In the midst of the swing into total terror, yet another diversion was provided by Russian airmen. In June, Chkalov and his crew flew their ANT-25 over the North Pole to Falkland, Oregon, and in July Gromov flew another to San Jacinto, California, setting a world distance record. The two flights, both fine achievements, were the occasion for a further great press campaign: pages and pages of newspapers filled with greetings, meetings, lives of the airmen, photographs, and so on. When Chkalov finally crashed on 15 December 1938, Belyakin, Head of the Main Administration of the Aircraft Industry, Usachev, Director of the plant where the plane had been built, and Tomashevich, the designer, were shot for sabotage.139
The papers continued to carry general calls to vigilance and accounts of various methods used by the enemy. Pravda drew attention to misprints in the local press which amounted to sabotage—for example, a reference to the bedy (sorrows) rather than the pobedy (victories) of Socialism. And local trials were frequently reported. But the great blow was that now being delivered against the leading cadres of the regime, which was to ravage the old Central Committee and destroy the next level of the Party command in their thousands.
For it was now, starting in May 1937, that the flower of Stalin’s long-nurtured administrative and political machine began to go. After Rudzutak, no member or candidate member of the Politburo was to be arrested during the year, and several officials only just junior to them hung on until a specially mounted top-level operation in November and December took them. But for the moment, there was a broad sweep of their subordinates, running as high as men like Antipov,140 Vice Chairman of the Council of People’s Commissars, Party member since 1902, several times arrested under Tsarism, and organizer of underground printing plants, who had been among the half-dozen appearing with the Politburo on the May Day platform.
In the Central Committee apparatus, Malenkov’s Department of Leading Party Organs was overseeing a thorough “renewal.” Another figure who was to be named though not produced as one of the most important links in the Bukharin plot was Ya. A. Yakovlev, former People’s Commissar for Agriculture, and now Head of the Agricultural Department of the Central Committee. He figured prominently in the press over June, and was the rapporteur to the June plenum on its sole published item of discussion, vegetables. In the autumn, he fades out until his extraordinary transmogrification into a Rightist in March 1938—an odd appellation for the man who had been a chief operator in the collectivization field.
Another head of a Central Committee department now to disappear had at one time almost reached the summits of power—K. Ya. Bauman, Head of the Central Committee’s Scientific Department. He had been Secretary of the Central Committee and candidate member of the Politburo (as Uglanov’s replacement) for a few months in 1929 and 1930. An enthusiastic Stalinist, he had been the scapegoat for the first excesses of collectivization, but he had remained on the Central Committee. Bauman’s wife was also arrested, and his fourteen-year-old son, Volik, sent away to a home.141 Bauman was shot on 14 October 1937. With him went most of the staff of his department. The Head of the parallel, but more important, Agitation and Propaganda Department, Stetsky, an old economist who had held the post since 1929, was also arrested about this time.
Cynicism prevailed as well as terror. A senior Army officer in prison mentioned that he was once cheerfully greeted at a reception by Molotov’s wife, with the words “Ah, Sasha, whatever’s this? Why haven’t you been arrested yet?”142 She had become Head of the Cosmetics Trust (a post she was to hold for some years) through the elimination of her boss, Chekalov, who was sent to the Vorkuta railway camps,143 and she was to be a member of the 1939 Central Committee, which replaced the men now disappearing. Her own arrest came in 1948.
An atmosphere of fear hung over the Party and Government offices. People’s Commissars were arrested on their way to their jobs in the morning. Every day, another Central Committee member or Vice Chairman of a People’s Commissariat or one of their more important underlings was disappearing. In one sphere alone, for the moment, joy prevailed. Yezhov was awarded the Order of Lenin on 18 July, an occasion for photographs, leading articles, and general celebrations. Vyshinsky received the same award on 21 July, though with less panache.
Orders were now also handed out to many leading police officials. On the completion of the Mdivani Case, the Georgian NKVD men received their reward. One notes among them the names of men who a year later were to replace the current operators in Moscow and elsewhere, and who were only to perish at the end of the Beria epoch, in 1953 to 1955: Goglidze, Kobulov, Rapava, and their like.144 Other awards went to a group of Yezhov’s men, including the dreadful Ushakov, Frinovsky, and, as a junior, the long-surviving L. E. Vlodzimirsky, who was to serve Beria and be brought back by him in 1953 to be Head of the Section for Investigating Specially Important Cases, and be shot in December of that year.
Yezhov himself was now to get the highest accolade, a town named for him. On 22 July, Kaganovich’s protégé, the ex-OGPU man Bulganin, was appointed Chairman of the Council of People’s Commissars of the Russian Republic. The fall of his predecessor, Sulimov, involved a change in the name of the town of Sulimov, capital of the Cherkess Autonomous Province, which was now suitably renamed Yezhovo-Cherkessk.
Bulganin’s later colleague and rival Ithrushchev was conducting his own purge in the local machine of the city and province to the satisfaction of the authorities. He had started in late March, as in Leningrad.145 Now, at a meeting of the Moscow Provincial Committee on 23 August, he made a series of attacks on local leaders like Filatov, which presaged his disappearance, with many others. Ukhanov, Khrushchev’s Chairman of the Moscow Soviet until recently, was now filling one of the ministerial vacancies as People’s Commissar for Local Industry, and it was from there that he was seized. Like Antipov, Yakovlev, Stetsky, and Sulimov, he was a full member of the Central Committee.
August saw one of the biggest tourist influxes ever to reach Russia. The visitors noted no public gloom. Once again, a great Soviet flight was being celebrated—that of Levanevsky and his N-209 around the Union. The papers were full of celebrations, though they had time also, towards the end of the month, to announce the award of Orders of Lenin to the hard-worked Military Jurists, including Ulrikh, Matulevich, and Nikitchenko146 (the last two described as Vice Presidents of the Military Collegium), and to Prosecutors like Roginsky.147
Meanwhile, the Commissars and Vice Commissars of the economic Commissariats went the way of Ukhanov. Some—like Chernov, Commissar for Agriculture, removed on 30 October; Grinko, Commissar for Finance; and Ivanov, Commissar of the Timber Industry—were to appear in the next great trial. Others, like M. Rukhimovich, Commissar for the Defense Industry, who had been appearing with the highest leadership for a few months and lost his post in October 1937148 (being replaced by Kaganovich’s brother, M. M. Kaganovich), were to be tried in secret. Rukhimovich had supported Stalin against all the oppositionists; earlier he had been one of Stalin’s and Voroshilov’s closest accomplices in the intrigues against Trotsky in Tsaritsyn in the Civil War. In the same category comes Lyubimov, People’s Commissar for Light Industry, who was removed, with both his Assistant Commissars, on 7 September.149