“The Soviet people love their intelligence service, because it defends the vital interests of the people and it is their flesh and blood…. The faithful guardians of Socialism—the NKVD men—under the leadership of their Stalinist People’s Commissar, Comrade Yezhov, will continue in the future to crush and root out the enemies of the people—the vile Trotskyite, Bukharinite, bourgeois-nationalist and other agents of Fascism. Let the spies and traitors tremble! The punishing hand of the Soviet people —the NKVD—will annihilate them! Our ardent Bolshevik greetings to the Stalinist People’s Commissar of Internal Affairs, Nikolai Ivanovich Yezhov.”5
This paean to the terrorist-in-chief was composed at the very height of the terror, at the very moment when Yezhov was preparing by blackmail and torture the last of the three great treason trials which were to end with the annihilation of the whole of the Bolshevik old guard, when the labour-camps and prisons were packed with hundreds of thousands of loyal Party members, when the Red Army had suffered the liquidation of practically the whole of its higher command and about a third of its officers of the rank of major and above.
The point to be made is that Yezhov was Kaganovich’s man, and Malenkov was Yezhov’s man. It was well known that Yezhov, the most unpopular man in the Party, filled with bitter resentments and jealousies towards his more presentable comrades, had set himself the task of making a career through backstairs intrigue. As he rose, he contrived to establish for himself a private network of dependable lieutenants, bound to him by mutual advantage: he thus had his men in all the Party organs, in the Armed Services, and in the NKVD—which he was soon to command. There is no doubt at all that Kaganovich feared Kirov as a strong rival under Stalin, Molotov too. There is equally no doubt that the younger generation of toughs, including Malenkov, Zhdanov and Khrushchev, feared for their very jobs, which depended utterly on Stalin’s tough course: so long as he ruled by terror, they helping him, so long as all the most able of the old Bolsheviks and their protégés were kept down, they were safe. But if ever Stalin decided to adopt Kirov’s policy of reconciliation, bringing back into high office men who had once been in opposition, the newcomers who had climbed into their shoes were finished. The whole Party machine, headed now by Kaganovich, typified by the Malenkovs and the Khrushchevs, thus had the strongest possible interest in Kirov’s demise. Kaganovich could have given the order, Yezhov (whose second-in-command was Malenkov) could have arranged for it to be carried out. And this is almost certainly what happened.
But could this have been done without Stalin’s consent, or at least his tacit assent? It could not. According to contemporary accounts Stalin was filled with rage and grief by Kirov’s assassination. Eulogies and obituaries of the dead man filled the Communist Press for days. The magnificence of the State funeral was without precedent. Stalin was himself in Leningrad, and the crude tampering with the evidence indicated twenty-two years later by Khrushchev could not possibly have been carried out without his knowledge. Even if Stalin had done nothing more than curse Kirov in the presence of Kaganovich (Will nobody rid me of that turbulent pretender?!) he was ready to cover up for the men who had carried out the crime.
Why, then, did Khrushchev baulk at naming him?
Later, in the same speech, he had this to say of Yezhov and his relations with Stalin:
“We are justly accusing Yezhov of the degenerate practices of 1937. But we have to answer these questions:
“Could Yezhov have arrested Kossior, for instance, without the knowledge of Stalin? Was there an exchange of opinions or a Politburo decision concerning this?
“No, there was not, as there was none regarding other cases of this type.
“Could Yezhov have decided such important matters as the fate of such eminent Party figures?
“No, it would be a display of naïveté to consider this the work of Yezhov alone. It is clear that these matters were decided by Stalin, and that without his orders and his sanction Yezhov could not have done this.”6
Why was Khrushchev so ready to incriminate both Stalin and Yezhov for the liquidation of Kossior (and many others), while making a mystery of the Kirov case?
