Ordzhonikidze’s death freed Stalin to present his ideas to the lengthy Party Central Committee plenum that stretched from the end of February into mid-March 1937. He wasted no words of sympathy on Ordzhonikidze. Stalin also declared that the local party leadership was a tap-root of the Soviet state’s problems. He castigated the cliental system of appointments: ‘What does it mean if you drag a whole group of pals along yourself ? It means you’ve acquired a certain independence from local organizations and, if you like, a certain independence from the Central Committee.’34
This was no longer a prim administrative point because Stalin at the same time asserted that wreckers, spies and assassins had insinuated themselves into influential party posts, forming Trotskyist groups and aiming at a capitalist restoration. Allegedly, enemies of the people existed in every locality and party organization. The First Party Secretary in Ukraine, Pëtr Postyshev, had for weeks been rejecting this extraordinary claim. Postyshev had previously been a close supporter of Stalin; and Stalin, being determined to have implicit obedience from his supporters, made a public example of Postyshev by declaring that he had allowed enemies of the people to infiltrate the Kiev party apparatus.35 This was a hair’s breadth from denouncing Postyshev as an enemy of the people, and the plenum was cowed. Having achieved the desired effect, Stalin appeared to show magnanimity by only calling for Postyshev to be removed from the Politburo.36
The shooting of Pyatakov and the humiliation of Postyshev terrified every Central Committee member, and it was almost with relief that the plenum listened to Zhdanov’s parallel proposal to inaugurate a campaign for ‘democratization’ in local party organizations. The fact that the projected ‘re-elections’ might end the political careers of most of the audience was overlooked.37 For the number of arrested oppositionists and economic officials increased sharply in spring 1937, and Stalin deftly obviated any last obstacle to his wishes in the Politburo by getting sanction for the creation of a commission which could take decisions on the Politburo’s behalf. The commission consisted exclusively of leaders who by then accepted the case for intensified terror: Molotov, Voroshilov, Kaganovich, Yezhov (who was not even a Politburo member at the time) and Stalin himself.38
Thus empowered, Stalin expanded the scope of terror: no institution in the Soviet state failed to incur his suspicion. The next group picked by him for repression were the Red Army leaders. Stalin’s aim was to ensure that the armed forces were incapable of promoting policies in any way different from his own, and Marshal Tukhachevski laid himself open to trouble by arguing for a more adventurous military strategy for the USSR.39 He and several high-ranking commanders were arrested in May and beaten into confessing to plotting a coup d’état. Stalin called them all spies at a meeting of the Military Soviet of the People’s Commissariat of Defence, and they were shot in mid-June. On the same occasion he announced that Bukharin, Tomski and Rykov were guilty of espionage.40 Stalin repeated these charges against these former leaders of the Right Deviation at a Central Committee plenum starting on 23 June, where he stated that the NKVD had collected information sufficient to merit judicial proceedings.
At this Osip Pyatnitski, who had first been elected a Central Committee member in 1912 before Stalin himself became one, protested. An intermission was called so that Molotov and Kaganovich, Stalin’s intermediaries at the plenum, might bring Pyatnitski to his senses.41 Pyatnitski opted for death before dishonour. Thereupon Yezhov took not only Bukharin and Pyatnitski but also his own NKVD predecessor Yagoda into his care.
Yezhov enjoyed the technical chores of administering repression, devising instructions that anticipated most practical snags. Since 1927 he had risen to ever more senior posts in the Central Committee Secretariat. At the age of forty-three years he was a living caricature of gleeful fanaticism. He was ‘short of stature, almost a dwarf, with a piercing voice and bandy legs’.42 His associates played on the verbal associations of his name in the Russian language by dubbing him the Iron Hedgehog. On 2 July, at Stalin’s instigation, the Politburo passed a resolution ‘On Anti-Soviet Elements’, and Yezhov scuttled back to the Politburo on 31 July with the scheme for the NKVD to arrest 259,450 persons over the following four months.43 In mid-August 1937 torture was sanctioned as a normal procedure of interrogation in Soviet prisons. The Great Terror was raging. It did not cease until the end of 1938.
Central direction was constantly involved. On 27 August, when the Krasnoyarsk Regional Committee wrote to him about a grain-store fire, Stalin telegrammed back within hours: ‘Try the guilty [sic] persons in accelerated order. Sentence them to death.’44 His method was systematically arbitrary; for the Politburo decision of 31 July 1937 assigned arrest-quotas to each major territorial unit of the USSR. No serious effort was made to catch and punish people for offences they had really committed; and it was laid down that 72,950 of victims — twenty-eight per cent — should be shot and the rest given ‘eight to ten’ years in prison or labour camp.45 A Central Committee plenum in January 1938 momentarily seemed to terminate the madness by passing a resolution calling for greater scrupulousness to be shown in decisions to expel individuals from the party, decisions which by then were normally a preamble to arrest by the NKVD.46 But the relief was illusory, and on 15 March 1938 an additional target of 57,200 ‘anti-Soviet elements’ was introduced. Fully 48,000 of them were marked for execution this time.47
The victims were tried by trios (troiki), typically consisting of the local NKVD chief, party secretary and procurator. Trials were derisorily brief and sentences were carried out without right of appeal. In searching out ‘anti-Soviet elements’, troiki were enjoined to capture escaped kulaks, ex-Mensheviks, ex-Socialist-Revolutionaries, priests, pre-revolutionary policemen and former members of non-Russian parties.48 As the Great Terror was intensified, the resolution ‘On Anti-Soviet Elements’ was applied to virtually anyone who had been active in or sympathetic to a communist oppositionist faction; and soon pretty well everybody who held a political, administrative or managerial post lived in fear. Not a single institution was unscathed by the NKVD’s interrogators. The quota system was applied not merely to geographical areas but also to specific public bodies. The objective was to effect a ‘cleansing’ throughout the state. The NKVD was not to restrain itself by notions about an individual’s possible innocence: the point was to eliminate all the categories of people believed by Stalin and Yezhov to contain the regime’s enemies.
According to official central records, 681,692 persons were executed in 1937–8.49 This may well be an underestimate, but the total number of deaths caused by repression in general was anyway much higher as people also perished from the inhuman conditions of their captivity. Between one million and one and a half million persons, it is tentatively reckoned, were killed by firing squad, physical maltreatment or massive over-work in the care of the NKVD in those two years alone.50 The Jews and Gypsies exterminated by Hitler knew that they were dying because they were Jews and Gypsies. Stalin’s terror was more chaotic and confusing: thousands went to their deaths shouting out their fervent loyalty to Stalin.