In these somewhat brighter years, the seeds of destruction were already sown. On December 1, 1934, an assassin killed the leader of the party in Leningrad, Sergei Kirov. The authorities proclaimed the murder to be the work of unrepentant Trotskyists, though the most likely theory is that it was the result of Kirov’s romantic entanglements. In public the uproar died down quickly, but in the ensuing months the NKVD (in place of the GPU from 1934) began to search for enemy agents, particularly among the former oppositionists working in Soviet institutions. By 1936 they were ready to bring Zinoviev and Kamenev together with other old Bolsheviks, mostly former oppositionists, to trial. The charges were the murder of Kirov, a conspiracy to kill Stalin, and treasonous arrangements with fascist agents. The defendants all “confessed” in a carefully staged public trial and were mostly sentenced to death. In January of 1937, another trial followed, and this time the main defendants were Karl Radek, a journalist and Comintern official, and Georgii Piatakov. Both were former Trotskyists, and Piatakov had in recent years been the right-hand man of Ordzhonikidze in the People’s Commissariat of Heavy Industry. Ordzhonikidze seems to have been the only one in the leadership to resist the coming terror – at least as it applied to the institutions he headed at the time. On February 17, after a long conversation with Stalin, Ordzhnokidze committed suicide. His death was announced as the result of sudden illness, and he received a grandiose state funeral.
In late February 1937, the Central Committee of the Party met in plenary session, its agenda being to discuss the new constitution about to be promulgated for the country. The new constitution replaced the formal institutions formed in the Civil War with ones that looked more like those of a normal state, though it had no impact on the actual relations of power, dominated as they were by the party. A rather dull meeting seemed to be in prospect. Early in the proceedings Molotov and other confidants of Stalin arose to add to the deliberations the need to “unmask the Trotskyist agents of fascism” whom they asserted to be hiding in large numbers in the party and state apparatus. By the end of the meeting the unmasking of traitors had become the main task proclaimed by the Central Committee. In the ensuing months the NKVD, under its new head Nikolai Ezhov, began to arrest tens of thousands of people as enemies of the people. In May the NKVD ordered the arrest of nearly the whole of the high command of the Red Army. Marshal Tukhachevsky and seven others, almost all Red Army heroes of the Civil War, were accused of treason and confessions were extracted by torture. They were tried in secret, and quickly executed. Some forty thousand officers perished or went to prison in the wake of the Tukhachevsky trial. At the ranks of brigade commander and above nearly ninety percent were executed, altogether some eight hundred men. The terror was not confined to such elite groups, for other and larger classes of victims accompanied them to the camps and the firing squads. In July the Politburo issued order 00447 (the 00 signified top secret) providing each regional unit of the NKVD with a quota for arrests and executions. The total for the country in this order alone was to be seventy-two thousand. The victims were to be, in principle, all known former kulaks, White officers, Mensheviks or SRs, and a multitude of lesser and vaguer categories. Each office of the NKVD began frantically to search through its card files for anyone ever arrested or under suspicion in any of the relevant categories. Regional NKVD units wrote to Moscow begging to be allowed to over fulfill the plan for executions and arrests. Their requests were granted, and similar orders followed. These orders at least targeted (mostly) real potential enemies of the Soviet order.
Stalin also struck at the party apparatus with the NKVD, again by torture extracting confessions from party members that they were wreckers and Japanese or German spies. To enforce the terror, Stalin sent trusted deputies, Kaganovich, Georgii Malenkov, and others, to republican and provincial capitals to “unmask” the enemies in the party hierarchy and order their arrest. Ezhov presented Stalin with long lists of enemies and wreckers, some forty-four thousand in all, and Stalin personally checked off the names, presenting them to Molotov and others in his inner circle for confirmation. Molotov and Stalin even added comments in the margins of the list: “Give the dog a dog’s death,” or “Hit them and hit them.” Most of the members of the central party leadership, including the Central Committee of the Party, People’s Commissars, and other high government officials perished. The same occurred at the republican level, and even reached down to provincial and city party and government circles. Thus most of the party apparatus perished. The names of the dead and imprisoned simply disappeared from public documents, and they were erased along with Trotsky from the history books.
