The conquered—the repentant and humiliated former oppositionists—were indeed a worrisome subgroup within the community of Old Bolsheviks. Although the secret police kept a close watch over them, the former oppositionists were still party members in good standing. Many held posts within the government and even the party apparat, or they had senior positions in major economic enterprises. Most Old Bolsheviks remembered the role the oppositionists had played during the glory days of the revolution. Kirov’s murder and the fabricated case alleging that followers of Zinoviev and Kamenev were involved in a terrorist plot changed everything. The former opposition was transformed overnight from comrades who had once committed political indiscretions into “enemies” and “terrorists.”
The former oppositionists were not the only ones affected by this sudden transformation. Among the old guard it was hard to find anyone who was not in some way tied to them. A significant proportion of Soviet generals had served under Trotsky, who had founded the Red Army and led it for many years. Many up-and-coming functionaries had “erred” in their youth. In the 1920s, either because they were not yet sure which way the winds were blowing or were simply following their hearts, many had at some point supported the opposition. Others developed friendships with future members of the opposition during their years underground and during the revolution or when they fought side by side during the Civil War. Some had recently collaborated with repentant oppositionists. In short, in striking a blow against the former oppositionists, Stalin launched a huge shake-up in the party ranks. It allowed him both to take care of political opponents who might have been lurking in the shadows and to purge the apparat overall, including getting rid of some of his Politburo comrades.
Between 1935 and early 1937, the persecution of former oppositionists was accompanied by shake-ups at the highest echelons of power. The Kirov murder strengthened the position of three enterprising young men: Nikolai Yezhov, Andrei Zhdanov, and Nikita Khrushchev. Yezhov’s promotion was especially significant. It was on his shoulders that Stalin placed direct responsibility for conducting the purge. After acquitting himself well in fabricating cases during the Kirov Affair, Yezhov was entrusted with a new assignment—the Kremlin Affair. In early 1935 a group of support staff working in government offices located in the Kremlin—maids, librarians, and members of the Kremlin commandant’s staff—were arrested and accused of plotting against Stalin. Among those arrested were several relatives of Lev Kamenev, who was charged with hatching the plot.
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The arrestees came under the authority of Stalin’s old friend Avel Yenukidze, who oversaw the running of all Kremlin facilities, and he was accused of abetting the plot.
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Stalin took a great interest in the Kremlin Affair. The archives show that he regularly received and read arrestee interrogation protocols, made notations on them, and gave specific instructions to the NKVD.
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Although Yenukidze was not a member of the Politburo, he was an intimate part of the system of collective leadership insofar as he was close friends with many top officials, including Stalin himself. Stalin in essence used Yenukidze to test the durability of the collective leadership system. This was the dictator’s first significant strike against his inner circle. The test was successful. The Politburo offered only weak resistance, and Yenukidze was fired, arrested, and shot. For a while Stalin trod carefully, taking the operation one step at a time, but gradually the cleansing of the top nomenklatura picked up steam. A turning point was the first Moscow show trial of former opposition leaders in August 1936. After being extensively tortured, the defendants, who included Kamenev, Zinoviev, and other prominent party figures, were proclaimed terrorists and spies and then shot.
The August trial took the hunt for enemies to a new level of hysteria. Stalin appointed Yezhov to take over the NKVD, and under the
vozhd
’s guidance, he began preparing new trials and intensified the purge of the party and state apparats. In January 1937 a second show trial was held, this time of former oppositionists who held senior positions overseeing the economy and industrial enterprises. They were charged with wrecking and espionage. Stalin’s close associates, compromised by ties with supposed enemies, gave in. Only Ordzhonikidze would not allow his underlings in the heavy-industry sector to be arrested, sparking a conflict with Stalin that ended with Ordzhonikidze’s suicide.
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This desperate act shows how helpless the Politburo members felt before Stalin, whose control of the secret police made him an indomitable force. The
vozhd
’s long-standing comrades-in-arms, to say nothing of middle-level functionaries, were a fractured force. They fell all over one another in an effort to ingratiate themselves with Stalin, each hoping to save his own skin.
