Zhdanov’s success was an episode in the struggle among institutions. The Soviet economy was run on the basis of central command, and it was important that the people’s commissariats maximized their power to impose their will. Yet there was a danger that this power might be used against the wishes of the central political leadership. And so the party had to be retained to control the commissariats. But the party might lack the necessary expertise. As central politicians tried to resolve this dilemma, they alternated in their preferences between the people’s commissariats and the party. Indeed this had become the perennial institutional dilemma of the one-party, one-ideology state and the state-owned economy of the USSR.
Yet Stalin had his own motives in supporting Zhdanov. Apparently Zhdanov wished to box off the party purge from the concurrent arrests of ex-oppositionists. But Stalin rejected any such demarcation, and on 13 May 1935 the Secretariat sent out a secret letter to local party committees asserting that party cards had got into the hands of many adventurers, political enemies and spies.24 Thus persons expelled from the party could now find themselves accused of espionage, for which the punishment was either execution or years of forced labour. On 20 May, the Politburo issued a directive for every former Trotskyist to be sent to a labour camp for a minimum of three years. On 20 November, Trotski, Kamenev and Zinoviev were accused of spying for foreign powers.25 Stalin, designedly or not, was moving towards a violent general resolution of the political tensions. Apparently not even Kaganovich or Zhdanov or even Molotov, his closest associates, were demanding the extension of terror. But by then none of them dared deny Stalin something upon which his mind was fixed.26
Not only political administration but also economic management became more hazardous. For it was also in 1935 that an extraordinary campaign was introduced to raise industrial productivity. In the Don Basin, in eastern Ukraine, the miner Aleksei Stakhanov hewed 102 tons of coal in a six-hour stint in August. This feat was fourteen times the norm set by his enterprise. When the news reached Moscow, Stalin and Molotov perceived that a summons to all industrial labourers to emulate Stakhanov would help to break the spine of the objections by managers, technical experts and workers to the Politburo’s policies.
Stakhanov was hailed as a worker-hero; a Stakhanovite movement was founded. Suddenly it was found that practically every industrial machine could be made to function much, much faster. Even the boilers of steam-trains started to perform wonders. Managers and administrative personnel were intimidated into altering patterns of work to accommodate attempts on records; and the workers were put under pressure to change their working procedures.27 Critics of Stakhanovism in any enterprise were not merely reprimanded but arrested as ‘wreckers’. Ordzhonikidze as a Politburo member had immunity from such a sanction, and he pointed out that Stakhanov and his emulators could perform miracles only by means of the deployment of other workers to service their needs. Yet he was ignored. The Stakhanovite movement suited Stalin, who wanted to foster utopian industrial schemes by terrorizing doubters and encouraging enthusiasts.
His hostility to factory directors, local party chiefs and former oppositionists was coalescing into a single repressive campaign. It would take little to impel Stalin into action. Politics had been dangerously volatile for years as institutional interests clashed and rivalries among the leaders intensified. In 1935–6 there was again a dispute in the Politburo about tempos of economic growth.28 As usual, Stalin was strongly in favour of increasing the tempos. At the same time there was administrative chaos and popular resentment in the country. And then suddenly, in summer 1936, Stalin was driven frantic by evidence obtained by the NKVD that Trotski had been keeping contact from abroad with clandestine groups of supporters and that these groups had been negotiating with supporters of Bukharin, Kamenev and Zinoviev.29 For an extremely suspicious and vengeful person such as Stalin, this threat called for massive retaliation. In the rest of the year he sought to settle accounts bloodily with all those whom he identified as his enemies.
First he moved against Kamenev and Zinoviev. On 29 June 1936, a secret letter was sent by the Central Committee Secretariat to the local party bodies alleging the discovery of ‘the terrorist activities of the Trotskyist- Zinovievite counter-revolutionary bloc’.30 In August 1936, Kamenev and Zinoviev were dragged from their cells and re-tried. This time the proceedings were held in public. The defendants were privately threatened with the death sentence unless they ‘confessed’ to having set up an Anti-Soviet Trotskyist-Zinovievite Centre that organized assassinations. Supposedly Stalin was next on their list after Kirov. They duly confessed, and Stalin duly broke his promise. The court condemned them to death and sentence was carried out early next morning.
This was the first execution of anyone who had belonged to the Party Central Committee. Stalin’s campaign was relentless. He sacked Yagoda in September on the grounds that he was four years behind in catching enemies of the people. His replacement was Nikolai Yezhov a rising figure in the central party apparatus. The atmosphere in the Soviet leadership was not relaxed by the economic news. The 1936 grain harvest turned out to be twenty-six per cent smaller than the harvest of the previous year;31 and in November a massive explosion occurred at the Kemerovo coal-mine. Many such troubles in agriculture and industry were the product of the technical disruptions brought about by Stalin’s management of the economy. But he blamed the troubles on wreckers and anti-Soviet elements and strengthened his resolve to stick to his methods.
Ordzhonikidze and Kuibyshev, who themselves had supported the brutal industrialization during 1928–32, were disconcerted by Stalin’s continued brutality.32 But Kuibyshev, a heavy drinker, died of a heart attack (or was he poisoned on Stalin’s orders?) in January 1935. Ordzhonikidze was becoming isolated in the Politburo. Others who had their doubts — Mikoyan, Voroshilov and Kalinin — were threatened back into submission. And so Stalin had the preponderant influence in the central party organs. The Politburo, which had convened weekly during the First Five-Year Plan, met only nine times in 1936.33 Despite losing his title of General Secretary in 1934, Stalin still dominated the Secretariat. He also had his own office, headed by A. N. Poskrebyshev, which kept hold of its own long-established links with the NKVD.
Even Stalin, however, needed a sanction stronger than his signature as Party Secretary in order to start a systematic extermination of communist oppositionists. He was not yet a dictator. The party was the regime’s most influential institution, and Stalin still had to get his strategy, ill-defined as it was, approved by the rest of the Politburo. Ordzhonikidze was a source of difficulty. Stalin attacked him in a particularly nasty fashion by putting Pyatakov, former oppositionist and presently Ordzhonikidze’s deputy in the People’s Commissariat of Heavy Industry, on show-trial alongside fellow ex-oppositionist Karl Radek. Under intense psychological pressure Pyatakov and Radek confessed to leading an imaginary Parallel Anti-Soviet Trotskyist Centre aiming to restore capitalism in Russia. Pyatakov was shot and Radek sent to a labour camp. In February, unhinged by Pyatakov’s execution, Ordzhonikidze shot himself — or possibly he was murdered on Stalin’s orders.
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, Petr 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