The last of the show trials took place in March 1938, and featured the former rightists, Bukharin, Rykov, and others, as well as Ezhov’s predecessor as head of the NKVD, Genrikh Yagoda. The usual confessions and violent denunciations from the prosecutor, Andrei Vyshinskii (himself an ex-Menshevik), were the highlights. This lurid spectacle was the last of the show trials, and though it and its predecessors attracted world attention, it served mainly as a background to the real killing. In the course of 1937–38, the NKVD executed some three quarters of a million people, including the bulk of the military and political elite, all former oppositionists from within the party, but the majority of the victims, however, were people in all walks of life who fit into the prescribed categories of enemies such as former nobles or Mensheviks. To top all this off, the NKVD also decided to deport the entire population of the so-called “western national minorities”: the Poles, Latvians, Germans, Finns, and others who lived near the western boundary of the USSR. Hundreds of thousands perished in transit. When the NKVD ran out of people in the assigned categories, they rounded up common criminals, executed them, and listed them as political. In the two years, the total who were executed or died of privations in transit came out to a million people. Finally, the blood came to an end. Through 1938 Stalin gave increasingly frequent signals that “excesses” had been committed, putting the blame on the NKVD, and Ezhov himself was soon executed. By 1939, the wave had passed. A semblance of peace descended on a terrorized society.
After the end of the terror, the subject passed entirely from Soviet public discourse. Stalin soon ordered the composition and extensive publication of the Short Course of the History of Communist Party and ordered all members of the party to study it thoroughly. It became a compendium of the official line, and offered a wholly falsified history of Bolshevism and the 1917 revolution, with Trotsky and other leaders omitted except to vilify them for their opposition in the 1920s and their alleged later roles as spies and traitors. Its centerpiece was a simplified sketch of Marxism authored by Stalin himself though not publicly acknowledged as such. The book offered no explanation of the events of 1937–38 other than to describe the results of the show trials. The actual terror never received any public explanation then or later in Stalin’s lifetime. Though the specific charges at the show trials and in secret arrests normally had been manufactured, Stalin, Molotov, and the others around them seem to have seriously thought that they were fighting and destroying real and dangerous enemies. Such, at least, is the language of their surviving private correspondence with one another. Their public statements in 1937 asserted that the successful building of socialism only “sharpened the class struggle,” which seems to have meant that Stalin’s policies, especially collectivization, produced more and more doubters, whom Stalin and his circle interpreted as conscious enemies suborned by foreign intelligence services. In addition they feared that such internal enemies might try to strike when the inevitable war in Europe broke out and involved the Soviet Union. The mentality of Soviet leaders, and particularly the NKVD, encouraged such conclusions. NKVD officials during collectivization regularly interpreted objections by the peasants to minor aspects of the new order as conscious political opposition to the Soviet system. In their minds and in Stalin’s, if someone disagreed with some details of the plan targets for the aluminum industry, that person must be a secret opponent of t
he regime, and as the Short Course taught, all enemies of socialism are ultimately in league with one another.
Not everyone who was arrested was shot, and as a result, the population of the prison camps boomed. In the 1920s the prison camps had been relatively small and organized around the main camp on the Solovki Islands in the White Sea. In those years just over one hundred thousand people languished in Solovki and various other prisons, in cold, insect-infested cells, required to work cutting peat or felling trees. In 1929 Stalin and the security police decided to turn the prison system into a network of labor camps on the Solovki model, and common criminals were placed in the same camps. The great expansion came with the collectivization of agriculture, for those kulaks considered especially dangerous were sent to camps rather than to the special settlements. By 1934, when the GULAG, or the Chief Administration of Camps, under the OGPU/NKVD came into being, there were half a million prisoners. By 1939 a million-and-a-half prisoners lived in camps and “labor colonies,” which had a somewhat less strict regime. Though plenty of people died in Soviet camps, they were not death camps, but labor camps, and the GULAG took the labor component quite seriously. At first they even advertised their “successes,” such as the building of the White Sea Canal in 1931–32, touted as an example of labor successfully re-educating class enemies. From 1937, however, the camps were in principle secret. The system was a complex hierarchy, ranging from “special settlements,” where the prisoners lived in fairly normal housing or minimally livable barracks, to horrific mining settlements like Vorkuta or the Kolyma gold fields on the east coast of Siberia, reachable only by ship. Most prisoners were assigned labor in forests, cutting trees for the timber industry with primitive tools, or were assigned to mine, or work in construction. Death was the result of disease, accidents, and general privation, for the GULAG needed labor to meet its own plans. Most deaths occurred during the shipment out to the camps in 1937–38 when hundreds of thousands were shipped east and north in unheated boxcars to places where facilities for the prisoners were almost non-existent. In the Stalin years, failure to meet the plan could be fatal, so the camp commandants engaged in a complex juggling game to keep the prisoners well-enough fed and housed to be able to work while not expending too much on them. With the special settlements, some four million people lived “under the jurisdiction of the NKVD” by 1941. Of these most were not political prisoners in the usual sense. In the camps and colonies, only about twenty percent had been convicted of “counter-revolutionary actions” or other political offenses, and the rest were a mixture of common criminals and those who fell afoul of increasingly strict laws on labor discipline, hooliganism, or “theft of state property,” a particularly murky area given the realities of Soviet life. Many were imprisoned for passport violations after the introduction of internal passports in 1932. Even the “political” prisoners included many classified as political only in the super-politicized categories of Stalin and the NKVD. The camp system under Stalin was primarily a system of convict labor into which political prisoners were added.
