Stalin gave grounds for worry that the flames of his severity had not been extinguished. While agreeing on the need for economic consolidation, he did not fail to argue the need for vigilance and repression whenever enemies of the people were discovered. He declared that internal party oppositionists had ‘descended into the camp of livid counter-revolutionaries and wreckers in the service of foreign capital’.19 Former oppositionists had only recently been readmitted to the party. It seemed from Stalin’s Central Committee report than he was not entirely convinced that the settlement should be permanent — and he menacingly linked internal party opposition to traitorous activity at the level of the state. It is no wonder that many delegates thought it dangerous to leave him in post as General Secretary.
Events behind the scenes at the Congress remain mysterious. Those intimately involved in them — Kirov and Kaganovich — never divulged the details. Most of the lesser participants were to disappear in the Great Terror and no formal record was made of what had happened at the Congress. Kirov was to acquire a posthumous reputation as a political moderate in the Politburo. There is little to sustain this beyond a few gestures in the direction of increasing bread supplies in Leningrad where he was City Party Secretary.20 All Politburo members tended to protect their sectors of work against the ravaging effects of general policy, and Kirov was no exception. And if indeed Kirov was approached at the Congress, he is likely to have told Stalin of the kind of support he was receiving from delegates. Kirov did not comport himself as a Leader in the making and gave no sign of this ultimate ambition. It cannot be demonstrated beyond doubt that the Congress vote for the new Central Committee humiliated Stalin. All that may confidently be said is that many officials were disenchanted with him and that they may have registered this on their ballot papers. Stalin for his part had cause to worry regardless of the stories about Kirov and the Central Committee vote. Having won victory on all fronts in the First Five-Year Plan, he had learned that a multitude of fellow victors refused to give him carte blanche to proceed however he wished.
For a while he did little in reaction, and the more moderate face of official policy was maintained. It was made more difficult for the police arbitrarily to arrest specialists working in the economy. The OGPU, moreover, was incorporated in the People’s Commissariat of Internal Affairs. Some contemporary observers hoped that this would lead to a taming of the repressive zeal of the Chekists. Thousands of individuals arrested in the late 1920s started to return from the labour camps and resume a free life. The economy was steered steadily towards the achievement of the goals of the Second Five-Year Plan in an atmosphere untainted by the previous hysteria.
But then something happened which disrupted the political calm. On 1 December 1934 Kirov was shot by an assassin. Leonid Nikolaev, probably annoyed by Kirov’s dalliance with his wife, walked into the Smolny Institute and killed him stone dead. The Leningrad NKVD had already been reported for sloppiness in September 1934,21 and its subsequent incompetence belonged to a pattern. Stalin was shocked white and rigid — or at least this was how he appeared to others at the time. Nikolaev was listed as a former Zinovievite. He was quickly interrogated, including a session in Stalin’s presence, and then shot. Mysterious accidents swiftly occurred to his police handlers — and although the NKVD leadership in Leningrad was disciplined for its oversights, the punishment was far from severe for most of them.22 Stalin issued a decree sanctioning the formation of troiki which could mete out summary ‘justice’ without recourse to the courts. The basis was laid for an extension of state terror. Former oppositionists were arrested and interrogated. Zinoviev privately speculated that Stalin would use the murder as a pretext to undertake his own campaign of repression on the model of Hitler’s activity in Germany.23 Stalin attended Kirov’s funeral looking grim and determined. Even his close associates wondered how he was going to deal with the situation; but everyone assumed that severe measures would be applied.
Instantly the rumour spread that Stalin had connived in Kirov’s liquidation. He was known for a preference for repressive action, and stories abounded that Kirov had been touted as his replacement as General Secretary. Supposedly Stalin was behind the killing. In fact all the evidence is circumstantial and no proof has ever been found. What is undeniable is that Stalin had no compunction about drastic measures. He had not yet killed a close associate but the assassination of Kirov could have been the first such occasion; and even if he did not order the killing, it was he who most benefited from it. Kirov’s death permitted him to treat the former oppositionists as he had implied he wanted to in his Central Committee report to the Seventeenth Party Congress.
Zinoviev and Kamenev were taken into the NKVD’s custody in Moscow and accused of having organised a terrorist conspiracy with their oppositionist followers. Stalin had never ceased to worry about the capacity of the oppositions of left and right to return to power, especially if their ideas had resonance among current party officials. The suppression of successive groupings under Lominadze, Eismont and Ryutin gave no cheer. There could easily be others lurking in Moscow and the provinces. What is more, Stalin knew that Bukharin, Kamenev and Zinoviev had not lost hope of restoration to power. He maintained surveillance over them through the eavesdropping facilities of the political police.24 He knew that they hated and despised him. Bukharin, while professing respect for Stalin to his face, was privately denouncing him. Kamenev and Zinoviev were contemptuous in the extreme. And Trotski was at liberty abroad editing the Bulletin of the Opposition and sending his emissaries into the USSR. Stalin was aware that, despite what they pretended, his party enemies felt they had a lot in common with each other. There was a distinct possibility that they would establish a clandestine coalition to undermine Stalin and his Politburo. Trotski’s capacity to maintain contact was well established. When sixty-eight of his supporters were arrested in Moscow in January 1933, the OGPU discovered a cache of Trotski’s latest articles.25
There was also a surge of resentment throughout society at the effects of Stalin’s policies. Peasants had been battered into the collective farms and detested the new agricultural system, and hundreds of thousands of kulak families had been badly abused. Workers who failed to be promoted to managerial posts experienced a drastic deterioration in their conditions. Wages, food and shelter were seldom better than rudimentary. Higher up the social system too the bitterness was intense: engineers, intellectuals, economic experts and even managers bore a grudge about the harassment they suffered. The sense of civic disgruntlement was deep and widespread. Former members of other parties as well as defeated communist oppositionists were rancorous about the hostile sanctions applied against them. Whole national and religious groups prayed for a miracle that would remove the burden of Stalin’s policies from their shoulders. There was plenty of human material across the USSR which could, if conditions changed, be diverted into a coup against his Politburo.
Zinoviev and Kamenev refused to ‘confess’ to conspiratorial organisation. But faced with a long prison sentence as well as permanent separation from involvement with communism, they cracked and admitted political and moral responsibility for Nikolaev’s action. The Politburo — or rather Stalin — decided that Zinoviev was the more dangerous of the two. Zinoviev was given ten years, Kamenev five. The NKVD did not stop at that. Six hundred and sixty-three past supporters of the Leningrad Opposition were rounded up and exiled to Yakutia and other parts of eastern Siberia.26 The incrimination of former internal oppositions continued. Trotski was regularly reviled in Pravda and Izvestiya. At the same time as the verdict was passed on Zinoviev and Kamenev it was announced that an exchange of party cards was to take place. The purpose was to sieve out party members who had failed to carry out the minimum of their duties or had behaved improperly or even had once belonged to internal party oppositions. No judicial consequences were anticipated for those who were to have their membership cards withdrawn. But a signal was being given that a campaign of persecution which had as yet been confined to ex-oppositionist leaders and their supporters was not to stop at the gates of the party. All had to prove themselves loyal to the Politburo or risk expulsion and demotion.