Throughout December, articles and statements on the elections continued to appear. There were many reports from abroad of, for example, “The Great Impression Made in England.” And so the days drew on. As the election publicity gradually petered out, there were other themes for the public—for example, the centenary of the Georgian poet Rustaveli—eked out with much Stakhanovite conferencing.
But the year was not to end without a demonstrative killing. Only five months had separated the Zinoviev and Pyatakov Trials. Since then, eleven had passed, and the Bukharin Case was still not ready. As an interim measure, a group of men who were not prepared to confess was tried in camera under the 14 September law.
On 20 December 1937 the papers ran page after page to celebrate the twentieth anniversary of the VCHEKA–OGPU–NKVD, with pictures of Dzerzhinsky and Yezhov. That body’s vigilance had been demonstrated the previous day by the announcement of a purge in the bread-distribution organizations. Workers’ meetings sent applause, and poems about the splendid role of the Secret Police appeared in profusion. Pravda carried a long article by Frinovsky, and also a long list of awards, including the Order of Lenin to Boris Berman. Among this feast of laudatory generalization, a short announcement drew attention to the more practical side of the work of Yezhov’s men. It said that on 16 December, Yenukidze, with Karaldian, Sheboldayev, Oraldielashvili, and others, had been tried before the Military Collegium of the Supreme Court as spies, bourgeois nationalists, and terrorists, had confessed, and had been executed.171
In the Bukharin Trial, Yenukidze was to be made the central villain of terrorist activity, held responsible for the organization of the murder of Kirov, and said to have instructed Yagoda to tell Zaporozhets not to hinder the act.172 He was also to be responsible for plotting the murder of Gorky.173 Orakhelashvili, who had been Secretary of the Georgian Central Committee, had for the past five years acted as Deputy Director of the Marx-Engels-Lenin Institute in Moscow. He is now said to have lost his life as a result of objecting to Beria’s book on the Bolshevik movement in the Caucasus, which was heavily faked to give Stalin a major role.
Although the charges and the supposed confessions did not impress, there seemed no reason to doubt that such a trial had indeed taken place as stated. It was only in the 1960s that death dates given for the accused made it clear that the whole thing was a complete lie. Karakhan had been shot on 20 September (with several others, including I. A. Teodorovich, Head of the Society of Former Political Prisoners); Yenukidze and Sheboldayev had perished on 30 October (with other leading figures, including thirteen other full members of the Central Committee, such as Chudov, Kodatsky, Rumyantsev, Khatayevich, and Lobov). Sheboldayev’s wife, Lika, a niece of Rudzutak, was severely interrogated, with threats to her newborn baby, and is reported going mad.174 Nazaretyan was also shot on 30 October. His wife, Klavdia, with her seven-year-old son and five-year-old daughter, were taken to a special prison for women and children, a former church. Later they were sent to camp, but the daughter was eventually retrieved by a “brave aunt.” Klavdia was apparently sentenced to eight years, released in 1946, rearrested, but survived to be rehabilitated.175
Orakhelashvili, indeed, had been executed on 11 December, only five days before his supposed trial; he was not even tried by the Supreme Court, as stated, but by a troika of the Georgian NKVD (his wife had been shot on 17 September).176
At any rate, none of the supposed leading defendants at the “trial” of 16 December were in fact alive when it took place. Why Stalin played this elaborate farce is unknown.
Another massacre of the 30 October type had taken place on 26–27 November. N. S. Komarov was then shot, as was E. I. Kviring, former secretary of the Bolshevik faction in the Duma; Ya. S. Hanecki, who had secured Lenin’s release from Austrian jail (his daughter was also arrested);177 N. A. Kubyak, former Secretary of the Central Committee; D. E. Sulimov; Nosov; and at least fourteen other important figures, including M. M. Nemtsov, secretary of the Society of Old Bolsheviks.
On 21 December, there was a grand ceremonial meeting for the NKVD in the Bolshoi Theater in the presence of Kaganovich, Molotov, Voroshilov, Mikoyan, and Khrushchev. The whole of the full membership of the Politburo, including Kossior and Chubar (who were not present), were elected to the honorary Presidium, but only Zhdanov and Yezhov among the candidate members, the remaining places being taken by Khrushchev and Bulganin. Mikoyan was the main speaker, lavishing praise on Yezhov as “a talented faithful pupil of Stalin … beloved by the Soviet people,” and as having “achieved the greatest victory in the history of the Party, a victory we will never forget.” He concluded, “Learn the Stalinist style of work from Comrade Yezhov, as he learned it from Comrade Stalin!”178
In January came an important plenum of the Central Committee and the presentation of a new Government to the Supreme Soviet. The positions of Postyshev and Kossior were affected.
In Kuibyshev province, Postyshev had tried to make up for his earlier opposition to the purges by extremely harsh action. He was now accused of excesses in this line. Malenkov, reporting, accused him of “by cries of ‘vigilance’ hiding his brutality in connection with the Party.” When Postyshev replied that almost all the Secretaries of District Committees and Executive Committees were in fact hostile elements, Molotov, Mikoyan, and Bulganin accused him of exaggerating, Kaganovich brought up his supposedly similar errors in Kiev the previous year,179 and Malenkov summed up that his acts, and refusal to admit them, were an obvious “provocation.” (Malenkov was not even a candidate member of the Committee. Only twenty-eight of the seventy-one full members elected four years earlier were now in fact available to constitute the “plenum.”)180
Postyshev, still described as “Comrade,” was replaced as candidate member of the Politburo by Khrushchev.181 (This was the last occasion on which a removal from Politburo was officially announced. Henceforth, names simply disappeared from lists and photographs.) Pravda’s leader of the same day denounced the heads of certain Party organizations, giving that of Kuibyshev as an example, for having around them “sworn enemies of the people,” while expelling honest elements. The Central Committee resolution menacingly noted that the NKVD had had to intervene to save slandered Party members expelled in the province.182 Postyshev had also in fact received a confidential Party censure while in Kuibyshev for “protecting enemies of the people.”183 Stalin had now suggested that Postyshev might be removed from the Politburo, remaining a member of the Central Committee, and this was voted unanimously. However, his case was referred to the Control Commission, which reported that he had known of and worked with the Right—Trotskyite organization, and he was expelled from the Party.184 But he was not arrested for a few days. He had a small flat in Moscow, where he was visited after this by his fighter-pilot son.185 There he seems to have remained until his arrest on 21 February.
Kossior, in Kiev among the crumbled remnants of his power, had had a bad year. His brother I. V. Kossior, also a member of the Central Committee, had died in apparent good odor on 3 July, though it was later revealed that his death was, in reality, a suicide like Ordzhonikidze’s.186 Another brother, V. V. Kossior, an old oppositionist, had been given ten years in 1934 and been implicated again in the Pyatakov Trial;187 during the summer, he had been one of a batch of oppositionists brought from Vorkuta to Moscow and shot. Kossior and Petrovsky went to Kiev on 26 January 1938 and were welcomed at the station by the supposititious Ukrainian Central Committee. On 27 January, its “plenum” released Kossior from his post.188 The First Secretaryship of the Ukraine was transferred, as we have seen, to the coming man, Nikita Khrushchev.189 But far from falling into immediate oblivion, Kossior was appointed instead Vice Chairman of the USSR Council of People’s Commissars and President of the Soviet Control Commission.