The answer is not very difficult. In making his secret speech in 1956 Khrushchev was working with two main objects in view, one apparent to all, one apparent only to those with an intimate knowledge of Kremlin politics from 1934 onwards. The first was to disassociate himself from Stalin’s crimes; the second was to hint very strongly at the guilty knowledge of certain of his fellow-members and rivals in the famous collective government —above all Kaganovich, Malenkov and Molotov. Responsibility for the liquidation of the great Ukrainian leaders, Kossior, Chubar, Postychev and others had to be pinned very firmly and directly on Yezhov and Stalin, for the simple reason that, as we shall see, Khrushchev himself was to profit most directly from their liquidation. When it came to the Kirov murder, on the other hand, although Khrushchev must have had first-hand knowledge of what had actually happened, and although he may have approved it, he cannot have been an active agent in the murder plot. He was thus free to twist the facts, or make a mystery of them: short of directly accusing Kaganovich, Malenkov, perhaps Molotov, all seated on the platform with him, of the murder, he did what he could to smear them by implication. None of these could clear themselves without admitting to guilty knowledge. But none of them, it will be remembered, followed Khrushchev and Mikoyan and joined in their condemnation of Stalin. Instead they had to sit silent, listening to Khrushchev twisting other facts in his favour—as when he pretended that the Central Committee Plenum of 1938, at which he had been elected a candidate member of the Politburo, had condemned the Terror, when in fact, having queried certain “incorrect” expulsions from the Party, it had praised Yezhov for the “integrity” of the purge.7
In a word, the secret speech cannot be understood unless it is realised that Khrushchev was striking his first major blow at those rivals who, within a year, were to combine against him— and, at the eleventh hour, be beaten by him and disgraced. Khrushchev was sailing very close to the wind, but at least he was sailing. His colleagues were far more guilty and they could say nothing against Khrushchev because of this.
There was a good deal to be said. Khrushchev was largely covered from accusations of active complicity in Stalin’s crimes, which were connived at or instigated by his senior colleagues, in 1956—Molotov, Kaganovich, Voroshilov, Mikoyan too, all Politburo members at the height of the purges. Malenkov, like Khrushchev, was not then a member of the Politburo, but everybody knew that as head of ORPO he had worked hand in glove with Yezhov. But all these men, had they not themselves been so vulnerable through their own guilt, could have turned round then and there and demonstrated conclusively that even if Khrushchev had not participated actively in these crimes, he had supported them up to the hilt. They were in no position to cite from Khrushchev’s own speeches during the 1930s and compare what he said then about Stalin and Stalin worship with what he was saying in 1956. Let us do it for them.
In his secret speech Khrushchev violently assailed the flattery accorded Stalin, above all by Beria, and Stalin’s own self-glorification. He instanced in particular the Short Biography published in 1948, written by Beria, and, said Khrushchev, amended by Stalin in his own hand: “This book is an expression of the most dissolute flattery, an example of making a man into a godhead, of transforming him into an infallible sage, ‘the greatest leader, sublime strategist of all times and nations’.”8
All this is very true, but Khrushchev was the last man to throw stones in this particular glass-house. Listen to him in August 1936 speaking through the Moscow Party to stimulate a furious hatred of Kamenev, Zinoviev and others who were then being tried for their lives—but not yet found guilty:
“They pulled the strings of this bloody plot and directed a blow at the heart of the Revolution, at thee, our Stalin, and at thy closest disciples. Damned Fascist degenerates! They lifted their hands against one whose name millions of toilers pronounce every day, ev
ery hour, with pride and boundless love…. They lifted their hands against the greatest of all men … our dear friend, our wise vozhd, Comrade Stalin.”9
And again, during the second great show trial, featuring Radek, Piatakov and others, five months later, he addressed a mass meeting in Moscow in these terms:
“These murderers aimed at the heart and brain of our Party. They raised their villainous hands against Comrade Stalin.
“By raising their hands against Comrade Stalin they raised them against all of us, against the working class, against the toiling people! By raising their hands against Comrade Stalin they raised them against the teaching of Marx, Engels, and Lenin.
