balance of opinion was in favour of letting the commissariats get on with fulfilling the Second Five-Year Plan without interference by local party bodies.5
But how could this be achieved without losing control of the commissariats? Kaganovich suggested that the party should be given a crucial supervisory role at the local level. Thus the party committees would establish an internal department for each major branch of the economy. The task of the departments would be to check on the implementation of central economic objectives at the local level without taking over the functions of detailed management.
Kaganovich’s proposal had the virtue, from Stalin’s standpoint, of strengthening compliance with the Second Five-Year Plan. Each local party secretary would be reduced in authority when his committee was turned into ‘a small apparatus subordinate to the People’s Commissar’,6 and the party as a whole was subjected to greater control from the centre. In 1933 yet another purge of the membership was undertaken, resulting in the withdrawal of party cards from 854,300 persons identified as careerists, drunkards, idlers and unrepentant oppositionists.7 While all this was sweet music to Stalin’s ears, there remained much to annoy him. Firstly, the trimming of the party’s sprawling powers served to increase hostility to Stalin’s policies and mode of leadership among many party secretaries in the provinces. Stalin was less and less their hero. Secondly, the enhanced autonomy of the governmental organs made them still less amenable to Stalin’s control. Stalin was not the sort of leader who found this a tolerable situation.
Basic questions about how to consolidate the regime were therefore yet to be resolved. The Politburo reserved the right to take any definitive decision. No one was allowed to refer directly to these questions at the Seventeenth Congress of the All-Union Communist Party, which opened in Moscow on 26 February 1934. The press had indicated that it would be a Congress of Victors. The internal communist oppositions had been defeated; industrialization and agricultural collectivization had been imposed; military security had been reinforced. The party’s unity under its great leader was to be celebrated.
Stalin in his speech to the Congress, however, indicated that he was not going to be gracious in victory: ‘Consequently it is necessary not to sing lullabies to the party but to develop its vigilance, not to send it to sleep but to keep it in a condition of militant readiness, not to disarm but to arm it.’8 He warned against complacency about the party’s economic achievements and against indulgence towards the former oppositionists. His associates were equally intransigent. Molotov asserted that ‘vestiges of capitalism’ continued to affect thinking in the party; Kaganovich added that anti-Leninist deviations still threatened the party.9 Lesser figures added to the belligerent chorus. M. F. Shkiryatov suggested that the central leadership needed to intervene more vigorously to make improvements in local party life; and R. I. Eikhe declared that Bukharin had not done enough to prevent the emergence of ‘Ryutin and other counter-revolutionary swine’.10
They did not have everything their own way. Politburo members Kuibyshev and Mikoyan refrained from calling for a sharpening of political struggle.11 Similar reluctance was shown by influential regional party first secretaries including Petr Postyshev of Ukraine, I. M. Vareikis of the Central Black-Earth Region and B. P. Sheboldaev of the Azov-Black Sea Region.12 Molotov bridled at any such signs of diminishing militancy, and in his report on the economy he proposed — presumably with Stalin’s approval — to raise the projected annual industrial growth rate by another five per cent.13 Ordzhonikidze’s intervention led to a limitation of the increase to three per cent.14 The intensity of the dissension between Molotov and Ordzhonikidze ought not to be exaggerated. Nevertheless the Congress’s other decisions were generally in favour of slackening the political tensions, and it would seem that Leningrad party boss Sergei Kirov, too, was popular among Congress delegates for favouring such a relaxation. Pointedly Kirov had stated in his main speech: ‘The fundamental difficulties are already behind us.’15
There is also fragmentary evidence that Stalin did so poorly in the elections to the new Central Committee that the number of votes cast for each candidate was withheld from publication. Another story is that several Congress delegations asked Kirov to stand against Stalin for the General Secretaryship — and that Kirov declined the request.16 The full truth remains beclouded. What is clear is that Stalin lost his title of General Secretary and was redesignated simply as Secretary, and that Kirov was given the same rank.17 On the other hand, it remains far from clear that Kirov’s policies were really very different from those of Stalin and Molotov. Certainly he eulogized Stalin in his same speech to the Congress;18 and probably, too, he actually tried to resist his own promotion to Central Committee Secretary.19 Nevertheless Stalin had not had the enjoyable time during and after the Congress which he had thought his due: this much appears clear. His usual reaction in such a situation was to search for ways to settle accounts finally with those whom he regarded as his enemies.
