But Stalin had the wit not to publish these documents. They had not been devised solely for his benefit, and perhaps did not entirely suit his intention. And if they had been made public, it might, for all he knew, have been possible for experts to detect flaws, or even for the Germans to blow the gaff.
Thus the result of Stalin’s sudden blow, and the absence of specific evidence, was that people found it easier to believe that a plot genuinely existed. As the Minister of War remarks in Penguin Island of the efforts of his Chief of Staff in providing reams of proofs against the accused Jewish officer,
Proofs! Of course it is good to have proofs, but perhaps it is better to have none at all … the Pyrot affair, as I arranged it, left no room for criticism; there was no spot at which it could be touched. It defied assault. It was invulnerable because it was invisible. Now it gives an enormous handle for discussion.
It was not so much that people believed the precise charges. Some of these, as later developed, were incredible—in particular that Yakir and Feldman, both Jews, had really worked for Nazi Germany. What was found tolerable was simply the central thesis that the generals were plotting to use their power against Stalin.
The essence of the plot, according to evidence in the Bukharin Tria1,13 was Tukhachevsky’s “favorite plan”—the seizure of the Kremlin and the killing of the leadership by a group of military men. Gamarnik had proposed also seizing the NKVD headquarters. He is represented as believing that “some military under his direct command” would obey him. He considered he had sufficient Party and political prestige in the Army and that some of the commanders, “especially the daredevils,” would support him.14
A curious sidelight is that Gamarnik, with a choice of “daredevil” officers allegedly at his disposal, and Yakir, the fighting general, are supposed to have instructed the Chief of the Department of Savings Banks of the Ministry of Finance, Ozeryansky, to prepare a terrorist act against Yezhov.15 This is another of those little touches which might perhaps have fortified the skepticism of Western dupes.
Various versions were planted. For example, the American Ambassador, Joseph Davies, says in his memoirs that he was told by Ambassador Troyanovsky on 7 October 1937, when he had queried the idea that Tukhachevsky would have become a German agent simply for money, that the Marshal had a mistress who was herself a German agent. This story was evidently planted elsewhere: Davies reports hearing it also from the French Ambassador on the authority of the Deuxième Bureau, which is supposed to have got it from Prague. Walter Duranty recounts a similar story. There is no reason to believe it.
As we have said, the apparent suddenness of the blow at the Army, the great air of urgency, contributed to the plausibility of Stalin’s story. And this theme was put about even in the outer circle of the NKVD. A senior NKVD officer, as late as October 1937, was telling his subordinates in Spain, “That was a real conspiracy! That could be seen from the panic which spread there on the top: all the passes to the Kremlin were suddenly declared invalid; our [i.e., NKVD] troops were held in a state of alarm: as Frinovsky said, ‘the whole Soviet Government hung by a thread….’”16
To another, Frinovsky remarked that the NKVD “had uncovered a giant conspiracy—we have got them all!”17 though this seems to have been said around 20 May, when the “uncovering” was accomplished, but three key arrests were yet to come.
This notion of a sudden secret emergency was doubtless useful in providing a panic tension in military, Party, and NKVD circles. But it was not in accord with the facts. The pressure against the Army, though little publicized, had, on the contrary, been gradual and cumulative.
It was eleven months since Stalin had in fact made the first moves against the High Command, which had now borne such fantastic fruit.
The first arrest in the series that was to lead up to the great blow at the generals had taken place on 5 July 1936, when the NKVD seized Divisional Commander Dmitri Shmidt, commanding a tank unit in the Kiev Military District, without informing or consulting his superior officer, Yakir. Yakir went to Moscow, where Yezhov showed him “material” implicating Shmidt.18 This material presumably consisted of the confessions of Mrachkovsky, Dreitzer, and Reingold, which revealed Shmidt and his accomplice B. Kuzmichev (Chief of Staff of an Air Force unit) as having been under Mrachkovsky’s instructions, through Dreitzer, to assassinate Voroshilov, in the interests of the Trotskyite element in the “Bloc.”19 In accordance with Stalin’s style, Shmidt was a man against whom a particular individual grudge awaited settlement. Not only was he an ex-oppositionist, but he had give Stalin personal offense.
Shmidt, a Party member since 1915, was the son of a poor Jewish shoemaker. He had become a sailor, and then, through the Civil War, a brilliant cavalry commander in the Ukraine. During the period, all sorts of rival factions were fighting right through the area; for example, Vasily Grossman recounts that Berdichev had changed hands fourteen times. It had been occupied “by Petlyura, Denikin, the Bolsheviks, Galicians, Poles, Tutnik’s and Maroussia’s bands and ‘nobody’s Ninth Regiment.’”20
Amid this chaos, Shmidt had risen to command first a regiment and then a brigade, had captured Kamenets-Podolsk, far to the west and surrounded by enemy forces, and had finally been ordered to prepare for the attempt, never in fact made, to break through Poland and Romania to help the Hungarian Soviet Republic in 1919. He had ridden into a camp of nationalist guerrillas with two aides and, after negotiations failed, engaged in a successful gunfight. In fact, he was a typical though not outstandingly gifted “natural leader” of partisans—swashbuckling, simple, frightened of nothing, a true product of the Civil War. Later, in peacetime, he had shot, but failed to kill, a senior officer who had insulted his wife, the matter being hushed up.
Between 1925 and 1937, Shmidt had become associated with the opposition, though not in any significant way. Arriving in Moscow at the time of the 1927 Congress, when the expulsion of the Trotskyites was announced, he had met Stalin coming out of the Kremlin. Shmidt, in his black Caucasian cloak and silver-ornamented belt, with his fur hat cocked over his ear, had gone up to Stalin and, half-joking, half-serious, had started to curse him in the extravagant soldier fashion of the time. He ended by gesturing as though to draw his great curved saber, and told Stalin that one day he would lop his ears off.21
Stalin said nothing, listening white and tight-lipped. The incident was taken as a bad joke, or at most an insult beneath political notice. Shmidt, after all, had accepted the Party decision which he objected to so strongly, and for nearly a decade he continued to serve. In fact, the Trotskyites were allegedly to find him suitable conspiratorial material precisely because he was “under no suspicion in the Party.”22 As to his rudeness, after all, Stalin had defended “rudeness” among comrades. And, indeed, that sort of thing from a rough soldier would not have been much regarded earlier on, or by any of the leaders but Stalin.
From the start, it was clear that Shmidt’s arrest was not an isolated act. The “cases” of Shmidt and Kuzmichev are among those named in the indictment of the Zinoviev Case as “set aside for separate trial in view of the fact that the investigation is still proceeding.” In court, Mrachkovsky spoke of a “terroristic group of people including Shmidt, Kuzmichev and some others whom I do not remember,” which already implied a larger military organization. Reingold, too, mentioned them as forming only a part of a “Trotskyite group of military men,” which had a number of other members whose names he did not know.
Kuzmichev, like Shmidt, was an old comrade of Yakir’s. Another friend of his, Ivan Golubenko, Chairman of the Dnepropetrovsk Soviet, was also arrested in August 193623 as a Trotskyite, though later transmuted to a spy. Already a member of “a counter-revolutionary Trotskyite–Zinovievite nationalist bloc”24 in the summer of 1936, he was mentioned in January 1937 as a member of a terrorist group formed to assassinate both Stalin25 and “the leaders of the Communist Party and the Soviet Government of the Ukraine.”26 He is said to have really been associated with Ordzhonikidze’s attempts to halt the Terror.