In fact, the new Government presented by Molotov to the Supreme Soviet on 19 January 1938 had as its three Vice Premiers S. V. Kossior, Chubar, and Mikoyan, while Eikhe was People’s Commissar for Agriculture.190
The Vice Chairmen of the Council of People’s Commissars cannot indeed seriously have thought of themselves as holding powerful positions. Both Voroshilov and Kaganovich, in charge of important departments and invariably ranking senior to them in Party listings, were not at this time Vice Premiers—an adequate demonstration of the post’s comparatively decorative significance.
Even so, we have the extraordinary spectacle of Molotov taking the chair at a meeting of the Council of People’s Commissars, the official order for the trial and arrest of several of whose members he had already signed. At meetings of Molotov and the Vice Premiers, two out of the three supposedly contributing to policy discussions were actually no more than dead men talking, whose opinions were by now quite meaningless.
During the Khrushchev period, it was customary to speak of the January 1938 plenum as marking a return to legality, it being thought suitable for such a turn of events to mark Khrushchev’s promotion to the highest levels. Indeed, the resolution of the plenum as ever speaks strongly against unjust expulsions from the Party, and this, with the attacks on Provincial Committees for the same error, which were to continue throughout the year, gave that impression to those who wished to receive it. But there was no sign of any real improvement. A Soviet account given in April 1964 managed to satisfy the demands both of Khrushchev and of truth by saying, “The January 1938 plenum of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party somewhat improved the situation. However, repressions did not cease.”191
It was Yezhov himself who made some of the most critical remarks about the wickedness of expelling members wrongly. Throughout the Terror, the leadership had constantly spoken against unfair expulsions—with the aim, however, of destroying its subordinates. For example, as we have seen, in the 1937 attack on Postyshev, the real motive of which was to remove an objection to the Terror, the official line was condemnation of inadequate Party democracy. In fact, this can be traced even in the Central Committee’s key letter of the summer of 1936, which spoke strongly against unprincipled expulsions.192
The January 1938 resolution criticizes a large number of local Party organizations in addition to that of Kuibyshev for such practices, blaming officials such as “the former Secretary of the Kiev Provincial Committee of the Communist Party of the Ukraine, the enemy of the people Kudryavtsev,” “the exposed enemy of the people” Shatsky (Head of the Leading Party Organs Administration of the Rostov Provincial Committee), and so on, and telling pathetic tales of honest Bolsheviks, and even their relatives by marriage, who had lost their jobs as a result of incorrect denunciation.
The persistence of this theme is remarkable. Clearly, it was a great advantage to blame Postyshev and others for inhumanity rather than for belated humanity. In this way, the central leadership could, or might think it could, avoid some of the unpopularity arising from its own actions. But we might perhaps go further and see in this a sign that Stalin, right from the start, had determined to put the odium on his instruments and to destroy them when their task was completed. If so, he was to some degree successful. The “Yezhovshchina” remained the popular name for the Reign of Terror, and with the disappearance of Yezhov himself, some of the curse was taken off the surviving leadership.
On 9 and 10 February 1938, as if to mark the continuity of the Purge, a fresh group of fourteen or fifteen significant figures perished. They included A. P. Smirnov, Kaminsky, and Muklevich. M. I. Erbanov, First Secretary of the BuryatMongol ASSR, was among them. Purged with him was his Second Secretary, A. Markizov. Markizov’s daughter, Gelya, was in a famous photograph taken in 1936 in which she is held in Stalin’s arms, which indicated his love of children; and it continued to appear after he had orphaned her. In fact, a sculpture modeled on the photograph was set up in the Stalinskaya Metro station.193
Meanwhile, arrests and denunciations continued. N. V. Krylenko, now serving as People’s Commissar for Justice, was attacked in January at the first meeting of the Supreme Soviet, for neglecting his duties in favor of mountain climbing and chess, and was not reappointed. When he had handed over (to Ulrikh’s subordinate, N. M. Rychkov), Stalin personally telephoned him to reassure him about future work. He was, of course, on the list of those to be arrested, and was in fact arrested the same night, 31 January 1938, with some of his family.194
Krylenko, whom Lenin had appointed Commander in Chief of the Army immediately after the Revolution, had impressed Bruce Lockhart in 1918 as an “epileptic degenerate” and is referred to in 1938 by a fellow prisoner as “notorious and universally despised.”195 He had conducted the prosecution in such faked trials as the Shakhty Case and the Menshevik Trial. As to his other interests, he had shown farcical dogmatism at a Congress of Chess Players in 1932:
We must finish once and for all with the neutrality of chess. We must condemn once and for all the formula ‘chess for the sake of chess,’ like the formula ‘art for art’s sake.’ We must organize shockbrigades of chess-players, and begin immediate realization of a Five-Year Plan for chess.196
On his arrest, he is reported being treated with special indignity in the Butyrka “to take the conceit out of him.”197 But he was soon taken to the Lefortovo for serious interrogation. The original charge was of connections with the Bukharin conspiracy, and the creation of a wrecking organization in the Commissariat of Justice, in which he had personally enlisted thirty people. On 3 March, he confessed that he had belonged to an anti-Soviet organization since 1930. But by 3 April, this was put further back, and he was confessing to having worked against Lenin before the Revolution and having plotted with Bukharin, Pyatakov, and Preobrazhensky after it.198
In general, secret executions of prominent committee members already arrested, and arrests of many of those still at large, continued.
The Party, as it had existed a year previously, had been broken. From District Secretaries to People’s Commissars, the veterans of Stalin’s first period of rule had fallen to Yezhov’s assault. But further blows were being prepared for the terrified survivors.
9
NATIONS IN TORMENT
Of all the treasures a State can possess, the human lives of its citizens are for us the most precious.
Stalin
It is very hard for the Western reader to envision the sufferings of the Soviet people as a whole during the 1930s. And in considering the Terror, it is precisely this moral and intellectual effort which must be made. To demonstrate the facts is to provide the bare framework of evidence. It is not the province of the investigator to do more. Yet it cannot but be that these facts are offered for moral judgment. And however coolly we consider them, we should think in terms of Pasternak, breaking off his Sketch for an Autobiography before the Terror with the words “To continue it would be immeasurably difficult…. One would have to talk in a manner which would grip the heart and make the hair stand on end.”