If Stalin’s mind had a predisposition towards mass terror, it remains to be explained why he abruptly intensified and expanded repressive measures in the last months of 1936. For two years he had been gearing up the machinery of state violence. He had crushed active critical groupings. He had arrested thousands of former members of the United Opposition and killed Zinoviev and Kamenev. He had deported tens of thousands of ‘former people’ from the large cities. He had filled the Gulag system of camps to bursting point with real and potential enemies of the regime. His personal supremacy was unchallenged. He suborned his entourage into accepting his main demands in policy; and when he sensed a lack of total compliance, he replaced personnel with ease. The procedural mechanisms had been simplified since Kirov’s assassination. Stalin still formally consulted the Politburo but its members were merely asked to ratify measures which the NKVD proceeded to apply through its
A further step in the direction of what became known as the Great Terror was taken at the December 1936 Central Committee plenum.1 Stalin let his dogs off the leash and set them on Bukharin and the veteran Rightists. Yezhov led the pack, declaring that Bukharin had known all about the terrorist plans and actions of the (non-existent) Trotskyist–Zinovievite block. The scheme was obvious. Yezhov had been sanctioned to widen the net of former oppositionist victims and to brand all of them as being in league with each other and working for foreign powers. Bukharin for months had been living in fear of something like this happening. When it occurred, it took him by surprise. He was still editor of
Bukharin was not yet arrested, but from December 1936 through to July 1937 the net of repression was cast ever wider and reached its full list of victim-categories. The NKVD arrested followers of oppositions of both Left and Right. It seized existing holders of office in party, government, army and all other public institutions. It moved against large groups in society which had connections with the pre-revolutionary elites. It apprehended members of former anti-Bolshevik parties, clergy and ex-kulaks. It picked up and deported several national and ethnic groups in the USSR’s borderlands. Having identified the categories for repression, the NKVD’s terror machinery was kept working at full pace until November 1938.
One thing is sure: it was Stalin who instigated the carnage of 1937–8, although there was a current of popular opinion in the USSR that it was not essentially his fault. Supposedly his associates and advisers had persuaded him that only the most extremes measures would save the state from destruction; and in later decades this notion continued to commend itself to a handful of writers.4 But this was self-delusion. Stalin started and maintained the movement towards the Great Terror. He did not need to be pushed by others. He and nobody else was the engineer of imprisonment, torture, penal labour and shooting. He resorted to terror on the basis of Bolshevik doctrines and Soviet practical precedents. He also turned to it out of an inner psychological compulsion.5 Yet although he did not need much temptation to maim and kill, he had a strategy in mind. When he acted, his brutality was as mechanical as a badger trap. Stalin knew what he was hunting in the Great Terror, and why. There was a basic logic to his murderous activity. It was a logic which made sense within the framework of personal attitudes which interacted with Bolshevism in theory and practice. But he was the despot. What he thought and ordered had become the dominant factor in what was done at the highest level of the Soviet state.
