Under the heading of the ‘Central Administration of Economic Accounting’ (TsUNKhU), Pokrovskii bul'var, Bolshoi Vuzovskii pereulok 2, we find the name of I. Kraval', the statistician in charge of the census of January 1937. Because the results of the census did not meet with the approval of the leadership of the Party and the state, Kraval' was arrested and executed as an ‘enemy of the people’. In the Central Administration of the Film Industry, Malyi Gnezdnikovskii pereulok 7, the director’s name is given as B. Shumiatskii. He was arrested in 1938 and sentenced to death. The Central State Committee for the Determination of Crop Yields, which occupied offices in ulitsa Petrovka 12, had V. Ossinskii as its chairman. He was accused in the third show trial of 1938, sentenced to death and executed. A. Muralov, deputy commissar at the People’s Commissariat of Agriculture and chairman of the Committee of Resettlement, Orlikov pereulok 1/11, was arrested in July 1937. The Directory lists the famous proletarian poet A. Gastev, the theoretician who founded the ‘League of Time’ [which was concerned with time-and-motion studies], as the chairman of the Committee of Standardization, ulitsa Razina 12. A year later he too would disappear and be killed.17 The lists in the People’s Commissariats are teeming with names of people destined to perish. In the People’s Commissariat for Heavy Industry we find, in addition to G. Ordzhonikidze, the name of his deputy, Iurii Piatakov, who was sentenced to death in the second show trial in February 1937. A further deputy, Mikhail Kaganovich, brother of Lazar' Kaganovich, the Politburo member and colleague of Stalin, would end his life in a camp in 1941. M. Rukhimovich, who was in the leading ranks of the People’s Commissariat, was likewise accused and shot. A. Serebrovskii and S. Rataichak, who appear in the same section, were also accused and shot in the second show trial in 1937.
The People’s Commissariat for Posts and Telegraphs (NKPS) – Novaia Basmannaia ulitsa 2, reception daily from 10 to 16.30 – headed by Lazar' Kaganovich, employed Ia. Livshits as late as 1936, after which he too was arrested and condemned in the second show trial.
There is no detailed information about the People’s Commissariat for Defence – ulitsa Frunze 19, Tel. 2-54 for inquiries – but it was the place where the generals and officers who were to be executed in 1937 and 1938 still went in and out.
The deputy commissar at the People’s Commissariat for Foreign Affairs – Kuznetskii most 5/21, Tel. 1-82-39 – is recorded in the Directory of 1936 as Nikolai Krestinskii. In 1938 he was put on trial in the third show trial, sentenced and executed. A further deputy commissar, Boris Stomoniakov, would die in prison in 1941.
Under the heading of the People’s Commissars of the RSFSR we find, inter alia, K. Ukhanov as People’s Commissar of Local Industry, N. Krylenko as People’s Commissar for Justice, and A. Bubnov as People’s Commissar for Education – they too would disappear, as would V. Antonov-Ovseenko, the Deputy People’s Commissar for Justice.
The Directory is at its most parsimonious when providing information about the Comintern, the Party organizations, the NKVD and the People’s Commissariat for Defence. The Executive Committee of the Communist International (ECCI) reveals only its address and telephone number: Manezhnaia ploshchad' 1, Tel. 0-28-50. The Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party likewise tells us only its address and telephone number: Staraya ploshchad' 4, Tel. 0-28-50. The key Party figures appear only in a secondary position. Stalin, for example, is mentioned only once in a volume of almost 700 pages – as a member of the Council for Work and Defence, a council only half of whose members survived the purges. Nikolai Bukharin, too, appears only in an unobtrusive place in 1936: as a member of the Soviet–German society Culture and Technology and as a member of the Academy of Sciences – whose presidency is to be found in Bol'shaia Kaluzhskaia ulitsa 24.18 A key figure in the relations between the Soviet Union and Western cultural circles and fellow travellers was A. Arozev. He appears in the entry on VOKS – the All-Union Society for Foreign Cultural Relations – Bol'shaia Gruzinskaia ulitsa 17, Tel. D1-6503.19 He too was arrested by the NKVD and was sentenced to death on 8 February 1938. In 1936, in the House of Soviet Writers – ulitsa Vorovskovo 50, Restaurant Tel. 4-84-97 – we find no names of the important writers of those