It was in this volatile situation that the engine of a Great Terror was cranked up and set in motion. The exact calculations of Stalin and his associates have not been recorded for posterity, but undoubtedly several leaders had been made edgy by the situation confronting them after the First Five-Year Plan. They knew that resentment of their rule in the rest of society was deep and wide, and they feared lest former Bolshevik oppositionists might exploit this circumstance. Stalin’s allies felt deeply insecure, and shared a rising sense of frustration. They were annoyed by the chaos that prevailed in the network of public institutions – and they had doubts about the loyalty of party, governmental, military and managerial officials, even including those who had implemented the First Five-Year Plan. They had few scruples about applying their repressive power. The thought, practices and institutions of the Civil War had set precedents for the horrors of the late 1930s.
Indeed state violence was already being applied widely under the First and Second Five-Year Plans. ‘Kulaks’, railwaymen-‘wreckers’, ‘nationalists’ and managerial ‘saboteurs’ were being arrested in large numbers. Nearly a million Soviet citizens languished in the forced-labour camps and colonies of the OGPU by 1933, and further millions were in prisons, deportation camps and compulsory resettlement areas.1 Consequently the Great Terror of 1937–8 was not a thunderclap in a cloudless sky but the worsening of a storm that was already raging.
None the less the Great Terror would not have taken place but for Stalin’s personality and ideas. He it was who directed the state’s punitive machinery against all those whom he identified as ‘anti-Soviet elements’ and ‘enemies of the people’. Among his purposes was a desire to use his victims as scapegoats for the country’s pain; and in order to sustain his mode of industrialization he also needed to keep his mines, timber forests and construction sites constantly supplied with slave labour.2 It was probably also his intention to take pre-emptive measures against any ‘fifth column’ operating against him in the event of war.3 These considerations, furthermore, fitted into a larger scheme to build an efficient Soviet state subservient to his personal dictatorship – and to secure the state’s total control over society. Such was the guiding rationale of the Great Terrorist.
Back in 1933, not even Stalin had been urging repression on that scale: he was still selecting specific ‘anti-Soviet elements’ as targets for the OGPU. Yet official violence was never absent from the Politburo’s agenda for long, and Stalin reprimanded his Politburo colleagues whenever they failed to support him. The tensions in public life were maintained. Stalin and his most trusted associates saw a tightening of discipline as the main means to attain economic success and political stability. Repeatedly they affirmed the need to root out class enemies, saboteurs and spies.
This did not happen without dissension in the Politburo. Three great power-bases had been consolidated during the First Five-Year Plan: the All-Union Communist Party, the People’s Commissariats and the OGPU. Relations between the party and the commissariats caused heated controversy. To Stalin’s fury, Ordzhonikidze as People’s Commissar of Heavy Industry prevented local party bodies from interfering in the activity of factory directors.4 But at the same time Stalin was angered by the power of the party at its lower levels, power that was frequently used to thwart the central party apparatus’s instructions. So that Stalin was unhappy with both the party and the government. Debate about this in the Politburo ensued in the winter of 1933–4 and the balance of opinion was in favour of letting the commissariats get on with fulfilling the Second Five-Year Plan without interference by local party bodies.5
But how could this be achieved without losing control of the commissariats? Kaganovich suggested that the party should be given a crucial supervisory role at the local level. Thus the party committees would establish an internal department for each major branch of the economy. The task of the departments would be to check on the implementation of central economic objectives at the local level without taking over the functions of detailed management.
Kaganovich’s proposal had the virtue, from Stalin’s standpoint, of strengthening compliance with the Second Five-Year Plan. Each local party secretary would be reduced in authority when his committee was turned into ‘a small apparatus subordinate to the People’s Commissar’,6 and the party as a whole was subjected to greater control from the centre. In 1933 yet another purge of the membership was undertaken, resulting in the withdrawal of party cards from 854,300 persons identified as careerists, drunkards, idlers and unrepentant oppositionists.7 While all this was sweet music to Stalin’s ears, there remained much to annoy him. Firstly, the trimming of the party’s sprawling powers served to increase hostility to Stalin’s policies and mode of leadership among many party secretaries in the provinces. Stalin was less and less their hero. Secondly, the enhanced autonomy of the governmental organs made them still less amenable to Stalin’s control. Stalin was not the sort of leader who found this a tolerable situation.
Basic questions about how to consolidate the regime were therefore yet to be resolved. The Politburo reserved the right to take any definitive decision. No one was allowed to refer directly to these questions at the Seventeenth Congress of the All-Union Communist Party, which opened in Moscow on 26 February 1934. The press had indicated that it would be a Congress of Victors. The internal communist oppositions had been defeated; industrialization and agricultural collectivization had been imposed; military security had been reinforced. The party’s unity under its great leader was to be celebrated.
