11
The Engine Room of the Year1937: The February–March Plenum of the Central Committee
‘A truly historic plenum’ – that was Georgii Dimitrov’s summing-up of his impressions of the plenary session of the Central Committee of the Communist Party which took place between 23 February and 5 March 1937.1 The Party leadership had gathered in Moscow from every corner of the Soviet Union for a period of two weeks. The unusual feature of the meeting was not just its length. What is extraordinary is that there is no report of this ‘historic event’ by witnesses or participants and that the official records appeared only after a sixty-year delay. There are no photographs from this meeting, apart from some caricatures left by committee members – and some of them were outstanding draughtsmen, painters, and caricaturists – to be discovered much later in the posthumous papers of Kliment Voroshilov, minister of defence and Stalin’s close confidant. The drawings of Nikolai Bukharin, Aleksei Rykov and others, made by Valerii Mezhlauk, the People’s Commissar for Heavy Engineering and editor in chief of The USSR in Construction, show them for the last time before their arrest, in pictures made by a Central Committee member who a year later was himself to be expelled from it and sentenced to death on 28 July 1938.2
Photos of the assembled company would have presented the observer with a collection of condemned men. When a plenary assembly that is to decide the fate of the state and the party, or, more accurately, the fates of countless thousands of human beings, fails to produce any photographs, this is not without its significance. It helps to ensure that the true centre of power in Stalin’s dictatorship remains a mystery. It means that we are forced to rely on documentation to tell us about the course of events at the plenum. In the event, this documentation has now become completely available.3
The agenda lists the issues which were important at the beginning of 1937. It consists of six items:
1 the question of Comrades Bukharin and Rykov;
2 preparations for the elections to the Supreme Soviet on the basis of the new voting system and the resulting reorganization of Party work;
3 report of the Plenary Commission on formulating the draft resolution on Bukharin and Rykov;
4 the lessons from the wrecking, sabotage and spying activities of Japanese, German and Trotskyist agents in the People’s Commissariats for Heavy Industry and Transport;
5 the lessons from the wrecking, sabotage and spying activities of Japanese, German and Trotskyist agents within the NKVD;
6 the political education of Party cadres and measures necessary to combat Trotskyist and other double-dealers in Party organizations.4
In the final analysis it boiled down to three questions. How were Bukharin and Rykov to be dealt with? How must the Communist Party prepare for the elections to the Supreme Soviet at the end of the year? How did the Party assess the situation in the country as a whole and what conclusions should be drawn for Party work and the security services?
Whereas the resolutions that were passed provide a succinct summary of the relevant decisions that could therefore be readily translated into directives, the detailed transcripts now enable us to reconstruct the course of the discussions, the dynamics and the crisis points of the deliberations. Above all, however, they give us a feel for the atmosphere of the meeting. The members of the Central Committee were alone together. They spoke the way they usually spoke with one another, and not for the public, the press or observers. People spoke candidly in an otherwise private group. There was frank discussion, in so far as we can use such an expression in connection with an organization as subject to group pressures as was the Central Committee – a choir with many voices, with discernible currents and undercurrents, well-practised turns of phrase, constellations in which everyone could show who he is and was, an arena not just for talk but for a life-and-death struggle. Who had ever heard before of a situation in which the participants in a controversial discussion do not simply leave the room, but are led out by the state police and taken directly to the cells? Surely those present cannot have remained unaffected by the thought that only two weeks previously some of the most important leaders of the Party and the state, men who had taken part in such meetings six months earlier, had been sentenced and shot as alleged spies and enemies of the people? Iurii Pyatakov, for example, had been Deputy People’s Commissar for Heavy Industry.5 And hadn’t the entire plenary meeting been postponed by two days because Georgii Ordzhonikidze, an outstanding member of the Politburo, who was scheduled to deliver a report and even chair the conference, had taken his own life one day before the meeting began?6 And what are we to think of a conference whose participants have come straight from the funeral ceremonies for a respected official who has died in mysterious circumstances? And had they not all arrived at the conference by travelling through a country that had witnessed the sudden exposure of wreckers, conspiracies, acts of sabotage and spy networks? The plenum of the Central Committee, with its roughly 100 members and candidates, was not simply the place where crucial decisions were arrived at in the spirit of the self-styled ideal of ‘democratic centralism’. It was a place where in actual fact the contradictions, tensions, rivalries and ambitions rampant in this organization all came together. And these tensions in their turn, while not acting as a conduit for the tensions in the nation at large, did in a sense reflect them. The debates in the plenum were conducted in an atmosphere oppressed by the burdens of a nation in which wild fantasies of change went hand in hand with apocalyptic catastrophes. The transcripts of the sessions give us an insight into the way in which the leadership would ‘conduct itself’ in a crisis, in what was in fact a hopeless situation of their own making.7 What we see is men practising the rhetorical tropes of unyielding toughness, testing out the resilience of the hard core, and steeling themselves to cling to power even at the price of a bloodbath.
