Krupskaya’s hand in helping create a Lenin Testament had failed to slow Stalin’s succession. He was among those who carried the urn of her ashes for burial in the Kremlin Wall on March 1. He allowed the newspapers to be filled with eulogies for a few days, but the highest-level official called upon to publish an obituary was the chairman of the RSFSR Supreme Soviet.118 Trotsky, in exile, rendered his own. “In addition to being Lenin’s wife—which, by the way, was not accidental—Krupskaya was an outstanding personality in her devotion to the cause, her energy and her purity of character,” he wrote (March 4). “Lenin’s illness and death—and this again was not accidental—coincided with the breaking point of the revolution and the beginning of Thermidor. Krupskaya became confused. . . . She made an attempt to oppose the Stalinist clique, and in 1926 she found herself for a brief interval in the ranks of the opposition. Frightened by the prospect of split, she broke away.” As a member of the Central Committee, Krupskaya had approved the expulsions and death sentences of Trotsky, Zinoviev, Kamenev, and Bukharin.119 With her death, Stalin had a chocolate factory named after her. Orders went out to the Soviet press: “Do not print another word about Krupskaya.”120 For the proposed ribbon on the official wreath, Stalin altered the text (with his red pencil) from “closest friend of Lenin” to “closest helpmate of Lenin.”121 Stalin was Lenin’s “closest friend.”
THE TERROR’S PROMOTIONS
At the party congress, Stalin received public credit for the mass arrests. “Comrade Stalin has directed the work of purging enemies who have wormed their way into the party,” Matvei Shkiryatov, deputy head of the party Control Commission, noted in an understatement. “Comrade Stalin taught us how to fight wreckers in a new way; he taught us how to get rid of these hostile elements quickly and decisively.” One female party member told a story of how she had mailed to Stalin a denunciation of “the gang” in the Communist Youth League leadership and how he moved to eradicate them, “although he was very busy.”122
The full scope of the bloodletting was not revealed, but it was secretly recorded: 15,485 of the 32,899 positions in 1939 on the Central Committee nomenklatura—the highest officials—had been appointed in the years 1937–38, a turnover of nearly half.123 Of the 10,902 party secretaries of counties, cities, and districts, 6,909 had been appointed in 1937–38. Of the 333 regional party bosses, 293 had assumed their posts since the 17th Congress, most since 1937–38; only six heads of regional machines were older than forty-six; 91 percent were between twenty-six and forty years of age. Forty-four of the 71 Central Committee members were new (by contrast, at the 17th Congress in 1934, 10 of the 71 had been new). The same picture obtained throughout industry: on the railways, 2,245 of 2,968 senior posts as of November 1938 had been at their positions just one year. In the NKVD, the average age of the upper ranks fell between 1937 and 1939, from around forty-three to thirty-five. Fully 85 percent of Red Army officers were under thirty-five years of age.124 These people, inexperienced and young, were by and large graduates of technical education.125 A mass of graduates (even greater numbers would now follow) helped make possible extermination of their predecessors.
Pravda deemed these new cadres “healthy young representatives of a healthy young people,” one of Stalin’s core tenets. They were manifestly one of his reasons for summoning the congress: to demonstrate that the purged party was alive and well. Alexei Kosygin (b. 1904), who had graduated from the Leningrad Textile Institute just four years earlier, would become commissar of textile production. Vyacheslav Malyshev (b. 1902), who had finished technical school in 1937, would become commissar of heavy machine building. The dashing Leonid Brezhnev (b. 1906), who had graduated from a metallurgical technicum in 1935, was promoted to party boss of his home region, Dnepropetrovsk (Ukraine). The village-born Mikhail Suslov (b. 1902), who had joined the party in 1921 and taken a few training courses, had been sent in 1936 to Rostov province, where, in October 1937, after the arrest of the entire provincial leadership, he was named third and then second secretary. In February 1939, after the arrest of everyone in neighboring Orjonikidze (Stavropol) province, Suslov had been named first secretary there. “Understand it is only thanks to Stalin that we have all risen so high,” he would later explain. “Everything we have is thanks to Stalin.”126
