The Great Terror came suddenly to an end on 23 November 1938. The occasion was marked unofficially by the removal of Yezhov from the NKVD and the advent to office of his deputy Lavrenti Beria. Until then there had been no serious attempt to stop the carnage. Everyone near Stalin had known that the campaign of arrests, tortures and executions had his active support: it was perilous to advocate a change of policy while he seemed fixed in purpose.
Signs had already appeared that some in Stalin’s entourage wanted to halt the machinery of terror. Malenkov began the attempt at the Party Central Committee plenum in January 1938; he did this subtly by deploring the large number of mistakes in expulsions from the party in the previous year.1 Direct criticism of arrests and executions was avoided. Holding to the theme of internal party procedures, Malenkov rebuked local leaders for throwing innocent communists out of the party. Everyone knew that more was involved than the loss of a party membership card. Expelled Bolsheviks were invariably sent to the Gulag or shot. Malenkov later claimed that he was putting pressure on Stalin to see the light. If so, it would have been the only time he did so. Malenkov was Stalin’s creature and it is inconceivable that Stalin did not sanction Malenkov’s initiative; and in any case, apart from a decision to handle expulsions more carefully, no brake was yet applied to the machinery of terror. Nevertheless Stalin evidently had growing doubts about Yezhov. He made this manifest in a typically indirect fashion when, on 21 August 1938, Yezhov was given the People’s Commissariat of Water Transport in addition to his existing duties. This implicitly warned him that he would have the NKVD taken away from him if he failed to satisfy the Leader.
Yezhov understood the danger he was in and his daily routine became hectic; he knew that the slightest mistake could prove fatal. Somehow, though, he had to show himself to Stalin as indispensable. Meanwhile he also had to cope with the appointment of a new NKVD Deputy Commissar, the ambitious Lavrenti Beria, from July 1938. Beria had until then been First Secretary of the Communist Party of Georgia; he was widely feared in the south Caucasus as a devious plotter against any rival – and almost certainly he had poisoned one of them, the Abkhazian communist leader Nestor Lakoba, in December 1936. If Yezhov tripped, Beria was ready to take his place; indeed Beria would be more than happy to trip Yezhov up. Daily collaboration with Beria was like being tied in a sack with a wild beast. The strain on Yezhov became intolerable. He took to drinking heavily and turned for solace to one-night stands with women he came across; and when this failed to satiate his needs, he pushed himself upon men he encountered in the office or at home. In so far as he was able to secure his future position, he started to gather compromising material on Stalin himself.
Quite how Yezhov could ever have made use of such documents is hard to imagine. His behaviour indicated how desperate he, the Iron Commissar, had become. Knowing he could be arrested at any time, he was sent daily into hysteria. His fate depended on whether Stalin wanted to alter policy or change personnel. If he was to survive, the NKVD chief needed Stalin to commit himself to permanent state terror with Yezhov still in charge.
A further decline in Yezhov’s influence was detectable on 23 October 1938, when the writer Mikhail Sholokhov gained an audience with Stalin to complain about being investigated by the NKVD.2 Stalin humiliated Yezhov by requiring him to attend. On 14 November an order came from Stalin to purge the NKVD of individuals ‘not worthy of political confidence’. Next day the Politburo confirmed a directive of party and government to terminate cases currently under investigation by the troiki and the military tribunals. On 17 November the Politburo decided that enemies of the people had infiltrated the NKVD.3 Such measures spelled doom for Yezhov. He drank more heavily. He turned to more boyfriends for sexual gratification. He spoke incautiously about politics.4He was psychologically collapsing as Stalin increasingly treated Lavrenti Beria as NKVD chief-in-waiting. The wolves were gathering. At an evening meeting with Stalin, Molotov and Voroshilov on 23 November, Yezhov confessed to his incompetence in catching enemies of the people; his resignation was accepted.5 Yezhov kept his other posts in the Central Committee Secretariat and the People’s Commissariat of Water Transport for some months. But his days of pomp and authority were over.
Beria was charged with restoring order in the NKVD and submitting it to the party’s control. Ruthless and competent, he could be trusted to clear up the mess left behind by Yezhov. Beria was no angel. Unlike Yezhov, he took an active part in beatings and kept canes for use in his office. Yet he had a steadier character than his predecessor, and Stalin and he instigated a set of reforms. Approval of torture in interrogations was not revoked but restricted, according to a January 1939 directive, to ‘exceptional’ cases.6 A dossier was assembled on Yezhov, who appeared in public for the last time on 21 January 1939. He was arrested in April and executed the following year. The entire system of troikis was dismantled. The nightmare of 1937–8 was ended; it was popularly referred to as the ‘Yezhovshchina’. This suited Stalin, who wanted the blame removed from his own shoulders. Yet although the terror-procedures were reduced, they were not abolished. The party did not control the NKVD at central and local levels on a daily basis. Torture continued to be used. The frantic atmosphere of the Great Terror had been dissipated but Stalin’s USSR remained a murderous madhouse – and most of the leading madmen were confirmed in power.
