For the moment nothing was done on either side. A Central Committee was elected, consisting almost solely of Stalinist veterans of the intra-Party struggle, but including Pyatakov among its full members and Sokolnikov, Bukharin, Rykov, and Tomsky among its candidates. Of the 139 members and candidate members now elected, 99 (that is, more than 70 percent) were to die violent deaths over the next five years—and eight others later on.40
The leading organs elected by the new Central Committee reflected a stalemate. The Politburo was no more satisfactory to Stalin than the one which had blocked him over the Ryutin issue in 1932. And, in particular, this time Kirov was elected not only to the Politburo, but to the Secretariat as well, where he joined Stalin, Kaganovich, and Stalin’s equally sinister protégé Zhdanov.
The Central Control Commission which had failed Stalin in 1932 was reduced in status and lost its remnant of independence from the political leadership; Kaganovich became its head. But Rudzutak was brought back to the Politburo, though with reduced seniority. He had been a full Politburo member before taking up the CCC post. Now he was the junior candidate member. This was the only change in the Politburo apart from the addition to candidate membership of Pavel Postyshev, “tall and thin as a lath, with a grating bass voice. No fool … but careless of others’ feelings,”41 Stalin’s latest and toughest emissary in the Ukrainian campaign.
The leading Party organs elected by the Congress were not to be the only bodies to play important roles in the forthcoming period. While the overt political struggle of the past decade had been going on, more sinister developments were taking place in what might be called the technical side of despotic rule. The Secret Police, founded in 1917, had become a large and highly organized body, and had gained great experience in arbitrary arrest, repression, and violence. None of the oppositionists had objected to it; Bukharin in particular had been effusively enthusiastic about its role.
In July 1934 the OGPU was abolished, or rather subsumed into a new All-Union NKVD. The thin-faced terror veteran Genrikh Yagoda was placed at the head of the new organization. His First Deputy was an old adherent and friend of Stalin, Ya. D. Agranov, who had been in charge of the brutal “investigation” of the Kronstadt rebels.42
The new body was to be efficiently deployed over the following years. Its increasingly privileged and powerful officers were to make its emblem—a serpent being struck down by a sword—prevail everywhere against the hammer and sickle of the Party membership. From Politburo members down, no one was to be exempt from their attentions. They themselves were to remain under the careful control of the supreme political authority, Stalin. In addition to police organization proper, a number of key measures date from this period. After the announcement in January 1933 of the forthcoming purge of the Party, a central Purge Commission was formed (on 29 April) which included Yezhov and M. F. Shkiryatov.
It is at this time, too, that what was to be, in many respects, the most important body of all came to the surface: the “Special Sector” of the Central Committee,43 headed by Poslcrebyshev. It was in effect Stalin’s private secretariat, the immediate organ for carrying out his will. It has been compared with Nicholas I’s Personal Chancellery of His Imperial Majesty. All sensitive issues were effectively handled through this channel—for example, the assassination of Trotsky.44
In connection with this personal secretariat, a special State Security Committee appears to have been organized; the main figures are believed to have been Poskrebyshev, Shkiryatov, Agranov, and Yezhov, at that time head of the Records and Assignment Department of the Central Committee.45 Shkiryatov’s key role is implied in an official description of his being “representative of the Central Control Commission to the Politburo and the Orgburo.”46
On 20 June 1933 a Prosecutor-Generalship of the USSR was established. Andrei Vyshinsky, though at first ranking only as First Deputy Prosecutor-General, was the most important figure. Links with the OGPU, the “legality and regularity” of whose acts the Prosecutors were supposed to check, were provided for.
Another major element in the Stalinist State had already emerged: the show trial. In 1922, a trial expressly designed by Lenin to crush the Social Revolutionary Party had been presided over, ironically enough, by Pyatakov. Although there was an important element of falsification, in that many of the supposed prisoners were agents provocateurs, the genuine Social Revolutionaries were given reasonable freedom of defense. And death sentences (much to Lenin’s anger) were abandoned under heavy pressure from the Socialist parties of Western Europe. In 1928 came the first trial in a newer mode—that of the Shakhty engineers, presided over by Vyshinsky. This was the first testing ground of the more recent technique of founding a case on false confessions extracted by terror. Over the following years came three similar great set pieces: the so-called Industrial Party of 1930, the Mensheviks in 1931, and the Metro-Vic engineers in 1933. The oppositionists, including Trotsky in exile, made no public objection to these horrible farces.
Thus a positive machinery of despotism had been created outside of and independent of the official political organs. Everywhere, in fact, the potential mechanisms for further terror were in existence, and manned for Stalin not by allies who might balk, but by accomplices who could be relied on against enemies, or friends, inside or outside the Party.
Meanwhile, the official leadership retained its power. The Stalinist writer Alexander Fadeyev commented on the Politburo, “They are bound together by the manly, principled, iron, gay friendship of the bogalyrs.”47 Half were to meet death or disgrace in the next four years. Kirov was the first to go.
There is little in his past record to suggest that he could have been a major leader. Even if Stalin had dropped dead, the Politburo contained men at least equally forceful, and more experienced, who would not willingly have submitted to Kirov. Pyatakov’s opinion was that if Stalin went, Kaganovich would be able to take over. Even granted the defeat of the entire Stalinist wing, we have no ground for any certainty that Kirov could have coped with his seniors among the “moderates.” But meanwhile, he seems to have presented the most awkward immediate problem from Stalin’s point of view.
Kirov was the best orator the Party had produced since Trotsky. And the concern he had shown, now that the Stalinist victory was complete, for the welfare of the Leningrad workers was beginning to gain him a certain amount of personal popularity. In the Party itself, this popularity was genuine and unqualified. But the most significant thing was the fact that Kirov controlled a definite source of power—the Leningrad organization. When the Leningrad delegates demonstratively led the applause for Kirov at the XVIIth Congress, it may have reminded Stalin of the similar support given by an earlier Leningrad Party generation to Zinoviev.
Throughout Stalin’s career this powerful fief was viewed as a seedbed of rebellion—from his removal of Zinoviev in 1926 to his slaughter of the third generation of Leningrad Communists in 1950. And it is true that in the great northern metropolis, no longer—since 1918—the country’s capital, a certain alienation from the great mass of the hinterland was still present. Russia’s “window on Europe” had always been a sort of advanced outpost. Its citizens thought of themselves as far ahead, even dangerously far, of the rest of the country in civilization and the arts of the West. In this youngest of the great cities of Europe—founded, indeed, after New York, Baltimore, Boston, and Philadelphia—Kirov was truly showing signs of a certain independence.