due process of law could be ignored in order to guarantee rapid justice. The corpses piled up in the basement of the Leningrad NKVD. The great purge years were beginning.
Chistki (purges) of the Communist Party had been common occurrences in the Soviet Union from the early 1920s onwards. Party members would be instructed to hand in their membership cards and asked to answer a number of questions to show that they deserved their place amongst the privileged elite. Undesirables were expelled and lost the perks afforded to members. One purge, in 1933, had resulted in the withdrawal of party cards from 854,000 people on the grounds that they were ‘careerists’, ‘drunkards’, ‘idlers’ or ‘opportunists’. Leonid Nikolaev, the embittered assassin, had probably been one of them.
Only after the murder of Kirov did the purges take on the more sinister form we associate them with today. Throughout 1935 and the first half of 1936 Stalin moved to tighten his grip on the party. He had become frustrated with those who opposed his plans to accelerate the pace of economic growth, and a report from the NKVD that Trotsky had been secretly liaising with opposition groups in the party served as the excuse Stalin needed to crush his ‘opponents’ decisively. He announced to local party committees that large numbers of party cards had fallen into the hands of political enemies and spies. Those removed from the party in all subsequent chistki could therefore be convicted of espionage, a capital offence in the Soviet Union. Former or suspected members of the so-called Left Opposition were arrested and interrogated, often brutally, until they admitted they had been part of a Trotskyite plot to overthrow the Soviet leadership. Under torture, they were induced to incriminate others, many of them undoubtedly innocent. The circle of denunciations grew ever larger, until the NKVD felt it had enough ‘evidence’ to carry out a piece of political theatre that would become emblematic of this period of Soviet history.
In the summer of 1936, Kamenev and Zinoviev, who had already been sentenced to prison terms for their ‘moral complicity’ in Kirov’s death, were re-tried. This time they were accused of leading a terrorist organisation that had eliminated Kirov and was intent on killing Stalin. It would be the first in a series of show trials designed to whip public opinion into a frenzy of paranoia and denunciations.
Holding a public trial was a risk. There was no objective evidence to back up the conspiracy claims; success would depend entirely on the confessions of the accused. Without confessions, the trials would be seen as a sham. It would have been simpler to hold the proceedings behind closed doors, but Stalin’s aim was to crush his ‘enemies’, both physically and in the court of public opinion. And to do that he needed to transform the defendants from lauded heroes of the Bolshevik revolution into evil saboteurs bent on the destruction of the people’s socialist society.
Before their trial, the NKVD assured Kamenev and Zinoviev that their lives, and those of their families, would be spared as long as they admitted their guilt and implicated other Old Bolsheviks, including Nikolai Bukharin, Mikhail Tomsky and Karl Radek. The goal appeared to be the elimination of all those who had played key roles in the events of 1917, leaving Stalin as the sole link and successor to Lenin. All remaining party members would owe their positions and their careers to him alone.
After months of preparations, the trial began on 19 August 1936. It was held in the October Room of the House of Unions, formerly the Assembly of the Nobility, a blue neoclassical building in the centre of Moscow, built during Catherine’s reign. The theatrical master of ceremonies was Andrei Vyshinsky, the Soviet state prosecutor who had conducted the Metropolitan-Vickers case (see here) and was now beginning his remarkable career as the driving force in the political trials of the pre-war years. His eventual reward would be to serve as chief Soviet prosecutor in the Nuremberg War Crimes Trials and to become Soviet foreign minister in the final years of Stalin’s reign.
Vyshinsky understood perfectly that the aim of the show trials was to incite the people’s hatred of the defendants. In speeches full of anger and disgust, he described Zinoviev and Kamenev as dogs, perfidious enemies of the people, the lowest form of life:
The enemy is cunning4, and a cunning enemy must not be spared. The people leapt to their feet in indignation at these ghastly crimes. The people are quivering with rage. And I, as the representative of the state prosecution, join my indignant voice to the rumbling of the voices of millions! I remind you, comrade judges, that it is your duty, once you find these people, all sixteen of them, guilty of crimes against the state, to apply to them in full measure those articles of the law that the prosecution has demanded. I demand that these rabid dogs be shot – every one of them – until the last of them is wiped out!