Such was the state of affairs when the already thinned ranks of the nomenklatura convened for the February–March Central Committee plenum of 1937. During the plenum, Stalin ordered that repression be continued, and Yezhov made a speech calling for a case to be brought against the leaders of the “right deviation,” Nikolai Bukharin and Aleksei Rykov (their fellow “rightist,” Mikhail Tomsky, had already killed himself in August 1936). The plenum of course approved Yezhov’s proposal. Bukharin and Rykov were arrested, and in March 1938 they were convicted to be shot at the third Moscow show trial. Like the other trials, this one was followed by a wave of spurious convictions across the country.
The repression that roiled the party and state apparats came down with particular force on the “power structures,” the NKVD and the army—organizations that Stalin thought posed the greatest threat to his dictatorship. Once Yezhov took over the NKVD, he destroyed his predecessor, Yagoda, and many of his associates. In June 1937, after being tortured, a large number of senior military officers, including the deputy people’s commissar for defense, Mikhail Tukhachevsky, were given death sentences based on trumped-up charges of belonging to an “anti-Soviet Trotskyite military organization.”
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Soon afterward, a wave of arrests swept through the entire army. Scholarly investigation of recently opened archives can now set decades-long debate to rest: the Tukhachevsky Affair and the entire anti-military campaign was based on evidence fabricated by the NKVD under Stalin’s direct supervision. The charges brought against the military leaders had absolutely no basis in fact.
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At first, repression was primarily targeted at key members of the government, party, state security services, and military and had little effect on ordinary citizens. If the terror had been limited to the party-state nomenklatura, one might agree with those who have argued that Stalin’s main goal was to destroy the party’s old guard and install a new generation of functionaries blindly devoted to him. He did undeniably pursue this goal. But in the second half of 1937, the terror was brought to bear on a much larger swath of the Soviet population, and this expansion is what made it “the Great Terror.” In terms of their scale and the number of victims, these later operations greatly overshadowed those primarily targeted at officials. After shooting a significant fraction of the nomenklatura, Stalin brought his terror to its logical conclusion. Having solidified power at the top, he undertook to purge the country of a suspected fifth column. The threat of a major war exacerbated Stalin’s paranoia. Hundreds of thousands of innocent people paid the price.
TREPIDATION IN THE INNER CIRCLE
The initial arrival of the four at the near dacha, early morning hours of 2 March 1953.
The bodyguard entered Stalin’s apartments with the packet of mail and started looking for him. After walking through several rooms, he finally found the
vozhd
in the small dining room. The sight must have been extremely disturbing. Stalin was lying helpless on the floor, which was wet beneath him.
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This last point is important not for reasons of schadenfreude or as an evocative detail but because it affected subsequent events. It appeared to the bodyguard that Stalin was unable to speak, but he did make a small hand gesture, beckoning him to approach. The bodyguard summoned his colleagues, who helped him lift Stalin onto the couch. They then rushed to telephone their immediate superior, State Security Minister Semen Ignatiev. According to the bodyguards’ later accounts, Ignatiev refused to make any decisions and told them to call members of the top leadership: Beria and Malenkov.
Ignatiev’s reaction was perfectly understandable. He was behaving just as the bodyguards had done several hours earlier, when they were afraid to enter Stalin’s rooms uninvited. Ignatiev did not want to take responsibility for a decision to summon doctors to the
vozhd
. This was a ticklish matter for a man who, just two years earlier, had been plucked from the relatively cozy position of Central Committee department head and assigned to hunt for enemies of the people as minister of state security. He must have rued the day Stalin picked him for this job, which carried a high price for failure. From then on he lived in fear. Upon hearing that Stalin had suffered some sort of stroke, his only desire was to hand decision-making responsibility to somebody else.
