The Great Terror

One view commonly held at the time was that the essential struggle of the early 1930s was waged between the Stalinist “moderates” and men of the Kaganovich type, for “priority of influence over Stalin.” In fact, Stalin himself was occasionally giving in with apparent good grace to hostile majorities while leaving Kaganovich and company the task of overtly putting the extreme case. As a result, the moderates seem to have thought that Stalin might have been induced to accept compromise and make shift with less than autocratic power. This mistake weakened them, as it had weakened all the previous opponents of Stalin.

There seems, indeed, no doubt that Kaganovich and others identified with terrorism did their best to dissuade Stalin from any policy of relaxation. For the Party would have forgiven Stalin, but a change in line would certainly have led to the fall of this cabal. That Stalin needed their encouragement is a more dubious proposition: his suspicions and ambitions were so strong as not to be notably affected by the efforts of these advisers. Khrushchev probably had the hierarchy of influence right when he commented, “Arbitrary behavior by one person encouraged and permitted arbitrariness in others.”³¹

Apart from the true politicians operating the overt machinery of Party and State, Stalin began from the 1920s to build up a personal group of agents, chosen for their lack of scruple and totally dependent on and devoted to himself. There is a Russian proverb, “Out of filth you can make a prince,” which, Trotsky says, Stalin was fond of quoting.³² These men were truly disgusting characters by any standards, a cadre which had abandoned all normal political or even Communist standards and which may be regarded as in effect a personal group of hatchet men, ready for any violence or falsification at the orders of their leader. At the same time, the political mechanism—containing comparatively reputable figures—continued to exist and was held to the front, just as Al Capone’s rule over Cicero was fronted for by civic officials, and employed the usual quota of economic and administrative cadres.

The “bloodthirsty dwarf” Yezhov—he was only about five feet tall—joined the Party in March 1917. Stalin found him in provincial posts and brought him into the Secretariat. He became a member of the Central Committee in 1927. An old Communist remarks, “In the whole of my long life I have never seen a more repellent personality than Yezhov’s.”³³ He was reminded of one of those slum children whose favorite occupation was to tie paraffin-soaked paper to a cat’s tail and set fire to it—and this was long before Yezhov had shown his full potential. On one view, Yezhov was merely a typical apparatchik: if so, the level implied is deplorable. A recent Soviet account speaks of his “low moral qualities” and “sadistic inclinations”; “women working in the NKVD were frightened of meeting him even in the corridors”; he “lacked any trace of conscience or moral principles.”³⁴

The intelligence of Yezhov himself has universally been described as low. But that is not to say that he, and the others, did not have adequate organizational and “political” capacities. Such have been found also in leading gangsters, who have, indeed, also been known to nourish a sense of allegiance to the mystique of an organization in much the same way as Yezhov and his colleagues. For such men, the Party was indeed cosa nostra—“our thing.”

Another such character, even closer to Stalin, was his secretary Poskrebyshev—bald, slightly humpbacked, heavily pockmarked. He was accustomed to speak quietly, but in the coarsest possible language, and gave a general impression of being almost totally uneducated. As head of the “Special Sector” of the Central Committee for many years, he was Stalin’s closest confidant until 1952.

Similar men, who were to play important roles in the Terror, were Mekhlis and Shchadenko, who destroyed the Army; Shkiryatov, Yezhov’s chief Purge assistant; and a dozen others of lesser note.

A last figure, more important than most, was Andrei Vyshinsky. Educated, intelligent, cowardly, and servile, he had been a Menshevik until 1921 and had joined the Bolshevik Party only after it established itself as victor. He was thus vulnerable to pressures and threats, and soon sought the protection of the faction best able to provide it. He made a quasi-academic career for himself in the Faculty of Law at Moscow University, and rapidly became its Rector on the intervention of the Party apparatus. Later he was a high official in the Commissariat for Education and was deeply involved in the purge of the academic world.