Stalin in his speech to the Congress, however, indicated that he was not going to be gracious in victory: ‘Consequently it is necessary not to sing lullabies to the party but to develop its vigilance, not to send it to sleep but to keep it in a condition of militant readiness, not to disarm but to arm it.’8 He warned against complacency about the party’s economic achievements and against indulgence towards the former oppositionists. His associates were equally intransigent. Molotov asserted that ‘vestiges of capitalism’ continued to affect thinking in the party; Kaganovich added that anti-Leninist deviations still threatened the party.9 Lesser figures added to the belligerent chorus. M. F. Shkiryatov suggested that the central leadership needed to intervene more vigorously to make improvements in local party life; and R. I. Eikhe declared that Bukharin had not done enough to prevent the emergence of ‘Ryutin and other counter-revolutionary swine’.10
They did not have everything their own way. Politburo members Kuibyshev and Mikoyan refrained from calling for a sharpening of political struggle.11 Similar reluctance was shown by influential regional party first secretaries including Pëtr Postyshev of Ukraine, I. M. Vareikis of the Central Black-Earth Region and B. P. Sheboldaev of the Azov-Black Sea Region.12 Molotov bridled at any such signs of diminishing militancy, and in his report on the economy he proposed – presumably with Stalin’s approval – to raise the projected annual industrial growth rate by another five per cent.13 Ordzhonikidze’s intervention led to a limitation of the increase to three per cent.14 The intensity of the dissension between Molotov and Ordzhonikidze ought not to be exaggerated. Nevertheless the Congress’s other decisions were generally in favour of slackening the political tensions, and it would seem that Leningrad party boss Sergei Kirov, too, was popular among Congress delegates for favouring such a relaxation. Pointedly Kirov had stated in his main speech: ‘The fundamental difficulties are already behind us.’15
There is also fragmentary evidence that Stalin did so poorly in the elections to the new Central Committee that the number of votes cast for each candidate was withheld from publication. Another story is that several Congress delegations asked Kirov to stand against Stalin for the General Secretaryship – and that Kirov declined the request.16 The full truth remains beclouded. What is clear is that Stalin lost his title of General Secretary and was redesignated simply as Secretary, and that Kirov was given the same rank.17 On the other hand, it remains far from clear that Kirov’s policies were really very different from those of Stalin and Molotov. Certainly he eulogized Stalin in his same speech to the Congress;18 and probably, too, he actually tried to resist his own promotion to Central Committee Secretary.19 Nevertheless Stalin had not had the enjoyable time during and after the Congress which he had thought his due: this much appears clear. His usual reaction in such a situation was to search for ways to settle accounts finally with those whom he regarded as his enemies.
From spring to autumn 1934 some impression was given that Stalin was making compromises just as Lenin had done in introducing the NEP. Kirov went on speaking in support of increased rations for workers, greater respect for legal procedures and an end to the violent extortion of grain from peasants.20 Restrictions were placed on the arbitrary arrest of economic experts.21 The OGPU lost its separate institutional status, and its activities and personnel were transferred under the control of the People’s Commissariat of Internal Affairs (NKVD). Thus the state’s mechanisms of arbitrary repression appeared to have been weakened. Yet the changes for the better were nugatory. Massive instrumentalities of violence remained intact, and the NKVD’s engorgement of the OGPU had the result of constructing an even mightier centralized organ for policing and security. Political passions therefore remained high: the Congress had ultimately resolved little.
On 1 December 1934 an astonishing event triggered an upward ratcheting of the level of repression. A young ex-Zinovievite, Leonid Nikolaev, walked into Kirov’s office in Leningrad, pulled out a revolver and shot him. Stalin exploited the assassination as a pretext to rush through a set of decrees granting full authority to the NKVD to arrest, try and execute at will. This gave rise to the belief that Stalin connived in the killing. Nikolaev had previously been caught in possession of a firearm in suspicious circumstances. He was executed before any exhaustive interrogation could take place and an improbably large proportion of those who handled Nikolaev after Kirov’s death, including the van-drivers, quickly perished in mysterious circumstances. Yet Stalin’s complicity in the Kirov murder remains unproven. What is beyond dispute is that the assassination enabled him and his associates to begin to move against the somewhat less militant among the Stalinists and their tacit supporters.
Stalin first took revenge upon Zinoviev and Kamenev, who were accused of conniving in Kirov’s death. They agreed to accept moral and political responsibility for their former minor adherent in return for an assurance that they would receive a light sentence. Their trial was held in camera in January 1935. On Stalin’s orders Zinoviev and Kamenev were consigned to ten and five years of imprisonment respectively. Stalin’s prisons were not rest-homes. Furthermore, 663 past supporters of Zinoviev in Leningrad were seized and sent into exile in Yakutia and other bleak Siberian locations. Over 30,000 deportations of members of social groups regarded as hostile to the communism in Leningrad and other cities as the security agencies intensified its years-old campaign against undesirables.22
Stalin was cranking up the motor of prophylactic repression. Neither the exiled communist ex-oppositionists nor the deported former middle-class city dwellers had been conspiring against Stalin. But Stalin did not want to give them the chance to do so. His desire for complete control was even extended to ordinary communists who had never belonged to an oppositional faction. Yet another clear-out of undesirable rank-and-file members was ordered in 1934 and a block was placed on recruitment for the second half of the year. Coming after the purge of 1933, this measure was a sign of the Secretariat’s undispelled concern about the revolutionary ‘vanguard’. In January 1935, as Kamenev and Zinoviev received their prison sentences, a general exchange of party cards was announced. This would be a purge under a different name: the aim was to identify and remove those many members who did nothing for the party while deriving advantage from having a card. In consequence, by May 1935, 281,872 persons had ceased being Bolsheviks.23
This fitted the schemes of Andrei Zhdanov, who had become a Central Committee Secretary in 1934 and Leningrad party chief after Kirov’s murder. Zhdanov wanted to restore the authority of the party at the expense of the people’s commissariats; he saw the internal party purge as a prerequisite of this task. Once it had been ‘cleansed’, the party would be in a condition to resume its role as the supreme institution of the Soviet state. At a practical level, Zhdanov aimed to reverse the Seventeenth Party Congress’s decision to reorganize the departments of party committees on parallel lines to the economic branches of government. The local party committees, according to Zhdanov, should reclaim their role in propagating Marxism-Leninism, mobilizing society and in selecting personnel for public office. His implicit argument was that the Soviet order could not safely be entrusted to the people’s commissariats.
