The Great Terror

In 1927, the Trotsky—Zinoviev bloc made one last effort. Defeated and isolated in the ruling councils of the Party, they thought to appeal to the “Party masses” and the workers. (This was a measure of their lack of contact with reality: the masses were now wholly alienated.) In the autumn came the setting up of an illegal Trotskyite printing press, and illegal demonstrations in Moscow and Leningrad. Mrachkovsky, Preobrazhensky, and Serebryakov accepted responsibility for the print shop. They were all immediately expelled from the Party, and Mrachkovsky was arrested. Stalin gave the whole thing a most sinister air by representing the GPU provocateur who had exposed the opposition printing in an entirely false role as “a former Wrangel officer.” Opposition demonstrations on 7 November were a fiasco. The only result was that on 14 November Trotsky and Zinoviev were expelled from the Party, and Kamenev, Rakovsky, Smilga, and Evdokimov from the Central Committee. Their followers everywhere were also ejected. Zinoviev and his followers recanted. Trotsky’s, for the moment, stood firm. The effective number of Trotskyites and Zinovievites is easy to deduce: 2,500 oppositionists recanted after the 1927 Congress, and 1,500 were expelled. The leading Trotskyites were sent into exile. In January 1928, Trotsky was deported to Alma-Ata. Rakovsky, Pyatakov, Preobrazhensky, and others of the Left followed him to other places in the Siberian and Asian periphery.

On 16 December 1928 Trotsky refused to abjure political activity. In spite of efforts by Bukharin, together with Tomsky and Rykov, with the support, apparently, of the moderate Stalinist Kuibyshev, the Politburo agreed to his expulsion from the USSR. He was arrested on 22 January 1929 and expelled to Tdrkey.

STALIN’S MEN

As his rivals fell one by one, Stalin was promoting a following with different qualities. Not one of them had any status as a theoretician, though most were capable of putting a line to a Party Congress in the conventional Marxist phrasing, which to some degree disguised this disability. Few of them had great seniority in the Party. But they were all Old Bolsheviks, and their characteristics were doggedness and a willingness to work at the dull detail of administration.

They included men of ability, if not of brilliance. It was natural that Molotov, Russia’s best bureaucrat, should gravitate to Stalin’s side. He had been one of the first leaders in Petrograd when the underground Bolsheviks emerged in 1917, and before that he had edited Pravda. He had become a candidate member of the Politburo in 1921. In 1922 he was joined in that capacity by the administrative tough V. V. Kuibyshev. But it was not until January 1926 that a further intake of Stalin’s men took place: Voroshilov, his creature since the Civil War, became a full member; and Yan Rudzutak, a Latvian who typified the durs of the old underground, and G. I. Petrovsky, formerly a member of the Duma and latterly an executive of Stalinist policy, came in as candidates.

Later in 1926 Rudzutak was promoted to the full membership lost by Zinoviev, and the candidates were reinforced by five more Stalinists, including the Georgian “Sergo” Ordzhonikidze, who had been a member of the Central Committee even before the war; Sergei Kirov, appointed to head the Leningrad Party on the rout of the Zinovievites; Lazar Kaganovich; and Anastas Mikoyan. Ordzhonikidze, whom Lenin had proposed to expel from the Party for two years for his brutality to the Georgian Communists in 1922, was a feldsher, or medical orderly. Uneducated, except in Party matters, he gave foreigners the impression of being genial but sly. He seems to have intrigued with Zinoviev in 1925 and with Bukharin in 1928 and then let each of them down.²⁵

Ordzhonikidze’s vacillations, though, appear to have been due to weakness rather than ill will. He was apparently willing to accept Zinoviev and Kamenev back into the Party in 1927 on better terms than Stalin granted, describing them as men “who have brought a good deal of benefit to our Party,”²⁶ and he expressly dissociated himself from some of the more extreme charges against Trotsky.²⁷ He was reasonably popular in the Party, and in the years to come was to be to some extent a moderating influence.