The Whisperers

by Orlando Figes

  Stalin grew increasingly mistrustful of the Comintern, which he feared was slipping out of his control. At its Seventh Congress, in August 1935, he engineered a radical reshuffle of its leadership. Piatnitsky was dismissed from the executive and placed in charge of a new department in the Central Committee to supervise the work of the Party bureaucracy. The show trial of the former oppositionists, Kamenev and Zinoviev, in August 1936, was a clear warning from Stalin to his critics that all policies would be decided at the top. Nowhere was this more the case than in the Comintern, where the opposition was identified by Stalin with the work of ‘foreign spies’. ‘All of you there in the Comintern are playing right into the enemy’s hands,’ Stalin wrote to Dimitrov in February 1937. Several thousand Comintern officials and foreign Communists were arrested in 1937–8. The German, Polish, Yugoslav and Baltic Communist parties were practically wiped out. At Comintern headquarters and the Hotel Lux in Moscow, where many of the Comintern’s officials lived, there was so much panic that, in the words of one official, ‘many are half mad and incapable of working as a result of constant fear’.6

  Piatnitsky was denounced by Stalin as a Trotskyist. He was later implicated in a ‘Fascist Spy Organization of Trotskyists and Rightists in the Comintern’. But according to the version of events related by his sons, the real cause of his arrest was a brave speech they believe he made at the Plenum of the Central Committee in June 1937.* Apparently, Piatnitsky had been shocked by what he had discovered in his work at the Central Committee. He was particularly troubled by the enormous personal power of Stalin and his unbridled use of the NKVD to eliminate his enemies. At the June plenum, it is believed, Piatnitsky accused the NKVD of fabricating evidence against ‘enemies of the people’ and called for the establishment of a special Party commission to oversee the work of the NKVD. It was a suicidal speech, as Piatnitsky must have realized. When he finished speaking there was silence in the hall. The tension was palpable. A recess was called. On instructions from Stalin, several Party leaders, including Kaganovich, Molotov and Voroshilov, attempted to persuade Piatnitsky to withdraw his statement and thus save his life. Molotov begged him to think about the consequences for his wife and children. But Piatnitsky would not back down; he claimed that he knew what his destiny would be, but that his ‘conscience as a Communist’ would not allow him to retract his words. According to Kaganovich, Piatnitsky told him that his protest had been a conscious and premeditated act. ‘He said that for the unity and moral purity of the Party he was ready to sacrifice his life and, if necessary, to trample on the corpses of his children and his wife.’ When this was reported to Stalin, the leadership resolved to adjourn the plenum for the day. The next morning the plenum opened with a speech by Nikolai Yezhov, the NKVD chief, denouncing Piatnitsky as a tsarist spy who had been sent by the capitalist powers to infiltrate the Comintern. Yezhov called for a vote of censure against Piatnitsky. It was passed with three abstentions, one of them by Krupskaia, who refused to believe the NKVD charges against Piatnitsky (‘He is the most honest of men. Lenin greatly loved and respected him’) right up until his arrest.7 Piatnitsky returned from the plenum ‘exhausted and depressed’, Julia noted in her diary. When she asked him what was wrong, Piatnitsky ‘talked of all the children, of all the innocents, who were forced to live under constant psychological stress’.8

  Osip Piatnitsky at the Seventh Congress of the Comintern, Moscow, 1935

  For the next two weeks, Piatnitsky stayed at home, locked away in his office. He ate very little, and spent all day on the telephone trying to make contact with Yezhov. Julia could not bear the tension and went off to the dacha for a few days – a decision which she later regretted. ‘I should have been by his side,’ she wrote in her diary in March 1938. ‘I did not understand what he was going through. I was not intelligent enough, or strong enough. To be the wife of such a person means to serve him, to be always at one’s post.’9 During this fortnight, Osip prepared for his arrest. He transferred his savings book and valuables to Julia and destroyed his private notebooks and letters. A seasoned revolutionary, who had been arrested many times before, he knew how to prepare. On 5 July he was expelled from the Party. He felt so despondent, Julia noted on her return from the dacha, that he thought of suicide. He could not imagine living without the Party. But the next day, when they paid a visit to old friends, Osip told them he had changed his mind. He said that he would submit to his punishment for the sake of Party unity: ‘If a sacrifice has to be made for the Party, then however burdensome that sacrifice might be, I will bear it joyously.’ Osip warned his sons to expect his arrest. He explained to them that he had argued with his comrades in the Party leadership and that they had denounced him; he denied his guilt and said that he would fight to prove his innocence as long as that was possible, but that, if he was arrested, they should not expect to see their father again. ‘He warned me not to fight against Stalin. That was the main thing he told me,’ remembered Igor.10

