As the ringleaders of the phantasmagorical “Center of Centers,” Yezhov named Bukharin (who was writing desperate, groveling letters to Stalin), Rykov (who had failed to act decisively when he had his chance back in 1928–29), Tomsky (who shot himself rather than his tormentors), Zinoviev (who had been writing his own groveling letters to Stalin), Kamenev (who could have smothered the Bolshevik monopoly in its cradle in 1917 but shrank from doing so), émigré SR, Menshevik, and White Guard organizations (which were infiltrated and in some cases established by the NKVD), and Pyatakov (who begged to be the executioner of all the others, an offer Stalin declined, reasoning out loud at the Central Committee that “no one would believe that you voluntarily decided to do this, without being coerced, and besides, we have never announced the names of the people who carry out sentences”).21 This was a pathetic register of coup leaders. As for the supposedly threatening anti-Soviet émigré organizations, Yezhov’s NKVD had thoroughly penetrated them. Some, such as the Helsinki branch of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN), were actually led by Soviet agents, while the leaders of others, such as General Evgeny Miller of the Russian All-Military Union, had been kidnapped.22 “They present no value whatsoever,” Sergey Spigelglas, deputy director of NKVD foreign espionage, reported, “since they have neither money, nor international connections, nor organization, nor people.”23
Ultimately, however, Yezhov was right in one crucial way: a conspiratorial “Center of Centers” threatening the Soviet Union
COMMUNISM’S EASE OF MASS MURDER
Throughout 1937 and 1938, there were on average nearly 2,200 arrests and more than 1,000 executions per day.24 The NKVD extracted testimony under torture even from people who would not be tried publicly, because that was one way they met quotas—gathering ever more names of accomplices—but also, more fundamentally, because Stalin craved this. Even when “confessions” had been edited by him, he treated them as if they were real, underlining passages, circulating them to the politburo, and referring to “testimony.” During the two frenzied, gruesome years of 1937 and 1938, Yezhov forwarded to him more than 15,000 written “special communications,” an average of 20 per day, many of which Stalin marked up and returned with further instructions.25
The terror’s scale would become crushing. More than 1 million prisoners were convoyed by overloaded rail transport in 1938 alone.26 The Lubyanka’s feared inner prison contained a mere 110 cells. (The building had been a hotel for visiting insurance executives and retained its parquet in the corridors. Most of the floors were aboveground, but the windows were bricked up; the cellars were reserved for priority prisoners and executions.)27 But Butyrka, tsarist Russia’s former central transit prison—whence the Cheka founder Felix Dzierżyński had once escaped—filled with 20,000 inmates, six times capacity. And Butyrka was considered a resort compared with Lefortovo, while the most feared of all, Sukhanovka, located at a former monastery just outside Moscow and known as the dacha, was still more jammed.28 Some arrest sweeps had to be delayed or put off because of overcrowding.29 Urgent requests to Moscow for instructions began to sit without response (by summer 1938, more than 100,000 unattended cases would languish).30 Stalin, for two years running, felt constrained to skip his much-beloved annual southern holiday—even he struggled to keep the pace, despite his inhuman capacity for work.
Given the numbers involved, the state’s violence against its own population inevitably was chaotic.31 Stalin lost track of people, writing next to names in interrogation protocols, “Arrest,” when they were already in custody, a point he came to recognize. (“Comrade Yezhov: The names identified by me in the text with the letters ‘ar’ are to be arrested, if they have not yet been arrested.”)32 Stalin would suddenly remember someone and inquire about his fate (some were dead, some not). People whose names sounded similar to someone else’s would suffer misdirected arrests. Not everyone on the hundreds of lengthy execution lists was shot.33 But for all this messiness, the process was systematic, driven by continuous orders and codified in updated antiterrorist laws and procedures. Mass murder does not somehow “break out,” but must be set in motion, and then driven onward, as Stalin did, and be sustained by powerful drivers.