When, in June, the Provincial Committee was itself unmasked, a hysteria of arrest and accusation seized Belyi. On 26 and 27 June, a further meeting there saw violent denunciation of Kovalev and all the other members of the local leadership of his time. The whole of the Kovalev leadership fell, and on 18 and 19 September a plenum of the District Committee was held to destroy those who had succeeded them. The new local Secretary, Karpovsky, was accused of having been an agent of Rumyantsev’s, of having once belonged to a bandit gang, of having relatives abroad, of maintaining connections with a sister who had married a former merchant. Karpovsky defended himself, saying that he not only had not been a bandit, but had killed several bandits. He had received a letter from an aunt in Romania, but had not seen her since she left Russia in 1908. Both his sister and her former merchant husband were now employed in useful work. A friend who had fought with Karpovsky testified that the two of them had fought against bandits. But speaker after speaker attacked the Secretary in the most violent terms, and even this friend finally said weakly that he had just not been aware of Karpovsky’s membership in a bandit gang. All Karpovsky’s associates fell with him or shortly afterward. By the end of the year, a completely new team, all strangers to Belyi, was in charge. The Party membership, which had been 367 on 1 September 1934, had gone down to less than 200.24
Almost as striking as the calls for terror from above was this hysterical lynching mood of what now became a dominant section of the lowest Party organizations. For while the upper and middle levels of the Party were being wiped out, Moscow’s envoys everywhere found denouncers, like Nikolayenko in Kiev, to give them “evidence” against those they wished to destroy.
A Soviet article of the Khrushchev period entitled “The Dossier of a Provocateur”25 describes how a Party member in Azerbaijan made his career during the purges by denouncing prominent Party colleagues to the NKVD. Among those he denounced were three Secretaries of the Azerbaijan Central Committee and the former Chairman of the local Council of People’s Commissars. The “provocateur,” I. Ya. Myachin, was until these revelations a well-known and well-liked local Communist whom “Communists for forty years had known simply as ‘Vanya.’” At one time, he had held the post of Deputy People’s Commissar for the Azerbaijan textile industry.
His belated undoing was the fact that he typed two copies of all his denunciations, sending one “to the NKVD, addressed to Bagirov’s underlings,” and the other, which he signed, to the archives, where it was added to a file which lay on a shelf “for a quarter of a century” until an archivist discovered it. It covered Myachin’s activities for the period February to November 1937, and contained material “compromising” fourteen Party, Soviet, and economic leaders. A typical victim was accused of attempting “to give instructions to counterrevolutionaries to keep their mouths shut” because once on a bus he advised against talking about sabotage. In justification of his activities, Myachin said, “We thought this was what we had to do…. Everybody was writing….” He was, of course, by his standards, quite right.
And, by such means, the Purge struck everywhere. In the Urals, in the newest industrial area, a “Ural Uprising Staff” was discovered, headed as was customary by the First Secretary, Kabakov, of the Sverdlovsk Provincial Committee, full member of the Central Committee. It was a “bloc of Rights and Trotskyites” and also included Social Revolutionaries and Church leaders.26
All the many industrial trusts in the area suffered as well; the Heads of Uralmash, Uralmed’rud, Levikhostroi, Sevkabel’, and others, and their leading engineers, were of course arrested. Other institutions purged included the Bacteriological Institute, which lost “almost all” its staff, including its director, Professor Kuteyshchildiov, who committed suicide in jail. The Institute was closed down, its building being taken over by the NKVD, which certainly needed the space. One cell alone in the local prison now held twenty-seven wives of arrested officials.27
Malenkov went to Kazan in August 1937 to a plenum of the Tatar ASSR Provincial Committee, at or after which the First Secretary, Lepa, and most other high officials were arrested. At the same time, railway officials of the area were arrested on Kaganovich’s orders.28
Zhdanov oversaw similar operations in various provinces and republics. In Karelia, he violently attacked the leadership—Irglis, Gylling, Rovio, and others, all of whom were arrested as Finnish spies. All the ten Finnish-language newspapers were closed down.29 At a meeting of the Bashkir Provincial Committee on 4 to 6 October 1937, Zhdanov announced that the leading posts were held by “bourgeois nationalists, Trotskyites, fascist diversionists, spies and murderers.” Ya. B. Bykin, the local First Secretary, was “an old spy.” He and almost all the local Party and Government leadership were arrested, including all the members of the Party Bureau and heads of departments. The local prison was not large enough for such an operation, and the victims were shot in “ravines and quarries,” Bykin’s pregnant wife among them.30
In Novosibirsk, the daughter of the head of the West Siberian medical department, Maxim Thallmann, tells us, in a recent Soviet article, how on 16 Au gust 1937 her father was arrested with most of the local leadership. Her mother, sister of the former Central Committee member Vladimir Milyutin, followed on 3 September, and then all the leaders’ wives and children over sixteen (only a few of the arrested survived). The daughter, aged seventeen, was one of 250 then held in a local NKVD children’s home, and this was only one of several such homes.31
There were some special cases. Yosif Vareikis, who had been very much in Stalin’s confidence, and had served as First Secretary in Voronezh and Stalingrad, was now First Secretary of the Far Eastern Territory. He telephoned Stalin in September 1937 with a query about the reasons for the arrest of certain Communists.32 In the conversation he put some question about the arrest of Tukhachevsky. He had served with him in the Civil War, when the two had at one time been seized by Social Revolutionary mutineers, whom they had eventually suppressed.
Stalin shouted, “That is not your business. Don’t interfere in what doesn’t concern you. The NKVD knows what it’s doing.” He then went on to say, “Only an enemy would defend Tukhachevsky,” and threw down the telephone. Vareikis was deeply shaken. He told his wife that he could hardly believe it was Stalin.
On 30 September, he got a telegram summoning him to the capital on official business. On 9 October, he was arrested a few stations out of Moscow. His wife was arrested four days later. He was mentioned as a plotter in the Buldiarin Tria1,33 and was later shot. It seems very probable from the context that the conversation must have had something to do with the position of Marshal Blyukher, who commanded in the Far East, and that Stalin’s lapse into open rage may have reflected a real anxiety about trouble from the Far Eastern Army.
IN THE REPUBLICS
In the Republics, things went in the same way as in the provinces of Russia proper. In the Byelorussian Republic, the “verification” of Party cards ordered in 1935 and 1936 was used by Yezhov to expel, in connection with an alleged anti-Soviet underground, “more than half of the entire membership,”34 The local officials opposed these actions, which amounted to the first phase in the destruction of the old Party and the rebuilding of another on its ruins. After the February—March plenum, on 17 March 1937, V. F. Sharangovich, as an emissary of the center, was sent to take over the Byelorussian First Secretaryship.