Zhdanov’s success was an episode in the struggle among institutions. The Soviet economy was run on the basis of central command, and it was important that the people’s commissariats maximized their power to impose their will. Yet there was a danger that this power might be used against the wishes of the central political leadership. And so the party had to be retained to control the commissariats. But the party might lack the necessary expertise. As central politicians tried to resolve this dilemma, they alternated in their preferences between the people’s commissariats and the party. Indeed this had become the perennial institutional dilemma of the one-party, one-ideology state and the state-owned economy of the USSR.
Yet Stalin had his own motives in supporting Zhdanov. Apparently Zhdanov wished to box off the party purge from the concurrent arrests of ex-oppositionists. But Stalin rejected any such demarcation, and on 13 May 1935 the Secretariat sent out a secret letter to local party committees asserting that party cards had got into the hands of many adventurers, political enemies and spies.24 Thus persons expelled from the party could now find themselves accused of espionage, for which the punishment was either execution or years of forced labour. On 20 May, the Politburo issued a directive for every former Trotskyist to be sent to a labour camp for a minimum of three years. On 20 November, Trotski, Kamenev and Zinoviev were accused of spying for foreign powers.25 Stalin, designedly or not, was moving towards a violent general resolution of the political tensions. Apparently not even Kaganovich or Zhdanov or even Molotov, his closest associates, were demanding the extension of terror. But by then none of them dared deny Stalin something upon which his mind was fixed.26
Not only political administration but also economic management became more hazardous. For it was also in 1935 that an extraordinary campaign was introduced to raise industrial productivity. In the Don Basin, in eastern Ukraine, the miner Aleksei Stakhanov hewed 102 tons of coal in a six-hour stint in August. This feat was fourteen times the norm set by his enterprise. When the news reached Moscow, Stalin and Molotov perceived that a summons to all industrial labourers to emulate Stakhanov would help to break the spine of the objections by managers, technical experts and workers to the Politburo’s policies.
Stakhanov was hailed as a worker-hero; a Stakhanovite movement was founded. Suddenly it was found that practically every industrial machine could be made to function much, much faster. Even the boilers of steam-trains started to perform wonders. Managers and administrative personnel were intimidated into altering patterns of work to accommodate attempts on records; and the workers were put under pressure to change their working procedures.27 Critics of Stakhanovism in any enterprise were not merely reprimanded but arrested as ‘wreckers’. Ordzhonikidze as a Politburo member had immunity from such a sanction, and he pointed out that Stakhanov and his emulators could perform miracles only by means of the deployment of other workers to service their needs. Yet he was ignored. The Stakhanovite movement suited Stalin, who wanted to foster utopian industrial schemes by terrorizing doubters and encouraging enthusiasts.
His hostility to factory directors, local party chiefs and former oppositionists was coalescing into a single repressive campaign. It would take little to impel Stalin into action. Politics had been dangerously volatile for years as institutional interests clashed and rivalries among the leaders intensified. In 1935–6 there was again a dispute in the Politburo about tempos of economic growth.28 As usual, Stalin was strongly in favour of increasing the tempos. At the same time there was administrative chaos and popular resentment in the country. And then suddenly, in summer 1936, Stalin was driven frantic by evidence obtained by the NKVD that Trotski had been keeping contact from abroad with clandestine groups of supporters and that these groups had been negotiating with supporters of Bukharin, Kamenev and Zinoviev.29 For an extremely suspicious and vengeful person such as Stalin, this threat called for massive retaliation. In the rest of the year he sought to settle accounts bloodily with all those whom he identified as his enemies.
First he moved against Kamenev and Zinoviev. On 29 June 1936, a secret letter was sent by the Central Committee Secretariat to the local party bodies alleging the discovery of ‘the terrorist activities of the Trotskyist-Zinovievite counter-revolutionary bloc’.30 In August 1936, Kamenev and Zinoviev were dragged from their cells and re-tried. This time the proceedings were held in public. The defendants were privately threatened with the death sentence unless they ‘confessed’ to having set up an Anti-Soviet Trotskyist-Zinovievite Centre that organized assassinations. Supposedly Stalin was next on their list after Kirov. They duly confessed, and Stalin duly broke his promise. The court condemned them to death and sentence was carried out early next morning.
This was the first execution of anyone who had belonged to the Party Central Committee. Stalin’s campaign was relentless. He sacked Yagoda in September on the grounds that he was four years behind in catching enemies of the people. His replacement was Nikolai Yezhov a rising figure in the central party apparatus. The atmosphere in the Soviet leadership was not relaxed by the economic news. The 1936 grain harvest turned out to be twenty-six per cent smaller than the harvest of the previous year;31 and in November a massive explosion occurred at the Kemerovo coal-mine. Many such troubles in agriculture and industry were the product of the technical disruptions brought about by Stalin’s management of the economy. But he blamed the troubles on wreckers and anti-Soviet elements and strengthened his resolve to stick to his methods.
Ordzhonikidze and Kuibyshev, who themselves had supported the brutal industrialization during 1928–32, were disconcerted by Stalin’s continued brutality.32 But Kuibyshev, a heavy drinker, died of a heart attack (or was he poisoned on Stalin’s orders?) in January 1935. Ordzhonikidze was becoming isolated in the Politburo. Others who had their doubts – Mikoyan, Voroshilov and Kalinin – were threatened back into submission. And so Stalin had the preponderant influence in the central party organs. The Politburo, which had convened weekly during the First Five-Year Plan, met only nine times in 1936.33 Despite losing his title of General Secretary in 1934, Stalin still dominated the Secretariat. He also had his own office, headed by A. N. Poskrëbyshev, which kept hold of its own long-established links with the NKVD.
