THE XVIIITH CONGRESS
The XVIIIth Party Congress on 10 to 21 March 1939, which saw Yezhov’s fall, was the scene of the complete consolidation of all Stalin had striven for since that of 1934. The changes were extraordinary.
Of the 1,966 delegates to the previous Congress, 1,108 had been arrested for counter-revolutionary crimes.135 Even of the residue lucky enough to survive, only 59 now appeared as delegates. Of these, 24 were old Central Committee members, leaving only 35 of the 1,827 rank-and-file delegates of five years previously—less than 2 percent! This is an indication of how literally we may take the thesis that Stalin created an entirely new Party in this period.
The list of the Central Committee membership now elected shows that 55 of the 71 who had been full members in 1934 had gone, and 60 of the 68 candidate members. Of the 115 names no longer appearing, which included some natural and some possibly natural deaths, 98 had been shot, as Khrushchev later stated in the 1956 Secret Speech. The most recent official account gives the total sooner or later killed by an executioner, by a murderer (Kirov), or by their own hand as 107.136 The discrepancy is due to the inclusion or otherwise of suicides, assassinations and so on, and of those shot at a later date, such as Lozovsky.
In the new Committee one can note the groupings—no longer political factions, as in the pre-Stalin period, but personal followings—which were to contend for Stalin’s favor over the next fourteen years, and for power thereafter.
Zhdanov and his group are well represented, with himself, Shcherbakov, Kosygin, and A. A. Kuznetsov as full members, and Popkov and Rodionov as candidate members. The first two were to be the alleged victims of the later Doctors’ Plot, and three of the other four were to be shot in the “Leningrad Case” of 1949–1950.
Another group was associated with Malenkov: he and V. M. Andrianov in the Central Committee; Pervukhin, Ponomarenko, Pegov, Tevosyan, and Malyshev as candidate members—together with Shatalin, Malenkov’s closest associate, on the Revision Commission.
Beria was better represented still. With himself, Bagirov, and V. N. Merkulov on the Central Committee, and Gvishiani, Goglidze, Kobulov, Dekanozov, Arutinov, Bakradze, and Charkviani as candidate members (plus Tsanava on the Revision Commission), we see his control in the Secret Police and in the political mechanism in the Caucasus. (There were four other NKVD representatives—Nikishov, Head of Dalstroy; V. P. Zhuravliev; Kruglov; and Maslennikov as candidate members—a total of ten secret police on the Central Committee, by far the highest number yet.)
Khrushchev, too, had his band—four full members of the Committee from his own selection in the Ukraine.
Stalin’s own personal group was also, of course, fully represented, with Mekhlis, Shkiryatov, Poskrebyshev, Shchadenko, and Vyshinsky.
In the Politburo, the losses had been less great than at the lower level. But they were still remarkable. Kirov had been assassinated, and Kuibyshev had died or been poisoned. Ordzhonikidze had been either murdered or forced into a suicide which was scarcely different from murder. Rudzutak had been shot eight months earlier; Kossior, Chubar, and Postyshev, just before the Congress. Petrov-sky had been removed, and was in Moscow, uncertain of his fate and begging for a menial post. Of the four who had been brought in between the Congresses, Khrushchev and Zhdanov were balanced by Eikhe, in prison awaiting execution, and the doomed Yezhov. Of four of the fallen leaders, it has now been specifically said that they were tortured (Rudzutak, Eikhe, Kossior, and Chubar).
On 22 March 1939, four promotions were made in and to the Politburo, of those who had served Stalin most satisfactorily during the recent period. Zhdanov and Khrushchev were raised to full membership; Beria became a candidate member, as did Shvernik, who after Tomsky’s removal in June 1929 had been appointed head of the unions. He had adequately transformed them into organizations for mobilizing and disciplining labor.
There is a notable difference in Stalin’s treatment of the more senior generation of his supporters on the Politburo and those promoted later. If we take the members of that body who supported him against the oppositions: of the eleven promoted to it up to July 1926, six survived right through the Purges, two were physically destroyed by informal means (Kirov and Ordzhonikidze), one died in doubtful circumstances (Kuibyshev), one, though removed from his posts, survived until after Stalin’s own death (Petrovsky), and only one was “tried” and shot (Rudzutak). But of the eight promoted from July 1926 until the end of 1937, only one (Zhdanov) survived. All the others were executed.
This distinction should perhaps be interpreted as follows: in the earlier period, it was not a question of Stalin simply nominating rapidly promoted figures from the second rank of the Party. He was bound to rely on men who had reached high position to some extent on their reputations, and who in any case were widely enough known to the leading circles of the Party and had good enough Party records for their presence not to appear absurd on a body still containing distinguished and widely known oppositionists.
They were men who, in however minor a way compared with the Trotskys and Bukharins, yet represented a continuity with Lenin’s leading cadre. Some of them, like Kaganovich, were eager supporters of the Great Terror. Others, like Molotov, may have had qualms but became enthusiastic accomplices, whether through fear or from other motives. More reluctant figures, like Kalinin, remained useful figureheads. In disposing of them, Stalin inclined to roundabout and concealed methods. But the Eikhes and Postyshevs carried little more Party prestige than the other members of the Central Committee, and they were as readily expendable if they failed to satisfy.
The new leadership, Stalinist in every sense, made the Congress a triumphal celebration. At the same time, dissociating themselves from Yezhovism, the most notorious Purge operators deplored more strongly than ever the excesses of the Purge.
Shkiryatov quoted at length an incident of a man in Archangel wrongly removed from his job, arrested, and restored as a result of an appeal to the Central Committee. Zhdanov referred to a man who had written 142 denunciations, all false, and raised a number of cases in which individual Party members had been wrongly expelled, including such incidents as one in Tambov province, where the expulsion and wrongful arrest of one man led to the expulsion from the Party of his wife and seven other members, and from the Komsomol of twenty-eight Young Communists, while ten non-Party teachers lost their jobs.
Khrushchev’s ally Serdyuk expressed horror at a denunciation of a large number of enemies of the people in the Party apparatus in Kiev which had turned out on investigation to be signed by someone using a false name, and to be in the handwriting of the Head of the Cultural Section of one of the District Committees. Another case, also in Kiev, was of a woman teacher who in 1936 and 1937 had denounced a large number of innocent people, and also obtained by blackmail and threats 5,000 rubles from various organizations and three free trips to a resort; Serdyuk explained to the disgusted delegates that her slanders had been written at the dictation of “enemies of the people since unmasked,” and that she herself had been sentenced to five years.
Stalin himself summed up: the Purge had been accompanied by “grave mistakes,” indeed “more mistakes than might have been expected.” “Undoubtedly,” he went on, “we shall have no further need of resorting to the method of mass purges. Nevertheless, the Purge of 1933–6 was unavoidable and its results, on the whole, were beneficial.”137
The phrase “1933–6” might have struck the layman a little oddly. The fact is that the expulsions from the Party at that time had been constitutionally and publicly authorized, while the later Purge had not ever been formalized, and so could be taken as irrelevant.