  The NKVD came for Osip shortly after 11 p.m. on 7 July. Yezhov made the arrest in person. Bursting into the apartment, the NKVD men threw a dressing gown at Julia and told her to put it on. She began to shout and swear at them, whereupon Yezhov told her that ‘Soviet citizens do not talk that way to representatives of the authorities’. Osip apologized for his wife’s behaviour. He left with the NKVD men, carrying a small suitcase which contained his dressing gown and a toothbrush. Julia fainted as they left. When she came to, they had gone. ‘I had just one thought,’ she noted in her diary – ‘the overwhelming thought that I will never see him again – that and a feeling of terrible powerlessness.’ The next day, while Julia was at work, the NKVD broke into the apartment. They searched through Osip’s papers and took away the family’s valuables: cash and savings books, a radio, a bicycle, coats, sheets, linen, even little things like teacups disappeared. The door to Osip’s office was then sealed with wax. No one dared to break the seal, but if they had, they would have found a library which the Piatnitskys could have sold to help them through the next few months, when, like all the families of ‘enemies of the people’, they were suddenly reduced to poverty.11

  Osip’s fate was probably decided long before his protest to the June plenum. In the Great Terror of 1937 – 8 – when at least 1.3 million people were arrested for crimes against the state – the Comintern was one of Stalin’s main targets. The reasons for this are worth examining, because they are a key to the riddle of the Terror’s origins.

  Extraordinary even by the standards of the Stalinist regime, the Great Terror was not a routine wave of mass arrests, such as those that swept across the country throughout Stalin’s reign, but a calculated policy of mass murder. No longer satisfied with imprisoning his real or imagined ‘political enemies’, Stalin now ordered the police to take people out of the prisons and labour camps and murder them. In the two years of 1937 and 1938, according to incomplete statistics, a staggering total of at least 681,692 people, and probably far more, were shot for ‘crimes against the state’ (91 per cent of all death sentences for political crimes between 1921 and 1940, if NKVD figures are to be believed). The population of the Gulag labour camps and colonies grew in these same years from 1,196,369 to 1,881,570 people (a figure which excludes at least 140,000 deaths within the camps themselves and an unknown number of deaths during transport to the camps). Other periods of Soviet history had also seen mass arrests of ‘enemies’, but never had so many of the victims been killed. More than half the people arrested during the Great Terror were later shot, compared to less than 10 per cent of arrests in 1930, the second highest peak of executions in the Stalin period, when 20,201 death sentences were carried out. During the ‘anti-kulak operation’ of 1929–32, the number of arrests was also very high (586,904), but of these victims only 6 per cent (35,689 people) were subsequently shot.12

  The origins of the Great Terror are not easy to explain. Nor is it immediately clear why it was so concentrated in these two years. To begin to understand it, we must look at t
he Great Terror not as an uncontrolled or accidental happening, a product of the chaos of the Stalinist regime that could have erupted at almost any time – a view occasionally put forward13 – but as an operation masterminded and controlled by Stalin in response to the specific circumstances he perceived in 1937.

