Moscow, 1937

by Karl Schlogel

  According to this analysis, no branch of the economy was truly intact. The activities of ‘wreckers’ were ubiquitous – from pit fires to the queues at food shops. The general conclusions, however, aimed not at improvements in working practices and the normalization of work routines, but at political vigilance and police interventions. The cosmos of the lifeworld shifted the tasks and perceptions of the plenum members onto the plane of political and police activity. Yezhov proudly referred to the numbers of wrecking activities exposed by his commissariat in the previous five months: in the People’s Commissariat for Transport there were allegedly 137 cases; in light industry there were 141, in the food industry 100, in municipal services 60, in internal trade 82, in agriculture 102, in the finance sector 35 and in education 228. In shipping he detected exactly 2,849 acts of sabotage for the year 1936. Robert Eikhe stated that there were around 1,600 accidents in the mining industry in 1936.

  The balance sheet of the ‘wreckers and saboteurs’ arrested in the People’s Commissariats is impressive. Between October 1936 and March 1937 the following were arrested as ‘members of Trotskyist organizations’: 585 people in heavy industry and the armaments industry, 228 in education, 141 in light industry, 137 in transport, 102 in agriculture, 100 in the food industry, 82 in internal trade, 64 in health, 62 in forestry, 54 in posts and telegraphs, 35 in finance, 88 in the water industry, 35 in the state farms, 5 in the Northern Sea Route Administration, 4 in foreign trade, 77 in academies and universities, 68 in publishing houses and the press, and 17 in the courts and the prosecutor’s office. In the NKVD, 238 workers in the central office and 107 in the central administration of State Security were arrested.33 In short, the traces of the subversive activities of saboteurs were to be found in every sector of society.

  Wreckers at work in the NKVD

  There was a special agenda item for the situation in the People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs (NKVD), as there had previously been for Heavy Industry and Transport. Wrecking activities had penetrated even the NKVD, as Nikolai Yezhov explained in a wide-ranging, self-critical report. The NKVD’s work had come four years too late, he explained, since the crucial statements had been made in a briefing of 8 May 1933. The problem was that this briefing had not been acted upon by the heads of the NKVD – that was a sideswipe aimed at Genrikh Iagoda, the former People’s Commissar whom Yezhov had replaced in September 1936. Even at that time, the work of the NKVD should have been addressing the new situation, for what was needed, once the kulaks had been defeated, was not a continuation of mass reprisals, but a targeted attack on an enemy that had assumed a radically different form. The NKVD had proved incapable of changing its methods; its system was too fixed in its ways. As a result, the NKVD concerned itself predominantly with routine cases, minor offences, hooliganism and petty criminality; 80 per cent of the people arrested represented no threat to the security of the state, while the genuine crimes – in other words, the political crimes – escaped its notice. The NKVD was completely swamped by routine tasks and hence utterly unprepared for the new form taken by hostile activities – namely, subversion, wrecking activities, sabotage and spying beneath the mask of political loyalty. The appropriate response was not mass actions and mass reprisals but the targeting of individuals, something that was possible only if NKVD officials were themselves sufficiently educated politically to be able to distinguish genuinely loyal people from disloyal people in disguise. The NKVD was unprepared for the new situation and, overloaded with bureaucratic red tape and campaigns of all sorts, had proved itself incapable of unmasking the enemy. It was necessary, he maintained, to make more use of agents – i.e. to develop a wider network of undercover operatives to identify specific offences, networks and conspiracies – to produce the necessary evidence and in that way unmask and defeat the enemy. The NKVD’s complacency and naïvety had been unable to keep pace with the masked enemies of society. Concrete evidence of criminal activities was for a long time dismissed as fantasy and defamation; concrete pointers were not followed up, and this helped these enemies in disguise – many of them in leadership positions – to maintain their networks, warn other enemies and cover their own tracks. Many leads were not followed up because it was thought ‘nonsensical’ and ‘idiotic’ to imagine that the origin of crimes such as the murder of Kirov should be sought in the circles associated with Zinoviev and the Trotskyists.

