The result so far was not entirely satisfactory to Stalin. The Party would still scarcely have accepted a direct incrimination of Zinoviev and Kamenev simply on trust, without the assassin being produced to testify to it in public. Moreover, after the first shock of Kirov’s death had died down, a strong element in the Politburo and elsewhere continued to put out Kirov’s own line of reconciliation and relaxation.
Negotiations were afoot with the imprisoned opposition leaders to get them to assume the entire guilt for reasons of Party discipline, but these were unproductive. On the other hand, they began to feel that it was in their own interests to do all they could to discourage terrorism, which could only lead to worse repressions against themselves and their followers. So they finally agreed to accept “moral responsibility” for the murder—in that the assassin could conceivably have been encouraged to his act by their political attitudes.
On 15 and 16 January, Zinoviev, Kamenev, Evdokimov, Bakayev, Kuklin, and fourteen others were brought to trial in Leningrad as the “Moscow Center.” Ulrikh again presided, and Vyshinsky prosecuted. The line taken was that, knowing the terrorist inclination of Kotolynov’s “Leningrad Center,” those now accused had given it political encouragement.
The new trial was not, however, reported fully. Only a three-quarter-page summary appeared in the press, with a few quotations from the evidence of Zinoviev and others admitting their partial guilt. The group was said to have been “exposed” by Bakayev and by Safarov, who was not on trial.49 Bakayev, who had been under interrogation for over a month, seems to have made the fullest confession. Zinoviev was reported as saying in court, “The former activity of the former opposition could not, by the force of objective circumstances, but stimulate the degeneration of those criminals.”50 He took full responsibility for those he had misled, and summed up by remarking that
the task that I see confronting me on this subject is to repent fully, frankly and sincerely, before the court of the working class, for what I understand to be a mistake and a crime, and to say it in such a way that it should all end, once and for all, for this group.51
But though this general acceptance of the moral responsibility of the opposition was made, charges of more sinister involvement were rejected. Kamenev expressed his lack of trust in the “witness” Safarov; he also stated flatly that he did not know of the existence of the “Moscow Center,” of which it now turned out he was an active member, though insofar as it existed he took responsibility for it.52 Zinoviev, too, said that many of those in the dock were unknown to him,53 and added that he learned of Kotolynov’s role only from the indictment in the “Leningrad Center” Case.54 In spite of the partial surrender of the oppositionists, it is clear that their stand was not fully satisfactory to Stalin and that a public trial would not have been a success.
On 16 January 1935 Zinoviev was sentenced to ten years’ imprisonment, Evdokimov to eight, Bakayev to eight, and Kamenev to five. The other sentences ranged from ten years to five. At the same time, it was announced that the NKVD Special Board had sentenced forty-nine people, including Zalutsky, to “confinement to concentration camps for a period of four to five years,” while twenty-nine others, including Safarov, had been sentenced to exile. The length of the sentences was in any case to prove unimportant, as there is no known instance of any of these figures, major or minor, ever being released. Two days after the trial (18 January 1935) a further secret circular on vigilance was issued by the Central Committee—an official call to all branches to start rooting out “enemies” which significantly condemned lack of vigilance as “a re-echoing of the Right deviation.”55 A fresh wave of arrests, running into tens of thousands, now struck all the former opposition and other suspects at local levels.
There was still one batch of prisoners from the Kirov Case left to be dealt with—the Leningrad NKVD leadership, whose forthcoming trial had been announced on 4 December. On 23 January they finally came before a court under, as ever, Ulrikh. Instead of the nine originally charged, there were now twelve—and Zaporozhets was among them. Medved and Zaporozhets were charged with failure to observe the basic requirements of State security, in that “having received information about the preparations for the attempt on S. M. Kirov … they failed to take the necessary measures to prevent the assassination … although they had every possible means of arresting it.”
The sentences were extremely light. One official, Baltsevich, got ten years for—in addition to the main charge—unspecified wrongful acts during the investigation. Medved got three years, and the others either two or three. The sentences were specifically to be served in a kontslager (concentration camp), a word soon to fall into disuse.
These sentences struck observant NKVD officers as totally out of proportion to the charges, especially as those sentenced for mere “negligence” got two years, and those for “criminal negligence” (apart from Baltsevich) three years—only one year more! Stalin’s natural reaction to a criminal failure to guard against a genuine assassination attempt—of the sort which might strike him next—would have been the exemplary execution of all the NKVD defaulters; in fact, they could scarcely have avoided a charge of complicity in the actual crime. But the whole thing became even odder and more sinister when it was discovered that Medved and Zaporozhets were being treated as though the sentences were little more than a tedious formality.
As was later said at the 1938 Trial, Yagoda displayed “exceptional and unusual solicitude” towards them. He had “entrusted the care of the families of Zaporozhets and Medved” to his personal secretary, Bulanov; he had “sent them for detention to the camp in an unusual way—not in the car for prisoners, but in a special through car. Before sending them, he had Zaporozhets and Medved brought to see him.”56
This is, of course, impossible to conceive as a personal initiative of Yagoda’s. A higher protection was being provided. Moreover, NKVD officers learned that Pauker and Shanin (Head of the NKVD Transport Department) were sending records and radio sets to Zaporozhets in exile—contrary to the strict Stalinist rule of instantly breaking even with one’s best friend, once arrested.57
After the various odd circumstances of the whole Kirov Case, it was this above all which convinced many officials that Stalin had approved, if not arranged, the Kirov killing. The true story gradually filtered through the NKVD apparatus. Even then it was recounted with great reserve. Both Orlov and Krivitsky were told, as the former puts it, “The whole affair is so dangerous that it is healthier not to know too much about it.”58
A prisoner from the White Sea Canal camps reports that Medved appeared at the headquarters of the camp complex, arriving by train in a special compartment and being put up by the head of the project, Rappaport, in his own house, where he gave a party for him. Medved was wearing an NKVD uniform without the insignia of his rank. He then went on, in the same style, to Solovetsk.59
When the ice of the Okhotsk Sea made the move possible, Medved, Zaporozhets, and all the others we can trace were sent to Kolyma, where they were technically prisoners, but in fact given high posts—Zaporozhets as head of the road-building administration in the Kolyma complex.60
As to the final fate of these NKVD exiles, Khrushchev was to remark twenty years later: “After the murder of Kirov, top functionaries of the Leningrad NKVD were given very light sentences, but in 1937 they were shot. We can assume that they were shot in order to cover the traces of the organizers of Kirov’s killing.”61