“By raising their hands against Comrade Stalin they raised them against everything that is best in the possession of humanity. For Stalin is hope; he is expectation; he is the beacon that guides all progressive mankind. Stalin is our banner! Stalin is our will! Stalin is our victory!”10
Two hundred thousand Muscovites were said by Pravda to have listened to that speech in Red Square in January 1937. Quite a number of these must have survived until 1956 to hear Khrushchev denounce the cult of personality. All Khrushchev’s colleagues in the Presidium must have remembered that speech, and many others like it. They would have known too that Khrushchev and Kaganovich had been the first men to speak of Stalin as vozhd, or leader in the absolute sense. “Our great genius, our beloved Stalin,” he would later say; “our great leader of the peoples, our friend and father, the greatest man of our epoch”; “the greatest genius of humanity, teacher and captain, who leads us towards Communism, our very own Stalin.”11
The interesting thing is that neither Molotov nor Malenkov ever permitted themselves to speak of Stalin in such fulsome terms; but they had to sit on the platform, listening to Khrushchev by implication accusing them of fostering Stalin-worship which had in fact been carried by him to its dizziest heights.
There were yet other aspects of the secret speech which Khrushchev’s senior colleagues could have contradicted had they been in a position to expose themselves. In one of the apparently most wise, tolerant and reasonable passages of all, Khrushchev attacked Stalin for his use of the term “enemy of the people”:
“Stalin originated the concept ‘enemy of the people.’ This term automatically rendered it unnecessary for the ideological errors of individuals or groups standing in controversial positions to be proved. This term gave the green light to repression of the cruellest kind, violating every norm of revolutionary legality, against anyone who in any way disagreed with Stalin, against all those who were only suspected of hostile intention, against all those whose reputations were not crystal clear. This concept, ‘enemy of the people,’ in fact, eliminated the possibility of any kind of ideological argument or the expression of personal views on any issues, even quite practical issues.
“It has to be said that in regard to those persons who in their time came to oppose the Party line there was no sufficiently serious reason for their physical annihilation. The formula, ‘enemy of the people,’ was specifically introduced for the purpose of physically annihilating such individuals.”12
That is all fine and true. The trouble was that Khrushchev himself was as free as anyone in his use of the term. Thus, the senior soldiers in his audience will have remembered how in 1937, at the height of the Yezhov terror, when, in Khrushchev’s own words, “mass arrests and deportations of many thousands of people, execution without trial and without normal investigation, created conditions of insecurity, fear and even desperation,”13 he went out of his way to denounce General Garmanik as an “enemy of the people” and a “traitor to the Motherland.” Garmanik, a hero of the Civil War, was Deputy People’s Commissar for the Army and Navy (under Voroshilov) and chief of the Army’s Political Administration. He committed suicide just a week before Marshal Tuchachevsky and eight other Marshals of the Soviet Union were publicly accused of spying for a foreign power and high treason. For years he had been a member of Khrushchev’s own Moscow City Party Committee, to which he was re-elected, with Khrushchev’s approval, three days before he killed himself.
In the secret speech of 1956 there was another passage of sweet reasonableness:
“Now, after a sufficiently long historical period, we can speak of the fight against the Trotskyites with perfect calm and can analyse this matter with sufficient objectivity. After all, there were around Trotsky people whose origins could not by any means be traced to a bourgeois society. Some of them belonged to the Party intelligentsia, some were recruited from among the workers. We can name many individuals who at one time and another joined the Trotskyites; nevertheless, these same individuals also played an active part in the workers’ movement before the Revolution, during the Socialist October Revolution itself, and also in the consolidation of the victory of this greatest of revolutions. Many of them broke with Trotskyism and returned to Leninist positions. Was it necessary to annihilate such people? We are deeply convinced that, had Lenin lived, such an extreme method would not have been used against many of them.”14
Emotion recollected in tranquillity…. Here is Khrushchev on the Trotskyites in November 1937 after the execution of a number of alleged Trotskyites at Kemerovo:
“The working people of Moscow city and province … fervently approve the fair sentences published to-day … on the enemies of the people, the foul gang of counter-revolutionary Trotskyites. We draw our proletarian sword to chop off the heads of these loathsome creatures, double-dealers and murderers, agents of Fascism…. The mad beast must be finished off.”15
And here, for good measure, are further passages from the speech to the 200,000 in January 1937. He is glorying in the outcome of the second great show trial, which ended in the execution of Piatikov, Sokolnikov, and many other colleagues:
“Comrade workers, men and women, engineers, employees, scientists, artists and all working people of our country! We are gathered here in Red Square, to raise our proletarian voice in complete support of the sentence passed by the Military Collegium of the Supreme Court on the enemies of the people, the traitors to the Motherland, the betrayers of the workers’ cause, the spies, the diversionists, agents of Fascism, the vile, despicable Trotskyites.
