Stalin had scheduled the next Central Committee plenum for February 20. The agenda approved by the politburo on February 5 included a report on the Bukharin-Rykov case (Yezhov); three reports on wrecking and espionage in industry (Orjonikidze, Kaganovich, Yezhov); and a report on “the political education of party cadres and measures of the struggle against Trotskyism and other double-dealers in party organizations” (Stalin).43 There would also be a report on elections to party organizations and to the new Supreme Soviet (Zhdanov), in line with the new constitution. Unbeknownst to the Central Committee members, in preparation for the gathering, Georgy Malenkov, a thirty-five-year-old apparatchik overseeing personnel, had secretly compiled inventories of “anti-Soviet elements.” These consisted of all “formers”: tsarist officials, military officers, police, merchants, and nobles; White officers and officials; SRs, Mensheviks, and kulaks—eighteen categories of people, all told, who were viewed as targets for recruitment by foreign adversaries. “It should be noted in particular,” Malenkov underscored in a cover note to Stalin (February 15), “that there are currently more than 1.5 million former members and candidates of the party who have been expelled or lost their membership card over the course of events at various times dating to 1922.” He designated more than 100,000 as “alien” or “socially harmful.” Stalin underlined Malenkov’s figures.44
Suddenly the number of putative enemies was colossal, and they were everywhere. At the Moscow Ball-Bearing Factory, for example, there were 1,084 expellees and only 452 current party members, an alarming picture that could be found at strategic enterprises all across the Union.45 And it was in the big factories that the party was strongest. Of course, these were people who had been expelled by Stalin’s purges and party card exchanges, so if any had become disloyal, the dictator had a big hand in making them so. As per usual practice, Central Committee members received a package of preparatory documents, and in them Stalin included “testimonies” being extracted in Lubyanka cellars implicating sitting Central Committee members. But Malenkov’s inventories remained secret as the NKVD field couriers delivered the plenum packages to the Central Committee, the party Control Commission, and around fifty invited guests, including, unusually, some twenty operatives from the NKVD.46
Stalin edited Orjonikidze’s draft report for the plenum, advising, “State with facts which branches are affected by sabotage and exactly how they are affected.”47 That same evening, arriving considerably late, Orjonikidze addressed the central directorate of his heavy industry commissariat. He admonished officials that worker deaths on the job used to elicit reactions even under the “Black Hundred” Duma of tsarist days, while in the USSR, twenty workers could be killed and buried and officials would report the working class in good spirits. He lashed out at them for failing to see wrecking (“Do you tell me how you’ll end the wrecking and which measures you’ll adopt?”) while also employing Stalin’s language to condemn his recently executed deputy Pyatakov. Orjonikidze was as familiar as anyone with Stalin’s emotional bullying. During the first forty-seven days of 1937, he met Stalin in the Little Corner twenty-two times, for a total of almost seventy-two hours.48 There were also phone calls, meals together, walks on the Kremlin grounds. The heavy industry commissar, careful to demonstrate his loyalty, was trying to soften the dictator’s rule. Orjonikidze indicated to his staff that alleged incidents of sabotage should be investigated objectively, and decided to send his own commissions to look into the NKVD’s three most sensational “wrecking cases,” evidently hoping to present fresh reports to the Central Committee plenum and disprove the blanket allegations.49