  The prisons resembled compulsory convalescent homes where enemies of the people could move freely, talk to one another and coordinate their activities. Literature, paper and writing materials were freely available in unlimited quantities; married couples lived there together, and they could even produce children, having demoted the prison authorities to the role of errand boys. There should be an end to this liberal attitude towards prisons and the policy of isolating political opponents. The briefing of 8 May having been more or less ignored, and those responsible having failed to follow up the leads in the Kirov murder, it was only with the Central Committee’s letter of 29 July 1936 that the NKVD’s mistakes could begin to be corrected, and since then he, Yezhov, had carried out a large number of arrests.34 Yezhov delivered his critique of the NKVD and Iagoda’s leadership with such vehemence that Iagoda leapt up in indignation, almost slipping into the same role that Bukharin and Rykov had found themselves playing a few days previously. Iagoda was accused of having built up and protected networks of cronies; he was accused of incompetence in providing security for Soviet officials and representatives – a criticism advanced by Maksim Litvinov, the People’s Commissar for Foreign Affairs, and it was said that the NKVD had descended into chaos and anarchy. One speaker at the plenum, Ivan Zhukov, even asked why Iagoda had not yet been arrested. The transcript at this point notes: ‘Uproar in the hall’.35 And it was Andrei Vyshinskii, the state prosecutor, of all people, who attacked the methods of investigation and interrogation used by the NKVD. In particular, he objected to the widespread reliance on obtaining confessions rather than evidence that had been carefully built up. The investigating agents showed little interest in objective facts, the concrete evidence or expert opinions and preferred to concentrate on confessions that could be retracted at will by the accused. When this occurred the court was completely undermined, since it had nothing with which to counter such recantations, with the consequence that a case could collapse at any moment. Vyshinskii referred to a number of recent trials (making an exception of the two Moscow show trials and his own prominent part in them). He cited instances in which the accused had been abused and put under pressure to the point where they fell silent and ended up giving the answers wanted from them. ‘What are we to make of such confessions?’ Vyshinskii asked. It was thought awkward and unacceptable, a blot on the ‘honour of the uniform’, if the investigation did not end with a confession. A criminal case that did not culminate in a confession cast a shadow on the work and the professional integrity of the NKVD. ‘Thanks to such practices, it is not the guilty parties who end up in the dock but people who are subsequently found not to be guilty or people who are indeed entirely innocent.’36 Up to 50 per cent of all cases had to be discontinued or terminated with different sentences because of such practices. There were members of the NKVD who boasted of their use of such illegal practices and who even wanted to be given medals for it. Vyshinskii resorted to self-criticism to atone for the fact that such enemy practices had not been eliminated and that ‘Trotskyists’ still survived even in the state prosecutor’s office. Yezhov, the head of the People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs, gave a description of certain NKVD practices in his speech to the plenum:

  I have to make it clear that the following practice existed: before an accused man’s statement was given to him for his signature the investigating judge looked through it first and then showed it to his superior. Important statements even went up as far as the People’s Commissar himself. The latter made notes on it and made suggestions about alterations to be made to the statement. The statement was then given back to the a
ccused (Intervention by Molotov: ‘A pretty bad practice’). Naturally, I cannot exclude the possibility that an investigating judge, who had recorded the interrogation, may have gone to his superior and asked him whether he fully understood the statement. Obviously, you have to give the statement back to the arrested man, who will correct it. But to say in advance what should be in a statement and what not – that is impermissible.37

  Yezhov remarked that he could think of far worse examples than those referred to by Vyshinskii.

  Stalin – who had interrupted to query the vanguard role of the NKVD claimed for it by Yezhov – took the analysis of the ideological reasons for its failings one step further by explaining that people in the NKVD did not realize that everything should be seen in the context of encirclement by capitalism and the growing threat of war. It was no longer merely a matter of smashing the class structure – that had already been achieved – or indeed of the annihilation of alternative political movements – these now lacked support in society. What counted now was to track down individuals and elements who, even when they had denounced themselves and distanced themselves from their earlier beliefs, had merely donned a new mask in order to undertake subversive activity on behalf of the enemy. The act of distancing oneself from previous views was simply a tactic to survive in the Soviet environment. Stalin referred here to the attitudes adopted by Kamenev and Zinoviev in the first trial and Piatakov, Sokol'nikov and Radek in the second.38

  The final resolution on this agenda item enshrined the decision to direct the work of the NKVD towards the new enemy, the new stage of the debate, tightening up the prison regime and improving the selection and training of Chekist personnel. Alongside such organizational reforms as the creation of new penal agencies to be responsible for everyday criminality and minor offences, the resolution proposed greater use of secret police (agentura: agents, informers) and the elimination of NKVD personnel who lacked vigilance and awareness. Furthermore, staffing and training would have to be improved.39 But the sheer difficulty of recognizing the enemy became clear from Yezhov’s own statement that he himself had taken a long time before he was able to develop a nose, an instinct for the new situation.40 And, in fact, how should enemies be recognized, given what was said about them? Should poor work be taken as a sign that someone should be unmasked? Or did the fact that someone did his work well mean that he was disguising his sabotage? Which workers aroused the greatest suspicion as being predestined for wrecking activities? Former members of the opposition or super-loyal and uncritical conformists? What compass might help the NKVD, the ‘vanguard of the Party’, find its way in this fog in which class frontiers had ceased to exist?

