Given the heavy-handed, repressive approach that the Stalinist revolution adopted, a broader concentration camp system was almost inevitable. After a series of changes in 1929–30, Stalin egged on its expansion under the acronym GULAG (Glavnoe upravlenie ispravitelno-trudovykh lagerei), or Main Administration of Corrective Labor Camps.54A vast chain of camps and colonies was built to hold designated “enemies.” In 1930 this system had 179,000 prisoners, and it grew to 510,307 in 1934; 1,196,369 in 1937; and 1,929,729 in January 1941.55
At the same time, an “unknown Gulag,” a parallel system of special settlements (spetsposelenie) often overlooked by historians, was created. The settlements were carved out of the wilderness in the far north and were intended mainly for kulaks and their families caught up in the collectivization drive. It held 1.3 million prisoners in 1932 and stayed close to a million until well into the war years, when in 1942 it began to increase again.56
Stalin’s harsh attitude did not sit well with his wife, Nadezhda Alliluyeva. She had been by his side since their time in Tsaritsyn (Stalingrad) and bore him two children. She was a good Bolshevik but found it difficult to accept the horrors of collectivization and shared her thoughts with Bukharin, who often visited. She reached the limit of her endurance during the annual festivities at the Kremlin in 1932 to celebrate the Russian Revolution. It is not clear what exactly led to her breaking point. Stalin may have flirted with another woman, “jokingly” thrown orange peels and cigarette butts at his wife, or been just his oafish self while drinking. In any case Nadya ran from the room and later that night shot herself.57 Their daughter said that Stalin thought of his wife “as his closest and most faithful friend” and that he was crushed by her death. Perhaps so, and yet he regarded what she did as a betrayal.58
Thereafter the Soviet dictator lived the life of a militant revolutionary ascetic—with the exception of his overindulgence in drinking. He all but disowned his son Yakov (born 1907), from his first marriage, and eventually distanced himself from the children of his second marriage, particularly Vasily (born 1921), though he retained fond feelings for his daughter, Svetlana (born 1926).
Bereft of anyone with whom he could share human warmth, Stalin became all the more committed to the ideas that gave his life meaning. An alarm signal was struck on December 1, 1934, when Leningrad leader Sergei Kirov was assassinated. Stories circulated later that Stalin might have seen Kirov as a rival and had him killed. According to rumors from the 1960s, Stalin had been upset that 270 to 300 delegates to the Seventeenth Party Congress in 1934 had voted against his membership on the Central Committee. More recent research, however, shows that only 3 of 1,059 delegates cast a ballot against Stalin. Moreover, Kirov had no major policy differences with the Boss, remained part of the charmed inner circle, and the Kremlin had no reason to get rid of him. The assassin Leonid Nikolaev was mentally unbalanced and acted alone.59
Nevertheless, Stalin would use accusations of involvement in the crime to justify eliminating an ever-widening circle of real and imagined enemies. Now he arrived in Leningrad with his angel of death, Nikolai Yezhov, a longtime party member with experiences like Stalin’s in the civil war. As if to show that the hand of vengeance was nigh, the police immediately executed “dozens” of prisoners in various cities, none of them remotely related to the case. Similarly innocent were the 11,095 “former people” in Leningrad itself—such as former aristocrats, tsarist officers, merchants, and clergy—who were driven out of their homes in the dead of winter.
Yezhov’s greatest talent was to sense what Stalin wanted and then translate it into investigations that brought results. He was bound to come up with links between Kirov’s death and “higher-ups” on Stalin’s long list of doubters.60 A purge of the Communist Party, which in fact had been envisaged before Kirov’s death, thus began in mid-1935 and was officially termed a proverka, or verification of documents. Yezhov set off the purge and commanded it, and by year’s end 9.1 percent of the members (or 177,000) were expelled when “compromising materials” were discovered.61
In early 1936, Stalin told Yezhov that “something did not seem right” about the Kirov investigation, which had been closed, with the lone killer caught and punished. Now the case was reopened, and the dredging went deeper; new incriminating material was then used in a show trial of the “Trotskyite-Zinovievist-Kamenevist counter-revolutionary group.” The August event featured Zinoviev, Kamenev, and fourteen others—all were found guilty and executed.62 Although the charges were farcical, many in the ruling elite believed “the defendants must be guilty of something or other, perhaps a conspiracy against Stalin.”63
Either at Stalin’s behest or on his own initiative, Yezhov also came up with networks of “right oppositionist” leaders and even discovered “deficiencies” in the work of the NKVD. He besmirched its boss, Genrikh Yagoda, at every turn and in late summer 1936, armed with files, visited Stalin at his vacation home in the south. They looked over a list of several thousand alleged Trotskyites for execution. Stalin demurred, though he saw enough to recognize Yezhov’s talents and decided first to demote and ultimately to arrest Yagoda, his once-faithful executioner. On September 25, Stalin informed the Politburo that Yezhov would be the new head of the secret police, which, he complained, was already “four years behind” in its work of “exposing the Trotskyite-Zinovievite bloc.”64
At the Central Committee plenum in December, Yezhov reported yet another conspiracy involving a “parallel anti-Soviet Trotskyite center” with ties to major figures Karl Radek, Yuri Piatakov, and fifteen additional persons.65 A show trial was staged in January; once again all were executed. These trials were played up in the press and managed in detail, but what made them a public sensation was the apparent willingness of the accused to confess their conspiracies and crimes.66
This trial was merely a prelude to the Central Committee plenum in February–March 1937, after which the terror went into high gear.67 The first item on the agenda was the case of Bukharin and Aleksei Rykov (another proponent of the NEP) and others who “deviated” to the right of the party line.
Stalin had long known about Bukharin’s doubts. Traveling through Ukraine in 1930—well before the famine really struck—Bukharin had been brought to tears, having been beseeched at every train stop by “packs of children” with swollen stomachs. He wondered aloud if the whole Soviet experiment really was worth it.68 Hardheaded ideologues knew about such empathetic comrades, but getting rid of them all at once was just not done. Stalin moved forward on the case with more care than is often assumed, and he encouraged the NKVD to wait until the Central Committee met on January 23, 1937. There Bukharin was to face a test of truth by way of a “confrontation” with his accusers. Once they all had been his close comrades, but now they voiced the most far-fetched allegations against him.69
Bukharin and Rykov were dragged before the high priests at the Central Committee plenum to confess to treason, wrecking, and terrorism. Bukharin was questioned and insulted by Stalin and his top paladins Mikoyan, Molotov, Kaganovich, and Voroshilov. Yezhov claimed that the accused had allied with followers of Trotsky and Zinoviev and conspired with the fascists in Germany and Japan to organize a mass uprising and seizure of power. Bukharin and Rykov were duly expelled from the party and arrested. They and nineteen others went before the third major show trial in March 1938, and all were executed.70