  Some historians have traced the origins of the Great Terror to the assassination of the Leningrad Party boss Sergei Kirov in December 1934 – an act, it is said, that set the regime on its murderous hunt for hidden enemies. But this theory raises the question of why the mass arrests and killings did not start in 1934–5. Why was there a two-year lull before the storm of 1937–8? After Kirov’s murder there were mass arrests in Leningrad, but otherwise the years of 1935 and 1936 were relatively terror-free for the political classes in the rest of the Soviet Union. In fact, under the direction of Aleksandr Vyshinsky, the Procurator of the USSR, the regime made a conscious effort to return to a more stable and traditional legal order following the chaos of 1928–34.14 Other historians have connected the Great Terror to Stalin’s fears of an internal threat, particularly in the countryside, where, they argue, mass discontent could have turned political, if Soviet elections had been allowed to go ahead, as they had been promised by the ‘Stalin Constitution’ of 1936.15 But the NKVD reports of domestic discontent were unreliable (‘anti-Soviet sentiment’ and ‘threats of unrest’ were often fabricated by the NKVD to justify increases in its budget and its staff) and it is far from clear whether Stalin or anybody else in the ruling circle took them at all seriously. In any case, these reports contain no suggestion that the internal threat was any greater in 1937 than it had been at any other time. There were just as many reports of discontent and opposition during 1928–32, but nothing in those years to match the intensity of state killing in 1937–8.

  Yet other historians have suggested that the Great Terror is best understood ‘as a number of related but discrete phenomena’, each one capable of being explained on its own but not as part of a single event.16 And indeed the Great Terror was a complex amalgam of different elements: the great ‘show trials’ against the Old Bolsheviks; the purging of the political elites; the mass arrests in the cities; the ‘kulak operation’; and ‘national operations’ against minorities. But while it may be helpful to analyse the various components of the Terror separately, the fact remains that they all began and ended simultaneously, which does suggest that they were part of a unified campaign that needs to be explained.

  The key to understanding the Great Terror as a whole lies perhaps in Stalin’s fear of an approaching war and his perception of an international threat to the Soviet Union.17 The military aggression of Hitler’s Germany, signalled by its occupation of the Rhineland in 1936, and the occupation of Manchuria by the Japanese, convinced Stalin that the USSR was endangered by the Axis powers on two fronts. Stalin’s fears were reinforced in November 1936, when Berlin and Tokyo united in a pact (later joined by Fascist Italy) against the Comintern. Despite his continuing support of ‘collective security’, Stalin did not place much hope in the Soviet alliance with the Western powers to contain the Axis threat: the Western states had failed to intervene in Spain; they appeared committed to the appeasement of Nazi Germany; and they reportedly gave Stalin the impression that it was their hidden aim to divert Hitler’s forces to the East and engage them in a war with the USSR rather than confront them in the West. By 1937, Stalin was convinced that the Soviet Union was on the brink of war with the Fascist states in Europe and with Japan in the East. The Soviet press typically portrayed the country as threatened on all sides and undermined by Fascist infiltrators – ‘spies’ and ‘hidden enemies’ – in every corner of society.

  ‘Our enemies from the capitalist circles are tireless. They infiltrate everywhere,’ Stalin told the writer Romain Rolland in 1935. Stalin’s view of politics – like many Bolsheviks’ – had been profoundly shaped by the lessons of the First World War, when the tsarist regime was brought down by social revolution in the rear. He feared a similar reaction against the Soviet regime in the event of war with Nazi Germany. The Spanish Civil War reinforced his fears on this account. Stalin took a close interest in the Spanish conflict, seeing it (as did most of his advisers) as a ‘valid scenario for a future European war’ between Communism and Fascism.18 Stalin put the military defeats of the Republicans in 1936 down to the factional infighting between the Spanish Communists, the Trotskyists, the Anarchists and other left-wing groups. It led him to conclude that in the Soviet Union political repression was urgently required to crush not just a ‘fifth column’ of ‘Fascist spies and enemies’ but all potential opposition before the outbreak of a war with the Fascists.