Even Stalin, however, needed a sanction stronger than his signature as Party Secretary in order to start a systematic extermination of communist oppositionists. He was not yet a dictator. The party was the regime’s most influential institution, and Stalin still had to get his strategy, ill-defined as it was, approved by the rest of the Politburo. Ordzhonikidze was a source of difficulty. Stalin attacked him in a particularly nasty fashion by putting Pyatakov, former oppositionist and presently Ordzhonikidze’s deputy in the People’s Commissariat of Heavy Industry, on show-trial alongside fellow ex-oppositionist Karl Radek. Under intense psychological pressure Pyatakov and Radek confessed to leading an imaginary Parallel Anti-Soviet Trotskyist Centre aiming to restore capitalism in Russia. Pyatakov was shot and Radek sent to a labour camp. In February, unhinged by Pyatakov’s execution, Ordzhonikidze shot himself – or possibly he was murdered on Stalin’s orders.
Ordzhonikidze’s death freed Stalin to present his ideas to the lengthy Party Central Committee plenum that stretched from the end of February into mid-March 1937. He wasted no words of sympathy on Ordzhonikidze. Stalin also declared that the local party leadership was a tap-root of the Soviet state’s problems. He castigated the cliental system of appointments: ‘What does it mean if you drag a whole group of pals along yourself ? It means you’ve acquired a certain independence from local organizations and, if you like, a certain independence from the Central Committee.’34
This was no longer a prim administrative point because Stalin at the same time asserted that wreckers, spies and assassins had insinuated themselves into influential party posts, forming Trotskyist groups and aiming at a capitalist restoration. Allegedly, enemies of the people existed in every locality and party organization. The First Party Secretary in Ukraine, Pëtr Postyshev, had for weeks been rejecting this extraordinary claim. Postyshev had previously been a close supporter of Stalin; and Stalin, being determined to have implicit obedience from his supporters, made a public example of Postyshev by declaring that he had allowed enemies of the people to infiltrate the Kiev party apparatus.35 This was a hair’s breadth from denouncing Postyshev as an enemy of the people, and the plenum was cowed. Having achieved the desired effect, Stalin appeared to show magnanimity by only calling for Postyshev to be removed from the Politburo.36
The shooting of Pyatakov and the humiliation of Postyshev terrified every Central Committee member, and it was almost with relief that the plenum listened to Zhdanov’s parallel proposal to inaugurate a campaign for ‘democratization’ in local party organizations. The fact that the projected ‘re-elections’ might end the political careers of most of the audience was overlooked.37 For the number of arrested oppositionists and economic officials increased sharply in spring 1937, and Stalin deftly obviated any last obstacle to his wishes in the Politburo by getting sanction for the creation of a commission which could take decisions on the Politburo’s behalf. The commission consisted exclusively of leaders who by then accepted the case for intensified terror: Molotov, Voroshilov, Kaganovich, Yezhov (who was not even a Politburo member at the time) and Stalin himself.38
Thus empowered, Stalin expanded the scope of terror: no institution in the Soviet state failed to incur his suspicion. The next group picked by him for repression were the Red Army leaders. Stalin’s aim was to ensure that the armed forces were incapable of promoting policies in any way different from his own, and Marshal Tukhachevski laid himself open to trouble by arguing for a more adventurous military strategy for the USSR.39 He and several high-ranking commanders were arrested in May and beaten into confessing to plotting a coup d’état. Stalin called them all spies at a meeting of the Military Soviet of the People’s Commissariat of Defence, and they were shot in mid-June. On the same occasion he announced that Bukharin, Tomski and Rykov were guilty of espionage.40 Stalin repeated these charges against these former leaders of the Right Deviation at a Central Committee plenum starting on 23 June, where he stated that the NKVD had collected information sufficient to merit judicial proceedings.
At this Osip Pyatnitski, who had first been elected a Central Committee member in 1912 before Stalin himself became one, protested. An intermission was called so that Molotov and Kaganovich, Stalin’s intermediaries at the plenum, might bring Pyatnitski to his senses.41 Pyatnitski opted for death before dishonour. Thereupon Yezhov took not only Bukharin and Pyatnitski but also his own NKVD predecessor Yagoda into his care.
Yezhov enjoyed the technical chores of administering repression, devising instructions that anticipated most practical snags. Since 1927 he had risen to ever more senior posts in the Central Committee Secretariat. At the age of forty-three years he was a living caricature of gleeful fanaticism. He was ‘short of stature, almost a dwarf, with a piercing voice and bandy legs’.42 His associates played on the verbal associations of his name in the Russian language by dubbing him the Iron Hedgehog. On 2 July, at Stalin’s instigation, the Politburo passed a resolution ‘On Anti-Soviet Elements’, and Yezhov scuttled back to the Politburo on 31 July with the scheme for the NKVD to arrest 259,450 persons over the following four months.43 In mid-August 1937 torture was sanctioned as a normal procedure of interrogation in Soviet prisons. The Great Terror was raging. It did not cease until the end of 1938.
Central direction was constantly involved. On 27 August, when the Krasnoyarsk Regional Committee wrote to him about a grain-store fire, Stalin telegrammed back within hours: ‘Try the guilty [sic] persons in accelerated order. Sentence them to death.’44 His method was systematically arbitrary; for the Politburo decision of 31 July 1937 assigned arrest-quotas to each major territorial unit of the USSR. No serious effort was made to catch and punish people for offences they had really committed; and it was laid down that 72,950 of victims – twenty-eight per cent – should be shot and the rest given ‘eight to ten’ years in prison or labour camp.45 A Central Committee plenum in January 1938 momentarily seemed to terminate the madness by passing a resolution calling for greater scrupulousness to be shown in decisions to expel individuals from the party, decisions which by then were normally a preamble to arrest by the NKVD.46 But the relief was illusory, and on 15 March 1938 an additional target of 57,200 ‘anti-Soviet elements’ was introduced. Fully 48,000 of them were marked for execution this time.47
The victims were tried by trios (troiki), typically consisting of the local NKVD chief, party secretary and procurator. Trials were derisorily brief and sentences were carried out without right of appeal. In searching out ‘anti-Soviet elements’, troiki were enjoined to capture escaped kulaks, ex-Mensheviks, ex-Socialist-Revolutionaries, priests, pre-revolutionary policemen and former members of non-Russian parties.48 As the Great Terror was intensified, the resolution ‘On Anti-Soviet Elements’ was applied to virtually anyone who had been active in or sympathetic to a communist oppositionist faction; and soon pretty well everybody who held a political, administrative or managerial post lived in fear. Not a single institution was unscathed by the NKVD’s interrogators. The quota system was applied not merely to geographical areas but also to specific public bodies. The objective was to effect a ‘cleansing’ throughout the state. The NKVD was not to restrain itself by notions about an individual’s possible innocence: the point was to eliminate all the categories of people believed by Stalin and Yezhov to contain the regime’s enemies.