Yezhov’s removal came after Stalin started to allow discussion in his entourage about abuses of power. Two years of arrests and executions had occurred, and it was known that a high proportion of the victims did not belong to the categories of people describable as ‘anti-Soviet elements’. It is quite possible too that Yezhov misled Stalin about aspects of the process. Yezhov’s career and life depended on his ability to persuade Stalin that genuine anti-Soviet elements and enemies of the people were being arrested and eliminated. Yezhov’s activity put everyone at risk.
Just as many people at the time and a few subsequent commentators surmised that the Great Terror had not been started on Stalin’s initiative,7 so the idea got about that the process was entirely out of his control once it had begun. Stalin may well have failed to anticipate the catastrophic excesses of the NKVD under Yezhov. What is more, local police organs undoubtedly bothered less about arresting individuals who fell into the designated social categories than in meeting the numerical quotas assigned to them. Repressions in 1937–8 were constantly accompanied by ‘wrongful’ arrests. Abuses and excesses were ubiquitous. It is also true that many truly anti-Soviet individuals survived the Great Terror and put themselves at the disposal of the German occupation regime in 1941. Hitler’s forces had little difficulty discovering kulaks, priests and other anti-Soviet elements which had been intended for elimination by Soviet terror operations. To that extent it is true that Stalin’s purposes had been frustrated. The ‘cleansing’ of the USSR of all its enemies, real or potential, had not been completely successful despite one of the most thorough repressive projects in world history.
Yet his failure to achieve all his objectives in their entirety is scarcely proof that he did not succeed to a very large degree. The fact that a multitude of people were wrongly arrested was neither here nor there. Essentially Stalin was applying to the judicial system what he had already developed for the economic system. The management of most sectors of public affairs in the USSR was chaotic. Policy was imposed and quantitative targets were set with dire punitive sanctions in the event of failure to hit the targets. This had been how the industrial growth rates were administered in the First Five-Year Plan. Agricultural collectivisation had been directed in the same way. The point was that the entire administrative system operated on the premise that lower-level officials had to be given precise numerical indicators. Stalin and the Politburo knew that the information reaching them from the localities was frequently unreliable. Misinformation was a basic defect of the Soviet order. Just as waste occurred in industrial production, so unnecessary human losses could be accepted in the Great Terror. So long as Stalin achieved the ultimate aim of eradicating most of that mass of disgruntled individuals who might remain a menace he had no compunction about the mayhem he caused.
Unmistakably he had become the country’s despot. He had eliminated foes in every institution. Not even the party had restrained him. Among the main results of the Great Terror had been drastic reduction in the party’s power and status. Stalin had turned himself into the unchallengeable individual locus of state authority. His was a most personal autocracy. He had come closer to total despotism than almost any monarch in history. He held sway over the Soviet state; no state institution could push him into decisions which he found uncongenial. Grand policy was firmly in his grasp and, by unpredictable interventions in smaller affairs of state, he caused all holders of office to try and anticipate his wishes. The state, moreover, kept its people in a condition of traumatic subservience. Civil society barely existed. Only the Russian Orthodox Church kept the slightest vestige of autonomy from the state – and it was scarcely much of an autonomy when tens of thousands of priests had been murdered. Every other institution and association was subject to the requirements of the central political authorities. Stalin had stabilised his despotism and its structures by means of the Great Terror, and the pervasiveness of control by the one-party state was deep and irresistible.
Yet this was not a totalitarian dictatorship as conventionally defined because Stalin lacked the capacity, even at the height of his power, to secure automatic universal compliance with his wishes. He could purge personnel without difficulty. But when it came to ridding the Soviet order of many informal practices he disliked, he was much less successful. In such cases he was like someone trying to strike a match on a block of soap.
