The Armenian Party had been under general attack since May. “Suspicious people” were found to be in the Party apparatus.56 During the summer, TerGabrielian, who had been Chairman of the Council of People’s Commissars in 1935, was interrogated for seven hours in the office of the head of the local NKVD about alleged embezzlement on the railways, and killed on the spot. Stalin then sent a letter to the Armenian Central Committee alleging that Ter-Gabrielian had been a plotter liquidated by his accomplices to cover their traces.57
On 15 September 1937 a plenum of the Armenian Central Committee was held in Yerevan, and the decisive blow was struck. The All-Union Central Committee was represented by Mikoyan, supported by Beria and Malenkov. Under the New Constitution, Armenia no longer formed part of the old “Transcaucasian Socialist Federal Soviet Republic” ruled by Beria. It still came under his aegis in a general way, but in this case it was not thought to be an intrusion when Malenkov was sent “on Stalin’s direct instructions”58 to carry out the operation. Malenkov stopped off at Tbilisi on his way to Yerevan to concoct a story about the death of Khandzhyan, whom Beria had shot, to their mutual satisfaction. The rest of the Armenian leadership was now to be blamed for the crime.59
The First Secretary, Amatouni, is said to have put up a stout resistance and to have shouted back, “You lie!” He was, however, arrested, together with the Second Secretary, the Chairman of the Council of People’s Commissars, the President of the Republic, and the head of the NKVD, and was denounced as an enemy of the people on 23 September.60 Almost the entire leadership of Armenia’s Central Committee and Council of People’s Commissars was illegally arrested. Malenkov personally interrogated the prisoners, “using proscribed methods” in the process.
In this third week of September 1937, there was a wave of mass arrests throughout the Republic. Of the Bureau of sixteen members and candidate members elected in June 1935, none were left at the end of September 1937. Of those who formed the new Bureau in 1937, only two remained in 1940. Of the Central Committee of fifty-five elected in June 1937, only fifteen were reelected just a year later in June 1938, and they included the nonlocal names of Stalin, Beria, and Mikoyan. About thirty of those removed can be traced as having been expelled from the Party and probably arrested.
As in Georgia, the whole second level of the Party went too. “Over 3,500 responsible Party, Soviet, economic, military, and Komsomol officials were arrested … in a few months of 1937 alone. Many of them were shot without a trial and the requisite investigation.”61 On the last day of the year, the execution of eight leading Armenian officials was announced, together with—ironically enough—the posthumous disgrace of Khandzhyan.62
The launching of mass arrests in both Georgia and Armenia in September was not a coincidence. A general decision to destroy the old Parties in the national Republics seems to have been taken. By midsummer, the entire Government of the Tatar Republic was under arrest.63 September saw the sudden start of a press campaign conducted in more violent terms than ever, on a threat about which not much had been heard for some time: bourgeois nationalism. Such articles as “The Rotten Position of the Daghestan Provincial Committee” became common. From about 8 September, the Parties in the minority areas were subjected, under heavy headlines, to a continual stream of abuse. In Uzbekistan, Kirghizia, Kazakhstan, Bashkiria, Karelia, everywhere, large groups of traitors were found in the leaderships—in fact, constituting the leaderships. (The most prominent of these—the Uzbek—we will deal with in connection with the Bukharin Trial; see here.)
The pattern that emerges in the Purge in the Republics and provinces is a striking one. It amounts to this: an operation planned in Moscow and carried into effect by missions from the center almost everywhere destroyed the old Party, raising up instead from the rank and file a special selection of enthusiasts for a new organization of terrorists and denouncers. What requires the most emphasis is the sheer extent of the changes, the completeness of the liquidation of the hierarchy. At the center, Stalin had already created his own cadres, and infiltrated them into high position. In the coming months, the ravages were to be very great in Moscow too, but there was a continuity provided by a handful of men at the top and a group of Stalin’s junior nominees in the instruments of power. In the provinces, the “black tornado” really uprooted the old “Party-line” Stalinists, the veterans who represented a continuity, however tenuous, with the old Party of the underground, of 1917, and of the Civil War. This amounted to a revolution as complete as, though more disguised than, any previous changes in Russia.
We may incidentally note a lesser point: whereas previously the Party Secretary had been the most powerful man in any area, it was now the NKVD chief who counted. Over the next year or two, the new Party executives were to regain a good deal of their power. But for the moment, the police—themselves purged and purged again—were the direct agents of the center and executors of its main missions.
DEVASTATED AREA: THE UKRAINE
And Kiev groaned with sorrow.
The Armament of Igor
Stalin’s victory over the Party was assured when he crushed moderate hopes at the February–March plenum. All that was left to do was to set the machinery of the purges in motion. There was to be one last flicker of resistance—in the Ukraine.
In the Central Committee, the great cities, the provincial capitals, the smaller Republics, those who had opposed the Purge were isolated figures impotently awaiting their fate. In the Ukraine alone, most of the old leadership, based on its local Central Committee, remained in control. The demotion and removal of Postyshev had removed one hostile leader. But Petrovsky at least was one of the doubters. Postyshev’s place was taken by his predecessor in the post, Khatayevich, a full member of the All-Union Central Committee, who had been on the Ukrainian Politburo since 1933. A considerable purge in the lower ranks took place under an order from the All-Union Central Committee in the weeks following the February–March plenum; nearly one-fifth of Ukrainian Party members were expelled,64 and two-thirds of the provincial and one-third of the local leaderships were changed.65 But in the main, the old leadership was reelected at the Ukrainian Party Congress in May–June.
This Congress passed resolutions condemning errors in all ideological fields—the press, the Marx-Lenin Institute, the Institute of Red Professors, and elsewhere—and made strong attacks on Postyshev and the old Kiev leadership. Kossior, who had been comparatively mild at the time of Postyshev’s demotion, now spoke of lack of vigilance at the top which had allowed Trotskyites to penetrate the Kiev Provincial Committee.66 A day or two later, he denounced Postyshev by name for “co-opting numerous enemies” into the provincial apparatus.67 It was presumably the unfortunate Karpov who was meanwhile referred to by a Moscow Party periodical in a denunciation of “a former secretary of the Central Committee” of the Ukraine, who had refused to believe accusations that one of his staff was a Trotskyite and had left him in a post in which, until his arrest, he had access to secret documents.68
The Ukrainian Party had a special history. Lenin had underestimated Ukrainian national feeling. The 1917 vote in the Ukraine for the Constituent Assembly was 77 percent to the Social Revolutionary parties, 10 percent to the Bolsheviks. The local Soviets were usually under anti-Bolshevik control. From 1917 to 1920, Ukrainian nationalist regimes of various types were in existence, and Bolshevik rule was imposed and reimposed vary largely from outside.