On 23 September 1936 there was an explosion in the Tsentralnaya Mine at Kemerovo. Its director, Noskov, and several of his subordinates were at once arrested. His superior, Norkin, Head of the Kemerovo Combined Works Construction Trust since 1932, was arrested on 30 September.37 For the NKVD this was a most useful line of responsibility, as Norkin was an immediate link with Drobnis and, through him, with Muralov. A whole “Trotskyite nest” in West Siberia, operating moreover under the direct orders of the Deputy People’s Commissar for Heavy Industry, Pyatakov, was thus laid open to easy attack. To make it yet easier, the NKVD ordered its representative in the Kemerovo industrial area, Shestov, to accept the role of accomplice.38
It was thus possible to establish the idea of widespread sabotage before Pyatakov and the others came to trial. From 19 to 22 November, a great trial took place in Novosibirsk, before a court of the Military Collegium under Ulrikh, in which the accidents in the mines and factories of that city and Kemerovo were charged against Noskov and eight other defendants, including a German engineer, Stickling. In addition, the charge was now put forward that an attempt had been made to assassinate Molotov. The defendants were linked, through Drobnis and Shestov (who appeared as “witnesses”), with Muralov and Pyatakov.
At this trial there were confessions, and even documents, about an anti-Soviet printing establishment. It seems that this actually existed. The cellar where it had stood still showed signs of its presence three years later. But the whole thing had been an NKVD operation. The job had been done at night by prisoners under guard awaiting execution. As to the thousands of leaflets supposed to have been distributed, it was clear that this had not happened, since anyone caught with such a leaflet would have been arrested, and no one in Kemerovo knew of any such arrests. One local commented, “Maybe the conspirators printed them up just to provide themselves with bedtime stories.”39
One of the accused, the German engineer Stickling, was not given a death sentence. Later, in the Gestapo prison in Lublin, he said that his confession was false, and implied that it had been obtained because the NKVD was able to blackmail him about his private life.40
A Soviet industrialist who was sent to Kemerovo in 1939, and actually took over the very office from which Norkin had allegedly organized his crimes, has produced an account of the background of the trial. As a prominent local figure pointed out, though the saboteurs were now dead, the accidents still went on. In any case, if engineers had really wished to make trouble, it was clear that they could have blown the whole place to pieces. Moreover, in the files there were many reports from the executed men sent by them to the Commissariat of Heavy Industry coal administration warning about the conditions which were bound to lead to accidents.41
But the Tsentralnaya Mine disaster was not the only one which a determined investigation could turn up in the Kuzbas. On 29 October, a Commission of Experts was sent to Kemerovo to investigate two explosions and other accidents which had taken place in the plants of the Kemerovo Combined Works Construction Trust in February, March, and April 1936. A similar body started work on a series of pit fires in the nearby Prokopyevsk coal mines—sixty of these had occurred up to the end of 1935.42 The experts produced findings of sabotage. The material now available was sufficient by any standards to damn the West Siberian defendants.
Although this West Siberian group was to provide no less than seven out of the seventeen accused in the forthcoming trial, two other sabotage groups were also being prepared. One was headed by Rataichak, Chief of the Central Administration of the Chemical Industry in Pyatakov’s Commissariat: on 22 October 1936 the Head of the Gorlovka Nitrogen Fertilizer Works, Pushin, was arrested in connection with an explosion there on 11 November 1935. He confessed at once and implicated his chief.43 This group of saboteurs was completed by an NKVD agent, Hrasche,44 who worked in the Foreign Division of Rataichak’s Administration, and so formed a useful link with Japanese espionage and other sinister foreign forces.
More important was the third and last of the saboteur groups—that devoted to wrecking the railways. Its three leaders were Yakov Livshits, an Old Bolshevik and reformed Trotskyite, who was now Kaganovich’s Deputy People’s Commissar of Communications, and the lesser figures of Knyazev, Assistant Chief of the Central Traffic Department in the Commissariat, who had formerly been Head of the South Urals Railway, and Turok, Assistant Head of the Traffic Department of the Perm Railway.
Livshits’s dismissal was announced on 14 November, and Knyazev was giving evidence in mid-December, later than the other main figures, so it seems that the railway theme was the last to be brought in. It implicated in particular Serebryakov, who had run the Commissariat in the 1920s, and it linked up with Boguslavsky, who was responsible for railway wrecking in the West Siberian set-up.
The charge of sabotage was a serious one. But, ironically enough, it could have been represented to the Central Committee as a sign of possible clemency. Professor Ramzin, the main “saboteur” in the “Industrial Party” Case, not only had been amnestied a couple of years after sentence and repentance, but had been restored to office and to favor, and even awarded an Order.fn2
Stalin is reported back in Moscow, from his holiday, at a reception for a Mongolian delegation on 4 November. With him were several members of the Politburo, including Mikoyan and, of course, Yezhov. At the 7 November Parade, all the Politburo members based in Moscow were on the stand.
The slogans for this nineteenth anniversary of the Revolution included a violent attack on the Trotskyite—Zinovievite spies. There was no reference to the Right deviation, which presumably shows that the issue was still in abeyance. But the cat-and-mouse game with Bukharin continued. At the Red Square celebrations, he and his wife were on one of the minor stands. A soldier came over with Stalin’s invitation to join him on the Lenin mausoleum.45 Soon after, Bukharin was served with an eviction order from his Kremlin apartment. Stalin telephoned, and on being told of this said angrily that the evictors must get out immediately, and they did so.46
And now Stalin, perhaps looking ahead from the purge of the ex-oppositionists to the completer sweep he was to make of the Party, made his first move against one of his own followers.
Postyshev had served in Kiev from 1923, becoming a Secretary of the Kiev Committee in 1924, and from 1926 to 1930 had been a member of the Ukrainian Politburo, before going to Moscow to be a Secretary of the Central Committee. He had been again intruded on the Ukrainian apparatus in January 1933 to toughen it in its difficult struggle with the peasantry and Ukrainian national feeling. Although Kossior and his group were not displaced, as much power and prestige attached to Postyshev as to his theoretical superior. In addition to his Ukrainian Second Secretaryship, he held the First Secretaryship of the Kiev Provincial Committee of the Party.
During the whole period, it became customary to give Postyshev what, on the face of it, looked like an anomalous seniority. When greetings were sent to the Soviet Government, to the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party, or to the Ukrainian Government, in each case only the single leading figure was named as the recipient. But when it came to the Ukrainian Central Committee, both Kossior and Postyshev were conventionally named.fn3
A younger and better-looking man than most of the others, with a clipped moustache and high hair swept back over his oval head, Postyshev was in fact an irreproachable Stalinist. His reputation for fair-mindedness (within the limits of the system) was fairly good. It is said that he had been among the opponents of the proposal to shoot Ryutin, and had redeemed himself in Kiev. Opposition from such a source could, as with Kirov’s, have been a real threat.