Constraints continued to exist upon his rule. In 1937 he had told the Party Central Committee that he intended to eradicate the network of political patronage in the USSR. Yet cliental groups survived. The politics of the USSR continued to involve patronage – and in many parts of the country this meant links based on families and clans. There were also local ‘nests’ of functionaries leading the party, soviets and other public institutions. Technical and social obstacles to a neat vertical system of state power remained. Functionaries promoted in the late 1930s, however much they admired Stalin, saw it was vital to be cautious in messages to Moscow. Misinformation from below remained a basic local requirement for self-protection. The press, judiciary and market had countervailed only weakly against provincial political establishments under the NEP; they had massively less weight – if indeed they had any weight at all – after 1928. The situation changed little after 1938. Stalin’s clique could not know everything with the desired accuracy. Promoted functionaries were keen to enjoy their privileges. Stalin needed to treat them well materially; he could not permanently rely on terror alone.
He had a clear understanding of this. He had deliberately promoted the young and working-class cadres to high postings. Whereas in France and Britain the old clung to power, Stalin had brought on a fresh generation to replace the ageing veterans of the October Revolution – and he was pleased with his achievement.8 He had promoted young adults to all rungs on the ladder of party and government. This had long been one of his objectives, and he had attained it by the most brutal methods. At the end of the Great Terror he sought to keep the promotees on his side. The system of graduated perks and privileges was maintained. The higher the rung, the greater the reward. Stalin bribed them into murderous complicity. The administrative beneficiaries of the purges had a fixed higher income and guaranteed access to goods and services denied to the rest of society. Even if they did not literally step into dead men’s shoes, they certainly took possession of their apartments, dachas, paintings, carpets and pianos. They hired their tutors, chauffeurs and nannies. The promoted officials belonged to a privileged elite.
Stalin wished to sedate the minds of officials still fearful that he might resume the terror. At the celebratory Eighteenth Party Congress in March 1939, his general report picked up the theme:9
The correct selection of cadres means:
Firstly to value cadres like the gold reserve of party and state, to
cherish them, to show them respect.
Secondly to know the cadres, to make a careful study of the virtues
and defects of each cadre official, to know how to facilitate the
official’s capacities.
Thirdly to cultivate the cadres, to help each growing official to rise
higher, not to begrudge time in handling these officials
patiently and hastening their growth.
Fourthly to promote new, young cadres boldly and in a timely
fashion, to avoid letting them stand around in the same old
place or letting them go stale.
His appeal to the recent promotees was fervent. Unnamed discussants, he declared, thought it better for the state to ‘orientate itself to the old cadres’ with all their experience. But Stalin insisted that the wiser course was the one he had chosen.10 Not for the last time he gave the impression that the promotees had no firmer friend than himself.
Having created a new administrative elite, he wanted their allegiance. It was for them more than for any other group in society that he had ordered the publication of the Short Course. Indeed the whole ‘technical– scientific intelligentsia’ was in his sights. Recognising that they had limited time to do any reading at the end of the working day, he had supplied them with an easily assimilated text which explained and justified the existence of the Soviet order.11 This was also the group in society which, after the Great Terror, he and Zhdanov sought to recruit to the party. No longer were workers to be given privileged access to membership. Recruitment should take place on merit and usefulness for the socialist cause.12
A technocratic imperative was being proclaimed, and Stalin was putting himself forward as the Leader of the newly reformed USSR. With typical false modesty – and even self-pity – he pretended that the burden of individual leadership had somehow been thrust upon him. At times he complained about this. While other Soviet leaders tended the business of their assigned institutions, he gave consideration to the entire range of affairs. At a supper party in 1940 he was quite mawkish:13
But I alone am occupied with all these questions. Not one of you even thinks about it. I have to stand alone.
Yes, I can study, read, follow things up each day. But why can’t you do that? You don’t like to study, you go on living complacently. You waste Lenin’s legacy.
When Kalinin protested that they were always short of time, Stalin exclaimed: ‘No, that’s not the point! People wet behind the ears don’t want to study and re-study. They listen to me and then leave everything as it was before. But I’ll show the lot of you if I lose my patience. And you know how I can do that!’ This was a charade: Stalin would have locked up any Politburo members poking their noses into what he regarded as exclusively his business.
While wanting his policies to be followed, however, Stalin demanded that his subordinates should give frank, instant opinions. Every so often he got each of them on his own and enquired about options. For Stalin, Politburo members were useless unless they could come up with ideas for fresh measures. His period of rule was characterised by constant emergency. This made for an arena of discussion which would have driven most men crazy. Stalin was incessantly looking for signs of weakness or treachery. If they seemed shifty, he told them so; and he had a knack of catching them off guard. Always Stalin was querying whether a subordinate was ‘sincere’. He could not abide what official propaganda referred to as ‘double-dealing’. His ideal communist party associate was ruthless, dynamic, straightforward and utterly loyal. He liked, too, individuals who came ‘from the people’. Not all his subordinates, even after the Great Terror had spent itself, were working class or peasant in origin. Indeed Molotov, Zhdanov and Malenkov were distinctly middle class by parentage. But the general tone in Stalin’s entourage was never genteel, and all his subordinates had to join in displays of the crude masculinity which the Boss liked.
