338. RGASPI, f. 558, op. 11, d. 1120, l. 1–20. On Jan. 6, 1937, the USSR conducted a population census (it had been delayed twice), the first since 1926. The enumeration encompassed Gulag camps, too, but it returned only 162 million people, versus an expectation of more than 170 million. The census further showed that 57 percent of inhabitants above the age of sixteen identified themselves as religious. That was more than 55 million people. The census results were suppressed. Zhiromskaia et al., Polveka pod grifom “sekretno,” 98, 100. See also Merridale, “1937 Census.”
339. RGASPI, f. 558, op. 11, d. 1120, l. 7–8, 11–12.
340. RGASPI, f. 558, op. 11, d. 1120, l. 8–10. Stalin had supposedly said much the same, more colorfully, to the Soviet writer Mikhail Sholokhov (“What can you do? People need a little god”). Gromov, Stalin, 160, citing M. M. Sholokhov, “Razgovor o otsom,” Literaturnaia gazeta, May 23, 1990. See also Feuchtwanger, Moskva 1937 goda, 65. Kolakowski asserted that “Stalin as a despot was much more the party’s creation than its creator,” but he got right that Stalin “was the personification of a system which irresistibly sought to be personified.” Kolakowski, Main Currents of Marxism, III: 2, 5. See also Ennker, “‘Struggling for Stalin’s Soul.’”
341. RGASPI, f. 558, op. 11, d. 1120, l. 14–7. What Stalin did not divulge was that while the number of people arrested for terrorist acts and statements had dropped in 1936, to 3,388 people (from 8,988 in 1935 and 6,504 in 1934), the number of those rounded up for belonging to an opposition had jumped to 23,279 (from 3,447 in 1935 and 631 in 1934). Khaustov and Samuelson, Stalin, NKVD, 93 (citing TsA FSB, f. 8os., op. 1, d. 79).
342. RGASPI, f. 558, op. 11, d. 1120, l. 7–8, 11–12.
343. Stalin could be ingratiating in these circumstances, but this statement about fascism was not at all what the antifascist crusader Feuchtwanger wanted to hear. RGASPI, f. 558, op. 11, d. 1120, l. 18–9.
344. RGASPI, f. 17, op. 3, d. 983, l.14–15, 110–1. On Jan. 16, 1937, Postyshev was removed as Kiev province party secretary for having allowed “an extraordinarily great level of contamination by Trotskyites.” RGASPI, f. 558, op. 1, d. 5023, l. 1–17 (Jan. 13, 1937); Getty and Naumov, Road to Terror, 353–7; Na prieme, 198–9; Khlevniuk, 1937–i, 90–114.
345. Larina, This I Cannot Forget, 312.
346. Titarenko, VKP (b), komintern i kitai: dokumenty, IV/ii: 1090–1 (RGASPI, f. 495, op. 74, d. 281, l. 17–18); Titarenko, Kommunisticheskii internatsional, 271–2.
347. Titarenko, VKP (b), komintern i kitai: dokumenty, IV/ii: 1098 (RGASPI, f. 495, op. 74, d. 281, l. 28: March 2, 1937).
348. Khaustov et al., Lubianka: Stalin i glavnoe upravlneie, 9–19 (APRF, f. 3, op. 24, d. 269, l. 38–58, 80).
349. Khlevniuk, Stalin i Ordzhonkidze, 88–97.
350. Report of CourtProceedings, 54; “O tak nazyvaemom ‘parallel’nom antisovetskom trotskistom tsentre’”: 30–50.
351. Yagoda belatedly lost this rank. Khaustov et al., Lubianka: Stalin i glavnoe upravlenie, 60 (RGASPI, f. 17, op. 3, d. 983, l. 50); Kokurin and Petrov, Lubianka, 1917–1960, 14. In 1937, chief of the Gorky [Nizhny Novgorod] NKVD Lavrushin wrote a note to Moscow about Yagoda’s supposed past as an okhranka agent, with testimony from a witness about the removal on July 15, 1935, by former local NKVD boss Matvei Pogrebinsky of Yagoda’s tsarist police file from the local archives. Il’inskii, Narkom Iagoda, 51–2; Vinogradov, Genrikh Iagoda, 83–4 (testimony of Alexander Yevstifeyev, 1937). See also Orlov, Tainaia istoriia, 209–10. Yagoda’s supposed okhranka past would not be used against him at trial, perhaps because it was too evocative of whispers about Stalin. Pogrebinsky would commit suicide on April 4, 1937.
352. Lyons, Assignment in Utopia, 585. Some years earlier a German count had likened Radek to “something between Puck and Wolf, a bit of a street Arab, a cheeky, amusing, and terrifying Mephisto physiognomy.” Kessler, Tagebücher, 354 (1922).
353. Banac, Diary of Georgi Dimitrov, 51 (Feb. 2, 1937). The émigré Miliukov fantasized that Russia was being reborn, on the analogy of the French Revolution’s counterrevolution. Poslednie novosti, Jan. 23, 1937: 1. See also Nielsen, Miliukov i Stalin.
354. Broué, “Trotsky”; Broué, “Party Opposition to Stalin,” 166; Rogovin, 1937, 60–6.
355. In public, Smirnov alone retracted his confession. Rogovin, 1937, 23.
356. Trotskii, “Otkrytoe pis’ma.”