A leadership at its wits’ end: the voice of panic
It is worth evaluating the tone of these sessions, and not just because other testimony is lacking. But how can we assess tone and atmosphere so as to make it look like hard fact? Reading through the transcripts is excruciating and exhausting, but to confine oneself – for reasons of economy – to extracting factual information or collecting quotations would fail to yield an adequate picture. The analysis of tone, the decoding of the semantics, explains how a plenary debate among top-flight officials can be transformed into a tribunal. The transcripts show how the discourse of a ruling elite merges into a collective readiness to kill. We are witnesses of a plan to salvage that elite’s own positions of power at any, absolutely any price. Even at the price of destroying the Party as it had existed hitherto and the literal murder of members actually present at the plenum.
The transcripts show in purely quantitative terms the size of the gulf that had opened up between the activists in the discussions and the passive listeners and actors. The interaction between protagonists and chorus is highly visible in the especially heated debates about Bukharin and Rykov. Altogether around 1,000 contributions are recorded in those discussions. There was not a single attempt among them to defend the accused, however tentatively, or to rebut any of the charges levelled against them. All served either to denounce the accused or to ridicule them. On occasion, the mood in the hall became ‘really cheerful’, a way of providing relief to a psychotic atmosphere.
Roughly one-third of the contributions are introduced with the words ‘Voice from the hall’ – the secretaries were unable to determine the identity of the speakers. In the remaining two-thirds, the speaker’s name is given.
The largest single contributor was Stalin himself, who intervened 100 times, including his extended monologues interrupting Bukharin’s and Rykov’s speeches. Closest to him came Molotov (82) and Kaganovich (67). Contributions by other members of the Politburo came, in declining order, from Kosior (27), Voroshilov (24), Mikoian (24), Chubar' (11) and Kalinin (4).
Figures 11.1 and 11.2 Scenes from the plenum of February–March 1937, as recorded by
Valerii Mezhlauk, the chairman of the State Planning Commission, who was sentenced to death in 1938
‘Public occasions of this sort saw the performance of rituals, but if they did not go as planned, if someone forgot himself, then routine and ritual became muddled up, resulting in a moment of uncertainty.’
Of the candidates for the Politburo, Postyshev was the most active (88 interventions). He was followed by Eikhe (8), Zhdanov (5) and Rudzutak (1).
Contributions from men directly connected with the Party and Chekist inquiries relating to the Cheka are distributed as follows: Shkiriatov (46), Yezhov (17), and Vyshinskii (who belonged to none of the leading Party organs and took part in the plenum as chief prosecutor of the USSR) and Iaroslavskii (5 each).
Of the ‘ordinary’ Central Committee members and candidates, particular zeal was displayed by Beria (20), Mezhlauk (19), Budennyi (17) and Stetskii (17). They were followed by Gamarnik (11), Polonskii (8), Iagoda (7), Shvernik (6), Losovskii (5) and Khrushchev (4). There were a further three interventions by five people, and one or two by a further fourteen. In toto, therefore, roughly fifty people contributed to hunting down the accused – less than half the Central Committee members and candidates present at the plenum.
We must assume that Stalin undertook a careful analysis of these interventions – all the more so as they were all sent to the plenum for inspection and editing before being added to the shorthand record.8 We can identify something like a hard core and a great silent mass, and the interplay between them is what produced the overall group dynamic. The same may be said to apply to the discussion of the other items on the agenda. To say that we are talking here ‘just’ about fellow travellers would be simplistic. The majority of the plenum consisted of experienced, battle-hardened men. They were managers of power at the sharp end, some inclining towards despotism, others more towards the camaraderie of a men’s club; all had grown up amid the cruelties and horrors of revolution and civil war, an assembly of bosses, heads, sovereign rulers, undisputed masters for prolonged periods of time, equipped with far-reaching powers in their own domains – men who at one time had ‘eaten their sausage wrapped up in newspaper’ but who now enjoyed infinite power, houses, apartments, dachas, cars and servants. It was an assembly not of subalterns but of decision-makers, who were authoritarian and ruthless by profession. They had mastered the language, the diction, and the semantic nuances contained in the various ‘signals’ emanating from Moscow. They were aware that the transition in forms of address from ‘Comrade’ to ‘Citizen’, from the familiar to the polite, could signify the end of a career, expulsion from the Party and perhaps even death. Since they had command of the Party jargon, they knew what it meant if they were no longer addressed as ‘Comrade’. It was all part of an a priori discourse of rulers. Nuances were crucial in a forum in which every expression of independent thought ranked as a deviation from the mainstream, as a dangerous violation of the current Party consensus, and where the ever present fear of factionalism led to pressure to conform. There was open season on anyone who could be interrupted or shouted down. Whoever was listened to attentively, applauded or widely quoted became something like a reference point, an authority, and to listen to such a person was not only advisable, it could be decisive for one’s