Vyshinsky’s fulminations were read out in factories and on collective farms. Workers cheered and celebrated the unmasking of such evil traitors. Telegrams poured in demanding the death penalty.fn1
The outcome of the trial was never in doubt. Remarkably, Kamenev, Zinoviev and the 14 other defendants played their parts perfectly. In confessions that seemed to have been learned by rote, so exactly did they corroborate each other, they freely admitted their guilt. On 24 August, after five days of hearings, the court announced that all 16 defendants had been found guilty. All were sentenced to death. The executions were carried out the following morning. Zinoviev and Kamenev became the first members of the Central Committee to be executed; they would not be the last.
The standard had now been set. In January 1937 Karl Radek, one of Lenin’s closest allies, appeared in the dock along with 16 others accused of terrorism and sabotage. All but four were sentenced to death and immediately executed. Radek himself avoided the death penalty because he agreed to implicate others, an act that would open the way for the biggest of the show trials two years later. But by that time Radek too would be dead, murdered by an NKVD assassin in the labour camp where he was sent to serve his sentence.
By 1937, the Soviet Union was gripped by fear. Many genuinely believed that spies, wreckers and saboteurs were in their midst and that they must remain constantly on the lookout for enemy agents. The atmosphere of suspicion was seized on by some to settle old scores or move up in the world. If they denounced a rival or an immediate superior, their chances of taking over their job increased. People denounced others out of fear of being denounced themselves. Anyone even suspected of being a kulak, a White sympathiser, a member of a non-Communist political party, or of a suspect nationality (German, Polish, Jewish or similar) was now at risk. It took very little for people to be sucked into the carnage.
Suddenly there were no longer ‘accidents’ in the Soviet Union. If a fire broke out, a machine in a factory or a tractor on a farm broke down, then someone was to blame and would be held responsible. Once arrested, their fate was swiftly decided by the dreaded troika, an extrajudicial system of express justice where a party member, an official from the Prosecutor’s office and an NKVD man had the power to dispense life and death. Laws introduced in 1934 had made families collectively responsible for crimes committed by a relative, so the wife and young sons of Lev Kamenev survived him by barely a few years; Zinoviev’s family suffered a similar fate.
Most monstrous was the brainwashing of the young. Under the influence of the omnipresent propaganda, a 13-year-old schoolboy in the West Siberian village of Gerasimovka denounced his father for ‘falling under the influence of kulak relations’. The year was 1932 and the boy’s name, Pavlik Morozov, would become celebrated across the Soviet Union. The denunciation of family members was not in itself a rarity – by the middle of the decade, newspapers were full of small ads announcing ‘I denounce my brother’ or ‘I break off relations with my mother’ and so on – but Pavlik’s subsequent fate made him an enduring hero. With his father safely packed off to ten years in a labour camp (where he would eventually be shot), Pavlik Morozov was himself murdered. The circumstances of his killing have never been satisfactorily explained, but the Kremlin propaganda machine was quick to turn it into an instructive morality tale for all other Soviet children.
According to the official version of events, Pavlik was murdered by angry relatives of his justly imprisoned father. His uncle and grandfather were accused of the crime and portrayed in the media as corrupt kulaks. With the case gaining widespread publicity, thousands of telegrams poured in demanding the death penalty, which was duly handed down and carried out. Pavlik became a martyr for the party, celebrated as a hero citizen and an example for all. In a remarkable reversal of natural morality, the state proclaimed that loyalty to family must take second place to loyalty to the ideals of the state. Maxim Gorky praised Pavlik’s ‘selflessness’, concluding that by ‘overcoming blood5 kinship, he discovered spiritual kinship’.