At the end of the 1930s the Soviet Union was even more a land of paradox than before. State centralization had continued to increase. The defeat of the Right Opposition had put Stalin’s allies in all the key positions of state: Molotov became the chair of the Council of People’s Commissars, the head of state and government. Along with Molotov and Stalin the inner circle now consisted of Lazar Kaganovich, Sergo Ordzhonikidze, Kliment Voroshilov, Anastas Mikoyan, and, until his death Valerian Kuibyshev. While Ordzhonikidze and Kuibyshev oversaw industry, Kaganovich took care of transport and Mikoyan of the crucial area of food supplies and trade. Voroshilov was in charge of the armed forces. All of them had other duties as well, and they regularly met to discuss even minute issues of economic management as well as political questions. Around this inner group until 1937–38 was a large number of managers and party officials who had mostly come out of the Civil War and come into power under Stalin. This was the core Soviet elite at the time, and most of them did not survive the terror of 1937–38. The result of the terror was to further concentrate power in the inner circle and even more so on Stalin himself, but to also bring new men into the leadership. Foremost among them was Lavrentii Beriia, another Georgian who replaced Ezhov as head of the security police. Others of the younger men were Andrei Zhdanov, Georgii Malenkov, and Nikita Khrushchev, all of whom would play major roles in the coming war and post-war years. Zhdanov was the son of a school inspector and worked his way up through provincial party leadership to take over Leningrad’s party after the assassination of Kirov. Malenkov, also from the Urals, and with a pre-revolutionary gymnasium education, made his career in the central party apparatus in Moscow. Khrushchev, by contrast, was actually a worker in the Donbass who rose through the party ranks when Kaganovich was running the Ukrainian party in the 1920s, and then moved on to Moscow. All three had served in the Civil War. Along with these new men came a shift in the structure of power at the center, with all of the leaders taking more direct roles in managing the state, not merely supervising it from the Politburo. The centralization of power was formalized in May 1941 when Stalin replaced Molotov as Chairman of the Council of People’s Commissars. Stalin now formally and actually headed both party and state.
Figure 19. The funeral of the writer Maxim Gorky in 1936. From right to left: Genrikh Iagoda, chief of the political police, Stalin,Viacheslav Molotov, Bulgarian Communist and Comintern leader Georgii Dimitrov, (in white) Andrei Zhdanov, Lazar Kaganovich.
Alongside the centralization of power in the Politburo and then with Stalin alone a whole cult of the leader appeared, managed from the center. It was already normal in the early 1920s to display portraits of Lenin, Trotsky, and the current leadership at major celebrations like November 7 and May 1. By the end of the 1920s Stalin was the central figure in these displays and by the end of the 1930s almost the only figure. Statues of Stalin sprouted in addition to the ubiquitous statues of Lenin, and cities and institutions were named in his honor. At party meetings it was the ritual to stand when his name was mentioned and acclaim him. Stalin was not a dynamic public speaker, in part because of his pronounced Georgian accent, and he never seems to have desired the unceasing public display and admiration that Hitler and Mussolini craved and staged over and over. He rarely appeared in public and his actual personality remained private, but the standard epithets – “great leader of peoples”– were obligatory. His writings were the required textbooks of Marxism and his image and his name were everywhere and became basic components of Soviet political culture.
