The enigma of the Great Terror has never ceased to fascinate historians, sociologists, psychologists. Nikita Khrushchev, in his memoirs, asks: "Why did Stalin commit these crimes? Was he deceived? If he was deceived, then by whom? And with how many victims did we pay for this deception?"82 The question, What were the causes of the Great Terror? has evoked numerous and varied answers, ranging from the need to replace an aging generation of leaders to Stalin's madness. All of them may fit as parts of the puzzle—with the exception of madness. There are substantial indications that after the war Stalin became mentally unbalanced,83 but the same cannot be said of the period 1935—1938. To be sure, the obvious pleasure he took in torturing and killing people was no sign of perfect mental health. In 1937 he suggested that all leading officials train at least two deputies capable of replacing them. Four times he assigned people to the post of commissar of posts and telegraph before destroying them. This was how he displayed his "sense of humor," which Churchill so greatly appreciated.
Some writers have seen in Stalin a personality similar to that of Joseph Fouche, the French revolutionist who went on to become minister of police under the Consulate and Napoleon, and who also served Louis XVIII after the restoration. Stalin, for his part, spoke highly of Fouch6: "He tricked them all; he made a fool of everyone." Boris Souvarine noted the "curious similarity in temperament and psychology" between Stalin and Fouch6, adding that both had been seminarians in their youth.84 The difference was of course that Fouch6 never became emperor. It may be that after reading Stefan Zweig's book Joseph Fouch^, which was a great success in Moscow in the 1930s, Stalin began to fear that there was a Fouch6 around him. Ezhov, in fact, accused Yagoda, after replacing him as people's commissar of internal affairs, of "conducting a policy к la Fouche."85
Stalin pursued a different kind of policy. In building a socialist state, that is, a totalitarian one (the terms may not be synonymous in theory, but in practice they have been identical), Stalin needed a monolithic party, one that would "obey him like a corpse," to borrow the excellent German expression. By 1935 the party had penetrated every cell of the social organism, so that a blow against the party affected every part of the state. That is why the terror became total. When one strand was pulled, the whole ball of string came along: the governmental, military, economic, and cultural apparatuses.
The enemy was everywhere. The country was in the throes of madness. On March 3 and 5, 1937, Stalin gave his most candid speeches, at the notorious "February—March Plenum" of the Central Committee, which was entirely devoted to implementing the terror. Stalin warned that since the enemy was everywhere, he who carried a party card was the most dangerous. This line of thought was developed in numerous pamphlets all with the same title: "Certain Perfidious Practices of Foreign Intelligence Agencies in Their Recruitment Work." One of the authors explained, "In order to carry out their spy missions, they find all means are good, being an 'active militant,' being a Stakhanovite at work... or even constantly marrying and divorcing as a way of finding a suitable informant."86 The enemy was everywhere, the "former people" (those who had held positions under the old regime), the wreckers, the kulaks, and now the spies. No one could be trusted. The newspapers hammered away at that theme, and so did the movies. Pavlenko's novel about the coming war included a Chinese Communist, broken by torture, who escaped while being taken out to be shot. In the movie version of the book, this Communist confesses to being a spy. In another movie the hero and the spy resemble one another exactly. The message was constantly stressed: anyone could be a spy. In a terrible joke of the period, a man looks at himself in the mirror and says, "It's either you or me."
The patron—proteg6 system on which the party apparatus was based meant that when an important leader was arrested a geometric progression of arrests ensued. On March 5, 1937, Stalin cited the case of a Central Committee secretary named Mirzoyan who, when assigned to Kazakhstan, gathered up thirty or forty of "his own people" from Azerbaijan and the Urals, where he had previously worked, and "entrusted them with the responsible posts" in his new location. Mirzoyan, said Stalin, had an entire "workshop" that he took around with him. Obviously things did not go well for this crew when its foreman was arrested.
There were other grounds for arrest, though. Stalin observed that there were comrades who had always "fought against Trotskyism but nevertheless maintained personal relations with certain Trotskyists." Personal links with enemies of the people was sufficient reason to arrest someone. According to Khrushchev, Beria warned him, after becoming head of the NKVD, that his relations with former NKVD boss Ezhov had been too friendly.
Arrests in this period were not limited to friends and acquaintances of those arrested earlier, however. They were based on regional and district quotas. Planning applied to this industry, too. Vladimir Petrov, who worked in the cryptography division of the NKVD in Moscow, recalls the texts of some telegrams sent out at the time: "Frunze. NKVD. You are charged with exterminating 10,000 enemies of the people. Report results by signal. Ezhov." The telegram to Sverdlovsk ordered that 15,000 be wiped out.87
"The party began to lose its authority and become subordinated to the NKVD," Khrushchev reports. Certainly all the arrests and executions were carried out by the NKVD, which was also in charge of the camps, but it and its personnel were just as defenseless as other Soviet institutions and citizens. On September 25, 1936, Stalin sent a telegram from Sochi to Moscow, addressed to Kaganovich, Molotov, and the other members of the Politburo. (It was cosigned by Zhdanov.)
We consider it absolutely necessary and urgent that comrade Ezhov be appointed to the post of people's commissar of internal affairs. Yagoda has definitely proved himself to be incapable of unmasking the Trotskyite- Zinovievite bloc. The GPU lagged behind for four years in this matter. This has been noted by all party activists and by most representatives of the NKVD.
(The reference to a four-year lag was Stalin's way of reminding the others of the Ryutin affair, in which he had asked for the death penalty to no avail.) That telegram was sufficient to put an end to Yagoda, although he had been Stalin's most loyal henchman since 1933 and controlled the "all- powerful" machinery of the NKVD. He went like a lamb to the slaughter, exactly like the millions of Soviet citizens he himself had victimized. On March 18, 1937, Ezhov spoke to a gathering of the senior officers of the NKVD in their clubroom at the Lubyanka, NKVD headquarters. He announced that their former boss, Yagoda, had been an agent of the tsarist Okhrana since 1907 (at which time he would have been ten years old), that he was a German spy, and that his closest collaborators had also been German spies. Nobody blinked an eye.88 Thus the Cheka officials of "the Yagoda enrollment" went to their deaths as submissively as their chief. In July 1938 Stalin repeated the operation. He appointed Beria to be Ezhov's deputy, then in December Beria replaced Ezhov, and the "Ezhov enrollment" was liquidated without the slightest resistance.
The mad wave of terror was speeded along more madly than ever by the bloody Moscow trials. In August 1936 Zinoviev, Kamenev, and fourteen "coconspirators" were tried. A year and a half earlier they had been convicted as "morally responsible" for the Kirov assassination, a charge they admitted. Now they were tried for the assassination itself, and for planning to kill Stalin, spying for foreign intelligence, and so forth. In January 1937 came the turn of Pyatakov, Radek, and fifeen "coconspirators" accused of essentially the same crimes.
On June 13, 1937, Commissar of Defense Voroshilov published an announcement concerning the arrest of a group of top military commanders, who had confessed to "treason, sabotage, and espionage." Pravda reported that they had all been shot after being sentenced by a military court. Among them were Deputy Commissar of Defense Tukhachevsky; Yakir, commander of the Kiev Military District; Uborevich, commander of the Byelorussian Military District; Primakov, deputy commander of the Leningrad Military district; Putna, the Soviet military аиасЬё in London; corps commanders Eideman and Feldman; and army commander Kork. Another traitor was said to have shot himself—Yan Gamarnik, also a deputy commissar of defense and head of the army's political directorate.