In the key organizational posts in the Party and Purge machinery, it was another matter. Nikolai Yezhov, a tested and ruthless operator, became a member of the Secretariat, and on 23 February was appointed in addition to the key post of Head of the Party Control Commission.10 Another prominent young Stalinist, Kaganovich’s protégé Nikita Khrushchev, was made First Secretary of the Moscow Party organization a few days later.11 Andrei Vyshinsky had been made Prosecutor-General by June. And by 8 July 1935 Georgi Malenkov was Yezhov’s chief deputy as Assistant Director of the Cadres Department of the Central Committee.12
Thus by mid-1935, Stalin had men of his personal selection, who were to prove themselves complete devotees of the Purge, in control of Leningrad and Moscow, and in the Transcaucasus, where Beria ruled; in the Control Commission and the key departments of the Party Secretariat; and in the Prosecutor-Generalship; and if the leadership of the NKVD was later to prove unsatisfactory to him, it was at least totally under his control.
In the formal organs of Party power, the Central Committee and the Politburo, he had not yet achieved the same total grip. Many of the provincial committees were still headed by men who dragged their feet. And the Ukraine was under the control of the same style of leadership which it had been necessary to remove in Leningrad by an assassin’s bullet. But a firm basis for attack on these old cadres had been established.
A quiet purge of the ex-oppositionists now in jail continued. The leading ex-Trotskyite, Ivar Smilga, arrested on 1 January 1935, was secretly sentenced on 26 March 1935 to imprisonment in the Verkhne-Uralsk isolator (later, apparently on 10 January 1937, to death) by the Military Collegium.13
In March and April 1935 came a secret trial of the “Moscow Counter-Revolutionary Organization—‘Workers’ Opposition’ Group.” A. G. Shlyapnikov, Lenin’s chief representative in Russia during the First World War, had headed the intra-Party Workers’ Opposition, which had opposed the bureaucracy until Lenin banned such groupings in 1921. He spent his later years sometimes free, sometimes in jail, sometimes in exile in the Arctic, or working on the Lower Volga Shipping Line. Like Smilga, he was rearrested on 1 January 1935. Shlyapnikov, his chief henchman S. P. Medvedev, and thirteen others were now sentenced by the Special Board to various terms of imprisonment, though worse faced them later.14 Shlyapnikov’s wife was sent to labor camp.15
The same piecemeal progress was being made, during this outwardly quiet period, in thought control and in the Party purge. A circular of 7 March 1935 ordered the removal from libraries of all the works of Trotsky, Zinoviev, and Kamenev. Another, dated 21 June, extended the list to include Preobrazhensky and others.16
A secret letter dated 19 May 1935 from the Central Committee called for the special investigation of “enemies of the Party and the working class” who had remained within the Party. On 27 June, a special (and evidently typical) Central Committee resolution on the Western province censured the local officials in charge of the Party purge for insufficient vigilance.
In the Smolensk rayon, 455 out of 4,100 members examined were expelled, after 700 oral and 200 written denunciations.17 One member was denounced for having admitted that he had in his possession “a platform of the Trotskyites.” A professor had given a favorable character reference to a Trotskyite and now “never expressed his attitude toward the Trotskyite counter-revolution.” A group of worker members of the Party wrote denouncing their local leadership for refusing to listen to denunciations. Typical of remarks at Party meetings were such attacks as “There is information that Smolov is married to the daughter of the merchant Kovalev, and that the Party organizer of the second group of the Institute is the son of a person who was given a strict reprimand.”18 By 1 August, as a report signed by Yezhov and Malenkov noted, 23 percent of the Party cards in this representative area had been withdrawn or held pending investigation.19
Even more striking were some of the changes in Soviet law. A decree of 30 March made the illegal carrying of a knife punishable by five years’ imprisonment. A decree of 9 June, later incorporated into the Criminal Code (Article 58 [i.a, i.b, ix]), was a much more startling departure, exemplifying in full the style of the Stalin epoch. It provided the death penalty for flight abroad by both civil and military; in the case of the military, members of the family aware of the intended offense were subject to up to ten years’ imprisonment, while (the real novelty) those who knew nothing whatever about it—“the remaining adult members of the traitor’s family, and those living with him or dependent on him at the time”—were made liable to a five-year exile.
A Soviet law book, justifying this, speaks approvingly of
the application of special measures in respect of the adult members of the family of a serviceman-traitor in the event of the latter’s flight or escape across the frontier in those cases where the adult member of the family in no way contributed to the act of treachery that was being prepared or executed and did not even know of it…. The political significance of it consists in the strengthening of the overall preventive action of the criminal law for the purpose of averting so heinous a felony as the action of a serviceman in crossing or flying across the frontier, as the result of which the guilty party cannot himself be subjected to punishment.20
In fact, we have a crude and frank institution of the hostage system—a sign of the way Stalin was thinking in other cases as well.fn1
More extraordinary still, and just as relevant to Stalin’s general plans, was the decree of 7 April 1935 extending all penalties, including death, down to twelveyear-old children.21
This decree was noted in the West, where it made very bad anti-Soviet propaganda. Many people wondered why Stalin had made such a law public. Even if he meant to shoot children, this could be done without publicity. Indeed, an NKVD veteran tells how the bezprizorniye—homeless orphans of the wars and famines—had been reduced by indiscriminate shooting two or three years earlier.22
Stalin’s motives, as it turned out, were centered elsewhere. He could now threaten oppositionists quite “legally” with the death of their children as accomplices if they did not carry out his wishes. The mere fact of his accepting the disadvantages of publicizing the law gave it a sinister seriousness.
Why the age limit of twelve was chosen is uncertain. Presumably, there were oppositionists whose children were just within that limit. On the other hand, it might be suggested that Stalin had a rough precedent to which the opposition had made no objection. The youngest member of the Tsar’s family, executed in the cellar at Ekaterinburg on 16 July 1918, was the Tsarevich Alexis, aged thirteen.
As to the precise timing, while it is true that Stalin often showed great foresight in his maneuvers, it seems that we must associate this decree with another case that was just coming up.
Almost nothing was published on the matter. But in effect, it was an attempt to link the opposition with an alleged plot against the life of Stalin in the library of the Central Executive Committee, by a young woman.23 Starting in January 1935, there were scores of arrests: eventually, according to a recent Soviet account, 110 in all. Nine cleaners, a porter, a twenty-year-old telephone girl, eighteen librarians, six persons working in the Secretariat of the Presidium of the Central Executive Committee, sixteen from the Kremlin Commandant’s administration, and other army men. In fact, there were two main “terrorist groups,” one in the library, the other in the Commandant’s headquarters, linked by the fact that one of the librarians was the sister of the leading victim from the Komendatura; and a “White Guard” counter-revolutionary group of five, all from non-Kremlin jobs, was thrown in for good measure.