years, but we do see that of V. Stavski, the literary official who was abruptly deposed in 1938 and who subsequently lost his life at the front.20 Under the address of the Society for the Advancement of the Aviation and Chemical Defence and Industry of the USSR (OSOAVIAKHIM SSR) – Raushskaia naberezhnaia 22 – we find the Society’s prominent chairman, R. Eideman. He was executed as a military conspirator on 11 June 1937.21 Under the heading of the sports association Spartak we find the secretary of the Moscow organization – Bol'shoi Cherkasskii pereulok 13 – a certain N. Starostin, a popular footballer who likewise failed to escape the repression.22 Among the members of the Academy of Sciences, we find many important scholars, such as the geneticist N. Vavilov, who was arrested later on and who died in prison.23 In 1936, in the Institute for State and Law, we still encounter Professor E. Pashukanis as director; he was arrested in January 1937 and would be sentenced to death on 4 September 1937.24 In the drama school in the Meyerhold Theatre – ulitsa Gorkovo 15, Vsevolod Meyerhold was still the director. He was arrested on 20 June 1939 and would be sentenced to death in February 1940.25 In the Moscow Municipal Museum – Novaia ploshchad' 12 – the historian and regional ethnographer Nikolai Antsiferov was still working; a year later he would be sent to a camp in the Far East.26
As will be seen later on from the lists of those arrested and executed, the traces of disappearance can be pursued through the factories’ and workers’ estates with their hostels and barracks. The Directory only provides global coverage of the non-places on the outskirts of the city: Cherkizovo, Fili on Aleksandr Bridge, Lefortovo, Aviamotornaiia, Perovskii poselok, Poklonnaia gora.27
In 1936 no one could have suspected what a difference a year would make to the tangle of institutions and individuals that went to make up the Directory. Historians would discover later on that, by the beginning of 1939, of the 139 members and candidate members of the Central Committee who had been elected by the Seventeenth Party Congress in 1934, 110 would have been arrested;28 that by the middle of 1939 only seven of 136 Party secretaries in Moscow and the Moscow region were still in their posts – all the rest had been arrested and shot and many had committed suicide.29 They would learn that thousands upon thousands would be arrested and killed on false and, indeed, absurd charges, and that the leadership and agencies of the state, the economic organizations and industrial plants, the institutes and, above all, the Red Army had been decimated to a degree that had no precedent, even in a war against a foreign enemy, however vicious. A wave of suicides had engulfed the city and the entire nation.
Figure 3.1 A page from the Moscow Directory of 1936 with the names of those who had died in 1937–8 crossed out ‘
In 1936 no one could have suspected what a difference a year would make to the tangle of institutions and individuals that went to make up the Directory.’
Nevertheless, in numerical terms the chief victims were the ordinary rankand-file Party members and above all people who belonged to no party, neither the ruling party nor a counter-revolutionary one. In Elektrozavod alone, one of the largest and most modern factories in Moscow, a thousand members of the workforce fell victim to the repressive measures. Hundreds of shop-floor and office workers were arrested in Moscow offices and on the Metrostroy building sites. No profession, no industry was untouched by the storm, so much so that a researcher could report:
The surreal turnover in territorial party committees gives an inkling of the impact on local institutions. Of the 63 people elected to the Moscow Gorkom in May 1937, only ten returned in June 1938, and I have tracked eight to new jobs; the other 45 (71.4%) were struck from the rolls, and the great majority, presumably, perished. Of 64 on the 1937 Obkom, eight were re-elected, ten are known to have gotten work elsewhere and 46 (71.9%) dropped from sight. In the Dzerzhinsky Raikom of the city, three first secreta
ries in succession were detained within a few months in 1937.30
But amid the wave of arrests and shootings, others made their way up the ladder into the posts vacated by the purges. One among thousands was Nikita Khrushchev, the young miner from the Donbass, who between 1935 and 1938 was the first secretary of the Moscow Party organization – in practice, therefore, the city mayor.
