In June 1935 Stalin’s deputy security chief, Nikolai Yezhov, presented a report to the central committee claiming that Kamenev, Zinoviev and Trotsky were ‘the active organisers of the murder of comrade Kirov, as well as of the attempt on the life of Comrade Stalin that was being prepared within the Kremlin’.63
The latter charge was a reference to the so-called ‘Kremlin Affair’, which began when three cleaners confessed to spreading slander about the state and its leaders. Among those implicated in anti-Soviet activities were three librarians working in the Kremlin’s government library. Of the 110 Kremlin staff arrested, 108 were imprisoned or exiled and two shot.64
Stalin was fond of giving lessons in realpolitik to soft-hearted western intellectuals and in June 1935 he told the well-known French writer Romain Rolland that a hundred armed agents from Germany, Poland and Finland had been shot for plotting terrorist attacks on Kirov and other Soviet leaders:
Such is the logic of power. In these conditions power must be strong, hard and fearless. Otherwise it’s not power and won’t be recognised as such. The French Communards didn’t understand this, they were too soft and indecisive. Consequently, they lost, and the French bourgeoisie was merciless. That’s the lesson for us. . . . It is very unpleasant for us to kill. This is a dirty business. Better to be out of politics and keep one’s hands clean, but we don’t have the right to stay out of politics if we want to liberate enslaved people. When you agree to engage in politics, then you do everything not for yourself but only for the state. The state demands that we are pitiless.65
He also told Rolland about the Kremlin Affair:
We have a government library, which has female librarians who can enter the apartments of responsible comrades in the Kremlin in order to tidy up their libraries. It turns out that some of these librarians had been recruited by our enemies for the purposes of terrorism. It has to be said that these librarians are remnants of the old, defeated ruling classes – the bourgeoisie and the aristocracy. We found out that these women had poison and intended to poison some of our officials.66
Egged on by Yezhov, Stalin decided to stage a public trial of Kamenev, Zinoviev and fourteen others accused of being the leaders of a ‘United Trotskyite-Zinovievite Centre’ that had organised the network that killed Kirov and plotted to assassinate other Soviet leaders. Stalin, together with Chief State Prosecutor Andrei Vyshinsky, drafted the detailed indictment and the trial took place in Moscow in August 1936. Having confessed to their crimes, all sixteen defendants were found guilty and executed. Trotsky and his son, Lev Sedov, were sentenced to death in absentia.
As Wendy Goldman so aptly summarises events so far: ‘The case, which began in December 1934 with a domestic murder and a lone gunman, now involved sixteen defendants, multiple murder plots, foreign spies, fascist contacts, and terrorist conspiracies. The initial objective, to find and punish Kirov’s assassin, had expanded into a nationwide attack on the former left opposition.’67
The arraignment of Zinoviev and Kamenev was in line with an established and well-rehearsed Soviet tradition, inspired in part by the political trials of radicals staged by Tsarist Russia in the late nineteenth century.68 The first trial was of the leaders of the Socialist Revolutionary party in 1922, accused of being involved in armed struggle and subversive activities against the state. That same year priests and lay believers who had resisted the Bolsheviks’ expropriation of church valuables were tried. In 1928 a large group of engineers and managers in the North Caucasus town of Shakhty were tried for conspiracy to sabotage the town’s coal mines. At the ‘Industrial Party’ trial of 1930, Soviet scientists and engineers were accused of conspiring with foreign powers to wreck the USSR’s economy. In 1931 a group of ‘Menshevik’ economists was tried for using disinformation to undermine the first five-year plan. In 1933 six British employees of Metro-Vickers, a company contracted to install electrical equipment, were prosecuted for economic wrecking and espionage.
But the charges levelled against Zinoviev and Kamenev in 1936 were far more serious, since those indicted were Old Bolshevik leaders who had once been among Stalin’s closest comrades-in-arms. It was a piece of crude political theatre whose none-too-subtle message was that even top leaders could turn out to be traitors and that no enemy of the system could hide from state security.
In January 1937 Stalin staged a trial of members of an ‘Anti-Soviet Parallel Trotskyist Centre’ – said to be a reserve network in the event the Trotskyist-Zinovievite Centre was exposed. The main defendants were the former deputy commissar for heavy industry, Georgy Pyatakov, former Izvestiya editor Karl Radek, and Grigory Sokolnikov, the former deputy commissar for foreign affairs. They and fourteen others were accused of treason, espionage and wrecking, their ultimate aim being to take power and restore capitalism in the USSR after it had been militarily defeated by Germany and Japan. Mostly former Trotskyists, the great majority of the accused were sentenced to death following their confession-based trial. The defendants implicated the leaders of the so-called Right Opposition – Bukharin and the former prime minister Alexei Rykov. These two were expelled from the party in March 1937, paving the way for their arrest, and the staging a year later of the third and last of the great Moscow show trials – the trial of the ‘Bloc of Rightists and Trotskyites’. At this trial Bukharin and Rykov duly confessed to conspiring with foreign powers to overthrow Soviet power and, together with most of their co-defendants, were sentenced to death and executed.69 The third leader of the so-called Right Opposition, the former head of the Soviet trade unions Mikhail Tomsky, escaped that gruesome fate by shooting himself in August 1936.
It is hard to credit that Stalin actually believed the absurd charges levelled against these former members of the Soviet political elite or that he gave any credence to the fantastical confessions upon which they rested. But, to paraphrase that adage about supporters of President Donald J. Trump, while Stalin took the confessions seriously he did not take them literally. Arguably, while his general belief in the existence of an anti-Soviet conspiracy was unshakeable, the detailed veracity of the specific confessions was another matter entirely.
In their analysis of the Great Terror, J. Arch Getty and Oleg Naumov distinguish between Yezhov, who truly believed in the existence of the enemies he hunted down on Stalin’s behalf, and Bukharin, who chose to serve Stalin by falsely confessing to being one. Yezhov, who was appointed head of the NKVD in September 1936, embraced official discourse as a description of reality; to Bukharin it was an invention, a drama in which he was prepared to play his prescribed role in order to safeguard the Soviet system.70 Stalin seems to have been a hybrid case. For him the conspiracy against Soviet power was as real as it was for Yezhov but he knew the truth was more complex and contradictory than the story framed for the show trials.
It was the February–March 1937 plenum of the party’s central committee that set the scene for a general purge of Soviet polity and society. In 1937–8 alone there were a million and a half political arrests and hundreds of thousands of executions. Stalin told the plenum that the ‘wrecking and diversionist-espionage’ activities of foreign agents had impacted on nearly all party and state bodies, which had been infiltrated by Trotskyists.
The party had underestimated the dangers facing the Soviet state in conditions of ‘capitalist encirclement’, said Stalin, notably the penetration of the USSR by numerous imperialist wreckers, spies, diversionists and killers. Pretending to be loyal communists, the Trotskyists had ‘deceived our people politically, abused confidence, wrecked on the sly, and revealed our state secrets to the enemies of the Soviet Union’.