Stalin’s involvement remained direct and deep as his envoys went to the main centres to preside over the sackings and arrests of local leaders. One of these envoys was Politburo member Andreev, a repentant member of the Workers’ Opposition whose past made it imperative to carry out orders implicitly. He went to cities such as Chelyabinsk, Krasnodar, Samara, Saratov, Sverdlovsk and Voronezh as well as Soviet republics such as Belorussia, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan.22 Andreev quickly decided whom to arrest and whom to replace them with. But he consulted Stalin before going ahead with his plans. From Stalinabad in Tajikistan he reported that ‘enemies have been working here in a basic fashion and have felt fairly free in doing this’. Stalin telegraphed back on 3 October 1937:23
We sanction Protopopov as [Party] First Secretary, Iskanderov as Second, Kurbanov as Ch[airman] of the Sovnarkom, Shagodaev as Ch[airman] of the Central Executive Committee.
Ashore and Frolov ought to be arrested. You need to leave in time to be back here in Moscow for the Central Committee plenum of the All-Union Communist Party on 10 October.
Let Belski proceed to Turkmenia in a few days’ time to carry out a purge. He will receive his instructions from Yezhov.
Andreev, Malenkov, Zhdanov and others toured the various regions carrying out their master’s policy.
Although it was physically impossible to ratify each and every operation carried out in particular localities, Stalin still managed to examine 383 ‘albums’ of proposed victims brought to him by Yezhov in the Great Terror. These albums alone contained the names of about 44,000 people. The higher the status of the victim, the more likely it was that Yezhov would seek Stalin’s signature before proceeding. Stalin, a busy man, was expected to go through the lists and tick off recommended sentences whenever he spotted a name he knew and had a preference for what should be done. He did this with his usual assiduity; there is no sign that he objected to doing things in the ‘album fashion’. All the time, too, he bound the rest of the Politburo to the process. Molotov, Kaganovich and Voroshilov and others were asked for their approval, and they frequently added their rhetorical flourishes to their names. ‘Give the dog a dog’s death!’ was one of Molotov’s touches. Stalin was still avoiding incurring exclusive responsibility. Obviously he retained a residual worry that he would not get away with the outrages he was organising. Having bludgeoned his comrades into condoning the measures, he wanted their continuing formal complicity.
The fact that Stalin targeted millions of persons who had broken no law had operational consequences. So too did his determination to purge every single public institution. In this situation it was crucial to obtain assent and co-operation from officials in party, government and police who might otherwise have disrupted the process — and as things turned out, many of them were doomed to pay for their compliance with their own lives. It was presumably for this reason that Stalin needed the trials, however spurious and brief they were, to take place. Not only that: he felt constrained to obtain proofs of crime. Somehow he had to demonstrate to the survivors of the Great Terror, including the individuals he promoted from obscurity, that the dreadful state violence had been justified. A comparison with Nazi Germany is apposite. When the German security agencies rounded up Jews, Roma, homosexuals and the mentally disabled there was no secret about the regime’s antagonism towards them. Hitler kept quiet about the scale of the arrests and the fate of those who had been arrested; but this coyness was aimed at avoiding unnecessary opposition among citizens of the Reich: he had no need as he saw things to pretend that the victims were spies or saboteurs. They had been arrested exactly because they were Jews, Roma, homosexuals or mentally disabled.
Such an approach would not do for Stalin. Kulaks, priests, Mensheviks, Germans, Harbinites and Trotskyists lacked the popular antagonism towards them that Hitler had whipped up against his victims. They had to be shown to be a malignant presence in respectable, loyal Soviet society. Stalin was running a terror-state. Yet the requirement existed even for him to keep the confidence of the office-holders whose lives he spared. It did not greatly matter that his case against the victims was inherently implausible. What counted was that stenographers could record that, as far as the state was concerned, due legal process had taken place. Perhaps there was a personal edge to this. Stalin had characteristically seen the world in black-and-white terms. Intermediate colours did not exist for him, and he implicitly believed that those persons whom he felt he could not trust were indeed working actively and conspiratorially against him and his policies. For psychological reasons, then, he too required that his victims could be shown to have done wrong; and since the NKVD lacked material evidence, the sole option was for the alleged spies and saboteurs to be brought to admit their guilt. Interests of state came together with the aberrant purposes of an unbalanced Leader.
Ostensibly he acted as he did because evidence was brought to him that ‘enemies of the people’ — imperialist agents, subversives and counter-revolutionaries — had been exposed by the NKVD. Stalin was so suspicious that he probably persuaded himself that many of those whom he condemned to the Gulag or to execution were genuinely guilty of such crimes against the state. The nearest he came to witnessing the result of his barbarism was when he held confrontations between some broken leader willing to ‘confess’ and some other leader who was being denounced but had not yet been arrested. At the confrontation with Kulikov in December 1936, Bukharin was like a butterfly seeing the needle about to pin him to a board.
Yet although Stalin apparently derived satisfaction from such confrontations, he organised them only in the period when he still needed the sanction of his Politburo comrades for particular verdicts. After early 1937 he dropped them as being no longer necessary. Throughout the last months of 1937 the purges continued. They affected both central and local functionaries as well as ‘ordinary’ people. Awards were announced for the heroic butchers in the NKVD. Yezhov’s name became second only to Stalin’s in official esteem. On 16 December it was the turn of Abel Enukidze and fellow defendants to be tried by a Military Collegium as spies, bourgeois nationalists and terrorists. This was done in secret and in quick order. They were all shot.24
In March 1938 it was the turn of Bukharin. Along with him in the dock were three others who had belonged to the Party Central Committee in Lenin’s time: Alexei Rykov, Nikolai Krestinski and Christian Rakovski. Yagoda was also a defendant, as were several lesser figures. The third great show trial was organised by those leading figures in the NKVD who had as yet survived the Great Terror. The charges were as bizarre as before. Bukharin in particular was said to have plotted in 1918 to murder Lenin and Stalin and seize power. He parried this particular accusation while accepting political responsibility for the anti-Stalin conspiracies alleged to exist in the late 1930s. Krestinski was less cooperative. At his first appearance in court he retracted his prison testimony. Next day, looking still more haggard, he reverted to the testimony agreed with his captors. Nearly all the accused had been savagely beaten. Bukharin was spared this but was visibly a broken man. From his prison cell he had written a note to Stalin: ‘Koba, why is my death necessary for you?’ But Stalin wanted blood. Constantly consulted by Chief Prosecutor Andrei Vyshinski and Vasili Ulrikh at the end of the court’s working day, he ordered that the world’s press should be convinced of the veracity of the confessions before sentences were passed.25 Many Western journalists were indeed hoodwinked. The verdict was announced on 13 March: nearly all the defendants were to be shot.