The tale of Pavlik Morozov became compulsory reading in schools; songs, plays, a symphony and an opera were composed in his honour. Sergei Eisenstein’s film Bezhin Meadow (1937) was named after the location of Pavlik’s murder. The school in Gerasimovka became a shrine to his memory, and statues of the boy who was honoured with the title ‘Informer Number One’ sprang up in parks all over the country.
Thanks to Comrade Pavlik, family members were placed under a legal obligation to inform. If they knew of the criminal intentions of a ‘traitor to the homeland’ and failed to report it, they could be sentenced to five years in the Gulag. Even if they didn’t know, they could still be exiled. By now people were disappearing without a trace, taken away by the secret police in the middle of the night, never to be heard from again. People lived in such constant fear of the knock at the door that they slept fully clothed with a packed suitcase under their beds. No one was safe from the ‘black crows’, the name given to the NKVD cars in which the secret police drove around at night, silently abducting their victims.
The true extent of the purges is illustrated by the fate of the men who administered them. Genrikh Yagoda had officially been the head of the NKVD since 1934, although he had effectively run the organisation since the death of its founder Felix Dzerzhinsky eight years earlier. In late 1936, he was replaced for falling behind in uncovering ‘Trotskyite saboteurs’ – in effect, for not arresting enough people. His successor, Nikolai Yezhov, a dwarf of a man with a piercing voice and bandy legs, quickly earned the nickname of ‘Iron Hedgehog’ (yezh in Russian means ‘hedgehog’) for his bloodthirsty enthusiasm in the job. In early 1937, he announced targets for the purges, similar to the quotas imposed on industry and agriculture. Numbers were fixed for arrests6 in each sector of society and it was decreed that 28 per cent of these should be shot. Yezhov set himself the goal of arresting 260,000 ‘anti-Soviet elements’; the actual offences were less important than fulfilling the quota.
In early 1938, partly to protect his own life, Yezhov agreed to arrest his predecessor. After a year’s anxiety-ridden retirement, Genrikh Yagoda appeared in the final and most famous show trial alongside Nikolai Bukharin, Alexei Rykov and Nikolai Krestinsky, all former members of the politburo. The Trial of the Twenty-One, as it was known, was designed to tie up the loose ends of the two previous trials and kill off the remaining Old Bolsheviks. The defendants were accused of being part of the ‘Right Trotskyite Bloc’ and of committing a dizzying array of crimes, including murdering Kirov and Maxim Gorky, attempting to assassinate Stalin, Lenin, Sverdlov and Molotov, conspiring to wreck the economy, spying for the West and making secret agreements to partition the Soviet Union between its enemies in the East and West. They confessed, and on 14 March 1938 18 of them were sentenced to death, leaving Vyshinsky to proclaim triumphantly:
The weed and the thistle7 will grow on the graves of these execrable traitors. But on us and on our happy country, our Glorious Sun will continue to shed His serene light. Guided by our beloved Leader and Master, the Great Stalin, we will go forward to Communism along a path that has been cleansed of the remnants of the last scum and filth of the past.
Strangely, for a man who had himself arranged show trials, and knew the inevitable outcome, Yagoda had continued to believe to the very last moment that Stalin would not allow him to be executed. Alexander Solzhenitsyn in his magnum opus The Gulag Archipelago (1973), describes the torturer’s last moments in court:
This murderer of millions8 simply could not imagine that his superior murderer, up top, would not, at the last moment, stand up for him and protect him. Just as though Stalin had been sitting right there in the hall, Yagoda confidently and insistently begged him directly for mercy: ‘I appeal to you! For you I built two great canals!’ And a witness reports that at just that moment a match flared in the shadows behind a window on the second floor of the hall, apparently behind a muslin curtain, and, while it lasted, the outline of a pipe could be seen … In light of the Oriental despot in Stalin’s character, I can readily believe that he watched the comedies in that October Hall. I cannot imagine that he would have denied himself this spectacle, this satisfaction.
