There was no way to ensure one’s survival, but people felt they could not just sit there and wait for the others to denounce them. Chain reactions spread—once triggered via these party meetings, rabid newspaper articles that vilified people by name, and Stalin’s plenipotentiaries (who had to please him). Kaganovich had arrived in Ivanovo like the head of a foreign occupation, with a bodyguard detail of thirty, and been greeted by local NKVD bosses; the party machine had not even been apprised in advance. He phoned Stalin repeatedly to detail his impressive results: the arrest of nearly every leader in the local party (he had brought an entire replacement leadership with him). But Stalin demanded still more pressure “to stop liberalizing.”62 (At the train station, as Kaganovich was seen off, he made a point to thank all service personnel and handed out tips of 50 to 100 rubles each, identifying with the proletarians.)63 In Kazakhstan, the entire party bureau—the republic equivalent of the politburo—was arrested. In Turkmenistan, no bureau existed for months.64 Many party machines would be wiped out two and even three times. This could hardly render the provincial apparatus more responsive.65 Rather than make examples of some disobedient regional functionaries in order to frighten the rest, the terror effectively paralyzed the entire, sprawling regional apparatus. “During the purges hundreds of thousands of bureaucrats shook in their boots,” wrote the American eyewitness John Scott, who worked in provincial Magnitogorsk. “Many people reacted by shunning responsibility. . . . Still other people became exasperated and bitter.”66
A good number of upper-level functionaries had been working sixteen- to eighteen-hour shifts, often through the night, under tremendous strain. The commissar for domestic trade, Israel Veitser, was suffering from impaired health, according to the Kremlin medical team, partly because he usually arrived at the office around noon and departed between 3:00 and 5:00 a.m., taking papers home with him. (The Council of People’s Commissars decreed that he should finish work by midnight.)67 Veitser’s deputies, advisers, and secretaries all worked similar hours. Veitser, who happened to be married to the theater director Natalya Sats (the onetime mistress of Tukhachevsky), was sacked and arrested. Twenty of twenty-eight members of the Council of People’s Commissars would be arrested.68 Soviet industrial production, the supposed lifeblood of the regime, took a hit. In the strategic coal industry, output in 1936 had stagnated; in the first quarter of 1937, the plan went unfulfilled. Almost the entire provincial Donbass party that was appointed in May 1937, seventy-six people, would be slaughtered.69
Sarkis Sarkisov (Danielyan), an ethnic Armenian who served as party boss in the Donetsk coal basin, had worked in Leningrad under Zinoviev. When attacked by the NKVD, he went on the offensive, becoming complicit in the sweeping arrests of his colleagues in the provincial machine, until he, too, was arrested and executed.70 Eduards Prāmnieks, an ethnic Latvian stonemason who had succeeded Zhdanov as party boss in Nizhny Novgorod/Gorky, succeeded Sarkisov. “Many people cannot understand why the Donbass, which was always a fortress of Bolshevism, has become infiltrated by enemies and scum,” Prāmnieks pontificated. “One must remember that, as an extremely important center, the Donbass will always be a target for enemies and spies.”71 His work was paralyzed. “With whom to work?” he confided to the writer Avdeyenko. “All the first and second secretaries of the city have turned out to be enemies of the people. . . . The directors of factories have turned out to be wreckers or spies. The chief engineers, chief technicians, even the chief doctors of some hospitals, are also from the ranks of scum.”72 Then, another wholesale liquidation struck the Donbass—at least 140 factory and mine directors, chief engineers, and party officials—and Prāmnieks, too, turned out to be “scum.”73 Kaganovich, at a Kremlin reception for the coal and metallurgy sectors, would state that as a result of the “wrecking by Trotskyite-Bukharinite hirelings,” the coal industry had fallen into difficult straits. Stalin softened this dire verdict in the coal industry report that was published.74 Still, he evidently deemed the production losses a price worth paying.
NESTS OF SPIES