Ordzhonikidze’s suicide happened in the course of a Central Committee plenum that lasted into March 1937. Stalin, without hiding behind Yezhov, asserted that the Trotskyist–Zinovievite bloc had installed an agency for espionage, sabotage and terrorism working for the German intelligence services.10 Yezhov repeated that Trotskyists, Zinovievites and Rightists were operating in a single organisation, and Stalin with the plenum’s consent instructed him to carry out a thorough investigation.11 Stalin also threatened those who held posts in the party. He aimed to break up the clientelist system which inhibited the operation of a vertical administrative hierarchy:12
What does it mean if you haul a whole group of pals along with you? It means you’ve acquired a certain independence from local organisations and, if you like, a certain independence from the Central Committee. He has his own group and I have my own group and they’re personally devoted to me.
The alarm bell was being rung for a party and police purge. Bukharin was arrested on 27 February, Yagoda on 29 March. Mass expulsions meanwhile took place from the party through to the summer. Marshal Tukhachevski was arrested on 27 May along with most members of the Supreme Command. The armed forces had been added to party and police as suspect institutions. Tukhachevski was shot on 11 June; he had signed a confession with a bloodstained hand after a horrific beating.
The tall poppies of the USSR were being cut down. Yet another Central Committee plenum was convoked on 23 June. Yezhov reported on his investigations. Shamelessly fabricating the evidence, he reported that a Centre of Centres had been uncovered uniting Rightists, Mensheviks, Socialist-Revolutionaries, the Red Army, the NKVD, Zinovievites, Trotskyists and provincial party leaders. This was an alleged conspiracy on the grandest scale. Not only anti-Bolsheviks and former Bolshevik oppositionists but also current party leaders were said to have plotted to overthrow Stalin and his comrades; and Yezhov implied that only his own vigilance had prevented a coup from occurring.13
Stalin managed the process cunningly. He contrived again to hide behind Yezhov’s initiatives and pretend that he himself had nothing to do with the planning of repression. But as the moves were made against Central Committee members, it was unfeasible for him to say nothing; and in any case he was easily thrown into a bad temper by open criticism of the arrests. At the June 1937 plenum of the Central Committee G. N. Kaminski, People’s Commissar of Health, objected: ‘This way we’re killing off the entire party.’ Stalin barked back: ‘And you don’t happen to be friends with these enemies!’ Kaminski had taken his stand on principle and stuck to it: ‘They’re absolutely not my friends.’ Stalin came back at him: ‘Well, in that case it means you’re a berry from the same field as them.’14 Another brave individual was Osip Pyatnitski, a leading Soviet functionary in the Comintern, who vehemently opposed the proposal to execute Bukharin and accused the NKVD of fabricating its cases. Stalin suspended the proceedings and assembled the Politburo to discuss the outburst. Voroshilov and Molotov went to Pyatnitski to persuade him to retract. Pyatnitski refused. When the Central Committee reconvened, Yezhov denounced Pyatnitski as a former Okhrana agent, and Pyatnitski’s days were numbered. Stalin drew the plenum to a close on 29 June. He had crushed all opposition and called on the Central Committee to expel thirty-five full and candidate members from its ranks. The shocked Central Committee voted in favour.15
Equipped with the Central Committee’s troubled approval, the Politburo on 2 July decided on a decree to carry out a definitive purge of ‘anti-Soviet elements’. Not only the alleged leadership of the (entirely fictitious) Centre of Centres was to be eliminated but even whole social categories were to be savaged.16 It would affect former kulaks, Mensheviks, Socialist-Revolutionaries, priests, Bolshevik oppositionists, members of non-Russian parties, White Army soldiers and released common criminals. Order No. 00447 was drawn up by Stalin and Yezhov and sanctioned by the Politburo on 31 July. The campaign was set to start on 5 August, and Stalin signalled his intention to oversee it by not taking his regular vacation by the Black Sea. Yezhov, consulting him frequently, had established a USSR-wide quota for people to be condemned. With elaborate precision he determined that 268,950 individuals should be arrested. The procedures would involve judicial farce; the victims were to be hauled before revolutionary troiki of party and police and, without right of defence or appeal, found guilty. It was also indicated exactly how many should be dispatched to forced labour: 193,000 individuals. The rest, 75,950, were to be executed.
The fact that he ordered the killing of nearly three out of every ten people arrested under Order No. 00447 invalidates the suggestion that Stalin’s mass purges in mid-1937 were motivated mainly by the quest for slave labour.17 Undoubtedly the NKVD’s enterprises needed such labour to fulfil their targets for building, mining and manufacturing. But the Great Terror, while having an economic purpose, was systematically wasteful of human resources. The mass killings demonstrate that security interests were at the forefront of Stalin’s mind.
On 25 July 1937 he and Yezhov had also put forward Order No. 00439, which spread a net of terror across a further category of people. German citizens and Soviet citizens of German nationality were to be arrested. The order did not designate a quota: the NKVD was charged simply with getting on with the operation on its own initiative. In fact 55,000 people received punitive sentences and these included 42,000 executions.18 Stalin had decided that some types of foreigner were just as dangerous to him as kulaks and other ‘anti-Soviet elements’. He did not stop with the Germans resident in the USSR. After them came the Poles, the former émigrés in the Chinese city of Harbin, the Latvians and several other peoples. ‘National operations’ of this nature continued through the rest of 1937 and all 1938.
The conclusion is inescapable. Stalin had decided to deal with the objects of his security worries in a sustained burst of NKVD mass arrests and murders. Additions were recurrently made to the quotas set for the operation against ‘anti-Soviet elements’ and to the list of nationalities marked down as hostile. Leaders in the provinces were not discouraged from applying for permission to raise the number of victims to be seized. Stalin wrote telegrams fostering the murderous enthusiasm. No document survives of his having gone the other way and trying to stem the flood of arrests, torture and killing. When the Krasnoyarsk Party Regional Committee wrote to him about a fire in a grain store, he simply replied: ‘Try the guilty persons in accelerated fashion. Sentence them to death.’19 There was no injunction to local leaders to exercise care in repressing the ‘correct’ people. His emphasis was always upon getting his subordinates to carry out the Great Terror with zeal. Thick, bloody slices were cut from the personnel of party, government and all other institutions. The word went forth that the only way to save your life, if it was at all possible, was to comply eagerly with orders for repression.
Even Kaganovich had to plead his case before him when Stalin objected to his past association with ‘enemy of the people’ Marshal Iona Yakir. Kaganovich plucked up courage to point out that it had been Stalin who had recommended Yakir to him a decade before.20 Nikita Khrushchëv, Moscow Party Committee Secretary, was similarly threatened when Stalin accused him of being a Pole. At a time when Polish communist émigrés in Moscow were being routinely shot, Khrushchëv was understandably keen to prove that he was a genuine Russian.21