According to official central records, 681,692 persons were executed in 1937–8.49 This may well be an underestimate, but the total number of deaths caused by repression in general was anyway much higher as people also perished from the inhuman conditions of their captivity. Between one million and one and a half million persons, it is tentatively reckoned, were killed by firing squad, physical maltreatment or massive over-work in the care of the NKVD in those two years alone.50 The Jews and Gypsies exterminated by Hitler knew that they were dying because they were Jews and Gypsies. Stalin’s terror was more chaotic and confusing: thousands went to their deaths shouting out their fervent loyalty to Stalin.
Even Hitler’s Gestapo had to trick Jews to travel peacefully to the gas-chambers, and Stalin had to be still more deceitful: the risible fiction had to be disseminated throughout the country that a conspiracy of millions of hirelings of foreign states existed. Victims usually had to sign a confession mentioning participation in a terrorist conspiracy headed by Trotski and Bukharin and directed by the British, American, Japanese or German intelligence agencies. An immense punitive industry was developed with guaranteed employment for torturers, jailors, stenographers, van-drivers, executioners, grave-diggers and camp-guards. Meticulous records were kept, even though the blood of the signatories occasionally smudged the documents.51
Bukharin, who was put on show-trial in March 1938, was one of the luckier ones inasmuch as he was not physically abused. But he was nevertheless put under acute psychological duress to ‘confess’. Bukharin surrendered as part of a deal to save the lives of his wife and son. The protracted rigmarole of denunciations, confessions, trials and sentencings in any event made the immense stratum of surviving officials complicit in the Terror. Even Nikita Khrushchëv, a rising party official in the 1930s who lived to denounce Stalin posthumously in 1956, was heavily involved; and Georgi Zhukov was exceptional among Red Army generals in refusing to make allegations of criminal activity against fellow generals.52 At the central level Stalin’s civilian associates competed with each other in the stylistic flourish with which they confirmed death sentences. Among Molotov’s favourite addenda was: ‘Give the dog a dog’s death!’
Vans and lorries marked ‘Meat’ or ‘Vegetables’ could carry the victims out to a quiet wood, such as the one near Butovo twenty-five kilometres north of Moscow, where shooting-grounds and long, deep pits had been secretly prepared. Plenty of work could be found for prisoners spared capital punishment. Cattle-trucks were commandeered for journeys to the labour camps of the Gulag in Siberia, Kazakhstan and arctic Russia. The trains rumbled through towns at night-time to avoid public curiosity. Food and drink on the journey were grievously inadequate. The convicts were treated as badly as the Negro slaves who had been shipped to the West Indies. On arrival at their camp they sawed timber, dug for gold, mined coal and built towns. Their meals left them constantly famished: Yezhov’s dieticians had estimated a provision of calories barely enough to sustain men and women who were not doing strenuous physical labour with wholly inadequate clothing and medical care in some of the USSR’s most inhospitable regions.53
The exact death-rate of inmates is not known, but was indubitably high. Contingent after contingent of fresh (or rather newly-battered) prisoners were needed to replenish a labour-force that afforded a crucial portion of the state’s industrial output. Not even Stalin, an enterprising proponent of the virtues of penal servitude, turned over his camps to agriculture. The kolkhozes and sovkhozes were already so close to being labour camps that the transfer of wheat cultivation to the Gulag would have brought no advantage. In times of famine, indeed, peasants in Vologda province were reduced to begging for crusts of bread from the convoys of prisoners in the locality.
And so it would seem that by 1939 the total number of prisoners in the forced-labour system – including prisons, labour camps, labour colonies and ‘special settlements’ – was 2.9 million.54 In each camp there were gangs of convicted thieves who were allowed by the authorities to bully the ‘politicals’. The trading of sexual favours was rife. Many inmates would kill or maim a weaker fellow victim just to rob him of his shoes. Alexander Solzhenitsyn, who was arrested after the Second World War, later wrote that experience of the camps could ennoble the character of prisoners. But Solzhenitsyn served most of his sentence in a camp in the Moscow suburbs where the inmates were given unusually light conditions in order to carry out scientific research. More typical for the Gulag inmates were the camps outside central Russia where it was every person for himself and moral self-control was rarely practised.
This convulsion of Soviet state and society had the severest consequences. Only one in thirty delegates to the Seventeenth Party Congress in 1934 returned to the Eighteenth Congress in 1939. The loss from the Central Committee was also drastic: just sixteen out of seventy-one members survived.55 Another devastated institution was the Red Army. Tens of thousands of officers fell into the grip of Yezhov’s ‘hedgehog gloves’, including fifteen out of the sixteen army commanders.