Fitzroy MacLean, the Scottish diplomat and adventurer, claims in his splendid memoirs of his time in Moscow (Eastern Approaches, 1949) that the dictator was indeed there, the invisible metteur-en-scène of the whole performance:
At one stage9 of the trial a clumsily directed arc-light dramatically revealed to attentive members of the audience the familiar features and heavily drooping moustache peering out from behind the black glass of a small window, high up under the ceiling of the courtroom.
Visible or not, however, the defendants in the show trials would have been acutely aware of Stalin’s hand guiding their fate. And that may shed some light on the question I find the most puzzling of all. As I read through the transcripts of proceedings, I found myself asking why these intelligent and strong-willed men agreed to falsely incriminate themselves. It is quite clear from the self-excoriating speeches of the Old Bolsheviks in the dock that they are confessing to imaginary crimes, to things they could not possibly have done. Why did they confess to attempting to destroy all they had worked for?
One answer is that they were tortured mercilessly, deprived of sleep, beaten and interrogated for days on end until they confessed. That is undoubtedly what happened to the majority of them. In addition, they were warned that their families would be killed if they did not do what they were told to do. But in many cases, there seems to be more to their confessions than simply a surrender to physical and mental coercion. Bukharin, the man Lenin had described in his testament as ‘the darling of the party’ (reason enough, no doubt, for Stalin to want rid of him), gave a hint in his final plea to the court:
If one were to die10 without repenting, it would mean one was dying for absolutely nothing at all. But repentance makes everything positive that glistens in the Soviet Union acquire new dimensions in a man’s mind. This in the end disarmed me completely and led me to bend my knees before the party and the country. When you think such thoughts, all the personal considerations, all the bitterness, rancour and pride fall away, disappear.
The desire for one’s death to have meaning, to make a positive contribution, is a natural one. But why would Bukharin and the others wish to serve the cause of a Communist Party that was now bent on destroying them?
The answer, perhaps, lies in the mindset of the Socialist Revolutionary. These were men who had spent their life in the service of a cause, and even if they disagreed with some aspects of the party line (in fact, their only real crime was that of disagreeing with Stalin), the triumph of the party remained the ultimate good. Opposing the party now would mean negating all that had gone before.
Arthur Koestler’s novel Darkness at Noon (1940) is based on the Trial of the Twenty-One, and it addresses the question of repentance in light of the author’s own experience as a political prisoner facing execution. Koestler notes wryly that the Bolshevik revolutionary had ‘become a slaughterer11 in order to abolish slaughtering; to sacrifice lambs so that no more lambs would be sacrificed; to whip people with knouts so that they may learn not to let themselves be whipped; to strip himself of every scruple in the name of a higher scrupulousness’. The Bolsheviks had sacrificed millions of lives ‘for the greater good’, making it an article of faith that the party was more important than any individual’s doubts. While Bukharin and the others had not committed the ludicrous anti-party crimes of which they were accused, they were no longer fully supportive of the direction the revolution had taken. So by the logic of the party, the logic by which they themselves had lived, their annihilation by the party was something that had to be accepted.
Bukharin seems to have consciously agreed to play the role of traitor in the hope that it would help the party, in time, to find its way back to the true path. (Rubashov, the defendant in Darkness at Noon, accepts the same fate.) Bukharin’s wife, who herself spent 20 years in Stalin’s camps, later confirmed that ‘one reason for his preposterous confession12 in the dock was precisely this: he hoped that the idea to which he had dedicated his life would triumph’. Bukharin told the court: ‘Know comrades, that the banner you bear13 in a triumphant march towards Communism contains a drop of my blood, too!’ and his final letter, which his wife memorised before his death, began: ‘I address this appeal14 to you, the future generation of party leaders, whose historical mission will include the obligation to take apart the monstrous cloud of crimes in these frightful times.’ It would take 50 years, but that future generation of Communist leaders answered his appeal. In 1988, under Mikhail Gorbachev, Bukharin was rehabilitated, exonerated of all the charges against him.