Lists of people to be shot and the posthumous reconstruction of their addresses
The true topography of violence can be revealed only when all the places in which people disappeared have been identified. The prisons of Lubianka, Butyrka, Lefortovo and Sukhanovka, the Krasnaia Presnia transit prison, the inner prison in Furkasovskii Lane, the execution cellar in the Military College of the Supreme Court – naturally, these addresses do not appear in the Directory. Up to now, the graves have not been opened in the cemeteries of Donskoi and Novospasskii monasteries or in the Kalitnikovskoie, Rogozhskoie, Vagankovskoie, Armyanskoie or Golyanovskoie cemeteries, or in the places of execution in Butovo, Kommunarka and near Dmitrov on the Moscow–Volga Canal. In Butovo there are about 25,000 bodies from the period 1937 to 1939, and in the mass graves of Kommunarka are the bodies of a further 14,000 victims of the firing squad.31
A reconstruction of the records of the secret police would yield the most accurate map of terror and violence. The secret police systematically recorded the facts district by district, street by street and house by house, as far as that is possible in a city like Moscow where migration and general population movement were such important factors. Lists recording personal data, such as social and ethnic origin and professional and political development, became the basis for the lists of detainees. The NKVD systematically compiled the addresses in the Residential (Adresnyi Stol) and Civil Registry (ZAGS) Offices.32 A member of the NKVD who had been involved in many arrests and interrogations, and who was himself subjected to interrogation in 1956, has described the procedure as follows:
On the instructions of the head of section, we went to the City of Moscow Housing Department, looked through the books and made a note of all the people listed with a foreign-sounding surname. Lists of such people were passed on to the Special Section, and they would instruct the operatives to issue the warrants …33
Important information held in the personal files of such organizations as the Comintern has verified addresses obtained in the course of the surveillance of political émigrés.34 The most complete and accurate list of addresses comes from the legal dossiers of people who had been arrested and sentenced.
The geography of arrests is very illuminating. The houses that were emptied out were those in which political émigrés had lived, as well as members of the Comintern and foreign skilled workers who had been invited by the Soviet government. For example, house No. 3 in ulitsa Obukha (which has now resumed its former name of ulitsa Vorontsovo Pole), where political émigrés had been housed in hostels, was completely emptied out. After the families of those arrested had moved out, the house itself came into the possession of the NKVD. Another residential building to be completely emptied was in Smolenskii Boulevard 3-5, which belonged to the Prometei Society and had been built with the society’s funds … After the Latvian organizations were smashed in 1938, the house was transferred to Glavlit and remained in its hands until 1957.35
At Kuznetskii most 22, the second floor was occupied by the living quarters of the German students of the Film Institute. After their arrest a new use was found for the vacant property. The reading room of the Federal Security Services (FSB) is now located there, and, alongside researchers, relatives are able to study the police files on their loved ones.36
The places most affected by the arrests were the ‘Houses of the Soviets’, above all, the Government House, which was as good as depopulated and then again repopulated in 1937–8.37 It was the streets in the city centre that were affected: Gorky Street and the Arbat, where the most beautiful detached houses of the elite were to be found, and which had attracted the attention of informers and the envious. There were also many arrests in the more affluent quarters with outstanding older houses on Kropotkinskaia Street, Kirovskaia Street, Bol'shaia Bronnaia Street, Pokrovka Street and Pliushchikha Street. In Varsonof'evskii Lane a number of houses had changed their tenants frequently.
In the old city quarter of Zamoskvorech'ye, those who suffered most from the fact that their houses had been built at the turn of the century were the residents of Bol'shaia Polianka, Bol'shaia Ordynka, Piatnitskaia, Yakimanka, and Novokuznetskaia streets. Beyond the Garden Ring there were many arrests in Bakinskaia and Novaia Basmannaia, as well as the three Meshchanskaia streets, home to many employees of the NKVD. There is also a long list of arrests for Leningrad Highway. This was where the specialists lived, who were working on the large construction sites and projects connected with the Moscow–Volga Canal in the north of Moscow. Of the outlying suburbs the worst affected was Kuntsevo, a favourite location for dachas and other houses belonging to the Soviet elites. The revealing of actual addresses enables us to see the degree of over-population in the city and the extreme scarcity of living accommodation. Arrests took place in huts, railway depots, factories, hospitals, landing stages, cemeteries, commercial security checkpoints, abandoned monastery buildings and bell towers that had recently attracted inhabitants.38
An additional contribution to mapping the Moscow topography of violence has been provided by the foreign enemy. While preparing for a military attack on the Soviet Union, and basing their findings on both Soviet material and their own local researches on the spot, the Germans produced maps and a search dossier listing the names and addresses of people they wished to capture. The very accurate 1941 map of Moscow and the wanted list contained the details of hundreds of properties and gave the names of 5,256 individuals who were to be arrested following the invasion of the USSR. Included were the names of Joseph Stalin-Dzhugashvili, the writers Il'ia Ehrenburg and Aleksei Tolstoi, the pianist Emil Gilels, and, above all, the Party leaders, members of state security, German political émigrés and anti-fascists who had found refuge in the Soviet Union.39
All these things – the mass arrests and executions, the devastation of an entire city and an entire nation by the hurricane of terror – all these things still lay beyond the horizons of the editors who published the All Moscow Directory for the year 1936. The hurricane completely ruled out its continued publication. No editorial board could have kept pace with the frantic rate at which people were driven from their posts and destroyed while their places were taken by others. The demise of the Directory as an institution embodying the routine and transparency of metropolitan life was an indicator of the dawn of a new age.