career and one’s future in general. Public occasions of this sort saw the performance of rituals, but if they did not go as planned, if someone forgot himself, then routine and ritual became muddled up, resulting in a moment of uncertainty. Such a moment occurred when Bukharin ventured to defend himself and to call false assertions lies and slanders. The course of the plenum shows that it had a dynamic and a drama of its own, complete with unforeseen twists, coups de théâtre and risks. It spent four days on Bukharin and Rykov alone; the decision about what to do about them was disputed. Nevertheless, the management of the plenum was professional and business-like, as was to be expected from Party organizers who had maintained their positions at the levers of power for twenty years. The committee was not primarily a voting machine, but a forum for sounding out opinion, the exploration of disagreements, the dramatization of different viewpoints, and then the stage for symbolic executions. Here the key figures provided the cues, but it was the anonymous voices who provided the excitement, the background noise, and who ratcheted up the tension. It was they who could not resist dramatizing the situation. They provided the chorus of derision and mockery which ensured that certain people were singled out, defamed, expelled and cursed – there was a refined and precise scale for discriminating against people and driving them into a corner. In the tidal wave of vulgar abuse, the few instances of decency and courage, which often consisted simply in the refusal to join in the chorus, are all the more striking. Where self-denunciation has become the norm, to assert the values one has stood for one’s entire life amounts to an almost suicidal act of courage – that was the situation with Valerian Osinskii. The entire panoply of rhetorical devices known to us from witch hunts was on parade – the heckling, the sharp rebuke, the denunciations and insinuations, aspersions instead of concrete evidence, and the untrammelled reporting of unsubstantiated rumours and ‘signals’! The plenum was a locus classicus of such devices. We can watch as the forms of supportive, comradely behaviour are sidelined, considerate treatment is brushed aside, and conventional restraints are broken down, culminating in a collective conspiracy to commit a crime. In rhetorical terms, too, everything became possible. Ideological, theoretical or political convictions were irrelevant here. A particular faction or individual could do as they liked. Stalin, for example, could describe Felix Dzerzhinsky, the founder of the Cheka, as a ‘valuable human being’, even though he had been a Trotskyist. The entire plenum was taken aback – people in the hall called out, who was he talking about? Arguments, positions that could be backed up, statements that might be confirmed or refuted – none of that mattered. What mattered was the right to make judgements, the ability to define who was a friend and who an enemy. The plenum was a perfect example of a purely arbitrary rhetorical world, one that had absolute power to decide on life and death.
Testing the limits and exceeding them: the Party indicts Bukharin and Rykov
The first item on the agenda was ‘the accused Bukharin and Rykov’. Bukharin and Rykov had earlier been accused of conspiracy at the Central Committee plenum of December 1936. Since then, there had been a series of confrontations with others already arrested. At the show trial in January, both men had been further incriminated by other accused men – Karl Radek in particular. Bukharin had been publicly accused at rallies and in the press of being part of the conspiracy. He had therefore asked the Central Committee to defend him and had gone on hunger strike to reinforce his request. At the plenum, where the records of the interrogations and denunciations to which he had been subjected were distributed, he appeared exhausted, unshaven, under great nervous strain, in a pitiable state and dressed in a terrible suit.9 Bukharin had submitted a 100-pagelong text and had also written an explanation for the benefit of plenum members.
I cannot go on like this. I have written a response to my slanderers. I am not capable physically and morally of attending the plenum. My legs are failing. I cannot bear the atmosphere that has been created. I am not able to speak in this situation. I have no wish to burst into tears, nor do I wish to faint or give way to hysteria …10
In his declaration he provided a detailed rebuttal of the accusations and statements, by Radek, above all, and also by the members of the ‘Bukharin school’ that he had allegedly founded. He called Radek a master slanderer, an ‘ingenious provocateur’, the inventor of monstrous calumnies. He went in detail into the fantastic allegations about contacts and networks. The ‘right centre’ he was supposed to have led together with Rykov was simply an invention. Similarly, the accusations about the ‘right-wingers’, his ‘disciples’, had overtones of insanity. He had never even had contact with many of those alleged to be his fellow conspirators; many of them he did not even know. He categorically rejecte
d all accusations about ‘bloc-building’, ‘uprisings’, ‘coups d’état’ and ‘wrecking activities’. In the evening session of 24 February, Rykov also made a statement. He did indeed criticize Bukharin’s hunger strike, but also rejected the accusations against himself. Rykov said it was evident that this would be his last appearance at a Party Congress. He resisted the invitation to denounce himself and to lie. ‘I repeat once more that I shall never confess to anything I have not done, and that I shall never admit to being the scoundrel that I am represented as being … And I shall abide by this as long as I live.’11
Moscow, 1937 Page 27