ever wider and reached its full list of victim-categories. The NKVD arrested followers of oppositions of both Left and Right. It seized existing holders of office in party, government, army and all other public institutions. It moved against large groups in society which had connections with the pre-revolutionary elites. It apprehended members of former anti-Bolshevik parties, clergy and ex-kulaks. It picked up and deported several national and ethnic groups in the USSR’s borderlands. Having identified the categories for repression, the NKVD’s terror machinery was kept working at full pace until November 1938.
One thing is sure: it was Stalin who instigated the carnage of 1937–8, although there was a current of popular opinion in the USSR that it was not essentially his fault. Supposedly his associates and advisers had persuaded him that only the most extremes measures would save the state from destruction; and in later decades this notion continued to commend itself to a handful of writers.4 But this was self-delusion. Stalin started and maintained the movement towards the Great Terror. He did not need to be pushed by others. He and nobody else was the engineer of imprisonment, torture, penal labour and shooting. He resorted to terror on the basis of Bolshevik doctrines and Soviet practical precedents. He also turned to it out of an inner psychological compulsion.5 Yet although he did not need much temptation to maim and kill, he had a strategy in mind. When he acted, his brutality was as mechanical as a badger trap. Stalin knew what he was hunting in the Great Terror, and why. There was a basic logic to his murderous activity. It was a logic which made sense within the framework of personal attitudes which interacted with Bolshevism in theory and practice. But he was the despot. What he thought and ordered had become the dominant factor in what was done at the highest level of the Soviet state.
Chief among his considerations was security, and he made no distinction between his personal security and the security of his policies, the leadership and the state. Molotov and Kaganovich in their dotage were to claim that Stalin had justifiable fears about the possibility of a ‘fifth column’ coming to the support of invading forces in the event of war.6 Stalin gave some hints of this. He was shocked by the ease with which it had been possible for General Franco to pick up followers in the Spanish Civil War which broke out in July 1936.7 He intended to prevent this from ever happening in the USSR. Such thinking goes some way to explaining why he, a believer in the efficacy of state terror, turned to intensive violence in 1937–8. Yet he would probably have felt impelled towards terror even without the pressures of the international situation. He felt the impulse to terror before the late 1930s. Inside the party there was much discontent with him and his policies, and indeed massive anger existed across the country. Although his power was enormous, he could never allow himself the luxury of complacency. The possibility of the bitter discontent bursting into a successful movement against him could not be discounted. Stalin’s revolutionary break with the NEP had caused tremors which were far from dying down. Beneath the surface of calm and obedience there boiled a deep resentment in state and society which had already given him cause for anxiety.
So if his reaction to the Civil War in Spain was the match, the entire political and social situation in the USSR over the past few years was the tinderbox. Stalin had come close to saying this in the message he and Zhdanov sent from the Black Sea to Kaganovich and Molotov on 25 September 1936:8
We consider it an absolutely necessary and urgent matter to appoint com[rade] Yezhov as People’s Commissar of Internal Affairs. Yagoda has clearly shown himself not up to the task of unmasking the Trotskyist– Zinovievite bloc. The OGPU is four years behind in this matter.
In lighting the match, Stalin did not necessarily have a predetermined plan any more than he had had one for economic transformation at the beginning of 1928. Although the victim-categories overlapped each other, there was no inevitability in his deciding to move against all of them in this small space of time. But the tinderbox had been sitting around in an exposed position. It was there to be ignited and Stalin, attending to all the categories one after another, applied the flame.
