Yet undoubtedly many Soviet citizens, like the woman textile worker, loved the Leader. Conditions did not worsen for everyone in the 1930s. Jobs became available offering improved salary, housing and consumer goods for promotees. Stalin’s rejection of the egalitarian principle for the Soviet order created an attractive prospect for them. Usually coming from working-class or peasant backgrounds, his beneficiaries could hardly believe their luck. They replaced the elites which were being butchered on his orders. The propaganda was crude but it worked with the grain of the self-interest of the promotees. They were ambitious, bright and obedient young men and women who wanted to get on in the world. The school system reinforced the message that Stalin had moved the USSR on to the tracks of universal progress. Needless to say, even the promotees might have had their doubts. It was possible to like some aspects of him and his policies and to disapprove of others. Many people hoped against all the evidence that the terror policies would eventually be abandoned. Perhaps, they thought, Stalin would soon see the need for reform — and some thought the violence would stop when he discarded the advisers who were misleading him.34
Stalin depended on this naïveté. He could hardly induce a purged kulak, priest or party oppositionist to love him. He could not expect a lot of undernourished, overworked factory labourers or kolkhozniki to sing his praises. But indisputably some of them did admire him. And, above all, members of the new administrative stratum wished to stick with him since he had given them their place in the sun. He had transformed the economy and built a military power. He was the Vozhd, the Leader, the Boss. Great was the name of Stalin in the minds of beneficiaries of the Stalinist state order.
The Great Terror came suddenly to an end on 23 November 1938. The occasion was marked unofficially by the removal of Yezhov from the NKVD and the advent to office of his deputy Lavrenti Beria. Until then there had been no serious attempt to stop the carnage. Everyone near Stalin had known that the campaign of arrests, tortures and executions had his active support: it was perilous to advocate a change of policy while he seemed fixed in purpose.
Signs had already appeared that some in Stalin’s entourage wanted to halt the machinery of terror. Malenkov began the attempt at the Party Central Committee plenum in January 1938; he did this subtly by deploring the large number of mistakes in expulsions from the party in the previous year.1 Direct criticism of arrests and executions was avoided. Holding to the theme of internal party procedures, Malenkov rebuked local leaders for throwing innocent communists out of the party. Everyone knew that more was involved than the loss of a party membership card. Expelled Bolsheviks were invariably sent to the Gulag or shot. Malenkov later claimed that he was putting pressure on Stalin to see the light. If so, it would have been the only time he did so. Malenkov was Stalin’s creature and it is inconceivable that Stalin did not sanction Malenkov’s initiative; and in any case, apart from a decision to handle expulsions more carefully, no brake was yet applied to the machinery of terror. Nevertheless Stalin evidently had growing doubts about Yezhov. He made this manifest in a typically indirect fashion when, on 21 August 1938, Yezhov was given the People’s Commissariat of Water Transport in addition to his existing duties. This implicitly warned him that he would have the NKVD taken away from him if he failed to satisfy the Leader.
Yezhov understood the danger he was in and his daily routine became hectic; he knew that the slightest mistake could prove fatal. Somehow, though, he had to show himself to Stalin as indispensable. Meanwhile he also had to cope with the appointment of a new NKVD Deputy Commissar, the ambitious Lavrenti Beria, from July 1938. Beria had until then been First Secretary of the Communist Party of Georgia; he was widely feared in the south Caucasus as a devious plotter against any rival — and almost certainly he had poisoned one of them, the Abkhazian communist leader Nestor Lakoba, in December 1936. If Yezhov tripped, Beria was ready to take his place; indeed Beria would be more than happy to trip Yezhov up. Daily collaboration with Beria was like being tied in a sack with a wild beast. The strain on Yezhov became intolerable. He took to drinking heavily and turned for solace to one-night stands with women he came across; and when this failed to satiate his needs, he pushed himself upon men he encountered in the office or at home. In so far as he was able to secure his future position, he started to gather compromising material on Stalin himself.
