The heavy pressure exerted by Stalin over the summer had to some degree advanced his plans for a purge. The dissolution of the Society uniting the Old Bolsheviks, the campaign against the “rotten liberalism” of Yenukidze, and the fresh sentence on Kamenev had taken things a step further. Nevertheless, the going had been hard, and it had been impossible to produce a public trial or even a death sentence for Kamenev. Further and more thorough preparation was evidently necessary. The next months were spent in consolidating the gains achieved and laying the groundwork for an NKVD set piece to crush the opposition.
THE NKVD PREPARES A TRIAL
From the point of view of the purges, the period from July 1935 to August 1936 was to all outward appearances something of an idyllic interlude. In the sense that nations without any history are the happiest, it seemed a greatly improved time. There were no deaths of Politburo members, no trials of important oppositionists, no removals of leading political figures. The harvest, too, was reasonably good.
A plenum of the Central Committee held in December 1935 passed a long resolution on checking Party documents, which was later to be the organizational basis of the Purge at the grass roots. But in itself, it appeared harmless. Moreover, it was announced at the same time that the purge of the Party ordered in 1933 was now complete.
The draft of a new Constitution had been occupying the minds of Bukharin and Radek, as the active members of a Commission set up for the purpose in February 1935.41 It was ready in June 1936, and Bukharin, in particular, thought of it as a document which would make it impossible for the people any longer to be “pushed aside.”42
It was indeed a model document, giving, for example, guarantees of freedom from arbitrary arrest (Article 127), the inviolability of the home and secrecy of correspondence (Article 128), and indeed freedom of speech, of the press, of meetings, and of demonstrations (Article 125). That Bukharin, who was mainly responsible for it, thought that it might be implemented shows that even he now imagined that a genuine relaxation was taking place.
Bukharin’s view of the Communists at this time was “They are all good people, ready for any sacrifice. If they are acting badly now, it is not because they are bad, but because the situation is bad. They must be persuaded that the country is not against them, but only that a change of policy is necessary.” He had come around to the view that Bolshevism needed humanizing, and had looked to the intellectuals—in particular, Ivan Pavlov and Gorky—to help him. Pavlov, the great physiologist, was strongly opposed to the Communists. When Bukharin’s name was put up for election to the Academy of Sciences in the mid-1920s, Pavlov spoke against him as “a person who is up to his knees in blood.” Eventually, however, the two men had become friendly. Pavlov himself was indeed now dead. But Bukharin is even quoted as wanting the intelligentsia to put up candidates under the New Constitution as a sort of “second party,43 not to oppose the regime, but to give constructive criticism.
In reality, Stalin had simply changed his tactics. Under the calm façade, there was furious activity. He had ready all the ingredients which he was to bring together into the set pieces of the Great Purge. First, he had developed direct control of the Secret Police and had set up other mechanisms of power responsible to himself alone and capable, given careful tactics, of overcoming the official hierarchy of Party and State. Second, the tradition of faked trials for political purposes had been established and not objected to in the Party, whose tradition of maintaining flat untruths for political purposes was in any case of still longer standing. Third, the former oppositionists had, under the particular pressures available in Communist life, already been induced to make admissions of error which they did not sincerely believe to be correct, in what they took to be the Party’s interest. Fourth, his operatives were accustomed to the use of torture, blackmail, and falsification—if as yet mainly on non-Party figures.
If his technical arrangements were complete, the same was evidently not so of his political preparations. It was still quite possible that he might have met with formidable opposition if he had set about the problem in the same way again. He chose a different method. The case was to be prepared in secret—not too difficult a matter, as the doomed Zinovievites and Trotskyites were already under arrest. It would take its course during the summer vacation, and in the absence of Stalin in particular. The death sentences would not be mentioned until they were pronounced, and even then every indication would be given that they would be commuted. But they would, on the contrary, be carried out without discussion.
When Stalin was retreating on the question of a death sentence for Kamenev, he was taking the first steps to gain the same result by his alternative method. A group of Komsomol students in the town of Gorky, said to have planned an attempt on Stalin, was one of many arrested at this time. They had not actually done anything beyond discussion, but already even this made the death penalty a foregone conclusion. This group was confessing to the plots to kill Stalin by early November 1935, though without implicating any of the Zinovievite or other accused of the August 1936 Tria1.44 The trial routine was about to be gone through when the case was held for “further investigation,” under instructions from the Secretariat.45
The NKVD selected this particular group because it had a ready-made way of linking the students with Trotsky, and hence of building a political conspiracy around them. The link was through one of its own men, Valentin Olberg.
Olberg was a former agent of the Foreign Department of the NKVD, and had worked in Berlin as a secret informer among the Trotskyites. In 1930, he had attempted to get a post as Trotsky’s secretary, one of the first of the many NKVD attempts to penetrate Trotsky’s ménage (which ended in success in 1940). Since 1935, Olberg had been working for the NKVD Secret Political Department, exposing Trotskyite tendencies in the important Gorky Pedagogical Institute, where the students in question worked: his appointment had been opposed by the local Party officials, in particular Yelin, Head of the Provincial Committee’s Propaganda and Education Section, since Olberg lacked qualifications and was a foreigner. Yelin, moreover, rightly complained that his documents seemed forged, and appealed to the Central Committee; but Yezhov then personally imposed Olberg.
By the beginning of 1936, the NKVD had made a good beginning in extending the scope of this Komsomol plot. Olberg and some professors at the Institute were arrested. Olberg, interrogated on 25 to 28 January, denied all the charges. Eventually, he is reported ordered as a matter of Party and police discipline to confess to being a link between the Gorky group and Trotsky. He was told that this was simply an NKVD assignment, and that whatever the verdict of the court he would be freed and given a post in the Far East. He then signed whatever was required of him.46 This was, in brief, that he had been sent by Trotsky to arrange the assassination of Stalin, recruiting professors and students to make the attempt when they went to Moscow for the 1936 May Day Parade.
The processing of the Olberg case was not straightforward, and took time. Yelin, who knew too much, was executed without tria1,47 though he was to be mentioned several times during the public hearings. Olberg’s brother, P. Olberg, was implicated, and his evidence was to be quoted in court, though he was not produced. Other accused included the Head of the Pedagogical Institute, I. K. Fedotov. He confessed, but perhaps did not seem reliable enough to present in public, for he was not brought to trial. Nelidov, a teacher of chemistry who was required as the hypothetical maker of bombs, was not a Communist and, in spite of violent pressure by one of the most vicious of the interrogators, the younger Kedrov, was not broken.