Party executions, in fact, continued. Over the next years, Stalin and Beria wound up most of Yezhov’s unfinished business.
In July 1939, the Prosecutor’s sanction for Eikhe’s arrest was at last obtained, to some extent legalizing the position. Eikhe was presented with the charges against him on 25 October 1939, and wrote to Stalin protesting his innocence—and blaming the frame-up in part on Trotskyites he now took credit for having persecuted in West Siberia. Ushakov and Nikolayev-Zhurid, he added, had “utilized the knowledge that my broken ribs have not properly mended and have caused me great pain,” as the result of which he had incriminated himself and others. He asked for an end to “the vile provocation which wound itself like a snake round many persons, in large measure through my meanness and criminal slander.”138 There is a story that, temporarily insane by torture in 1938, he had cried out that he confessed his “guilt of belonging to a criminal organization which goes by the name of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party (bolsheviks).”139
One of the charges against Eikhe is a trifle mysterious. He was accused of being responsible for certain “resolutions of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party (bolsheviks) and of the Council of People’s Commissars.” He pleaded that the resolutions in question “were not made on my initiative and without my participation,” and were “in any case correct.” Those made without his “participation” can only have been resolutions of the Council of People’s Commissars, to which he did not belong until October 1937. The natural explanation would seem to be that the charge was a general one, made against a number of accused, some of whom had participated.
Eikhe’s letters to Stalin were ignored, though evidently kept on file. On 2 February 1940 he was finally brought before a court, where he withdrew his confessions and again attributed them to torture by the investigator, and was then shot. (His wife was also executed.)140 It is interesting, in view of the previous association of political and military executions, that Admiral Dushenov, Commander of the Northern Fleet, former sailor on the Aurora, perished on 3 February (though on one in other ways inaccurate fictional account, he died in a labor camp).141 But these executions are chiefly remarkable as being included in a final settlement with the Yezhovites. The operation seems to have taken place in two phases: one around 26 and 27 January, and the other around 2 to 4 February. Frinovsky was shot on 3 February, and NKVD veteran M. A. Trilisser, Soviet representative on the Executive Committee of the Comintern (under the pseudonym Moskvin), on 2 February, together with Mikhail Kol’stov and the producer Meyerhold. Meyerhold’s alleged accomplice in the writers’ conspiracy, Isaak Babel, had been shot on 27 January, charged in addition with links with Yezhov. We now learn that several veteran NKVD men—I. M. Kedrov, L. I. Reykhman, and V. P. Golubev—were shot on 25 to 27 January while others, like Ushakov and Nikolayev-Zhwid, are also given as shot “in January 1940”—so they preceded their victim Eikhe to the grave, if only by days and as part of the same alleged conspiracy. Some recent Soviet sources give 1 April 1940 as Yezhov’s death date, but a more authoritative statement says “January 1940,”142 so this set of killings seems to mark Stalin’s final winding up of the Yezhovshchina.
None of those liquidated at this time could be considered as anything resembling an alternative political leadership to which the Party or the country might have turned in a crisis of the regime. In fact, few figures of any repute still survived. Bubnov had been shot, or died in prison, on 12 January 1940.fn1 (His daughter Valya was sent to labor camp.)143 And the last leading figure of the Stalinist cadres to go was Antipov, who (presumably having been the token non-death sentence in one of the earlier mass killings) was liquidated in Stalin’s elimination during the first German advance of all former such cadres remaining. Stalin’s victory on the political front had been complete. Now, in the disaster arising from his own miscalculation, no move to replace him was possible. Subjected to this very severe test, the Purge proved to have accomplished its object.
BOOK III AFTERMATH
… hope once crushed, less quick to spring again.
Matthew Arnold
15
HERITAGE OF TERROR
None of the evils which totalitarianism … claims to remedy is worse than totalitarianism itself.
Albert Camus
“Zachto—why?” The last words of Yakov Livshits, Old Bolshevik and Deputy People’s Commissar, as he awaited execution on 30 January 1937, got no answer. During the few remaining months that old Party members were still at liberty and able, occasionally at least, to talk of such things, his question was much repeated. If experienced politicians felt baffled, the man in the street was even more uncomprehending. “I asked myself and others, why, what for? No one could give me an answer.”1 As for victims, the first words on entering a cell were almost always, we are told, a shaken “But why, why?”2 The prison and camp literature tells of the same phrase, “Why?” often found written on cell walls, and carved into the sides of prison wagons and on the planks of the transit camps.3 The old partisan Dubovoyfn1 (whose long white beard, of which he was very proud, the examining magistrate had torn out) even developed in jail the theory that the Purge was the result of an increase in the number of sunspots.4
The simplest form of true answer would, of course, be “to destroy or disorganize all possible sources of opposition to Stalin’s progress to absolute rule.” But we can also see, in the system he created after his victory, the specific form of despotism for which he had sacrificed the nation and Party.
The victory was inevitably marked by a good deal of dislocation, and stability had not been achieved when the Soviet Union was faced with international emergencies, starting with the Finnish War of 1939 to 1940, which became a desperate struggle for mere existence in the four-year war with the Nazis from 1941 to 1945, and its of reconstruction. It was not until 1947–1948 that the Stalinist State became politically and institutionally stabilized.
But meanwhile, two main objects had already been accomplished. A vast number of past or potential “hostile” elements had been destroyed or sent to labor camps, and the rest of the population reduced to the most complete silence and obedience. And, on the other hand, the Communist Party itself had been turned into something entirely new.
This political transformation is to some extent masked by the fact that the organizational forms remained the same. But, in fact, the discontinuity between the Party of 1934 and the Party of 1939 was radical. The people opposed to Stalin had already been almost entirely eliminated from the leading organs of the party. Over the Purge period, the Stalinists themselves, except for a small and peculiar personal following, were destroyed. The extent of the discontinuity is plain if we consider the delegates to the XVIIth and XVIIIth Congresses. As we have seen, and it is worth repeating, less than 2 percent of the rank-and-file delegates of 1934 held their positions in 1939. The Communist Party of 1939 was more different from that of 1934 than Buchanan’s Democratic Party was from Andrew Jackson’s. If the latter case is more evident to historians, it is partly because, in the Communist case, emphasis on the continuous tradition, and thus concealment of the change, were of much greater political importance to the rulers.