One last major blow, against the Far Eastern Army, remained to be struck, and Marshal Yegorov and others were still to be dealt with. We shall go into that in a later chapter, and afterwards consider the whole effect of this unprecedented destruction of the officer corps. But it will already be obvious that if Stalin had destroyed a potential threat to his power, he had also inflicted enormous damage on Soviet defense.
8
THE PARTY CRUSHED
You have made of liberty a weapon for the executioner.
Lermontov
IN THE PROVINCES
April 1937 saw the beginning of intra-Party elections, the occasion for a great campaign in the press against those elements interfering, like Postyshev, with Party democracy, who were found everywhere. Some failures in this respect were dealt with harshly in the set-piece article which launched the campaign, “Internal Party Democracy and Bolshevik Discipline.”1 The author was Boris Ponomarev, still a member of the Central Committee of the Communist Party in 1988.
Among the first Central Committee members to be arrested were those from Leningrad. Outside Moscow, it was only in the northern capital, where Zhdanov ruled, and in Transcaucasia, under Beria, that local First Secretaries ready to purge without limit were already in control.
As a result of the Kirov murder,
the Leningrad Party organization suffered particularly large losses.… For a period of four years there was an uninterrupted wave of repressions in Leningrad against honest and completely innocent people. Promotion to a responsible post often amounted to a step toward the brink of a precipice. Many people were annihilated without a trial and investigation on the basis of false, hastily fabricated charges. Not only officials themselves, but also their families were subjected to repressions, even absolutely innocent children, whose lives were thus broken from the very beginning.… The repressions … were carried out either on Stalin’s direct instructions or with his knowledge and approval.2
But in fact the first waves of terror had struck at non-Party people and the mass of minor functionaries. Zhdanov had pursued the Stalin method. He had weakened the old Kirov cadre from below, replacing many of its junior veterans at the District Committee level. But he had not yet driven all Kirov’s leading supporters, a number of them members or candidate members of the Central Committee itself, from the higher posts they held in the city and the province. In 1936, he had, indeed, removed and demoted Mikhail Chudov, Kirov’s Second Secretary. A printer by trade, a Bolshevik since 1913, Chudov had been imported into Leningrad to reinforce Kirov in 1928. A full member of the Central Committee, he had been on the Presidium of the XVIIth Congress. In 1934, he had made Leningrad’s funeral speech on Kirov and been on the Kirov Burial Commission. More than anyone, he represented the Kirov tradition in the city. Kirov’s other closest associate, Kodatsky, was still in position.
The old Party leaders at this level were to prove unacceptable to Stalin throughout the country. But the Leningrad men were particularly unsatisfactory. First, they had been closely associated with Kirov and his platform, both of which had been the special objects of Stalin’s hostility. And second, they were the very men who, on that December afternoon over two years before, had rushed into the corridor when they heard the shot that killed Kirov, and must have noticed—indeed, we are now told, did notice—the absence of guards and other suspicious signs.
The Leningrad purge had already been violent even by Soviet standards. In the ensuing period, as it affected the entire political and industrial leadership, it was worse than those almost anywhere else in the country—though this meant a matter of a nearly 100 percent destruction, compared with 80 or 90 percent elsewhere.fn1 We happen to have fuller information about it than about the lesser provincial massacres which succeeded it, and it shows the sort of operation that now involved Party and population alike.
Zhdanov reported back from the plenum on 20 March 1937, at a Party meeting notable for attacks on various District Committees in the city. Zakovsky, Commissar of State Security, First Rank, spoke of “enemies still active” in the organization.3
Zakovsky was Zhdanov’s right hand in the ensuing assault. His left—indeed, his only trusted aide at an executive level—was the infamous A. S. Shcherbakov, who had served with him from 1924 to 1930 in the Nizhni-Novgorod (Gorky) province, becoming local chief of agitation and propaganda. Shcherbakov, a figure more personally disliked even than Zhdanov, was a plump man with glasses and Western-style hair, combed back. He had gone on from Gorky province to the Central Committee apparatus, and had then been appointed, in 1934, Secretary of the Union of Soviet Writers! After a year (1936–1937) in Leningrad, he went on as a mobile purger to various reluctant provinces, apart from being briefly Head of the Political Department of Transbaikal Military District. During 1938 alone, he was to serve in fewer than four of these posts. Leaving Irkutsk completely crushed, he held two First Secretaryships in the Ukrainian provinces left empty by Khrushchev’s purges, and then arrived in Moscow in the winter as the city’s First Secretary. During the Second World War, he was to take over political control of the Army and to become Secretary of the Central Committee and candidate member of the Politburo. He died in 1945, allegedly at the hands of doctor-poisoners. A typical Zhdanovite career.
This group soon set to work. In May 1937, Zhdanov assembled the executive workers of the Provincial Committee and announced: “Two enemies—Chudov and Kodatsky—have been exposed in our ranks, in the Leningrad organization. They have been arrested in Moscow.” No one spoke: “it was as if our tongues were frozen.” A woman Old Bolshevik, later to spend seventeen years in a labor camp, went up to Zhdanov and said to him:
Comrade Zhdanov, I don’t know Chudov. He hasn’t been in our Leningrad organization long. But I vouch for Kodatsky. He has been a Party member since 1913. I have known him for many years. He is an honest member of the Party. He fought all the oppositionists. This is incredible! It must be verified.
Zhdanov looked at her “with his cruel eyes” and said, “Lazurkina, stop this talk, otherwise it will end badly for you.”4
This conference of the Party organization “uncovered and expelled from its ranks the Anti-Soviet Rightist-Trotskyite-double-dealers—the Japanese–German diversionists and spies.”5 (Expulsion was the extreme measure of Party discipline proper. In these circumstances it almost invariably meant “relaxation to the secular arm” of the NKVD, followed by arrest.) And this was only the first step: of the sixty-five members of the new City Committee elected on 29 May, only two were reelected on 4 June 1938 (while five others were transferred to posts outside the city).6
The long days of summer had set in in the northern capital, presenting a minor technical difficulty to Zakovsky’s men. As the wave of arrests reached the top of the local Party, then swept downward again, involving those promoted to Party positions in the past year or two, and then out beyond them to the already stricken masses of the population, operations could no longer be conducted under the decent cover of night. For Leningrad is easily the most northerly of the great cities of the world, on the same latitude as the Shetland Islands and northern Labrador. In winter, daytime is extremely short, but in summer, as Pushkin says, one can read all night in one’s room by the “Transparent dusk and moonless glitter.” The rumbling and halting of police cars in the bright but deserted streets of the subarctic summer nights is said to have been particularly disturbing.