Like all bullies, Stalin acted out his fantasies. If ever any of these Soviet leaders was insincere in his behaviour to his intimates, it was the Boss himself. His was the least straightforward personality of all of them. He would have hated to be asked the piercing questions with which he skewered others. In identifying personal treachery as the most heinous offence, he was externalising a worry about his subordinates reflecting a cardinal feature of his own character. At last his gross personality disorder was functioning without restraint. He could indulge his paranoiac, vengeful proclivities to the utmost and nothing except a successful internal coup, military conquest or his premature death could save others from his murderous whims.
Across the 1930s Stalin had dominated the Politburo and the rest of the Soviet political leadership; but the Great Terror had elevated him to an unprecedented height above the other leaders. In all but name he was despot. His associates continued to respect him, even to admire him. But they also existed in mortal dread. Few dared to contradict him even in private conversation. Only Molotov had sufficient confidence to disagree with him about policies – and even he had to exercise caution in his phrasing and demeanour. The others were even more circumspect. It was a fiendishly difficult task because Stalin often deliberately disguised what he really thought. Politburo members were compelled to reveal their opinions without foreknowledge of his intentions. Always they were kept edgy by the master of intimidation and mystification. He had killed Kaganovich’s brother Moisei and demoted Molotov’s wife from office. He went on to arrest her as well as the wives of Kalinin and Andreev. Physical danger did not disappear from the Politburo. By devouring other members of their families, the Kremlin shark signalled that his appetite for victims had not been satisfied. They could take nothing for granted.
Most of those associates who survived the Great Terror succeeded in living out the natural term of their lives. Molotov, Kaganovich, Mikoyan, Voroshilov and Zhdanov had been with Stalin since the 1920s and were kept by his side at least until he started to move against some of them after the 1940s. The promoted newcomers – Malenkov, Khrushchëv, Vyshinski and Beria – stayed with him to the end of his life. The ruling group began to settle down. From the end of 1938 no Politburo member was arrested until Voznesenski was put away in 1949. No Red Army general was taken into custody, moreover, before the defeats of June 1941. But the memory of what had happened earlier did not vanish. All the rulers were acutely aware that they stayed in post solely at the whim of their supreme master.
He acted on his own. Among the arcana of Soviet administrative correspondence is a report of the NKVD in 1940 which Beria relayed to Stalin. The main conclusion was that the Gulag more than paid for itself as a sector of the Soviet economy: ‘The entire system of camps and labour colonies is fully paying its way and no subsidy for the prisoners (1,700,000 persons), their guards or the camp apparatus is needed.’14 Beria was on the make and may already have known that the opposite was true. But the regime was being consolidated; Stalin would not consider any basic alteration of what he had built. He was powerful and confident. He was overworked. He had strengthened the state as the prime lever of political and economic change. He had never believed in the spontaneous positive potential of the people. He wanted workers and peasants to support the regime, to work to their physical limit and to denounce ‘enemies’. He was jovial about the usefulness of the camps and executions. At the Eighteenth Party Congress he exulted that whereas 98.6 per cent of voters had supported the regime after Tukhachevski’s trial in mid-1937, the proportion increased to 99.4 per cent after Bukharin had been sentenced in March 1938.15
This was the comment of a man who felt he had largely succeeded. He had achieved enough of his objectives to know that his personal despotism and his design for the Soviet order were secure at least for the foreseeable future. He and the Politburo were to make minor modifications in future years as they sought to bind the walls together in the face of unanticipated storms. The basic design stayed intact; and those observers who have interpreted the modifications in terms of fundamentally separate periods are scarcely convincing. If it makes sense to talk of ‘late Stalinism’ or ‘high Stalinism’, the date of demarcation should be set at the end of the Great Terror in 1938. Stalin went on tinkering with his architect’s drawings. Relations among party, people’s commissariats and armed forces underwent alteration before, during and after the war. He fiddled with the scope allowed for Russian national identity and for cultural and religious expression; he also adjusted his cult to the social atmosphere of the time. Economic policies were repeatedly modified. Foreign policy was frequently amended. Stalin did not refer to his architecture as Stalinist but was not averse to others using the term. This order prevailed until the day he died – and in many respects it was to outlive him.