Chief among his considerations was security, and he made no distinction between his personal security and the security of his policies, the leadership and the state. Molotov and Kaganovich in their dotage were to claim that Stalin had justifiable fears about the possibility of a ‘fifth column’ coming to the support of invading forces in the event of war.6 Stalin gave some hints of this. He was shocked by the ease with which it had been possible for General Franco to pick up followers in the Spanish Civil War which broke out in July 1936.7 He intended to prevent this from ever happening in the USSR. Such thinking goes some way to explaining why he, a believer in the efficacy of state terror, turned to intensive violence in 1937–8. Yet he would probably have felt impelled towards terror even without the pressures of the international situation. He felt the impulse to terror before the late 1930s. Inside the party there was much discontent with him and his policies, and indeed massive anger existed across the country. Although his power was enormous, he could never allow himself the luxury of complacency. The possibility of the bitter discontent bursting into a successful movement against him could not be discounted. Stalin’s revolutionary break with the NEP had caused tremors which were far from dying down. Beneath the surface of calm and obedience there boiled a deep resentment in state and society which had already given him cause for anxiety.
So if his reaction to the Civil War in Spain was the match, the entire political and social situation in the USSR over the past few years was the tinderbox. Stalin had come close to saying this in the message he and Zhdanov sent from the Black Sea to Kaganovich and Molotov on 25 September 1936:8
We consider it an absolutely necessary and urgent matter to appoint com[rade] Yezhov as People’s Commissar of Internal Affairs. Yagoda has clearly shown himself not up to the task of unmasking the Trotskyist–Zinovievite bloc. The OGPU is four years behind in this matter.
In lighting the match, Stalin did not necessarily have a predetermined plan any more than he had had one for economic transformation at the beginning of 1928. Although the victim-categories overlapped each other, there was no inevitability in his deciding to move against all of them in this small space of time. But the tinderbox had been sitting around in an exposed position. It was there to be ignited and Stalin, attending to all the categories one after another, applied the flame.
Trotski’s former ally Georgi Pyatakov had been arrested before Yezhov’s promotion. Pyatakov had been working efficiently as Ordzho-nikidze’s deputy in the People’s Commissariat of Heavy Industry. Ordzhonikidze, in discussions after the December 1936 Central Committee plenum, refused to believe the charges of terrorism and espionage laid against him. This was a battle Stalin had to win if he was to proceed with his campaign of repression. Pyatakov was placed under psychological pressure to confess to treasonous links with counter-revolutionary groups. He cracked. Brought out to an interview with Ordzhonikidze in Stalin’s presence, he confirmed his testimony to the NKVD. In late January 1937 a second great show trial was held. Pyatakov, Sokolnikov, Radek and Serebryakov were accused of heading an Anti-Soviet Trotskyist Centre. The discrepancies in evidence were large but the court did not flinch from sentencing Pyatakov and Serebryakov to death while handing out long periods of confinement to Radek and Sokolnikov. Meanwhile Ordzhonikidze’s brother had been shot on Stalin’s instructions. Ordzhonikidze himself fell apart: he went off to his flat on 18 February 1937 after a searing altercation with Stalin and shot himself. There was no longer anyone in the Politburo willing to stand up to Stalin and halt the machinery of repression.9
Ordzhonikidze’s suicide happened in the course of a Central Committee plenum that lasted into March 1937. Stalin, without hiding behind Yezhov, asserted that the Trotskyist–Zinovievite bloc had installed an agency for espionage, sabotage and terrorism working for the German intelligence services.10 Yezhov repeated that Trotskyists, Zinovievites and Rightists were operating in a single organisation, and Stalin with the plenum’s consent instructed him to carry out a thorough investigation.11 Stalin also threatened those who held posts in the party. He aimed to break up the clientelist system which inhibited the operation of a vertical administrative hierarchy:12
