Thenceforward, the organization had been a willing tool of the General Secretary, a sort of “Stalinjugend.” Even this was not adequate, as Stalin held that “the very first task of all Komsomol education work was the necessity to seek out and recognize the enemy, who had then to be removed forcibly, by methods of economic pressure, organizational-political isolation, and methods of physical destruction.”45 In fact, he wanted the organization to become a youth auxiliary of the NKVD.
On 21 July 1937 Kosarev was summoned by Stalin and Yezhov and harangued for an hour and a half about the inadequate role played by the youth organization in vigilance and denunciation.46 He did his best to satisfy their demands.
A trial now took place of some members of the Central Committee of the Komsomoclass="underline" Lukyanov, Secretary of the Moscow Komsomol; Saltanov, editor of Komsomolskaya pravda; and others.47 In the Ukraine, the youth leadership had already been purged in January, apparently in connection with Postyshev’s offenses. On 22–25 July, the Ukrainian Komsomol Central Committee was simply dissolved: its counter-revolutionary organization had been headed by its First Secretary, S. Andreev,48 who was shot in the mass execution of 27 November 1937.
At the provincial level, when the Smolensk Komsomol was cleaned up in October 1937, it was charged that “Fascists, penetrating even into the Central Committee of the Komsomol, had now been exposed.” On 11 October 1937 the new local First Secretary, Manayev, reported that his predecessors, “the enemies of the people Kogan and Prikhodko,” had undermined 700 kolkhoz Komsomol organizations. The Pedagogical Institutes, the Tecluiicum, the intermediate schools had been “filled” with hostile people, as were the Pioneer organizations. Local secretary after local secretary was listed as a criminal. Already, from one-half to two-thirds of the members of committees and secretaries of organizations had been replaced.
However, Manayev himself was criticized for giving money for medical treatment to enemies of the people under arrest and for “criminal slowness” in uprooting enemies. The representative from Moscow said that the bad work of the provincial organization was possibly due to the fact that there were enemies in it yet to be unmasked.
The discussion consisted of a new torrent of denunciation. The Vyazma delegate, mentioning in passing that his district had lost five secretaries in the past few years, attacked the current holder of that office as “completely corrupt” and “a polygamist.” Although a number of hostile people had been expelled, so far they had only scratched the surface. As to teachers, another delegate claimed that out of 402 in his district, 180 were alien elements.49
As the denouncers came to the fore, Kosarev found that there were some more enthusiastic than himself.
A young woman called Mishakova from the Komsomol apparat, put up to it (it was later said) by Malenkov, made an attempt to compromise and destroy the leadership of Kosarev’s appointees in the Komsomol organizations in the Chuvash Republic. Kosarev intervened directly, prevented the proposed purge, and removed her. Mishakova wrote to Stalin on 7 October 1938. Two or three days later, she was invited to see Shkiryatov, whom Stalin had detailed to examine the case.
The whole incident, which had doubtless been arranged beforehand for that purpose, was used to complete the ruin of the last small power group which had gone through the Yezhov period unscathed. As late as 6 November, a speech of Kosarev’s to a ceremonial Komsomol plenum was promptly reported in Pravda. But on 19 to 22 November, a plenum of the Young Communist Central Committee was held. Stalin, Molotov, and Malenkov attended. Stalin strongly defended Mishakova and turned the occasion into a violent attack on the Kosarev leadership. A few days later, the majority of that Central Committee were arrested. Beria in person came for Kosarev, the first time he had done such a thing.50 This is almost certainly significant, as is the absence of Yezhov’s name from the entire investigation. For the Police Commissar was about to fall. According to one NKVD source, Kosarev was accused of plotting with him.51
By 1939, Mishakova was a secretary of the Komsomol, in which capacity she was able to tell this story, accompanied by references to the “Kosarev gang,” to the XVIIIth Congress, as a tribute to Stalin’s sense of justice. By that time Kosarev, after torture at the hands of the NKVD interrogator Shvartsman, had been shot.
The purge of the Kosarev leadership, in its social aspect, has been interpreted as the removal of a genuine, if Stalinist, youth cadre in favor of a new conformity and anti-egalitarianism associated with the sons of the new bureaucracy.52
As with their seniors, the Komsomol Central Committee was devastated: of 93 full members elected in 1936, 72 were arrested; of 35 candidate members, 21 were arrested; 319 of the organization’s 385 provincial secretaries were “repressed,” as were 2,210 of the 2,750 district secretaries.53
The pre-Kosarev leaders of the Komsomol had naturally fared badly, too. The original First Secretary, E. V. Tsetlin, had been expelled from the Party as a Rightist in 1933 and arrested, but was released and returned to membership; rearrested on 16 April 1937, he was sentenced on 2 June 1937 to ten years by the Military Collegium, and to death by the local NKVD Troika at Ivanovo on 16 September 1937. His successor, 0. L. Ryvkin, was sentenced to death by the Military Collegium on 7 August 1937. The third, L. A. Shatsky, was sentenced to five years by the Special Board in March 1935, and (as we have seen) to death by the Military Collegium on 10 January 1937. P. I. Smorodin, the next, whom we have already met in his later Leningrad career, was shot on 22 February 1939. The fifth, N. P. Chaplin, was “repressed” and died 25 September 1938. The next, A. I. Milchakov, only served sixteen years in labor camp and survived.54
A LAST BLOW AT THE ARMY
The Far Eastern Army had not been treated quite as the rest of the forces had. For strategic reasons, it had been organized as something like an independent entity.
It was the only great body of troops commanded by a Marshal—the tough, competent, and practically experienced Blyukher.
Blyukher, though his name suggests a German origin, was in fact of pure Russian descent. His peasant grandfather had had the name given to him by some whim of his landlord during the days of serfdom.55 Ironically enough, there was something of the German stance to him. Dark and grizzled, he had a square, bull-like face with a large close-clipped moustache in the feldwebel manner covering his large upper lip. He was now forty-eight.
He had been a worker in a wagon factory and had served a thirty-two-month sentence for leading a strike while still twenty years old. He first came to prominence when, with V. V. Kuibyshev, he had established an isolated Bolshevik enclave amid a sea of White Armies, in the Samara area. In the distinguished Civil War career which followed, he had been one of the first to be given the Order of the Red Banner. Later, under the pseudonym Galen, he had acted as chief military adviser to Chiang Kai-shek. He is said, back in the early 1930s, to have opposed collectivization in the Far East on military grounds and, with Voroshilov’s support, to have obtained a certain exemption there; and there was also talk of some connection with Syrtsov.56
While Blyukher was still in Moscow in June 1937 in connection with the Tukhachevsky “Trial,” the NKVD struck at his Army. His new Chief of Staff, Sangursky, is said to have become involved (with the Party Secretary of the Far Eastern Territory, Kutev) in what Stalin felt to be some sort of political intrigue against the leadership.57 He was now arrested and tortured. Another account has him implicating literally hundreds of officers and in 1938 repudiating his confession and claiming that saboteurs in the NKVD were attempting to weaken the Army.58 Sangursky is reported as still alive in Irkutsk jail in 1939,59 full of remorse for having, under torture, given away so many officers as fellow conspirators. He was then facing a further charge—conspiracy with Yezhov to wreck the Army!