Postyshev expressed his resentment. As a result, Kaganovich was immediately sent to Kiev to straighten out the situation. In his capacity as Secretary of the Central Committee, he urgently convoked a plenum of the Kiev Provincial Party Committee.64 On 16 January 1937 he had Postyshev replaced as First Secretary of the Kiev Provincial Committee, while leaving him his more important post. The official reason given was that Postyshev’s duties as Second Secretary of the Ukrainian Party were too demanding to allow him to hold the Kiev post as well. This was plainly false; indeed, when Khrushchev was appointed in 1938 to be First Secretary of the Ukrainian Party, he held the Kiev post as well without any difficulty arising.
So far, this was no more than one of Stalin’s typical first steps against a victim. Meanwhile, the preparations for the Pyatakov Trial were complete. First, however, the recalcitrant figures of Ryutin and others in like case were disposed of. On 10 January, he, Smilga, Zalutsky, Shatskin, and no doubt others were tried in camera by the Military Collegium and shot.65
THE PYATAKOV TRIAL
On 23 January 1937 another gruesome little pageant assembled among the florid columns of the October Hall. It was a bitterly cold day, and the hall was dark and gloomy. Just after midday, Ulrikh and Matulevich, with Divisional Military Jurist Rychkov in Nikitchenko’s old place, took their seats at the judges’ bench. Vyshinsky sat at his old table on the left. The NKVD soldiers were in their winter uniforms, with long coats and muffled helmets.
The men who filed into the dock were of a different sort from those of the previous August. Then, genuine rivals had been crushed. The new accused had presented no such obvious challenge. But they were quite impressive figures. Pyatakov had never been a member of the Politburo, but as we have seen he had long been one of the most prominent and able figures in the Party. Sokolnikov, former candidate member of the Politburo, was a most serious and respected politician. Serebryakov, former Secretary of the Central Committee, was also no negligible figure. And Radek was at least a widely known public person.
The new trial did not have the immediate and obvious aims of the first. The motives remaining are plain enough. First, revenge. Most of the leading ex-Trotskyites were now destroyed. And revenge carried with it, of course, Stalin’s idea of precautionary or preventive measures. A clean sweep, even if there was no more compelling reason for action by normal standards, fitted Stalin’s firm belief in “Stone dead hath no fellow” and “Better safe than sorry.”
Moreover, Stalin had been temporarily balked of a more important prey—Bukharin and the Rightists. The trial was thus not the one he had intended, but a pale substitute. At the same time, it kept the pot boiling. It provided continuity. And it could be, and was, used to implicate the Right once again. A minor mystery, given this motive of Stalin’s, is why Uglanov was not brought into it. He had been named as subject to investigation in the announcement of 21 August. He was not among those rehabilitated in September, and yet he was not tried. It would have been greatly to Stalin’s advantage to have put up so prominent a Rightist in January 1937, as a bridge to Bukharin and Co. And even though Yagoda is alleged to have protected him, there was time, on ordinary reckoning, between Yagoda’s fall and the January 1937 Trial for Yezhov to prepare him. One can only presume that, as we have said, he refused to talk.
The new batch of accused were designated simply “the Anti-Soviet Trotskyite Center.” No other group or faction was represented, unlike the case at the 1936 Trial of the “Trotskyite–Zinovievite Terrorist Center” or the later “Bloc of Rights and Trotskyites.” The first trial had anyhow been, as we saw, unimpressive on the Trotskyite side. Radek was now put up to say,
If you take the composition of the old centre you will find that the Trotskyites did not have a single one of the old political leaders on it. There were Smimov, who was more of an organizer than a political leader; Mrachkovsky, a soldier and a fighting man; and Ter-Vaganyan, a propagandist.66
Since there were no genuine Trotskyites to hand, as there were genuine Zinovievites and genuine Rightists, the distinguished ex-Trotskyites had to serve.
In other ways, the new accused presented a different impression from that of their predecessors. Then, there had been a seven-man “Center,” plus various hangers-on. This time, the Center consisted of only four people: Pyatakov, Radek, Serebryakov, and Sokolnikov. Radek and Sokolnikov were not accused of crimes as serious as those of the other two. Pyatakov and Serebryakov were charged with organizing three main sabotage groups (among dozens they had allegedly set up): the railway-wrecking organization headed by Livshits; the “West Siberian Anti-Soviet Trotskyite Center” at Novosibirsk, consisting of Muralov, Boguslavsky, and Drobnis, having under them a variety of industrial wreckers in the area; and the three wreckers in the chemical industry, coming directly under Pyatakov. The specializations were not complete; for example, the railway wrecker Knyazev was also a Japanese spy, while the coal wreckers of Siberia were also the organizers of the attempted assassination of all visiting Politburo members.
The indictment differed greatly from that of August 1936. Then, it had simply been a matter of terrorism. It had been remarked by Vyshinsky and in evidence that the accused had no policy except the seizure of power from Stalin. But such a policy was by no means unpopular,67 and soon after the executions the press had started to announce that Zinoviev did have a political program after all—one involving the restoration of capitalism, which he had naturally tried to concea1.68 Stalin was to remark:
At the Trial in 1936, if you will remember, Kamenev and Zinoviev categorically denied that they had any kind of political platform. They had full opportunity to unfold their political platform at the Trial. Nevertheless, they did not do so, declaring that they had no political platform whatsoever. There can be no doubt that they both lied in denying that they had a platform.69
This theme was strongly put in the new indictment. The accused intended to renounce industrialization and collectivization, and they relied for support in particular on the German and Japanese Governments. They proposed to make territorial concessions to Germany, to allow German capital into the country, and in case of war with Germany to carry out wrecking in industry and at the front. This had all been arranged at a meeting between Trotsky and Rudolf Hess.
Trotsky had also at least implied the desirability of defeat in war, having allegedly written to Radek: “It must be admitted that the question of power will become a practical issue for the bloc only as a result of the defeat of the U.S.S.R. in war. For this the bloc must make energetic preparations.…”70
Espionage contact had been established with the Germans and Japanese. And, as in the Zinoviev Trial, a number of terrorist groups had been organized, “in Moscow, Leningrad, Kiev, Rostov, Sochi, Novosibirsk and other towns.” An attempt had actually been made on Molotov’s life by involving him in a car crash at Prokopyevsk in 1934. Nor had their practical activity been limited to the preparation of terrorist acts. In addition, they had been responsible for many industrial accidents and deficiencies.
Other activities likely to prove more unpopular than assassination had been thrown in for good measure. For example, Knyazev was quoted as having confessed that “the Japanese intelligence service strongly stressed the necessity of using bacteriological means in time of war with the object of contaminating troop trains, canteens and army sanitary centres with highly virulent bacilli….”fn471