What does it mean if you haul a whole group of pals along with you? It means you’ve acquired a certain independence from local organisations and, if you like, a certain independence from the Central Committee. He has his own group and I have my own group and they’re personally devoted to me.
The alarm bell was being rung for a party and police purge. Bukharin was arrested on 27 February, Yagoda on 29 March. Mass expulsions meanwhile took place from the party through to the summer. Marshal Tukhachevski was arrested on 27 May along with most members of the Supreme Command. The armed forces had been added to party and police as suspect institutions. Tukhachevski was shot on 11 June; he had signed a confession with a bloodstained hand after a horrific beating.
The tall poppies of the USSR were being cut down. Yet another Central Committee plenum was convoked on 23 June. Yezhov reported on his investigations. Shamelessly fabricating the evidence, he reported that a Centre of Centres had been uncovered uniting Rightists, Mensheviks, Socialist-Revolutionaries, the Red Army, the NKVD, Zinovievites, Trotskyists and provincial party leaders. This was an alleged conspiracy on the grandest scale. Not only anti-Bolsheviks and former Bolshevik oppositionists but also current party leaders were said to have plotted to overthrow Stalin and his comrades; and Yezhov implied that only his own vigilance had prevented a coup from occurring.13
Stalin managed the process cunningly. He contrived again to hide behind Yezhov’s initiatives and pretend that he himself had nothing to do with the planning of repression. But as the moves were made against Central Committee members, it was unfeasible for him to say nothing; and in any case he was easily thrown into a bad temper by open criticism of the arrests. At the June 1937 plenum of the Central Committee G. N. Kaminski, People’s Commissar of Health, objected: ‘This way we’re killing off the entire party.’ Stalin barked back: ‘And you don’t happen to be friends with these enemies!’ Kaminski had taken his stand on principle and stuck to it: ‘They’re absolutely not my friends.’ Stalin came back at him: ‘Well, in that case it means you’re a berry from the same field as them.’14 Another brave individual was Osip Pyatnitski, a leading Soviet functionary in the Comintern, who vehemently opposed the proposal to execute Bukharin and accused the NKVD of fabricating its cases. Stalin suspended the proceedings and assembled the Politburo to discuss the outburst. Voroshilov and Molotov went to Pyatnitski to persuade him to retract. Pyatnitski refused. When the Central Committee reconvened, Yezhov denounced Pyatnitski as a former Okhrana agent, and Pyatnitski’s days were numbered. Stalin drew the plenum to a close on 29 June. He had crushed all opposition and called on the Central Committee to expel thirty-five full and candidate members from its ranks. The shocked Central Committee voted in favour.15
Equipped with the Central Committee’s troubled approval, the Politburo on 2 July decided on a decree to carry out a definitive purge of ‘anti-Soviet elements’. Not only the alleged leadership of the (entirely fictitious) Centre of Centres was to be eliminated but even whole social categories were to be savaged.16 It would affect former kulaks, Mensheviks, Socialist-Revolutionaries, priests, Bolshevik oppositionists, members of non-Russian parties, White Army soldiers and released common criminals. Order No. 00447 was drawn up by Stalin and Yezhov and sanctioned by the Politburo on 31 July. The campaign was set to start on 5 August, and Stalin signalled his intention to oversee it by not taking his regular vacation by the Black Sea. Yezhov, consulting him frequently, had established a USSR-wide quota for people to be condemned. With elaborate precision he determined that 268,950 individuals should be arrested. The procedures would involve judicial farce; the victims were to be hauled before revolutionary