These figures are most easily compiled for high and medium-ranking functionaries. But other folk could also get caught by the mass repression. In his pursuit of political security Stalin resumed and expanded the policy of national deportations. Especially vulnerable were national and ethnic groups which had a large number of people living beyond the USSR’s frontiers: Stalin was concerned lest they might prove disloyal in the event of war. Thus the Poles were removed from Soviet Ukraine by a secret decree of April 1936, roughly deposited in Kazakhstan and left to build their settlements. In the following year the Kurds were driven out from the North Caucasus, and the Koreans from eastern Siberia. Uninhabited tracts of Kazakhstan became a dumping ground for all peoples which incurred Stalin’s suspicion.56 As Yezhov carried out his master’s command, countless deportees died before reaching their destination.
The impact of the Great Terror was deep and wide and was not limited to specific political, administrative, military, cultural, religious and national groups. Even a harmless old Russian peasant woman muttering dissatisfaction with conditions in the kolkhoz or her young worker-son blurting out complaints about housing standards would be dispatched to the horrors of the Gulag. No trace of ‘anti-Soviet agitation’ was meant to survive. Casual jokes against Stalin, the communist party or the Soviet state were treated as the most heinous form of treason. In this fashion practically all Soviet citizens were extirpated who had displayed an independent mind about public affairs.
Yet Stalin’s very success brought about a crisis of its own. The original purpose of his clique in the central leadership had been to reconstruct the state so as to secure their authority and impose their policies. In carrying through this design, the clique came close to demolishing the state itself. The blood-purge of the armed forces disrupted the USSR’s defences in a period of intense international tension. The arrest of the economic administrators in the people’s commissariats impeded industrial output. The destruction of cadres in party, trade unions and local government undermined administrative co-ordination. This extreme destabilization endangered Stalin himself. For if the Soviet state fell apart, Stalin’s career would be at an end. He had started the carnage of 1937–8 because of real hostility to his policies, real threats to his authority, a real underlying menace to the compound of the Soviet order. Yet his reaction was hysterically out of proportion to the menace he faced.
Stalin had a scarily odd personality. He was in his element amidst chaos and violence, and had learned how to create an environment of uncertainty wherein only he could remain a fixed, dominant point of influence. His belief in the rapid trainability of functionaries and experts, furthermore, gave him his equanimity when butchering an entire administrative stratum. The Stalin of the Civil War and the First Five-Year Plan lived again in the Great Terror. His hyper-suspicious, imperious temperament came to the fore. No one coming into frequent contact with him in the late 1930s had a chance to become disloyal: he had them killed before such thoughts could enter their heads. He was unflustered about murder. When his old comrade Vlas Chubar telephoned him out of concern lest he be arrested, Stalin warmly reassured him; but Chubar was arrested the same day and, after disgusting physical torment, executed.
By then Stalin was privately identifying himself with the great despots of history. He was fascinated by Genghis Khan, and underlined the following adage attributed to him: ‘The deaths of the vanquished are necessary for the tranquillity of the victors.’ He also took a shine to Augustus, the first Roman emperor, who had disguised the autocratic character of his rule by refusing the title of king just as Stalin was permitting himself at most the unofficial title of Leader.57
Other rulers who tugged at his imagination were the Russian tsars Ivan the Terrible and Peter the Great. He admired them with the critical eye of a twentieth-century dictator: ‘One of Ivan the Terrible’s mistakes was to overlook the five great feudal families. If he had annihilated those five families, there would definitely have been no Time of Troubles. But Ivan the Terrible would execute someone and then spend a long time repenting and praying. God got in his way in this matter. He ought to have been still more decisive!’58 And, when proposing a toast at a celebratory banquet in honour of the Bulgarian communist Georgi Dimitrov in 1937, Stalin declared that any party member trying to weaken the military might and territorial integrity of the USSR would perish: ‘We shall physically annihilate him together with his clan!’ He summarized his standpoint with the war-cry: ‘For the destruction of traitors and their foul line!’59
This was a leader who took what he wanted from historical models and discarded the rest – and what he wanted apparently included techniques for the maintenance of personal despotism. No candidate for the Lenin succession in the mid-1920s would have done what Stalin did with his victory a decade later in the Great Terror. Nadezhda Krupskaya, Lenin’s widow, quipped that if he had not died in 1924, he would be serving time in one of Stalin’s prisons.
Lenin would surely have been appalled at the NKVD’s bacchanalia of repression. But it must not be overlooked how much Stalin had learned and inherited from Lenin. Stalin continued to admire Lenin even though Lenin on his death-bed wished to sack him from the General Secretaryship. Lenin’s ideas on violence, dictatorship, terror, centralism, hierarchy and leadership were integral to Stalin’s thinking. Furthermore, Lenin had bequeathed the terroristic instrumentalities to his successor. The Cheka, the forced-labour camps, the one-party state, the mono-ideological mass media, the legalized administrative arbitrariness, the prohibition of free and popular elections, the ban on internal party dissent: not one of these had to be invented by Stalin. Lenin had practised mass terror in the Civil War and continued to demand its application, albeit on a much more restricted basis, under the NEP. Not for nothing did Stalin call himself Lenin’s disciple.
It is hard to imagine Lenin, however, carrying out a terror upon his own party. Nor was he likely to have insisted on the physical and psychological degradation of those arrested by the political police. In short, Lenin would have been horrified by the scale and methods of the Great Terror.
He would also have been astounded by its autocratic insouciance. Stalin over the years reviewed 383 lists of the most important arrested persons in bound booklets he endearingly called albums, and his self-assigned chore was to append a number to each name. A number ‘1’ was a recommendation for execution, a ‘2’ indicated ten years in the camps, a ‘3’ left it to Yezhov’s discretion. A single album might contain 200 names, and the technique of reviewing cases ‘in the album fashion’ was copied at lower rungs of the ladder of state repression.60 Also attributable to Stalin personally was the insistence that leading victims should not be shot until they had been thoroughly humiliated. In one of his last pleas to Stalin, Bukharin wrote asking what purpose would be served by his death. This question must have given profound satisfaction to Stalin, who kept the letter in his desk until his own death in 1953. Countless unfortunates across the USSR were similarly robbed of every shred of dignity by interrogators who extracted a grovelling confession before releasing them to the firing squad.