After the Trial of the Twenty-One, the rate of executions started to slow. But two defining moments of the Terror were still to come. In late 1938, Nikolai Yezhov seemed to suffer a nervous breakdown. His fellow NKVD officers reported that he was no longer controlling the work of the department, that he was behaving oddly at meetings, staring out of the window and playing with paper aeroplanes. It seemed as if the years of torturing and murdering had driven him insane. Others speculated that he was feigning madness in order to escape from the horrors of his job, or that he wanted out before he too was purged. Yezhov was called in by Stalin and it was announced that he had ‘asked to step down’ as head of the NKVD, to be replaced by his deputy, the rapidly rising star, Lavrenty Beria. A year later, with Beria firmly installed as master of the Lubyanka, Yezhov too was arrested and treated to the same punishment he had inflicted on his predecessor. Like the dead Genrikh Yagoda, he too was stripped naked, beaten repeatedly and finally shot in the back of the head. It was beginning to look as if each successive head of the secret police was living under a potential death sentence: as each of them did Stalin’s dirty work, the secrets they accumulated and the power they wielded made them an ever greater liability, too much of a potential threat for Stalin to let them live.
With Yezhov dead, Stalin did his best to blame him for the Terror: any excessive zeal in the purges, he claimed, was due to the infiltration of the NKVD by ‘fascist elements’ and to Yezhov’s personal bloodlust, for which he had now been punished. Beria was instructed to purge the NKVD itself and scores of senior officials were executed.
To this day in Russia the years 1937–8, when the Terror was at its peak, are known in popular memory as the ‘Yezhovshchina’ (regime of Yezhov). As had happened with the Old Bolsheviks, his image was removed from official photographs, and the pages of his entry in The Great Soviet Encyclopaedia, which had celebrated him as a protector of the revolution, were ripped out. To fill the gap, a very long article was inserted on the subject of hedgehogs.fn2
With the death of Yezhov, the Terror seemed to be winding down. But Stalin had one last opponent to deal with. Leon Trotsky, public enemy number one in the Soviet Union, had kept up his vendetta against Stalin from his exile in Mexico. In vehement letters and damning public pronouncements reminiscent of Prince Andrei Kurbsky’s polemic against Ivan the Terrible (see here), Trotsky had continued to denounce the murderous policies of his former comrade and condemn the show trials. ‘Stalin’s trial against me15,’ he told the international public via radio and newsreel addresses, ‘is built upon false confessions, extorted by modern inquisitorial methods, in the interests of the ruling clique. There are no crimes in history more terrible in intention or execution than the Moscow show trials. They are the product not of Communism, not of socialism, but of Stalinism, that is, of the irresponsible despotism of the bureaucracy over the people … The true criminals hide behind the cloak of the accusers … The Stalinist secret police has sunk to the level of the Nazi Gestapo.’
In the summer of 1940, Trotsky was working on an excoriating biography of Stalin. It would never be completed. On 20 August, after numerous failed assassination attempts, Stalin achieved his aim. Trotsky had invited a young Spaniard into his villa in Mexico City, believing him to be one of the many political groupies who had congregated around him in the years since he left Russia. But Ramón Mercader was a Soviet agent, recruited by the NKVD during the Spanish Civil War (1936–9) and trained in Moscow in the art of assassination. As Trotsky worked in his study, Mercader hit him with savage force on the back of his head with an ice axe he had smuggled in under his raincoat. The former hero of the Russian civil war survived long enough to know that he had perished at the merciless hands of his great rival. His last words before dying the following day in hospital were reportedly, ‘I know I shall not survive this16. Stalin has finally accomplished the task he attempted unsuccessfully before …’
Mercader would serve 20 years in jail. On his release he was made a Hero of the Soviet Union, living out his final years in Moscow, where his story still occupies a prominent place in the displays of the KGB Museum in the Lubyanka.
