Walter Krivitsky was in Moscow in the summer of 1934. On the night of June 30 he prepared reports on the situation in Germany for a special session of the Politburo, which was to discuss the "night of the long knives," when Hitler murdered Ernst Roehm and his other former comrades of the SA. Among those included in the Politburo discussion was an intelligence official named Berzin. Krivitsky passes along Berzin's account of the Politburo discussion. After listening to those who considered the murder of Roehm and the others a sign that Hitler's power was weakening, Stalin rejected their view and presented his own summary conclusions: 'The events in Germany do not in any way mean that nazism is about to collapse. On the contrary, they will surely lead to a consolidation of the regime and the strengthening of Hitler's personal power."2
The "consolidation" of Stalin's power began the day Kirov was assassinated. On December 1 a law calling for speedy trials in political cases was ratified. It also provided that sentences involving capital punishment should be carried out immediately. Robert Conquest has written that the Kirov assassination could easily be called the "crime of the century."3 In the years that followed, millions of Soviet citizens, accused of the most diverse, and imaginary, crimes, were put to death. The "Kirov affair" started the earthquake known as the Great Terror. Immediately after the murder, thirty-seven "White Guards" were put to death in Leningrad, followed by thirty-three in Moscow and twenty-eight in Kiev.4 Elisabeth Lermolo reports that executions took place at NKVD headquarters in Leningrad for nights on end; each morning there would be a pile of some 200 corpses in the basement.5
A confidential letter from the Central Committee to all party organizations drew "the lessons of the events linked to the cowardly murder of Comrade Kirov." Trotskyists were sought and found all over the country. In Leningrad 30,000 or 40,000 people were arrested. Ante Ciliga met some of them in exile in Siberia. On December 22 Pravda announced that the real culprits in the murder of Kirov had been found, the members of the Zinovievist "Leningrad center." Ciliga in his memoirs recalls the Verkhne-Uralsk prison, where he witnessed the arrival of Zinoviev, Kamenev, and other Zinovievists not long after their trial in the Kirov affair. Others arrived as well, Shlyapnikov and Medvedev, former leaders of the Workers' Opposition, Timofei Sapronov, leader of the Democratic Centralists, and so on. Half the occupants of the Kremlin from the years 1917—1927, Ciliga remarks ironically, had moved to Verkhne-Uralsk.6
A purge of the party, underway since 1933, was scheduled to end in 1935, but the Central Committee decided to review the status of all full and candidate members immediately. On February 1, 1935, a new exchange of party cards began. (Members had to hand in their old cards and received new ones only if they had been checked and approved.) The membership, already under pressure since 1933, felt more intimidated than ever; those in charge of the review seemed to be examining them under a microscope, trying to peer into their very souls.
Between 1924 and 1933 the party had grown to colossal size, from 470,000 to 3,555,000, but from January 1931 to January 1933 more than a million members had been purged. Now more were to go. In these conditions new members learned how to behave so as not to be expelled— flatter their superiors, speak only in the most guarded way, keep an eye on their fellow members, and choose friends with the greatest caution. A party card admitted the bearer to the privileged stratum of society, but its loss cast him into the pit. He became a pariah, worse off than someone who had never been in the party. Every expelled member immediately came under the scrutiny of the "organs" of state security.
In July 1934 the official name of the "organs" had been changed again. The GPU became the People's Commissariat of Internal Affairs, or NKVD, and the "chief of security" became a "people's commissar." As in 1922, when the Cheka became the GPU, this transformation gave rise to high hopes, which were encouraged by promises that the jurisdiction of the "organs" would be circumscribed.
Stalin used the Kirov assassination to reverse this trend, to create an atmosphere of tension and conflict in which the "organs" would be called upon to use force to resolve problems. The main blow was aimed at the party itself, which was said to be in great danger. The opposition, which willingly approved the harshest use of terror against other strata of the population, considered the party sacrosanct and could never imagine the use of terror against it. Stalin had no such qualms. He acted according to Machiavelli's dictum: No one can strengthen his own power by relying on those who helped him win it. In 1935 Stalin dissolved two organizations that reminded him of those who had helped him win power, the Society of Old Bolsheviks and the Society of Former Hard Labor Convicts, that is, political prisoners under the tsars. The second organization included some former terrorists of the People's Will, but terrorism had become the most horrendous crime against the state. The displays at the Museum of the Revolution were also changed. The terrorists who had assassinated Tsar Alexander II were no longer there to remind people that bombs can be used to change the government. Their pictures were stored in the cellars. These two societies were also dissolved simply because they were organizations. Soon all organizations would be dissolved, whether they had to do with philately, Esperanto, or anything else.
In August 1929 Pravda had published an article entitled "What Will the USSR Be Like in Fifteen Years?" The author, Yuri Larin, concluded on the following note: "Our generation will be able to see socialism with its own eyes."7 The prophecy came true much sooner than expected. In August 1935 Dmitry Manuilsky, Stalin's representative at the Seventh Congress of the Comintern, declared: "Between the sixth and seventh congresses of the Communist International a major event in the lives of the people has taken place: the definite, irreversible victory of socialism in the USSR."8 That was how the Soviet people learned that they had finally reached their longed-for destination.
True, one year later, in reporting to the Congress of Soviets on the proposed new constitution, Stalin warned that although "our Soviet society has already, in the main, succeeded in achieving socialism," that was only "what Marxists call the first, or lower, phase of communism." This meant that the march was not yet over; in fact, conditions were becoming increasingly difficult—the closer they came to the ultimate goal, the greater would be the resistance of the class enemy. In other words, the better things get, the worse they get.
Nevertheless, Stalin asserted, "for the USSR socialism is something already achieved and won."9 Most important of all, though, socialism has already been built. American press magnate Roy Howard, who interviewed Stalin in March 1936, asked him whether it wouldn't be correct to call what exists in the Soviet Union "state socialism." Stalin categorically rejected such a definition: Our society is socialist, a genuinely socialist society "because private ownership of factories, plants, the land, banks, means of transportation has been abolished and replaced by public ownership."10
The year of the decisive attack upon the party—1935—was also the year of the "turn toward man." The main slogans of the day were "Man is the most valuable capital" and "Cadres decide everything." This was socialism with a human face, but the face was Stalin's. Along with the new orientation came an attempt to "humanize" him, too. To the standard epithets ("wise," "ingenious," "made of steel") new ones were added: "beloved," "dear," "kind," "good," "great humanist." During the May Day parade in 1935, Pravda reported, the demonstrators carried "thousands of portraits of him. There were also carvings and statues of the leader, and his name, repeated a million times that morning, was cast in metal, embroidered on transparent gauze, and spelled out in chrysanthemums, roses, and asters."11