Trotski’s former ally Georgi Pyatakov had been arrested before Yezhov’s promotion. Pyatakov had been working efficiently as Ordzho-nikidze’s deputy in the People’s Commissariat of Heavy Industry. Ordzhonikidze, in discussions after the December 1936 Central Committee plenum, refused to believe the charges of terrorism and espionage laid against him. This was a battle Stalin had to win if he was to proceed with his campaign of repression. Pyatakov was placed under psychological pressure to confess to treasonous links with counter- revolutionary groups. He cracked. Brought out to an interview with Ordzhonikidze in Stalin’s presence, he confirmed his testimony to the NKVD. In late January 1937 a second great show trial was held. Pyatakov, Sokolnikov, Radek and Serebryakov were accused of heading an Anti-Soviet Trotskyist Centre. The discrepancies in evidence were large but the court did not flinch from sentencing Pyatakov and Serebryakov to death while handing out long periods of confinement to Radek and Sokolnikov. Meanwhile Ordzhonikidze’s brother had been shot on Stalin’s instructions. Ordzhonikidze himself fell apart: he went off to his flat on 18 February 1937 after a searing altercation with Stalin and shot himself. There was no longer anyone in the Politburo willing to stand up to Stalin and halt the machinery of repression.9
Ordzhonikidze’s suicide happened in the course of a Central Committee plenum that lasted into March 1937. Stalin, without hiding behind Yezhov, asserted that the Trotskyist–Zinovievite bloc had installed an agency for espionage, sabotage and terrorism working for the German intelligence services.10 Yezhov repeated that Trotskyists, Zinovievites and Rightists were operating in a single organisation, and Stalin with the plenum’s consent instructed him to carry out a thorough investigation.11 Stalin also threatened those who held posts in the party. He aimed to break up the clientelist system which inhibited the operation of a vertical administrative hierarchy:12
What does it mean if you haul a whole group of pals along with you? It means you’ve acquired a certain independence from local organisations and, if you like, a certain independence from the Central Committee. He has his own group and I have my own group and they’re personally devoted to me.
The alarm bell was being rung for a party and police purge. Bukharin was arrested on 27 February, Yagoda on 29 March. Mass expulsions meanwhile took place from the party through to the summer. Marshal Tukhachevski was arrested on 27 May along with most members of the Supreme Command. The armed forces had been added to party and police as suspect institutions. Tukhachevski was shot on 11 June; he had signed a confession with a bloodstained hand after a horrific beating.
The tall poppies of the USSR were being cut down. Yet another Central Committee plenum was convoked on 23 June. Yezhov reported on his investigations. Shamelessly fabricating the evidence, he reported that a Centre of Centres had been uncovered uniting Rightists, Mensheviks, Socialist-Revolutionaries, the Red Army, the NKVD, Zinovievites, Trotskyists and provincial party leaders. This was an alleged conspiracy on the grandest scale. Not only anti-Bolsheviks and former Bolshevik oppositionists but also current party leaders were said to have plotted to overthrow Stalin and his comrades; and Yezhov implied that only his own vigilance had prevented a coup from occurring.13
Stalin managed the process cunningly. He contrived again to hide behind Yezhov’s initiatives and pretend that he himself had nothing to do with the planning of repression. But as the moves were made against Central Committee members, it was unfeasible for him to say nothing; and in any case he was easily thrown into a bad temper by open criticism of the arrests. At the June 1937 plenum of the Central Committee G. N. Kaminski, People’s Commissar of Health, objected: ‘This way we’re killing off the entire party.’ Stalin barked back: ‘And you don’t happen to be friends with these enemies!’ Kaminski had taken his stand on principle and stuck to it: ‘They’re absolutely not my friends.’ Stalin came back at him: ‘Well, in that case it means you’re a berry from the same field as them.’14 Another brave individual was Osip Pyatnitski, a leading Soviet functionary in the Comintern, who vehemently opposed the proposal to execute Bukharin and accused the NKVD of fabricating its cases. Stalin suspended the proceedings and assembled the Politburo to discuss the outburst. Voroshilov and Molotov went to Pyatnitski to persuade him to retract. Pyatnitski refused. When the Central Committee reconvened, Yezhov denounced Pyatnitski as a former Okhrana agent, and Pyatnitski’s days were numbered. Stalin drew the plenum to a close on 29 June. He had crushed all opposition and called on the Central Committee to expel thirty-five full and candidate members from its ranks. The shocked Central Committee voted in favour.15
Equipped with the Central Committee’s troubled approval, the Politburo on 2 July decided on a decree to carry out a definitive purge of ‘anti-Soviet elements’. Not only the alleged leadership of the (entirely fictitious)