The purges of the 1930s changed the face of the USSR. In political terms, they allowed Stalin to achieve his aim of removing all actual or potential rivals for power. The effect on the Communist Party’s higher echelons is illustrated by the fate of those who attended the Seventeenth Party Congress in 1934, the so-called Congress of the Victors. Eleven hundred of them, more than half those present, were arrested; and by 1939 two-thirds of those arrested had been executed. The Central Committee fared even worse: 119 of its 139 members were executed. The Congress of the Victors had become the Congress of the Condemned.
According to the NKVD17’s own records, they detained 1.6 million people during 1937 and 1938, of whom 681,692 were shot for ‘counter-revolutionary and state crimes’. The true figures are undoubtedly much higher. By comparison, in the 85 years from 1825 to 1910, the tsarist regime executed 3,932 people for political crimes.
The mass arrests of the purge years destabilised the Soviet economy. Industrial and agricultural production went into sharp decline. By 1939, the number of inmates in the Gulag ran into the millions. The zeki, as they were known, were put to work as part of the planned economy, labouring in mines, timber forests and on construction sites. Hundreds of thousands died from overwork and starvation. In a morbid variation on the Russian tradition of joint responsibility, they would receive their full ration of food only if their group accomplished its daily target. One inmate later wrote, ‘The hungrier we were18, the worse we worked. The worse we worked, the hungrier we became. From that vicious circle there was no escape.’
Perhaps the most disastrous consequence of the purges was the damage they did to national security. Stalin had not limited the bloodletting to his political rivals. The military high command also suffered heavy losses. In 1936, Stalin had claimed that elements of the Red Army were plotting against him. The truth or otherwise of the charge has never been established, and subsequent claims that the Kremlin was duped by Nazi disinformation are also unproven. But in June 1937, eight of the Red Army’s top commanders were charged with conspiracy with Germany. All were convicted19 and executed, including the army’s leading military strategist, Marshal Mikhail Tukhachevsky. The search for traitors spread rapidly through the lower ranks, and between 1937 and 1939 some 15,000 army officers and political personnel were shot. Of the 85 members of the Military Army Council, 68 were executed.
Stalin’s timing could not have been more catastrophic. He had destroyed the elite of the Soviet Union’s armed forces at the very moment that the clouds of world war were gathering on the horizon. But he appeared unconcerned. The record of his remarkable conversation with Sergei Eisenstein suggests that he saw himself as a modern-day Ivan the Terrible, doing whatever was necessary for the good of the nation, untroubled by mundane considerations of justice and morality. He approved of Ivan’s willingness to murder his rivals, and reproached him only for ‘praying and repenting’. ‘God disturbed him20 too much in this matter,’ he concluded. ‘He ought to have been even more decisive!’ In his copy of a biography of Genghis Khan, Stalin underlined the sentence ‘The deaths of the vanquished21 are necessary for the tranquillity of the victors.’
fn1 The same thing would happen in 1953 when Yezhov’s successor as head of the secret police, Lavrenty Beria, fell from grace. In his case, readers of The Great Soviet Encyclopaedia would find themselves very well informed about the Bering Strait.
fn2 A telegram, from the workers of the Meshchovsky Region near Kaluga, 100 miles southwest of Moscow, is typical of the tone of indignation and lust for vengeance: ‘The workers of the Meshchovsky Region demand merciless retribution against the terrorists and anti-party vermin of the Trotskyite apposition [sic] groups. An end to the counter-revolutionary activities of Zinoviev, Kamenev et al! Death to the enemies of the working class! Annihilate all who try to overthrow the dictatorship of the proletariat! Long live the invincible working class! Long live the Communist Party and its mighty leader, Comrade Stalin!’