From spring to autumn 1934 some impression was given that Stalin was making compromises just as Lenin had done in introducing the NEP. Kirov went on speaking in support of increased rations for workers, greater respect for legal procedures and an end to the violent extortion of grain from peasants.20 Restrictions were placed on the arbitrary arrest of economic experts.21 The OGPU lost its separate institutional status, and its activities and personnel were transferred under the control of the People’s Commissariat of Internal Affairs (NKVD). Thus the state’s mechanisms of arbitrary repression appeared to have been weakened. Yet the changes for the better were nugatory. Massive instrumentalities of violence remained intact, and the NKVD’s engorgement of the OGPU had the result of constructing an even mightier centralized organ for policing and security. Political passions therefore remained high: the Congress had ultimately resolved little.
On 1 December 1934 an astonishing event triggered an upward ratcheting of the level of repression. A young ex-Zinovievite, Leonid Nikolaev, walked into Kirov’s office in Leningrad, pulled out a revolver and shot him. Stalin exploited the assassination as a pretext to rush through a set of decrees granting full authority to the NKVD to arrest, try and execute at will. This gave rise to the belief that Stalin connived in the killing. Nikolaev had previously been caught in possession of a firearm in suspicious circumstances. He was executed before any exhaustive interrogation could take place and an improbably large proportion of those who handled Nikolaev after Kirov’s death, including the van-drivers, quickly perished in mysterious circumstances. Yet Stalin’s complicity in the Kirov murder remains unproven. What is beyond dispute is that the assassination enabled him and his associates to begin to move against the somewhat less militant among the Stalinists and their tacit supporters.
Stalin first took revenge upon Zinoviev and Kamenev, who were accused of conniving in Kirov’s death. They agreed to accept moral and political responsibility for their former minor adherent in return for an assurance that they would receive a light sentence. Their trial was held in camera in January 1935. On Stalin’s orders Zinoviev and Kamenev were consigned to ten and five years of imprisonment respectively. Stalin’s prisons were not rest-homes. Furthermore, 663 past supporters of Zinoviev in Leningrad were seized and sent into exile in Yakutia and other bleak Siberian locations. Over 30,000 deportations of members of social groups regarded as hostile to the communism in Leningrad and other cities as the security agencies intensified its years-old campaign against undesirables.22
Stalin was cranking up the motor of prophylactic repression. Neither the exiled communist ex-oppositionists nor the deported former middle-class city dwellers had been conspiring against Stalin. But Stalin did not want to give them the chance to do so. His desire for complete control was even extended to ordinary communists who had never belonged to an oppositional faction. Yet another clear-out of undesirable rank-and-file members was ordered in 1934 and a block was placed on recruitment for the second half of the year. Coming after the purge of 1933, this measure was a sign of the Secretariat’s undispelled concern about the revolutionary ‘vanguard’. In January 1935, as Kamenev and Zinoviev received their prison sentences, a general exchange of party cards was announced. This would be a purge under a different name: the aim was to identify and remove those many members who did nothing for the party while deriving advantage from having a card. In consequence, by May 1935, 281,872 persons had ceased being Bolsheviks.23
This fitted the schemes of Andrei Zhdanov, who had become a Central Committee Secretary in 1934 and Leningrad party chief after Kirov’s murder. Zhdanov wanted to restore the authority of the party at the expense of the people’s commissariats; he saw the internal party purge as a prerequisite of this task. Once it had been ‘cleansed’, the party would be in a condition to resume its role as the supreme institution of the Soviet state. At a practical level, Zhdanov aimed to reverse the Seventeenth Party Congress’s decision to reorganize the departments of party committees on parallel lines to the economic branches of government. The local party committees, according to Zhdanov, should reclaim their role in propagating Marxism-Leninism, mobilizing society and in selecting personnel for public office. His implicit argument was that the Soviet order could not safely be entrusted to the people’s commissariats.
