This document is one of many pieces of evidence that Stalin played the decisive role in organizing the Great Terror and that Yezhov was following his orders. Archival records clearly show Stalin to be the initiator of all key decisions having to do with purges of party and government institutions and the mass operations that swept up ordinary citizens. He not only ordered the arrest and execution of hundreds of thousands of people, but he also took a strong interest in the details. He sent telegrams about the need to make particular arrests, threatened dire consequences for insufficient vigilance, and signed lists of members of the nomenklatura to be executed and imprisoned. In many cases he personally decided whether someone would be shot or sent to a labor camp.26 Overseeing the large-scale operations to wipe out enemies took up a significant portion of the dictator’s time in 1937–1938. Over a twenty-month period from January 1937 to August 1938, he received fifteen thousand spetssoobshchenii (special communications) reporting on arrests and the conduct of various secret police operations or requesting approval for a particular act of repression, usually accompanied by interrogation protocols (transcripts). On a typical day, he received twenty-five documents from Yezhov, some running to many pages.27 Furthermore, the record of visitors to Stalin’s office shows that during 1937 and 1938, Yezhov visited him almost 290 times and spent a total of 850 hours with him. The only person who visited more often was Molotov.28
Yezhov was a capable and motivated pupil. He organized the trials of former oppositionists and conducted day-to-day oversight of the giant machine of repression. He personally participated in interrogations and issued orders to apply torture. To please Stalin, who always demanded greater efforts in the fight against enemies and constantly pointed to new threats, Yezhov encouraged his subordinates to exceed the Politburo’s targets for mass arrests and executions and to fabricate new conspiracies. To encourage them, the NKVD and Yezhov personally were lavished with praise throughout 1937 and most of 1938. Yezhov was given every conceivable award and title and simultaneously held several key party and government posts. Cities, factories, and kolkhozes were named after him.
Despite these signs that Stalin was pleased with his people’s commissar for internal affairs, there is evidence that the vozhd was maintaining a certain distance, even as Yezhov and his organization were lavished with praise for their excellent work in exposing enemies. Inevitably, Stalin eventually brought the mass extermination to a halt and blamed the “excesses” and “violations of law” on Yezhov and his subordinates. Stalin laid the groundwork for Yezhov’s removal gradually and systematically. In August 1938, he appointed Lavrenty Beria, first party secretary for Georgia, to serve as Yezhov’s deputy. On the surface, nothing had changed. Yezhov still seemed to enjoy power and favor. But now, by his side was a man he would never have chosen. Several months later Yezhov even alluded to Beria’s appointment in a letter to Stalin, describing it as showing “an element of mistrust toward me” and admitting that he saw “[Beria’s] appointment as preparation for my being relieved.”29 He was right. Unable to cope with the stress of the situation, he descended into alcoholism and lost control of both the NKVD and himself.
Two months after Beria’s appointment, Stalin took further steps toward Yezhov’s removal. On 8 October 1938 the Politburo established a commission to draft a resolution concerning the NKVD. Yezhov’s subordinates began to be arrested. Beria’s henchmen set to work beating testimony against Yezhov out of them, just as Yezhov’s henchmen had done when he was building a case against his precedessor, Genrikh Yagoda. On 17 November the Politburo adopted a transparently hypocritical and mendacious resolution remarking on NKVD successes in destroying “enemies of the people and foreign intelligence agencies’ espionage-sabotage networks” but also condemning “shortcomings and perversions” in the NKVD’s work.30 While repeatedly demanding an intensified struggle against enemies, Stalin had never questioned the mission of mass terror that he himself had conceived and promoted. Yezhov and the NKVD now stood accused of doing what Stalin had ordered them to do. If Yezhov had been allowed to make a serious case for himself, he would have had no trouble doing so. But as he knew better than anyone, that was not how the Stalinist system worked. All he could do was hope and repent.
Having done his job, the faithful Yezhov was no longer needed. He was arrested and shot as the head of a (nonexistent) counterrevolutionary organization within the NKVD. Stalin apparently did not feel the need to goad excessive public outrage, and Yezhov’s downfall was arranged without fanfare. The cautious tidiness with which he was removed shows that Stalin was reluctant to draw public attention to the activities of the NKVD and the mechanics of the Great Terror. Yezhov was Stalin’s senior scapegoat. He paid the ultimate price so that his vozhd could remain above suspicion. For the Soviet people, the Terror became the “Yezhovshchina”—a term using a Russian suffix suggesting some rampant evil.
The final stage of the Great Terror—its unwinding, which Stalin carefully controlled—mainly targeted Yezhov’s top lieutenants at the NKVD. A miniscule number of ordinary citizens swept up by the large-scale operations—primarily those who had fallen into NKVD clutches during the second half of 1938—were released. The machinery of terror remained in place with only minor adjustments, and ruthless repression continued until Stalin’s death. The vozhd never stopped believing that enemies were all around or demanding that they be unmasked, arrested, and tortured. But he never again resorted to repression on the scale seen during 1937–1938.
Stalin must have been aware of the Terror’s devastating consequences, yet he never, either in public or even within his inner circle, questioned its necessity. But the consequences could not have escaped his attention. A huge number of those responsible for running the Soviet economy had been arrested. Workplace discipline suffered, and engineers were afraid to propose any changes or innovations that might later subject them to unscrupulous accusations of “wrecking.” The Terror led to a sizable decline in the rate of growth in industrial production.31 The military too suffered from a shrinking pool of experienced and competent commanders and a decline in discipline and responsibility. The Red Army was so heavily affected by repression that the Soviet leadership was forced to return many previously arrested or discharged commanders to service, at least those the NKVD had not yet had time to execute.32
The Great Terror of 1937–1938 put huge stresses on Soviet society and caused widespread misery. Millions of people were directly affected. Many who escaped being shot, confined to labor camps, or subjected to internal deportation lost their jobs or were evicted from their apartments or even towns for the sole crime of having ties to “enemies of the people.” Such abuses and upheavals could not be forgiven and passively accepted. Although fear was a fairly effective means of keeping the population from expressing its displeasure, grievances were lodged. In 1937–1938, these grievances mainly took the form of the millions of complaints that came pouring into government and party offices. In January 1937 alone, 13,000 complaints were filed with the procuracy, and in February–March 1938 the number reached 120,000.33 It has not yet been established how many letters and petitions were sent to Stalin himself during the Great Terror or how many actually reached his desk. The records are either inaccessible or were not preserved. We can only assume that Stalin’s office was inundated with such petitions. The vozhd could not have been entirely shielded from his subjects’ desperation, grief, and disillusionment.