Soviet diplomats had already suffered severely. For example, Tairov, Ambassador to Mongolia, had been shot in June 1937. Both Krestinsky and Sokolnikov had served as Deputy People’s Commissars for Foreign Affairs. Karakhan had been Ambassador in Berlin. Various lesser figures had been involved in the trials—for example, Chlenov,30 of whom it was said in the Bukharin Trial indictment that his case would be subject to special proceedings. Others implicated in the Bukharin Trial were Yurenev, Ambassador to Berlin; Bogomolov, Ambassador to China; and Sabanin, Director of the Legal Department of the People’s Commissariat of Foreign Affairs.31 (Yurenev and Bekzadian, Ambassador to Hungary, were among the victims of the July 1938 massacre.)
At the Foreign Commissariat, an NKVD officer, Vasily Korzhenko, was appointed Chief of Personne1,32 and he and his family moved into Krestinsky’s Moscow house.33 The treatment of the Commissariat’s staff for comparatively minor offenses was interestingly described in a Soviet article of the Khrushchev period.
V. N. Barkov had long been Head of the Protocol Department:
On one occasion, on the instructions of Dekanozov, who was at the time a Deputy People’s of the most active members of the Beria gang, Barkov had to meet a foreign correspondent. Under the regulations in force, on the day of his talk with the correspondent, Barkov had to see Dekanozov without fail, but Dekanozov was nowhere to be found. Obeying the orders he had received, Barkov saw the correspondent.
On the following day Dekanozov summoned him.
“Who gave you direct permission for the interview?”
“I could not find you anywhere.”
“You could not have tried very hard.”
The dressing down went on for a long time. Barkov lost his temper and said:
“But on that day you could not be found!”
“Oh! It’s like that is it?” said Dekanozov menacingly, and closed the interview.
On that day Barkov never returned home. His relations only saw him eighteen years later.34
The People’s Commissar himself, Litvinov, beginning in 1937, and for the rest of his life, kept a revolver to hand, “so that if the bell rang in the night, he would not have to live through the consequences.”35 His Deputy People’s Cornmissar, V. S. Stomonyakov, attempted suicide on arrest, to die in the prison hospita1.36
Diplomats disappeared by the dozen. They had, indeed, had genuine contacts with foreigners, so that the presumption of their guilt was, by Yezhov’s standards, overwhelming. They were recalled and shot; in his memoirs, Ehrenburg says that few survived.37 He names nine that he knew personally whom Stalin liquidated.
But no trial took place. In particular, Antonov-Ovseenko simply went through a routine processing. He had been a Menshevik until 1917. He had led two local rebellions in 1905 and 1906 and had been sentenced to death in 1906. He had been arrested several times for underground activity afterward. (This record shows, incidentally, how mistaken is the notion that the Mensheviks were politically inactive because their views on party organization differed from Lenin’s.) Joining the Bolsheviks in 1917, he had led the attack on the Winter Palace which overthrew the Provisional Government.
It was he who had burst into the Government room, announcing, “In the name of the Military Revolutionary Committee, I declare you arrested.” He commanded on the Ukrainian front in the Civil War and later became Head of the Political Administration of the Army.38 Here he had supported Trotsky and was removed in favor of Bubnov. He remained a Trotskyite until 1928, when he submitted, like other oppositionists. He had since been employed in State and diplomatic posts, latterly in Spain.
Antonov-Ovseenko was held in a cell on the third floor of the Butyrka prison. He was ill and (as is often reported of the undernourished and overinterrogated) had swollen legs. But he bore himself boldly and entertained his cell mates with stories of Lenin, the October Revolution, and the Spanish Civil War. One of them was Yuri Tomsky (youngest son of Mikhail Tomsky), who has given an account of Antonov’s last days.39 At the interrogation, Antonov refused to sign anything, though the protocols of the interrogation ran finally to 300 pages. One day when they were being gone through, there happened to be a radio on in the investigator’s office. The NKVD man, I. I. Shneyderman, called Antonov an “enemy of the people.” The prisoner retorted, “You are an enemy of the people. You are a regular Fascist.” The radio started to broadcast a mass meeting. “Listen! Listen to how the people celebrate us. They trust us in everything, and you will be annihilated. There,” the NKVD official added, “I have had a medal on your account” (an Order of the Red Star, in the 19 December 1937 Honors List).40
Antonov-Ovseenko was sentenced to ten years with the group executed on 8 to 10 February 1938, but was in fact shot. When he was taken from his cell to execution, he took off his overcoat, shoes, and jacket and distributed them to the other prisoners, and then remarked (young Tomsky tells us), “I beg anyone who gets to freedom to tell the people that Antonov-Ovseenko was a Bolshevik and remained a Bolshevik till his last day.” The chief warders then led him away.
Antonov had himself served as State Prosecutor in the early 1930s. He had to wait twenty-five years for his message to be published to the Russian people. All the same, he was lucky. The Mensheviks who died in camps after the 1931 Trial or the Social Revolutionaries like Spiridonova were not similarly vindicated.
Meanwhile, other diplomats were being recalled for execution. The Soviet Minister in Bucharest, Ostrovsky, hesitated to return to Moscow, but went back when Voroshilov, with whom he had served in the Civil War, gave him a personal assurance of his safety. He was arrested on reaching the frontier,41 though only sent to labor camp.42 Others who disappeared included the Soviet envoys to Warsaw, Kaunas, Helsinki, Kabul, Copenhagen, and Riga.43
The veteran of the Baltic Fleet Mikhail Raskolnikov was Soviet Ambassador to Bulgaria, where the NKVD officer sent to purge the legation implicated everyone from the chauffeur, Kazakov, to the Military Attaché, Colonel Sukhorukov.44 Raskolnikov himself refused to return to Russia when recalled in April 1939. He was nevertheless rehabilitated in Khrushchev’s time (later restored to the category of traitor, he was more definitively rehabilitated in 1987). This must partly have been due to his particularly fine record in the Revolution and the Civil War, his total lack of involvement in any opposition, and his death within a few months (September 1939). Even Ehrenburg in his published memoirs mentioned having met him at the time when he was deciding to stay abroad and having sympathized with his position. Raskolnikov wrote an offensive letter to Stalin, which was published in the émigré Novaya Rossiya on 1 October 1939 after his death, and also a more moderate statement which appeared in another émigré journal, Poslednie Novosti, on 26 June 1939. In the latter, he says firmly to Stalin, “You yourself know that Pyatakov did not fly to Oslo”—showing that a good deal was known, and discussed, in Party circles.
KOMSOMOL
One major organization remained under its original Stalinist leadership—the Komsomol.
Kosarev had been sent by Stalin to purge the Leningrad Komsomol after the defeat of Zinoviev at the XIVth Party Congress in December 1925. In 1926, the opposition bloc had made a powerful attempt to secure the support of the young and of the students. Most of the “Trotskyist” protest groups were composed of young intellectuals, who attacked Party control over the Komsomol. Half the members of the Leningrad Komsomol Committee were expelled.
Kosarev had been boldly denounced by Kotolynov, then a leading Zinovievite in that body, for tactics of sheer bullying. He went on to practice these in Moscow, becoming a secretary of the Central Committee of the Komsomol in 1927 and its General Secretary in 1929.