The Great Terror

At the time, it is true, the Communists denied responsibility and claimed that they had been framed by their enemies. Georgi Dimitrov, at the Reichstag Trial, said, “This incident was not organized by the Bulgarian Communist Party … that act of provocation, the blowing up of Sofia Cathedral, was actually organized by the Bulgarian police” (

Selected Articles

[London, 1951], pp. 22–23). However, in a speech in 1948, he admitted and criticized “the desperate actions of the leaders of the Party’s military organization culminating in the attempt at Sofia Cathedral” (p. 203).

5 The Problem of Confession

fn1

We should note, incidentally, that some of the earlier crop of capitulations by “Trotskyites” had been much less abject than those of Zinoviev. Muralov had never made any declaration against the opposition. Ivan Stnirnov’s “capitulation” had been in rather noncommittal terms, and when he met Sedov in Berlin, they had been friendly. Trotsky recognized that Serebryakov’s capitulation, too, was “more dignified than some.”

fn2

The factual side of the confessions, as so often, contained impossibilities—as when the Head of the Congregationalist Church mentioned meetings with a British Vice Consul over a long period when the man concerned had not been in the country.

6 Last Stand

fn1

Kossior, Voroshilov, Kalinin, Chubar, Kaganovich, Ordzhonikidze, Andreyev, and Postyshev (Pravda, 28 August 1936).

fn2

In the January 1937 Trial itself, there was to be a curious reflection of this attitude: an engineer formerly sentenced in connection with the Shakhty Trial, Boyarshchinov, was referred to as having become an honest Soviet engineer, killed by the conspirators because he was exposing their wrongful methods of work.

fn3

For example, in

Pravda

of 6 January 1937, a Ukrainian public report is made to all four bodies: to the Central Committee in Moscow, it simply goes to Stalin; to the Central Committee in Kiev, to both Kossior and Postyshev. All this was later to be censured as a personality cult, reflecting years of complacency on the part of Postyshev and his entourage, who as a result had “let in enemies” (

Pravda

, 29 May 1937).

fn4

An early adumbration of the line to be used in the Korean War in the 1950s.

fn5

One difference between Byng’s situation and that of the Soviet industrialists 200 years later is that on his tomb in Southill, Bedfordshire, it was possible at once for his family to erect a monument, with the famous inscription beginning “To the Perpetual Disgrace of Public Justice …”

fn6

Which was by no means a foregone conclusion. Yezhov had given Ulrikh instructions on the sentencing on 28 January: all the accused were to be shot. Stalin must have changed his mind (as he had about the names for trial—Livshits and Turok being added at the last moment) (

lzvestiya TsK KPSS

, no. 9 [1989]).

fn7

Although we may note that the Secretary of the Azov-Black Sea Committee, Malinov, and the head of his Party Organs Department were to be denounced as Trotskyite conspirators (

Pravda

, 5 June 1937).

7 Assault on the Army

fn1

The other “military” full members were Voroshilov and Gamamik.

fn2

Blyukher, Budenny, Tukhachevsky, and Yegorov.

fn3

Stalin also put some of the blame for the Polish debacle on Smilga (John Erickson, The Soviet High Command [London, 1962], p. 99).

fn4

The same is true of vague reports that the idea of a coup occurred to some officers, in particular Feldman, but that none of the senior generals were involved. The other “military conspiracy” mentioned at the Bukharin Trial—that of Peterson, Commander of the Kremlin Guard, who intended a palace coup—is only perfunctorily linked with Tulchachevsky (

Bukharin Trial

, pp. 570, 177); but again, though not implausible, there is no evidence for it.

fn5

Shmidt was being interrogated “nine months before” the June Trial with a view to incriminating Yakir (I. V. Dubinskiy,

Naperekor vetram

[Moscow, 1964], pp. 243ff).

fn6

Who himself remarked that he could always turn a Communist into a Nazi, but could not do the same with a Social Democrat (Hermann Rauschning, Hitler Speaks [New York, 1940], p.

fn7

Indeed, in the occupied countries during the war, too, the Gestapo was in contact with the local Communist Parties, at least in the period before the German—Soviet war. In France, negotiations with the French Communist Party had reached the stage of discussing permission to let

L’Humanite

appear. In occupied Norway, Communist periodicals were briefly allowed. The position was similar in Belgium.

fn8

A minor point is that of the military men, they implicated Tulchachevsky only, and that they are said to have included Stalin’s Ambassador first in Berlin and then in Paris, Surits, who was (by a curious quirk) one of the very few Ambassadors to survive the Purge.

fn9

Shot on 14 June 1938 (

Sovetskaya istoricheskaya entsyklopediya)

.

fn10