  A paranoic fear of ‘enemies’ was, it seems, in Stalin’s character. It had been reinforced by the suicide of his wife Nadezhda in 1932 and by the murder of Kirov, a man Stalin claimed to love like a brother. ‘Maybe Stalin never trusted people very much,’ wrote his daughter Svetlana, ‘but after their deaths he stopped trusting them at all.’* Stalin blamed the Kirov assassination on the ‘Zinovievites’ (the ‘Leningrad Opposition’) and issued orders for the supporters of Zinoviev, the former boss of Leningrad, to be arrested, even though there was no evidence to connect them with the murder. Many of them were ultimately convicted of ‘moral complicity’ in Kirov’s killing on the grounds that they had created a climate of opposition which encouraged the assassination of Soviet leaders. In the two and a half months following the murder, when Stalin took charge of the investigation in Leningrad, nearly a thousand ‘Zinovievites’ were arrested. Most of them were exiled to remote settlements. Zinoviev and Kamenev, allies with Trotsky in the United Opposition against Stalin in the 1920s, were arrested: Zinoviev was sentenced to ten years’ imprisonment, Kamenev to five. When the NKVD officials proved reluctant to arrest so many Party loyalists, Stalin called in Iagoda, the NKVD boss, and warned him to be more vigilant, or else ‘we will slap you down’. Iagoda’s position was further undermined in 1935, when Yezhov, who was placed in charge of the Party purge, claimed to have uncovered a large network of ‘foreign spies’ and ‘terrorists’ organized by Trotsky and Zinoviev and undetected by the NKVD in the heart of the Kremlin. Stalin finally lost patience with Iagoda and replaced him with Yezhov, a brutal executioner without any moral conscience who was prepared to indulge Stalin’s paranoic fantasies by fabricating evidence of ‘counter-revolutionary conspiracies’ and ‘spy rings’ everywhere. For several years, Yezhov had promoted the theory that Kamenev and Zinoviev had been plotting on Trotsky’s orders from abroad to murder Kirov, Stalin and other members of the Party leadership. On this basis, Stalin now reopened the Kirov investigation. In August 1936, Zinoviev, Kamenev and fourteen other Party leaders were put on trial for treason. All of them were sentenced to death, along with 160 other people arrested in connection with the trial.19

  This was the first of several ‘show trials’ in Moscow. Their aim was to reveal and root out a coordinated ring of ‘spies’ and ‘terrorists’ organized by former oppositionists. A second show trial, in January 1937, witnessed the conviction of Georgii Piatakov, Deputy Commissar of Heavy Industry, Karl Radek and fifteen other former supporters of Trotsky for industrial sabotage and espionage. In April–May 1937, eight of the country’s senior military commanders, including Marshal Tukhachevsky (Deputy Commissar of Defence), General Uborevich (Commander of the Belorussian Military District) and General Iakir (Commander of the Kiev Military District), were arrested, tortured brutally and tried in camera for treason and espionage. It was said that they were financed by the Germans and the Japanese. All of them were shot on the same day. In the last and biggest of the show trials, in March 1938, Bukharin, Iagoda and Rykov, along with thirteen other senior officials, were sentenced to be shot for conspiring with the Zinovievites and Trotskyists to assassinate the Soviet leaders, sabotage the economy and spy at the behest of the Fascist powers. Iagoda’s involvement in the plot supposedly explained why it had taken so long to uncover it.

  W
hen a Party leader was arrested, everybody in his social orbit came under suspicion. The typical provincial town was ruled by a clique of senior officials – the district Party boss, the police chief, the heads of the local factories, collective farms and prisons, the local Soviet leader – who each had their own patron–client networks in the town’s institutions. These officials protected one another as long as their power circle was maintained. But the arrest of one would inevitably lead to the arrest of all the other members of his circle, as well as their hangers-on, once the NKVD got to work revealing the connections between them. In 1937, for example, the NKVD arrested the Party Secretary of Nikopol, in the eastern Ukraine. It also arrested his

  assistants, his friends, the men and women he had put into jobs anywhere in Nikopol. The Commandant of the Nikopol garrison went into the hunters’ bag, then the local Prosecutor and all his legal staff, finally the Chairman of the Nikopol Soviet… the local bank, the newspaper, all commercial institutions were ‘cleansed’… the manager of the Communal Administration, the Chief of the Fire Brigades, the head of the Savings Institution…20

  The terror in the leadership thus spread down through the Party ranks, Soviet institutions and society. According to one estimate, 116,885 Party members were executed or imprisoned in 1937–8. The more senior a Party member was, the more likely he was to be arrested, for juniors in the ranks were always ready to denounce their superiors in order to replace them in their posts. Of the 139 Central Committee members elected at the Seventeenth Party Congress in 1934, 102 were arrested and shot, and five more killed themselves in 1937–8; in addition, 56 per cent of the congress delegates were imprisoned in these years. The decimation of the Red Army was even more complete: of the 767 members of the high command (brigade commanders and above), 412 were executed, 29 died in prison, 3 committed suicide, and 59 remained in jail.21