Stalin had an extraordinary memory, but not even he could know the biographies of every real or potential antagonist. His method of rule had always been to manufacture a situation which induced local officials to compete with each other in pursuit of his principal aim. It gladdened him that troiki in the provinces sometimes appealed against centrally-assigned arrest quotas, conventionally known as ‘the limits’, that they regarded as too low.61 Nor did he punish local officials who went beyond their quotas. Between August and September 1938, for instance, the security police in Turkmenia carried out double the originally-assigned number of executions.62
Thus the Great Terror followed the pattern of state economic planning since 1928: central direction was accompanied by opportunities for much local initiative. While aiming to reach their ‘limits’, NKVD officials were left to decide for themselves who were the ‘anti-Soviet elements’ in their locality. Neither Stalin nor even Yezhov could ensure that these ‘elements’ fell precisely into the categories defined in their various instructions. Nor were even the local NKVD officials entirely free to choose their own victims. As well as personal jealousies there were political rivalries in play. Conflicts at the local level among leaders, among enterprises and among institutions could suddenly be settled by a nicely-timed letter of ‘exposure’. There was little incentive to delay in denouncing an enemy; for who could be sure that one’s enemy was not already penning a similar letter? Old scores were murderously paid off. And it greatly simplified the task of repression, once a fellow had been arrested, to compile a list of his friends and associates and arrest them too.
But if vile behaviour was widespread, it was at its worst among the employees of the NKVD. Neither Stalin nor Yezhov in person directly inflicted pain on those under arrest. But the duties of the NKVD attracted some enthusiastic physical tormentors. One such was Lavrenti Beria who became Yezhov’s deputy in July 1938.He had a collection of canes in his office, and Red Army commanders ruefully talked of such interrogations as occasions when they went ‘to have a coffee with Beria’.63 This newcomer to Moscow was notorious in Georgia, where he beat prisoners, sentenced them to death and gratuitously had them beaten again before they were shot.64 And Beria was by no means the worst of the gruesome sadists attracted to the NKVD’s employment.
Furthermore, the morbid suspiciousness of the Kremlin dictator was internationalized as Stalin turned his attention to the world’s communist parties. The irony was that he did this during a period of improvement of the USSR’s relations with several major foreign states. Formal diplomatic ties had been agreed with the United Kingdom, France and the USA in 1933. Entrance had been effected to the League of Nations in 1934 and treaties signed with France and Czechoslovakia. In the same year the Politburo also overturned its injunction to foreign communist parties to concentrate their hostility upon rival socialists; instead they were to form ‘popular fronts’ with such socialists in a political campaign against fascism. The containment of the European far right had become a goal in Soviet foreign policy. The reorientation was affirmed at the Seventh Congress of the Comintern in August 1935.
While making this adjustment in foreign policy, Stalin demanded vigilance from Europe’s communists, and the Comintern was ordered to rid its ranks of Trotskyist and Bukharinist ‘traitors’. Until 1937 this was a strictly political process because only the All-Union Communist Party in Moscow was a governing communist party with a secret police which could arrest those party members who had been expelled. This meant that while communists were being tortured in the USSR for long-past associations with members of left-of-centre political parties, communists abroad were expelled from their own parties as Trotskyists if they refused to collaborate with other parties on the left.
There was certainly reason for Stalin to worry about the world situation. Germany and Japan signed an Anti-Comintern Pact in November 1936, increasing the menace of a war against the USSR on two fronts. In the same year Hitler had wrecked the Treaty of Versailles in Europe by occupying the Rhineland and offering military support to the fascist forces of General Franco in the Spanish Civil War. The USSR’s call for intervention by the parliamentary democracies of Europe in concert with the Soviet state was ignored. Stalin sent equipment and advisers to Spain all the same. Official Soviet propagandists praised the principled stand being taken by the Kremlin. The USSR was the only state willing to translate its anti-fascist rhetoric into action and Stalin enhanced his prestige among those sections of Western political opinion which bridled at the passivity of the British and French governments.
As Soviet assistance reached Spain in 1937, however, so too did Soviet political practices. The Spanish and foreign volunteers fighting for the Madrid republican government did not consist exclusively of members of parties belonging to the Comintern: there were also liberals, social-democrats, socialists, Trotskyists and anarchists. Stalin, while wanting to preserve the policy of ‘popular fronts’ against fascism, rejected co-operation with rival far-left groupings; and he instructed his emissaries to conduct the same bloody terror against the Trotskyists, anarchists and others that he was applying to them in the USSR. Thousands of anti-fascist fighters were arrested and executed at the behest of the Soviet functionaries.
Stalin wanted to increase the influence of the world-wide communist movement, but only insofar as it in no way damaged the USSR’s interests as he perceived them. In 1938 he took the otherwise incomprehensible decision to wipe out the leading cadre of the Polish Communist Party. The victims were by then resident in Moscow, and the few surviving figures were those lucky enough to be in prison in Warsaw (and one of these, Władisław Gomułka, was destined to become the Polish communist leader in 1945). Stalin, knowing that many comrades from Poland had sympathized with leftist communist factions in Moscow in the 1920s, aimed to crush insubordination before it recurred. Moreover, the NKVD infiltrated their agents into groups of political émigrés from the Soviet Union. Assassinations were frequent. Trotski, immured in his own armed compound in Coyoacán in Mexico, survived for a while; but even his defences were penetrated on 20 August 1940, when his killer, Ramon Mercader, plunged an ice-pick into the back of his head.