“Here, in Red Square, before all the peoples of the Soviet land, before the workers of the whole world, we approve this sentence and declare that whatever enemy tries to obstruct our victorious movement forward to a Communist society will be crushed by us and annihilated! [stormy applause]…
“Judas-Trotsky and his gang intended to turn over the Ukraine, the Maritime Provinces and the Amur Region to the German and Japanese imperialists, and to transform our blossoming Motherland into a colony of German and Japanese imperialism. And they wanted to reduce Russian, Ukrainian, Byelorussian, Georgian, and all other peoples of the Soviet Union to the ranks of ‘inferior races’ to be ruled over by the ‘superior race’ of German Facist bandits.
“Like their bosses, the Trotskyite serfs counted only on the defeat of the USSR in a war with the German and Japanese imperialists; they strove to hasten that war and to prepare for the defeat of the USSR. They set off explosions in factories; they spied for the Fascist secret service. They killed and poisoned workers and Red Army men, children as well as grown-ups. They wrecked train-loads of our glorious Red Army men and they disrupted transport, being paid for this by the Japanese secret service. The Trotskyite murderers trafficked with the blood of he fighters of our valiant Red Army! …
“The Trotskyite clique was nothing but a gang of spies and mercenary murderers, diversionist wreckers, agents of German and Japanese Fascism. There rises a stink of carrion from the vile, base, Trotskyite degenerates….
“The despicable ringleaders and the members of the Trotskyite gang have received their deserved punishment for their black betrayal of the Motherland. The loathsome Trotskyite creatures have been crushed in the Soviet Union. But this must not dull our vigilance; on the contrary, we should become more vigilant and increase sti
ll further our work in all fields of socialist construction in order to finish off and wipe out all remnants of these vile murderers, Fascist agents, Trotskyites, Zinovievites, and their right-wing accomplices.”16
We have enough to indicate the public line Khrushchev was taking in the middle 1930s. It is established out of his own mouth not only that he acquiesced in the great terror and in Stalin-worship, but that he was active in abetting both. His speeches are the speeches of the born agitator, calculated deliberately to lash his audiences into a frenzy of hate. Nor was he content to string along behind Stalin, dutifully slandering those who were already down and could no longer be helped. It has often been said, without any evidence to support such statements, that even though Khrushchev had to echo the official condemnation of the “opposition” or himself die, he was active behind the scenes in saving many individuals from the attentions of the secret police. On the contrary, he was loudest in urging all good Communists not to rest for a moment in the urgent task of ferreting out concealed enemies, in keeping at white heat the atmosphere of suspicion and hatred:
“Sometimes a man sits, and enemies crawl round him, almost stepping on his feet. But he does not notice them and puffs himself up: ‘Among the personnel under my jurisdiction there are no wreckers and aliens.’ He says this not because there are in fact no enemies, but because of his deafness and political blindness caused by the idiotic disease—heedlessness.”17
And again: “… the enemy may foully disguise himself and carry on his subversive activity in the deep underground…. But let these enemies know that no matter how deep down they may sit in their burrows, we will uncover and annihilate them, and reduce to dust every last one of them, and scatter them to the four winds so that not even a trace will remain of these damned betrayers of the socialist Motherland.”18
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