  The dissolution of the Party and the creation of a new one

  All audit reports, balance sheets and self-criticisms – even those of the NKVD – eventually culminated in the question of the role and responsibility of the members of the Communist Party caught up in this runaway process and the conclusions that were to be drawn from it. Stalin took it upon himself to answer this key question, and there were further contributions to this debate by Andrei Zhdanov and Georgii Malenkov.

  Stalin’s core argument attacked the ‘lazy’ idea that the class enemy had become tamer and that, following the abolition of classes in the USSR, the class struggle had weakened: ‘On the contrary, the further we progress and the greater our success, then the more savagely the remnants of the exploiter classes hit out, the faster they will resort to more aggressive measures, the more they will bespatter the Soviet state with filth, and the more they will seek their last refuge in desperate measures.’41 We have to stop being complacent and putting our trust in false hopes and must instead face up to reality: in other words, the exacerbation of the international situation, the growing threat of war, the fact that construction takes a long time, while dynamiting a dam or a railway bridge is a matter of no more than a second. In this situation active Party members are of crucial importance. If they are prepared, all problems can be resolved. Stalin counted on three groups within the Party. At the top, there were the generals, who numbered around 3,000 to 4,000; in the middle, there was an officer corps about 30,000 to 40,000 strong; and lastly there were 100,000 to 150,000 Party members, who could be called the NCOs. At every level, the Party secretaries should appoint two deputies, who surely could be identified and promoted from among the countless thousands of able and energetic people. In order to train Party officials, courses should be mounted at the appropriate level. This would ensure an orderly succession of Central Committee members.42 This lecture, which was received with feelings of relief and even enthusiasm (cries of acclamation from Eduard Pramnek, Party secretary of the Gorky region, and Boris Sheboldaev, Party secretary of the North Caucasus), was followed by a two-day-long debate which was concerned initially with a general stock-taking. The tenor of the majority of contributions was that the Party was going through a period of great weakness, and in many places was even in a state of dissolution and paralysis. Forces hostile to the Party, mainly of a Trotskyist persuasion, had survived in many places and had even worked their way up the leadership ladder. The Party leaders on the spot sometimes behaved like ‘petty princes’ (kniazhki), responding tardily and passively and even with active hostility to the masses, and especially to criticisms from the masses. The middle and upper leadership levels were imbued from top to bottom with a fear of criticism. The debates were full of self-accusations about the lack of vigilance, about the fact that ‘signals’ had been ignored or dismissed. ‘I trusted people; it did not occur to me for a moment that they might be enemies. I did not imagine that this stratum of people could possibly turn out to be enemies, spies or saboteurs. It was blindness, an excess of trust that prevented us from even vetting them.’ They were assumed to be ‘our own people’.43 Now, however, one should trust no one. There were lengthy, dramatic descriptions of the situation in many Party organizations – in Kiev, the Black Sea and the Azov region. Party work in the army and the press was sharply criticized. Party representatives in the army boasted of having purged the Trotskyist elements early on – Yan Gamarnik, the deputy People’s Commissar for the Armed Forces, and Kliment Voroshilov, the People’s Commissar for Defence, were particularly prominent here. Others discerned the activities of Trotskyists in journalism in the proliferation of printing errors which distorted meaning and gave rise to politically provocative messages.44 Criticism focused on the behaviour, managerial methods and working style, especially of the leadership.

  This included criticism of flattery, boot-licking, and the autocratic behaviour of local and regional bosses who had installed their own cronies (whom they often took with them when they were transferred to other regions). There was criticism of the incessant changes in the leadership, since this meant that no one could really work his way into his role and assume long-term responsibility; the Party leadership acted as if it were permanently on tour (gastrolerski kharakter).45 A further target was the widespread nepotism, together with the culture of providing one’s own people with jobs and privileges, mutual back-scratching and, linked to that, the suppression of criticism. The principle that leadership positions should be filled only by election had long since fallen into abeyance; co-opting and recruitment from one’s own immediate background had become the rule. Elections and Party congresses which might have held people to account for their actions had ceased to exist. The debate revealed shattering data confirming the long-standing failure to fill Party posts by election and the fact that the numbers of people expelled from the Party exceeded those who remained.

  In the debate on the question of destroying ‘Party democracy’ through the policy of co-option, the following figures were given. ‘At all leadership levels in the structure of the Communist Party, the proportion of co-opted members was on average 11.6 per cent overall, in Kiev it was 22.8 per cent, in Belorussia 26.2 per cent, in Moscow city and the Moscow region it was 17 per cent, in Leningrad 17.5 per cent … while in the regional leaderships the proportions varie
d between 14 and 59 per cent.’46 This practice led to a greater uniformity in leadership personnel, a more defensive attitude towards criticism, and the growth of selfish interests and lobbies within the organizations.