All this time the situation around the USSR’s border became more threatening. While fighting a war against China, the Japanese military command was not averse to provoking trouble with the USSR. Violent clashes occurred in July 1937. Another series of incidents took place between July and August 1938, culminating in the battle of Lake Khasan on the Manchurian border. A truce was arranged, but there was no guarantee that Japan would desist from further aggression. In the same year, Hitler made Germany the most powerful state in Europe by occupying all of Austria and the Sudetenland in Czechoslovakia.
Yet it was also in 1937–8 that Stalin chose to liquidate practically the entire high command of his armed forces. Nothing more vividly demonstrates that his was the statesmanship of the madhouse. By late 1938 even Stalin was coming to the conclusion that the scale of state terror had to be reduced. The most obvious sign of this was given on 19 November 1938, when Yezhov unexpectedly resigned from the NKVD after a brief interview with Stalin. He retained a job as People’s Commissar for Water Transport, but began to while away the meetings of Sovnarkom by folding paper aeroplanes and flying them around the room. Acquaintances were puzzled as to whether he had finally gone off his head or was an accomplished actor; but Stalin was not one to leave such things to guesswork: Yezhov was arrested in April 1939 and executed in the following February.65
The Iron Hedgehog’s disappearance signalled the closing of the floodgates of the Great Terror. It was not the end of extensive terror; on the contrary, Stalin used it liberally for the rest of his career. But at the end of 1938 he had decided that the arrests should be fewer. He did not explain his changed position; and yet surely even he must have been shaken by the many practical effects of the blood-purge. There is still much uncertainty about the physical volume of industrial output in 1937–8; but certainly the rate of growth was severely curtailed. There may even have been an absolute decrease in production.66 The disorganization was extraordinary. Even the purgers of the purgers of the purgers had been arrested in some places. There are hints that Stalin recognized his own proneness to being too suspicious for his own good; he was to mutter in Khrushchëv’s presence several years later: ‘I trust nobody, not even myself.’67
Yet such comments were rare. On the whole Stalin gave the impression that abuses of power were not large in number and that anyway they were Yezhov’s fault. Consequently no action was taken against people who referred to the Great Terror as the Yezhovshchina.68 For this term distracted unpleasant attention from Stalin. And Stalin, having used Yezhov to do his dirty business, emerged as Soviet dictator in all but name.
He had broken the party as an independent, supreme political agency. Five years passed after the Seventeenth Party Congress in 1934 before he would permit another Congress to convene, and he restricted the Central Committee to one plenum in 1939. The Politburo was ceasing to meet on a regular, formal basis: Stalin preferred to hold discussions with whatever group of Politburo members suited his purposes at the time.69 The NKVD’s star had risen while the party’s had fallen; and Beria, when replacing Yezhov, entered the small circle of Stalin’s close advisers. The ‘organs’, as the security police were known, were at Stalin’s elbow whenever he needed them. Fearsome as it was, moreover, the NKVD itself operated in dread of Stalin. In consequence of the Great Terror of 1937–8, therefore, Stalin had succeeded in elevating himself above party, people’s commissariats, army, trade unions and police.
He fostered tension among these powerful institutions so as to maintain his towering position. Communists had typically given little mind to the demarcation of functions among state bodies since the October Revolution; they despised such pernicketiness as an obstacle to communist progress. Stalin exploited this attitude to his personal advantage. The NKVD conflicted with the Red Army, the Red Army with various People’s Commissariats, the Commissariats with the Central Council of Trade Unions and the Central Council with the Party Central Committee.
After 1938 these clashes were mainly bureaucratic squabbles; they often involved differing orientations of policy, but they were less frequently accompanied by mass arrests. All public institutions, while abjectly professing loyalty to Stalin, were confirmed in their power over the rest of society. The Soviet state was authoritative as never before. Satisfied that he had brought the party to heel, Stalin restored its prestige and authority somewhat. The salaries of its functionaries were raised. In December 1938 the NKVD was ordered to seek permission from the party apparatus before taking any official of the party into custody; and, at the Eighteenth Party Congress in March 1939, Beria stressed that not all the economic problems of the USSR were attributable to sabotage. It was even admitted that a great many expulsions from the party – which in 1937–8 had typically led to arrests – had been unjustified. Stalin confirmed the fresh attitude by asserting the necessity to ‘value cadres like the gold reserves of the party and state, esteem them, have respect for them’.70
The applause which greeted this statement of monumental hypocrisy stemmed from a feeling of relief that the party might again enjoy durable favour. Other institutions were similarly reassured; but the party remained rather special. It incarnated continuity with the October Revolution, with Lenin, with Marxism-Leninism, with the Communist International. It provided the ideological cement to help to maintain the Soviet state. Its cohesive capacity was equally important organizationally: holders of governmental, administrative and military office were virtually obliged to be party members and to operate under the party’s discipline; and the party apparatus, at the centre and elsewhere, helped to co-ordinate state institutions.
Furthermore, citizens of the USSR were acutely aware of their state’s immense and pervasive powers. The Great Terror, following quickly after the violent campaigns of collectivization and industrialization, left no one in doubt about the consequences of overt disobedience. The kind of conversation held by the visiting American engineer John Scott with Soviet managers in the early 1930s about the inefficiency of a particular coal-mine no longer took place. Similarly, the complaining talk among workers recorded at the beginning of the decade by the ex-Menshevik Viktor Kravchenko became more discreet by its end. Oppositional leaflets of discontented party activists, which still appeared as late as 1933, had become antiquarian artefacts. Officials in every institution and at every level were wary of saying the slightest thing that might conceivably be interpreted as disloyal. The traumatization had been profound, and the carnage of 1937–8 left a mark on popular consciousness that endures.