On 26 February came the turn of Kossior, Chubar, and Postyshev. Kossior had been produced by Yezhov, before the latter’s fall, at a “confrontation” with Petrovsky in the presence of Stalin. Kossior, completely broken, had admitted that he was a Polish spy and, on another account, to terrorism.104 Postyshev had also confessed.105 Others shot that day include Army Commander Fedko. He had confessed to being a German spy when Beria brought Voroshilov to see him in Lefortovo.106 Mirzoyan, too, was now shot, having confessed to being an agent of Bukharin, and implicating all the other Kazakh leaders.107
Others shot at this time included several of the most prominent NKVD men, such as Boris Berman (sentenced on 22 February).108 Among them was Zakovsky (who had been badly tortured). He is said to have been a British spy.109 Thus by a certain irony, Zakovsky seems to have perished in the same case as the Lenin-graders who had been his intended victims.
We are told in a recent article in Izvestiya that those now sentenced were “taken directly to the cellars,” and that “it was all done in such haste that a man had scarcely been shot when others sentenced to death were coming down the corridor.”110
Kossior’s two surviving brothers, Kazimir and Mikhail, perished too, as did his wife, Elizaveta, put on “List 4” and shot;111 and the wife of one brother is reported attempting suicide on receiving a ten-year sentence.112 Postyshev’s oldest son, Valentin, was shot, and his other children were sent to labor camps.113 His wife, Tamara, was viciously tortured night after night in the Lefortovo, often being returned to her cell bleeding all over her back and unable to walk.114 She is reported shot. Chubar’s wife was also executed.115 Kosarev’s wife and his seventeen-year-old daughter were sentenced to ten years, and his father-in-law, the Rector of the Trade Academy, was shot.116
There remained one Politburo figure who, though in bad odor, was not under arrest—Petrovsky. His position had now been extremely difficult for two years.
Among the Leningraders arrested in 1937 was his elder son, Peter, who had edited the local Leningradskaya pravda. Petrovsky, candidate member of the Politburo and Head of State of the Ukrainian Republic, was unable to get news of him. He met a “stone wall of silence.” Friends, “high officials in the Party and State,” made several attempts to find out the facts. Finally they had to give up. The strictest instructions had been given to prevent anyone from discovering what went on “behind the walls of the Lubyanka.” Young Petrovsky never emerged alive.117 Another son, Corps Commander L. G. Petrovsky, was expelled from the Party and Army, but though arrested was later released.118
Meanwhile, in July 1937, when various illegalities were being perpetrated in the Ukraine without the consent of the leadership, Petrovsky had written to Kalinin, his titular superior, complaining that the principles of Party democracy were being overborne.119 This is consistent with his failure to join in the denunciations at the Ukrainian plenum that month.
He had, it is said, “become critical of the personality cult.”120 But on 4 February 1938 he was awarded the Order of Lenin for his sixtieth birthday. And he remained theoretically Chairman of the Ukrainian Supreme Soviet throughout the fall of all his colleagues. After a conversation with Stalin which he described as “short and painful,” he was removed, in June 1938, from his Ukrainian posts.121 This was, it was pointed out in Khrushchev’s time, done “unconstitutionally.”122 At the 7 November Parade, he did not appear with the leadership, and was henceforth not to be named in the listings.
A political case was concocted against Petrovsky in the usual way. The caretaker of a villa near Kiev which had been used by the Ukrainian leaders made, after beatings, a confession incriminating him. Petrovsky’s secretary is also reported under arrest in the same circumstances.123 A brother of Petrovsky is reported in the Butyrka in 1938.124
In March 1939, during the XVIIIth Congress, charges were made as a result of which he was not elected to the new Central Committee: he was accused of friendship with K. V. Sukhomlin, Ukrainian Politburo member since exposed as a Japanese spy; of having failed to report his knowledge of S. V. Kossior’s connections with foreign counter-revolutionary organizations; and of having (presumably in the 1920s) opposed Kaganovich’s nomination as Ukrainian First Secretary.125
In fact, there is no doubt that a case against him, long prepared, was now to be launched. But Stalin held his hand. Petrovsky was relieved of his membership in the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet (his last and titular appointment) on 31 May 1939 in a public fashion and with the title “Comrade”—an indication that his name was not yet unsayable.
He had been unable to get any employment for some months, living on whatever his wife could earn. Finally, in June 1939, he was allowed to take up the post of Assistant Director of the Museum of the Revolution, offered him by another former Duma member, Fedor Samoilov, which he held until Stalin’s death.126 His name disappeared from reference books, and most foreigners imagined that he had been executed. But it continued to appear in one single list, that of former Bolshevik members of the Duma. Stalin shot none of them;127 the others, all third-rate figures, survived to die natural deaths. Since I first noted this, an account has appeared from the Petrovsky family archives, in which Stalin shouts at Petrovsky that his former membership in the Duma would not save him.128 But it did, or something did.
Petrovsky survived Stalin, only dying in 1958. In fact, he was the first figure to be restored to favor after Stalin’s death. A decree of 28 April 1953129 awarded him the Order of the Red Banner of Labor in connection with his seventy-fifth birthday and “his services to the Soviet State.” His real birthday was on 4 February, at a time when Stalin was still alive, when nothing had been said of it. So the incident was quite plainly a conscious political demonstration, made during Beria’s attack on the Stalin heritage.
During the Purge period, Petrovsky had certainly suffered, if less than many. Yet it would perhaps not be inappropriate to recall that, when Commissar of Internal Affairs in 1918, he had ordered the unconditional shooting of all engaged in any sort of “White Guard” activity.130
At the same time as the February 1939 executions came an event which caused little stir. One last ex-oppositionist remained. Krupskaya had been able to do little during these years, though Stalin had allowed her to save from death one or two figures like I. D. Chigurin, arrested in 1937—even though, his health ruined and not fully rehabilitated, he had to live in poverty thereafter. Although still a member of the Central Committee, Krupskaya had only the minor job of Assistant People’s Commissar for Education, and even there was “deprived of the possibility of influencing decisions in education.”131
She died on 28 February, and Stalin himself carried the urn with her ashes at her funeral.
Nadezhda Krupskaya will no more protect
The innocent, the dying, those executed like rats132
even to the slight extent that she had done so. The very next day, the head of the Commissariat of Education’s publishing house ordered his subordinates, “Don’t print another word about Krupskaya.” A part of her works was sent off to the “special store” sections of libraries; part was buried in oblivion and not republished.133 One Soviet account has it that she was poisoned, but others deny it.134