276. Not just those who had worked with Lenin and knew of his 1922–23 Testament were targeted, such as Trotsky, Kamenev, Zinoviev, Rykov, and Bukharin, but also those who were entirely creatures of Stalin (Kosior, Postyshev, Chubar, Eihe, and Rudzutaks, the loyalist whom Stalin had elevated to replace Zinoviev in the politburo). For a list of Central Committee members and candidate members not destroyed in the terror, see Mawdsley, “An Elite within an Elite,” 63.
277. The original end of the antikulak “mass operations” was to have been the second week of Dec.—the precise time of the elections—and in the meantime, functionaries who suddenly would have to stand against competition were writing to the Central Committee apparatus complaining that former “kulaks” might get their names on the ballot. Petrov and Jansen, Stalinskii pitomets, 123; “Demokratiia . . . pod nadzorom NKVD,” Nesizvestnaia Rossiia, II: 272–81; Khlevniuk, Politbiuro, 195. Wendy Goldman asserts that Stalin’s speech back at the Feb.–March 1937 plenum “aimed for a ruthless yet limited attack on former oppositionists,” but that (pseudo)democratic procedures involving criticism from below wildly expanded the modestly set targets. Goldman, Terror and Democracy, 129.
278. Ehrenburg, Sobranie sochinenii, IX: 189; Medvedev, “O lichnoi otvestvennosti Stalina za terror,” 289–330 (at 289–90). Sholokhov wrote to Stalin (Feb. 6, 1938) requesting that the arrests be checked, for “they are removing not only White Guardists, émigrés, torturers—in a word, those deserving of removal—but genuinely Soviet people.” The NKVD evidently arrived to arrest Sholokhov at his home in the village of Veshenskaya. He had fled north to Moscow; Stalin decided to spare him. “‘Vokrug menia vse eshche pletut chernuiu Pautinu . . . ’: pis’ma M. A. Sholokhova I. V. Stalinu (1937–1950),” 18. See also Murin, “‘Prosti, menia, Koba . . . ’: neizvestnoe pis’mo N. Bukharina.”
279. Shreider, NKVD iznutri, 106, 154–7. The case of Shreider (b. 1902) is particularly illuminating, and involves Stanisław Redens, Stalin’s brother-in-law and by now the NKVD boss in Kazakhstan, then Beria. Shreider would refuse to confess but get ten years and be dispatched to the Northern Railway construction camps (SveZhelDorlag), where, because he was employed in administrative work, he would survive. Shreider, NKVD iznutri, 85–95, 252. Redens was arrested in Nov. 1938 and executed in Jan. 1940.
280. Vernadsky showed considerably more understanding of Soviet realities than most contemporaries: “Millions of prisoners—forced labor, playing a very significant and huge role in the state’s economy,” he recorded on Jan. 5, 1938. Sovershenno sekretno, no. 8 (1990): 10–3; Khlevniuk, 1937–i, 214–5. See also Prychodko, One of Fifteen Million, 21.
281. Fyodor Stebenev, the commissar, speaking to Andrei Vedenin, continued: “I would bet my head that Iosif Vissarionovich [Stalin] does not know. Signals, complaints, protests are being intercepted and not reaching him. We need to get Stalin to know about this. Otherwise ruin. Tomorrow they’ll take you, and after you me. We cannot keep quiet.” Vedenin, Gody i liudi, 55.
282. For the gamut of contemporary (and ongoing) speculations, see Medvedev, Let History Judge, 523–601. Then there is the “theory” of a Russian “tradition” of violence. Courtois, “Conclusion: Why?,” 728–31.
283. On April 3, 1938, Mironov reported to Frinovsky that 10,728 “conspirators” had been incarcerated. Pavliukov, Ezhov, 390; Petrov and Jansen, Stalinskii pitomets, 118.
284. Mironov appeared at the Kremlin on New Year’s; he would be arrested on Jan. 6, 1939, at the foreign affairs commissariat and executed on the night of Feb. 21–2, 1940.
285. Misshima and Goto, Japanese View of Outer Mongolia, 21–2.
286. Coox, Nomonhan, 164–5.
287. Pravda, March 29, 1937; Getty, Origins of the Great Purges, 140. In 1935, the Soviet authorities recorded 340 aircraft “incidents” as well as 54 crashes (in which 88 people died); of these 394 events, fewer than half (163) were investigated as involving possible wrecking, but in 1937–8 everything became wrecking. Khaustov, “Deiatel’nost’ organov,” 330 (TsA FSB, f. 3, op. 3, d. 1411, l. 255).
288. Zhukov, Inoi Stalin, 293. Stalin’s Nov. 1936 dismissal of the notion that all former kulaks and White Guardists were enemies would be republished in the 1939 edition of his Questions of Leninism. Stalin, Voprosy Leninizma, 531–2.
