Postyshev had been interpreting the Central Committee circulars on expelling Party members in the wrong fashion. He was expelling provocateurs and slanderers and retaining their victims. One of these delators was a woman called Nikolayenko, who had been particularly troublesome for a year.47 Postyshev had expelled her from the Kiev Party organization.
Clearly, this expulsion was an action totally contrary to the whole spirit of the Purge and particularly to Central Committee decisions of 29 September and 21 October 1936, which may indeed have already been aimed at Postyshev. Everywhere, as the “Yezhovshchina” got going, it was precisely through the denunciation by such types that the police got their grip on the leaders of the Party organizations. It was later to be alleged that in Kiev, more than anywhere else in the Ukraine, Trotskyites had been able to gain important posts.48 Postyshev’s attitude is thus plainly established as being against this system, even before the showdown. In November, Stalin, seeking a pretext, took over the Nikolayenko case.49 The Central Committee apparatus in Moscow, that is to say, examined her appeal against expulsion in a favorable fashion. She was later found to have the execution of “some eight thousand people” on her conscience.50
The New Constitution finally passed into law amid a fanfare of speeches, ovations, and a press campaign which culminated in a speech by Stalin on 27 November. He went at great length into the questions which had arisen about how best to guarantee democracy, freedom of the subject, and all the other attributes of a State fully attuned to the people’s will.
Meanwhile, the issue of Bukharin and Rykov again came to the fore. Even before Yagoda’s fall, the NKVD was sending Stalin the interrogation records of E. F. Kulikov and others, which implicated Bukharin, Rykov, and Tomsky. On 7 October, Tomsky’s former secretary, Stankin (admitting to implication in a terrorist act planned against Stalin for November 6), gave testimony that Tomsky had told her of a “Right Counter-Revolutionary Center” consisting of “Tomsky, Bukharin, Rykov, Uglanov, [V. V.] Shmidt and Syrtsov.” The former director of the Lenin Library, V. I. Nevsky, gave testimony on 23 November that Bukharin, Rykov, and Tomsky were the leaders of the counter-revolutionary Rightist organization. (In January 1937, he was to withdraw this, and at his secret trial on 25 May 1937 he said that the NKVD had insisted on his signing it in the interests of the Party.)51
The Central Committee plenum met on 4 to 7 December. On 4 December, Yezhov reported on “the Trotskyite and Rightist anti-Soviet organizations” and said that Bukharin and Rykov had not “laid down their arms” but had gone underground. He produced the evidence of Kulikov and others, and Bukharin and Rykov were violently denounced by Kaganovich, Molotov, and Voroshilov. Although many seem to have remained silent, and Ordzhonikidze is reported as making remarks implying distrust of Yezhov,52 many speakers demanded the expulsion of the two Rightists from the Central Committee and the Party (all the Central Committee—including Bukharin and Rykov themselves—had been receiving confidential copies of the testimony against the two men). They strongly denied the accusations. During intervals they were brought to confrontations with Kulikov and with Pyatakov and Sosnovsky. But Stalin again temporized, and the plenum accepted his proposal “to consider the question of Rykov and Bukharin as incomplete. Further investigation to be undertaken, a decision postponed until the next plenum.”53
It was now that many of the accused in the Pyatakov Case were beginning to confess. This may show that a reluctant compromise had been reached among the leadership about the trial. At any rate, Ordzhonikidze already seems to have obtained from Stalin a promise to spare Pyatakov’s life. Comparable tactics, combined with the conveyor and the stoika, helped with others.54 On 4 December, Radek gave his first evidence. He had in the end decided to surrender if Stalin would give him the same guarantee he had given Sokolnikov. For some time Stalin refused to see him—but finally, it is said, he visited the Lubyanka and had a long talk with Radek in the presence of Yezhov. Radek then became the closest collaborator of the interrogation, and helped replan the scenario of the plot.55 Muralov, who had held out so long, now gave in—reportedly under Radek’s influence—and on the following day he too was confessing. Norkin started confessing about the same time. By January, hundreds of pages of evidence from all the defendants were in the files.
On the anniversary of the founding of the Secret Police, 20 December 1936, Stalin gave a small banquet for the heads of the NKVD. Yezhov, Frinovsky, Pauker, and others were present. Afterward, an account of what happened circulated among the NKVD. When everyone had drunk a good deal, Pauker, supported by two other officers acting the parts of warders, played for Stalin the part of Zinoviev being dragged to execution. He hung by their arms, moaning and mouthing, then fell on his knees, and, holding one of the warders by the boots, cried out, “Please, for God’s sake, Comrade, call up Yosif Vissarionovich!”
Stalin roared with laughter, and Pauker gave a repeat performance. By this time, Stalin was almost helpless with laughing, and when Pauker brought in a new angle by raising his hands and crying, “Hear, Israel, our God is the only God!” Stalin choked with mirth and had to signal Pauker to stop the performance.56
In fact, Stalin had good reason to be pleased with his secret policemen, who had their second production almost ready to go on. He now ordered pursuit of the line on which he had been blocked in the autumn. Bukharin and Rykov were to be implicated. At the end of December 1936, Radek’s evidence incriminating the Rightists in terrorism and other crimes was delivered to Bukharin, whose life now became a nightmare of denunciations and confrontations,57 until, on 16 January 1937, his name appeared for the last time as editor of lzvestiya.
A number of the Rightists under arrest, including Uglanov and V. V. Shmidt, did not give evidence against Bukharin before his own arrest. Some of his junior associates, however, were testifying to his plans for a “palace coup,” and their statements were sent to him.58 Bukharin was then called in for several confrontations in the presence of the whole Politburo and Yezhov. First the prominent ex-Trotskyite Sosnovsky gave testimony that some money Bukharin had given him when he was in trouble was a conspiratorial payment.59 Then came a confrontation with Pyatakov. Pyatakov is described as looking like a skeleton, and so weak that he could hardly stand. When he had confessed his membership in a counter-revolutionary center, implicating Bukharin, Ordzhonikidze asked him if his testimony was voluntary. He replied that it was.60 The next confrontation was with Radek. Although pale, he was not in such a bad state as Pyatakov, and, unlike the lifelessness reported of the others, was “visibly agitated.” He confessed everything, on his own behalf and Bukharin’s, including a plot of theirs at lzvestiya to assassinate Stalin.61 Rykov, who had earlier been sent confessions implicating him made by his secretary Ekaterina Artemenko, also had “confrontations” with Sokolnikov, Pyatakov, and others.62 Meanwhile, with the Bukharin–Rykov group thoroughly implicated, Stalin was fully prepared to face the resistance of his own “moderates” squarely.
The intervention against Postyshev in the Nikolayenko case was made formal by a decision of the All-Union Central Committee, dated 13 January 1937 (and unpublished at the time), attacking “unsatisfactory leadership” in the Kiev Party and faults in the Ukrainian Central Committee as a whole.63