The Great Terror

Kirov had joined the Party at the age of eighteen in Tomsk in 1904. Arrested or deported four times under Tsarism, he was leader of the Bolshevik organization at Vladikavkaz in the Caucasus—a typical minor but high testing post for the underground militant—during the February 1917 Revolution. He, too, was lacking in some of the worst Stalinist characteristics. He, too, was fairly popular in the Party. He was Russian, as Stalin was not. He was also, alone among the Stalinists, a very effective orator. Although Kirov unflinchingly enforced Stalin’s collectivization and industrialization policies, he does not seem to have had that streak of malice which characterized Stalin and his closest associates. Although ruthless, he was neither vicious nor servile. A foreign Communist who had dealings with him says that his Leningrad office had no air of revolutionary enthusiasm, and he himself “by his remarks and methods, reminded me of the cultured high officials of the Austrian administration I had known at Brunn.”²⁸

Such men as Kirov and Ordzhonikidze, Rudzutak and Kuibyshev, whose fates were to be important cruxes in the Great Purge, were supporters and allies of Stalin rather than real devotees. They did not see the logical tendencies of Stalin’s political attitude or penetrate the obscure potentialities of his personality. The same seems to apply to such men as Vlas Chubar, who joined the Politburo as a candidate member in November 1926, and S. V. Kossior, who came in in the following year—both of them Bolsheviks since 1907 and of worker origin.

There was a story in the early 1930s of Stalin telling Yagoda that he preferred people to support him from fear rather than from conviction, because convictions could change.²⁹ When it came to the point, he could not rely on these men to support him through everything. He was to deal with them just as ruthlessly as with the oppositionists, reminding one of Cosimo de’ Medici’s remark that “we are nowhere commanded to forgive our friends.”

The truest Stalinist of these promotions of the 1920s was Lazar Kaganovich. He was brought in by Stalin in 1922 as leader of the “Organization and Instruction” Section of the Central Committee under the Secretariat. He was raised to the Central Committee and to the Secretariat at the XIIIth Congress in 1924. Thenceforward, he undertook Stalin’s most important assignments—as First Secretary in the Ukraine from 1925 to 1928, being withdrawn as part of the concessions Stalin then felt worth making; as First Secretary in the Moscow Party organization from 1930 to 1935; and as administrator of the key Agricultural Department of the Central Committee in 1933.

Kaganovich, though to some degree shallow in his appreciation of problems, was a brilliant administrator. A clear mind and a powerful will went with a total lack of the restraints of humanity. If we have used the word ruthless as generally descriptive of Kirov, for Kaganovich it must be taken quite literally—there was no ruth, no pity, at all in his make-up.

In the Purge, he took the extreme line that the Party’s interest justified everything. Fixing him “with his steely blue eyes,” he told an industrial official that as the Party was cleansing itself there were bound to be occasional mistakes: “When the forest is cut down the chips fly.” He added that a Bolshevik must be ready to sacrifice himself for the Party: “Yes, ready to sacrifice not only his life but his self-respect and sensitivity.”³⁰ His public speeches, too, are full of appeals for ruthlessness and self-sacrifice. When he himself was removed, in rather easier circumstances, in 1957, he telephoned the victor and begged not to be shot. It is not difficult to conclude that we have here a bully and a coward.

We may also note here the rise of future Politburo members. Andrei Zhdanov, First Secretary of the important Nizhni-Novgorod (later Gorky) province, was typical of the younger Stalinist generation. In him we find an ideological fanaticism much more dominant than in most of his generation. To him is due one of the few benefits of the Stalin epoch as compared with the 1920s—the reestablishment of an educational system which, though narrow and sycophantic, at least restored in the nonpolitical subjects the rigor and effectiveness of Russian education, which had deteriorated in the experimental interlude. Georgi Malenkov, an equally ruthless and intelligent young man, worked in the Party apparatus. His mind ran less in the channels of ideological conviction and political fanaticism than in the skills and details of political maneuver, the apparatus and its personalities. Lavrenti Beria, a former OGPU operative, was appointed by Stalin in 1931 to head the Party organization in Transcaucasia, against the objections of local leaders. These four were to combine some political capacity with satisfactory ruthlessness and to rise high in the State. Their roles in the Purge were particularly murderous.