The Great Terror

The first lesson he seems to have drawn was that he could not easily obtain his followers’ consent to execution of Party members for purely political offenses. The attempt to read an assassination program into the Ryutin Platform was too unreal. A genuine assassination might prove a better theme.

At the same time, he saw among his own adherents men whose resistance could not easily be broken, and for whose removal it was difficult to find any political excuse. Over the next two years, he was to put these two thoughts together and find a logical solution—the assassination of Kirov.

A joint session of the Central Committee and the Central Control Commission took place from 28 September to 2 October 1932. (Zinoviev, Kamenev, and others had already been called before the Presidium of the Control Commission; Zinoviev and Kamenev had expressed regret, but Uglanov is reported “accusing his accusers.”) The Ryutin group were now expelled from the Party “as degenerates who have become enemies of Communism and the Soviet regime, as traitors to the Party and to the working class, who, under the flag of a spurious ‘Marxism-Leninism,’ have attempted to create a bourgeois-kulak organization for the restoration of capitalism and particularly kulakdom in the USSR.”¹⁵ Ryutin was sentenced to ten years’ imprisonment, and twenty-nine others to lesser terms.¹⁶

The plenum passed another resolution “immediately expelling from the Party all who knew of the existence of this counterrevolutionary group, and in particular had read the counterrevolutionary documents and not informed the CCC and CC of the All Union Communist Party (bolshevik), as concealed enemies of the Party and the working class.” It was signed “Stalin.”¹⁷ Zinoviev and Kamenev, thus again expelled from the Party, were deported to the Urals. Soon afterward, Ivan Smirnov, who on his readmission to the Party had become head of the Gorky Automobile Works, was rearrested and sentenced to ten years in jail, going to the “isolator” at Suzdal. Smilga received five years, and with Mrachkovsky was sent to Verkhne-Uralsk.

A resolution on a more general purging of the Party was passed by a plenum of the Central Committee on 12 January 1933. More than 800,000 members were expelled during the year, and another 340,000 in 1934.

The method of the Party purge was in itself an encouragement to informers, lickspittles, and conscienceless careerists. The local Purge commissions, in the presence of the entire local membership, would examine each member about every detail of his political and personal past. Intervention from the audience was welcomed. In theory, all this was a sign of Party democracy and comradely frankness. In practice, it attracted—and of course increasingly so as conditions got worse—first the inflation of true though pettifogging points from the past, such as distant relationship or acquaintance with former White Army officers, and finally simple invention or misrepresentation.

At the January 1933 plenum, too, the last of the new cycle of plots was exposed. The distinguished Old Bolshevik A. P. Smirnov, Party member since 1896 and formerly member of the Central Committee’s “Orgburo,” was charged with two other Old Bolsheviks, Eismont and Tolmachev (members since 1907 and 1904, respectively), with forming an anti-Party group.

A. P. Smirnov’s group is said to have had contact with Old Bolshevik workers, mainly in the trade unions, in Moscow, Leningrad, and other cities. Realizing that no legal methods could break Stalin’s grip, they had to a large degree gone underground, with a view to organizing for a struggle. Their program seems to have covered the revision of the unbalanced industrial schemes, the dissolution of most of the kolkhozes, the subjection of the OGPU to Party control, and the independence of the trade unions. Above all, they had discussed the removal of Stalin. When taxed at the plenum Eismont said, “Yes, there were such conversations among us. A. P. Smirnov started them.” Unlike Ryutin and his friends, none of the three had had any connection with the Trotskyite or Rightist oppositions. The exposure of this plot was described in the Khrushchev era as “the beginning of reprisals against the old Leninist cadres.”¹⁸

In his speech on the matter, Stalin significantly remarked, “Of course, only enemies could say that to remove Stalin would not affect matters.”¹⁹

Again, an attempt to have the oppositionists shot seems to have been made and blocked. It appears that Kirov, Ordzhonikidze, and Kuibyshev again played the main role in opposing the death penalty. Kalinin and Kossior supported them; Andreyev, Voroshilov, and, to some degree, Molotov took a vacillating position, and once again only Kaganovich supported Stalin to the end.²⁰