Stalin: A Biography полностью

Just as ominous was the change in personnel in the NKVD. Neither Genrikh Yagoda nor his predecessor Vladimir Menzhinski had always pleased Stalin. He had had to goad them into the extreme forms of action which he advocated from the late 1920s. They were not his placemen even though they never ultimately failed to carry out his commands. Yagoda tried to ingratiate himself by telling Stalin every time a fresh cache of Trotskyist material was found.⁴⁰ But it was not enough for Stalin. He wanted someone at the head of the NKVD who would be able to anticipate his wishes rather than respond to them, sometimes slowly and not very efficiently.

On 26 September 1936 he thought he had found that man in Nikolai Yezhov. Yagoda was sacked by Politburo decision and Yezhov took his place. Yezhov was a party official who had risen steadily through the ranks since 1917. He joined the Assignments and Records Department of the Party Secretariat in 1927, becoming its head in 1930. At the time of his appointment as People’s Commissar of Internal Affairs he was both Secretary of the Party Central Committee and Chairman of the Party Control Commission. Stalin had seen him at work and appreciated his fanatical commitment to rooting out and annihilating the adversaries of the ascendant party leadership. In 1935 Yezhov, with Stalin’s encouragement and editorial assistance, had produced a ‘theoretical work’, never published, on the internal party oppositions. Entitled ‘From Factionalism to Open Counter-Revolution’, it intensified the menace to everyone — especially the leaders — who had ever failed to accept Stalin’s line of policy. To have been an oppositionist in the past had become the same as to be guilty of treason in the present.⁴¹ On being appointed People’s Commissar of Internal Affairs, Yezhov was asked to devote nine-tenths of his time to the NKVD.⁴²

Since December 1934 Stalin had had the legislative and organisational basis for an expanded state terror in the form of the troiki. He had practised terror widely but fitfully in 1935–6. He had also shown a degree of self-restraint as had his associates, and his rule was increasingly characterised by economic advance and social quiescence. But resentment was deep in society even though active resistance had been quelled. Although oppositionists and ‘former people’ were being hunted down, many had escaped capture. Links remained between Trotski and his followers; Bukharin was not the sole leading ex-oppositionist leader who hoped for a change of personnel and politics at the apex of Soviet politics. As yet Stalin’s victims, at least in the course of the Second Five-Year Plan, fell into restricted categories. But there was no guarantee that this would always remain the case.

Stalin’s earlier career, especially in the Civil War and during the First Five-Year Plan, pointed to the dangers of the situation. He was always tempted to settle accounts violently with ‘enemies’, and he was angry when his entourage failed to identify them to him. He never lacked eagerness to take the initiative. He was at his most dangerous when he sensed peril for himself and the Soviet order. Sooner or later, Stalin, the most determined driver of the vehicle of terror, would again grasp the steering wheel and turn the key. The years from the end of 1932 through to late 1936 witnessed occasional ignition and abrupt forward movement. The machinery responded fitfully to Stalin’s guidance. When he turned the key the result was unpredictable. Sometimes the battery was flat and needed topping up. On other occasions the plugs were too damp and all he could achieve was a brief, sputtering sound. But in fact the vehicle was roadworthy; and when the circumstances were more favourable in 1937, the driver would be able to start and keep it running at full speed until he decided to bring it to a halt a year later.

The communist party administered a multinational state. Russians constituted 53 per cent of the population and Stalin tried to associate himself with the Russian nation.¹ This tendency of his had grown over the 1920s and early 1930s. Stalin and Lenin had fallen out when Lenin demanded gentler treatment for the Georgian communist leadership than Stalin approved.