Having failed to get any guidance from their boss, the bodyguards managed to find Malenkov, who then informed the other members of the ruling Five: Beria, Khrushchev, and Bulganin. This made sense. Without a clear understanding of Stalin’s condition, Malenkov did not want to go to the dacha by himself or be the only one to sanction the summoning of doctors. Any decisions should be made collectively. The four men agreed to meet at the dacha to assess the situation and give each other cover for whatever actions were taken.
Both Khrushchev’s memoirs and the bodyguards’ accounts describe the top leadership’s extreme caution after arriving at the dacha in the middle of the night. They were afraid of doing anything that might provoke Stalin’s wrath if he recovered. According to Khrushchev, at first they did not even enter Stalin’s apartments, choosing instead to interrogate the bodyguards. What they heard made them even more nervous. That Stalin was incapacitated and had apparently urinated on himself put the leaders in a difficult position. They knew he would not want anyone to see him in such a state. What if this was just a passing episode? Stalin would not look fondly on anyone who had witnessed his humiliating helplessness. As Khrushchev describes it, once they learned from the bodyguards that Stalin “now seemed to be sleeping, we thought that since he was in such poor shape, it would be awkward for us to appear at his side and make our presence officially known. So we went back to our homes.”
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Khrushchev’s memoirs apparently do not tell the whole story. According to the bodyguards, before leaving, the four designated Malenkov and Beria to enter Stalin’s rooms and personally assess his condition. Such an assessment required two men for obvious reasons. If all four went, they would make unnecessary noise and risk rousing the
vozhd
. And none of them wanted to go in by himself. Khrushchev and Bulganin thus waited in the bodyguards’ quarters while Beria and Malenkov snuck stealthily in to look at Stalin, terrified of waking him. The bodyguards recalled one slapstick detail: Malenkov’s new shoes made a squeaking noise, so he took them off and carried them under his arm. As the two men approached, they could hear Stalin lightly snoring. After emerging, Beria berated the bodyguards for raising a fuss over nothing. Stalin was just sleeping. The bodyguards defended their actions, explaining that matters had been much worse a few hours earlier.
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Dismissing the bodyguards’ concerns, the four men returned to Moscow.
Some historians and commentators have detected conspiratorial overtones in this episode and blame Stalin’s death on the decision not to call for medical help. This interpretation is doubtful. First, according to the doctors who performed the autopsy, Stalin’s stroke was the result of atherosclerosis that had been developing for years.
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Quick intervention would not have saved him. On the other hand, his fellow leaders could not have known this. They did not understand the implications of providing or withholding medical care, and their failure to summon doctors could have contained some malicious intent. Many Soviet leaders, in their hearts, surely did not wish their abusive leader long life. Nevertheless, less sinister explanations must also be considered. Stalin’s associates were simply afraid of intervening. They were not used to taking the initiative, and they knew Stalin’s suspicious and capricious nature all too well. During those days in early March, everyone involved—the bodyguards, Ignatiev, and the other members of the Five—behaved exactly as Stalin had trained them to behave. They tiptoed nervously forward, always looking over their shoulders and trying to shift as much responsibility as possible onto each other.
For many years, even Stalin’s closest associates and friends, people with whom he had shared long years of struggle, had lived under the constant threat of destruction. A dictator can only be sure of his power if those around him are at his mercy. After destroying the former opposition leaders, in 1937–1938 Stalin proceeded to have a significant portion of the Politburo shot. The close relatives of some of his surviving associates were also arrested or killed. The brother of Politburo member Lazar Kaganovich committed suicide, and Kalinin’s wife wound up in a camp.
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This suppression of potential oligarchs continued after the war. The Leningrad Affair did away with Nikolai Voznesensky and Aleksei Kuznetsov, two members of the younger generation who had risen to prominence under Stalin.
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Molotov’s wife was arrested around the same time. In the final months of his life, Stalin lashed out at Molotov and Mikoyan, essentially removing them from power. His death would provide the only guarantee against new purges.