The centralization of power also affected the complex federal structure of the USSR. Starting in 1929–30 all-union Commissariats of Agriculture, Education, and Culture and other organs had been created that stood over the analogous republican agencies. The policies and structures of the NEP era had meant a sort of de facto alliance of the party with intellectuals in the non-Russian republics to build and in some cases create local cultures. This arrangement in many ways paralleled the role of the pre-revolutionary Russian engineers and economists in Soviet industry, and it met the same fate beginning in 1929–30. Show trials of local nationalists signaled the end of collaboration, as did the appearance of an all-union Commissariat of Culture and Education. In 1932–33 the party carried out a campaign against Ukrainian nationalism, including show trials of Ukrainian intellectuals accused of nationalism and ties with foreign powers. The Ukrainian party leaders who preferred the older policy committed suicide and others were arrested or demoted. Similar campaigns took place in other republics, all of them part of the “cultural revolution” of 1929–1932.
Even more important for the fate of the Soviet republics was the tremendous growth in centralization of the economy. Republican plans for economic development were swamped by new central authorities’ grandiose schemes for regional development based on economic, not ethnic, criteria. In the northern autonomous republics of Russia, no local authority could compete with the sheer e
conomic power of the GULAG, even when the political arm of the NKVD was not involved. Ukrainian and Siberian economic development followed the dictates of the all-union industrial Commissariats, Gosplan, and other agencies. The result in many areas was massive economic development but also ultimate erosion of the authority of local party committees and republican governments. The republican authorities (including the Russian republic) were largely left with agricultural issues, by their nature requiring more local control. The hierarchy that emerged from industrialization was not based on the federal state structure, but on the economic structure. The hierarchy was not ethnic or political: a district or a republic with many factories under a high priority commissariat such as heavy industry or defense was favored both with investment and consumer goods. A district with light industry was not. This system favored the Ukrainian Donbass and neglected central Russian towns where the predominant industries were textile factories.
In some respects the central authorities continued to pay attention to local issues. For all the centralization, the formal federal structure remained. The 1936, “Stalin” constitution perpetuated the federal structure of the USSR, by now including twelve union republics and many autonomous republics under them. The end of the “indigenization” policy in the party came with the assault on local nationalism, but Stalin did not replace the local minorities in the party leadership with Russians. Local nationality party members came to be the majority in almost all union and autonomous republics, including the leadership groups, though Stalin continued to bring in occasional trusted outsiders at the top, like Nikita Khrushchev in the Ukraine in the wake of the 1937–38 terror. The Soviet Union’s central leadership was multi-national. Stalin himself was Georgian as was Orzdzhonikidze and the post-1938 head of the NKVD, Lavrentii Beriia. Molotov and Voroshilov were both Russian, while Kaganovich and the foreign minister in the 1930s, Maxim Litvinov, were Jewish. Mikoyan was Armenian. The campaign against local nationalism did not imply cultural Russification. Stalin and the leadership were perfectly happy for the non-Russians to speak and write native languages, as long as Moscow retained political control and Moscow ran most of the economy. In Russian-speaking Ukrainian cities the newspapers were still mostly in Ukrainian until 1939. After about 1932 the Soviet authorities began to heavily promote the celebration of non-Russian writers and artists in the central press, organizing meetings with Stalin and other leaders in Moscow to great press coverage. Pre-revolutionary Russian culture received a similar positive re-evaluation, culminating in the Pushkin anniversary celebrations of 1937. In the same years in the Ukraine new statues of the poet Taras Shevchenko appeared, to great organized festivity, and similar figures were glorified or occasionally invented in the other republics. This was not merely a cultural campaign, for it formed one of the foundations of “friendship of peoples,” the Soviet attempt to bond the various nations of the Soviet Union by downplaying conflicts of the past and emphasizing the supposedly harmonious present and future. In a predominantly centralized economy and state, the promotion of local culture alongside Russian provided a way to build a multinational society that would move toward a unified socialist state.
A Concise History of Russia (Cambridge Concise Histories) Page 43