4
The Creation of Enemies: The Criminal Prosecution of the Trotskyite–Zinovievite Terrorist Centre, 19–24 August 1936
Show trials are not judicial procedures but media events. Their rhetoric alone shows that the search for truth and just punishment are not the issue.
The chain of criminal acts committed against our socialist homeland here is terrible and monstrous. These crimes are such that each one merits the most rigorous condemnation and punishment. Terrible and monstrous is the guilt of these criminals and murderers who have raised their hands against the leaders of our Party … Monstrous are the crimes of this gang, who have not simply prepared acts of terrorism but who have also perpetrated the murder of one of the best sons of the working class, the unforgettable Sergei Mironovich Kirov.1
Andrei Vyshinskii, the public prosecutor of the USSR and state prosecutor in the trial of the Trotskyite–Zinovievite Centre, made four attempts to strike the right note in his final speech for the prosecution. He abused the defendants sitting in front of him as ‘a pack of traitors and adventurers, yapping pug dogs snapping in fury at the heels of an elephant’, and ‘not politicians but a band of murderers and criminals’. And he ended his peroration in the morning session of the trial on 22 August 1936 with the words: ‘I demand that these rabid dogs should all be
shot!’2 Once the accused had uttered their final pleas, the military tribunal of the Supreme Court of the USSR concurred with his demand, and on the following day, at 2.30 p.m., it sentenced all sixteen accused ‘to the ultimate penalty – to be executed by firing squad and to the confiscation of all their personal property’.3 The sentence was carried out even before the 72-hour period of grace had expired. The execution took place in the Lubianka, a mere five-minute walk away from the courtroom in the House of the Unions.
The five days of the trial proceedings left the public perplexed, baffled, shocked and very uncomfortable; it could make no sense of what it had seen with its own eyes. The accused were no ‘enemies of Soviet power’ as had been alleged to be the case in previous show trials – engineers, factory directors, ‘former people’ – but revolutionaries, Lenin’s comrades, well-known party leaders – before they came to oppose Stalin. All of them were now supposed to be murderers, conspirators and terrorists who had personally planned to overthrow the Soviet leadership by force. What the public found even more baffling were the self-accusations and confessions of men who before the Revolution had fought underground, had spent years in banishment or exile, and had refused to retract their opinions even under the most brutal conditions. There was a wide variety of reactions to the trials: a delegation of British lawyers, with D. N. Pritt KC in the lead, certified that legal procedures had been correctly followed. For André Gide, however, who had left the Soviet Union on the day the sentence was pronounced, this trial was one of the reasons to distance himself from the regime. However great the spectrum of reaction was to the trials, a residue of perplexity and shock remained.4 And that is still the situation today, despite all the revelations that have come to light since then about the minute planning that went into preparation of the trial, its entire stage-management and conduct.5 We have learned many details about the pre-trial interrogations, the methods of torture and pressure applied, the practice of arresting relatives of the accused, the false promises to spare the lives of the accused, and the manipulation of foreign observers and correspondents. Notwithstanding all this, there remains a residue of bewilderment about the spooky and baffling nature of those events. As a rule, efforts to understand the Moscow show trials are directed at what took place, or is said to have taken place, ‘behind the scenes’. Much of this has now come to light following the publication of internal correspondence among the leadership and the records of confrontations and interrogations.6 At the same time, the analysis of what transpired in public in the October Hall of the House of the Unions, the building which previously housed the Palace of the Nobility, is no less illuminating. Vyshinskii did not himself write the drama that was played out in August 1936 – the writing had taken place long before, in the sessions of the Politburo, in the meetings to produce the script, in the interrogations and confrontations, and in the telegrams and telephone conversations going back and forth between Moscow and Sochi, exchanges that continued right up to and during the trial itself.7 But Vyshinskii was the professional who could be entrusted with a drama full of such well-known figures, the virtuoso in command of all the registers that were needed to convey to the whole nation where it was headed.
Moscow, 1937 Page 11