By the end of the year, few Commissars apart from Voroshilov and Kaganovich remained. In addition to those already named, the Commissars for Communications (Khalepsky), for Internal Trade (Veitser), for Heavy Industry (Mezhlauk), for Education (Bubnov), for Justice (Krylenko), and for Sea and River Transport (Yanson) were arrested, together with successive heads of the National Bank and their subordinates.
For the moment, we may consider one last case in more detail—that of the naturally sensitive Commissariat of Foreign Trade. Its head, Rosengolts, was removed on 15 June for “other work.” Both his assistants, Eliava and Loganovsky, disappeared—Eliava to be shot during the year.150
Rosengolts, broad-shouldered, strong-minded, and Jewish, was an excellent administrator. He had in the past few years accommodated himself to the new style of rule. He had been brought up in a revolutionary family. When only ten years old, “My hand, the hand of a child, was used to hide illegal literature during the night and to recover it in the morning from a place where the hand of a grown-up could not reach.”151 He joined the Bolshevik Party at fifteen or sixteen and was first arrested when sixteen years old. At the age of seventeen, he was nominated as a delegate to the Party Congress. During the Revolution, he fought in Moscow, and in the Civil War was prominent at various fronts. He had ruled the Donbas in a ruthless fashion. After a brief flirtation with the Trotsky opposition, he was appointed to the London Embassy. In 1928, he returned and had since worked in the Government, holding his present post since 1930.
Rosengolts was still referred to as “Comrade” in the June decree releasing him from his post, and for some time no further move was made against him. This was in accordance with a common practice of Stalin’s. Arrest was decided on; the dismissal occurred; and then for months the victim was left in some minor post, never knowing when the blow would fall. An American resident in Moscow in August 1937 describes a high official seen, day after day, on a balcony opposite waiting to be arrested. “Waiting was killing him. He waited three more weeks while the G.P.U. watched and while his wife wasted away. Then the G.P.U. came.”152 Some survivors have described this as psychologically more wearing and destructive even than the eventual imprisonment and interrogation, and they add that the state to which a man was reduced made the process of interrogation a fairly easy one for the NKVD. In fact, some of its work had been done for it already without its officers having to move a finger, a useful saving of energy in a hard-worked organization.
Rosengolts was left to sweat it out for many weeks. He was still at large in August, when he made several desperate efforts to get an interview with Stalin—later to be interpreted as an assassination attempt.153 On his wife, “a jolly, red-haired girl, very imperfectly educated and brought up in a religious household,”154 the weeks and months of anxiety must have been frightful. She did all she could think of.
When her husband was finally arrested, the routine NKVD search revealed, sewn into his hip pocket, a small piece of dry bread wrapped in a strip of cloth. Inside the bread was a piece of paper on which she had written, as a charm against evil fortune, eight verses from Psalms 68 and 91, ancient cries of the helpless against their oppressors:
LX VIII
Let God arise, and let his enemies be scattered: let them also that hate him, flee before him.
Like as the smoke vanisheth, so shalt thou drive them away: and like as wax melteth at the fire, so let the ungodly perish at the presence of God….
XCI
Whoso dwelleth under the defence of the most High: shall abide under the shadow of the Almighty.
I will say unto the Lord, Thou art my hope, and my stronghold: my God, in him will I trust.
For he shall deliver thee from the snare of the hunter: and from the noisome pestilence.
He shall defend thee under his wings and thou shalt be safe under his feathers: his faithfulness and truth shall be thy shield and buckler.
Thou shalt not be afraid for any terror by night: nor for the arrow that flieth by day;
For the pestilence that walketh in darkness: nor for the sickness that destroyeth in the noon-day.…155
CLOSING IN ON THE POLITBURO
As the tempo of the public side of the Purge eased somewhat in the autumn of 1937, Stalin began to prepare the next phase. A number of figures, including Bukharin and Rykov themselves, were under interrogation with a view to public trial. A number of unsatisfactory Stalinists like Rudzutak and Antipov, though they were still perhaps resisting, lay ready as a possible reserve for the Bukharin Case, or alternatively as the central figures of a later trial. But much remained to be done.
The rank and file of the February–March waverers had been crushed. But the senior figures involved were still in positions in the highest leadership. Until they, and any others who had shown restiveness or independence, could be eradicated, there was a flaw, a weak spot, in the structure of autocracy. They were not, like Zinoviev and Bukharin, men long removed from the centers of power, or even, like Pyatakov, men long relegated to second-rank positions in the Government and Party. It is true that they constituted a minority and that—except for Kossior’s and (previously) Postyshev’s control of the Ukrainian machine—they had little grip on any true instruments of power. They nevertheless represented a higher potential of trouble than their predecessors. The one serious combination which, Stalin may have thought, remained was a combination of a group of “moderate” leaders with the Army. Nor was the striking down of the Army leaders in June 1937 entirely conclusive. Other commanders survived who could conceivably give trouble. In any case, Stalin proceeded with his usual combination of gradualness and ruthlessness.
But first, certain technical moves were called for. Since the decree of August 1936, people had been making a nuisance of themselves by complaining that their snap trials and executions were illegal. At any rate, on 14 September a decree was issued to introduce “simplified trial procedures,” in cases under Articles 58 (vii), 58 (viii), and 58 (ix) of the Criminal Code. It forbade appeals and also petitions for clemency, the right to which had been restored in 1936 with the object of deceiving Zinoviev and Co. More interesting still, the new decree “eliminated publicity in court trials.”156 There are some obvious anomalies: in the first place, many trials must already have been held without any, or any effective, public attendance; second, the Bukharin Trial, with its vast publicity, was yet to come. Still, however we take the decree, it may perhaps reflect some sort of decision by Stalin to bring public trials to an end as soon as the one then in hand was over. It is sometimes argued that the partial failure of the Bukharin Trial itself led to the dropping of any further court proceedings. This decree shows that the decision may have been taken earlier. It is indeed true that the Bukharin Case seems to have been giving Yezhov a good deal of trouble. While Pyatakov and Radek were ready for open court in four months, nine months had already passed since Bukharin’s and Rykov’s arrest, and they were not to be adequately prepared for another three or four months yet. However, the plans for the Bukharin Trial were now, as we shall see, reaching the stage at which all possible ingredients had been established—assassination, medical murder, industrial and agricultural sabotage, espionage, bourgeois nationalism, and treason. Each trial so far had added crimes to the roster, but after this there would be no further lesson to rub in.