On 28 October 1938, medals were awarded to the heroes of the recent fighting in the Far East, including Shtern. The true victor was now undergoing severe torture by his NKVD interrogators.
There is no evident reason for the NKVD to have practiced or feigned on this occasion the haste with which the May—June 1937 purge of the Tukhachevsky group had been carried out. And unlike the procedure not only in that case, but even in the July 1938 military executions, we learn from a Soviet publication of the Khrushchev period that Blyukher was killed “without court or sentence.”74 It was also stated that “uninterrupted interrogation broke down the health of this virile man.”75 And we are now told that by 6 November, he had been beaten until “unrecognizable” and died as the result of “inhuman beatings” though without signing any confession.76 (Fedko and Khakanian, his presumed associates, were not to be executed until the following February.)
His wife, Glafira, spent seven months in solitary confinement in the Lubyanka,77 then eight years in camps, but survived. Their five-year-old daughter was sent to an NKVD orphanage in Kemerovo, where her mother eventually found her, being the first mother ever to appear there.78
There have always been rumors that Blyukher, or some of the officers round him, had seriously entertained the idea of a revolt. There is no reliable evidence of this, though Lyushkov gave information to the Japanese about “opposition groupings” in Siberia. Much of this was seen, and transmitted back to Moscow, by the Soviet spy Richard Sorge. And whether it was factual or speculative, it seems from the timing that it may have been used against Blyukher.79
The true reasons for proceeding against the Marshal seems to have been that he was a comparatively independent-minded soldier, and (as a candidate member of the Central Committee) a politician, in a position of power and influence. His fall and death mark the end of the last tenuous hope of action against Stalin. By the beginning of November, official listings of the military leadership ran Voroshilov, Mekhlis, Shchadenko, Shaposhnikov, Budenny, Kulik, Timoshenko.80 For the first time, the Purge operatives ranked before the surviving soldiery. A few days later, the same order of listing contained an even more insulting and symptomatic insertion: Frinovsky, briefly become People’s Commissar for the Navy, immediately after Voroshilov.81
THE FALL OF YEZHOV
It was around the end of October that the first overt moves against Yezhov took place. Kaganovich and others persuaded Stalin to appoint a secret Commission of the Central Committee to report on the NKVD. Its members were Molotov, Beria, Vyshinsky, and Malenkov. It reported in mid-November, in terms hostile to Yezhov: two secret resolutions of the Central Committee criticized irregularities in investigative methods, and called for “recruiting honest people” to the security agencies. Over the next few weeks, several of Yezhov’s men were removed from their posts.82 Finally, on 8 December 1938, it was announced that his rule, at once pettifogging and bloodthirsty, had come to an end. He was replaced as People’s Commissar for Internal Affairs by Beria, retaining only his Commissariat of Water Transport.
For a time, Beria appeared together with Yezhov on the platforms and in the formal lists. Yezhov had by January dropped back to his former “correct” seniority in these lists, lowest of the candidate members of the Politburo (Khrushchev being absent in Kiev). He is last publicly mentioned on the presidium for the anniversary of Lenin’s death, on 22 January.83
Although not a delegate to the XVIIIth Party Congress, in March, he was present as a member of the outgoing Central Committee. And when the Congress’s “Senioren Konvent,” or informal Council of Elders, met to consider names for the new Central Committee, Yezhov’s went forward. There were no objections until Stalin said he thought him unsuitable, since he was involved in a plot with Frinovsky and others to use Stalin’s own bodyguard to assassinate him. Yezhov answered that it had been he who had exposed this plot. But Stalin retorted that this was only to cover himself; moreover, he had arrested many innocent people while protecting the guilty. Stalin ended by telling those present that in his opinion Yezhov was unfit to serve on the Central Committee, though it was, of course, up to them to decide.84
But Yezhov was only arrested in early April, at the Water Transport Commissariat, where he had chaired the Collegium but not taken part in the discussions, keeping silent or making paper airplanes. He is reported as confessing freely, and implicating others as required. He was charged with framing innocent people, with plotting to kill Stalin and seize power,85 and with being a British spy since the Civil War.86 But he was not shot until the following year.87 Frinovsky had remained Commissar for the Navy until removed and arrested in March. Otherwise, Yezhov’s leadership group in the NKVD had almost all been purged by the end of 1938. About 150 of his followers were shot.88
By March 1939, Beria’s men were everywhere in power; his own Georgian following held many of the major NKVD posts—in Moscow, Merkulov and Kobulov; in Leningrad, Goglidze; in the Maritime Province, Gvishiani; in Byelorussia, Tsanava.89 These were what was later to be characterized as the “Beria gang,” until they all fell together in 1953.
The appointment of Beria is usually taken as a convenient date to mark the end of the Great Purge. Of Beria!—that is, of a man whose name, even in official Soviet circles, is now the very embodiment of terror and torture. And yet there is some sense in the convention.
Yezhov’s removal was a simple piece of Stalinist expediency. The fact that most of his subordinates were executed under Beria was a simple matter of political mechanics. For apart from Yezhov himself and his personal nominees, the leading purgers, Stalin’s own agents, did not suffer. Shkiryatov, who had acted as Yezhov’s assistant, simply returned to Party work, and died, fully honored as Head of the Party Control Committee, a year after Stalin’s own death, in 1954. Mekhlis and Vyshinsky also survived into the 1950s. As for Malenkov, he flourished greatly in the years that followed, together with his rival Zhdanov.
In fact, throughout the Purge, Stalin had largely avoided public responsibility. And now, when the Terror had gone as far as it conceivably could, he could profitably sacrifice the man who had overtly carried out his secret orders, the man the Party and public then blamed most.
It would perhaps be going too far to compare the situation too closely with one common in despotisms—like the Byzantine favorite who “instead of being suffered to possess the reward of guilt was soon afterwards circumvented and destroyed by the more powerful villainy of the Minister himself, who retained sense and spirit enough to abhor the instrument of his own crimes.” Stalin had perhaps no strong liking for Yezhov, who never figures as one of his boon companions. But it would doubtless be Yezhov’s narrow political comprehension, rather than any moral deficiency, that his superior might despise. The comparison is, rather, with the old autocratic tradition of disposing of the executioner who has killed one’s rivals and thereby attracted to himself the main hatred of the survivors—a matter, in fact, of a common historical action which the wretched Yezhov had not the wit to foresee.