Through the spring and early summer, the other great nonpolitical news was a series of plays and ballets attended by the leaders of the Party and the announcement of long lists of awards to People’s Artists in these fields.
Meanwhile, as a particularly fine summer lay on the great plain, the arrests went on. Former oppositionists continued to fall. Nilcolai Krestinsky, former member of the Politburo and Secretary of the Central Committee, had been removed from the Foreign Commissariat to be Assistant People’s Commissar of Justice of the RSFSR in March.122 On his transfer, he spoke approvingly of his removal to the Party cell, saying that even ex-oppositionists should not, in present circumstances, work in the Foreign Commissariat, where leading figures should have the absolute confidence of the leadership and a spotless past.123
At the end of May, he was arrested. After a week-long interrogation,124 he started to confess on about 5 June.125 He had been severely tortured, and is described in a recent Soviet article as being in the Butyrka prison hospital for some days with his whole back like a single wound.126 Bukharin, with whom he was to appear in court as a fellow conspirator nine months later, had just begun his evidence.127
The way in which any sort of connection with the arrested oppositionists was made a crime can be seen in the case of the veteran Lomov, Party member since 1903, who, representing the Moscow Bureau of the Bolshevik Party, had (after Trotsky) been Lenin’s most enthusiastic supporter in the Central Committee in pressing for the seizure of power in November 1917.
In June 1937, an official of the U.S.S.R. State Planning Commission sent a letter to Stalin alleging that G. I. Lomov (Oppokov) a member of the Bureau of the U.S.S.R. Council of People’s Commissars’ Soviet Control Commission, had been on friendly terms with Rykov and Bukharin. Stalin wrote on this letter the instructions: “To Comrade Molotov. What to do?” Molotov wrote: “I’m for arresting this scum Lomov immediately, V. Molotov.” A few days later Lomov was arrested, charged with membership in a Right Opportunist organization, and shot.128
Lomov was to be mentioned at the Bukharin Trial as a fellow conspirator with Bukharin against Lenin.129
But even now, opposition was not entirely crushed. In the last week of June, another plenum of the Central Committee was held—ostensibly to discuss vegetable production. It was the scene of mutual denunciations and disappearances on the spot. Nazaretyan (not, indeed, a member of the Central Committee, but of the lesser Central Revision Commission), whom Ordzhonikidze had saved in the early 1930s, was arrested while actually on his way to the Kremlin to attend the plenum.130 In a few months, Stalin had progressed far in his ability to loose the Secret Police, without attention to political protocol, on to his opponents. His speech is said to have been in ruthless style, demanding, for example, less “coddling” of prisoners.131
In the meeting hall, many faces were already missing—Bukharin’s and Rykov’s, Rudzutak’s and Chudov’s, Gamarnik’s and Yakir’s, Yagoda’s and a dozen others. But the spirit of resistance had not yet been entirely quelled. “After the February plenum of the Central Committee a campaign was raised in the conspirators’ circles against Yezhov … an attempt was made to discredit Yezhov and the work he was doing in the Party, to slander him.”132 Even as late as this June plenum, there was an attempt to block the terror. Pyatnitsky, Kaminsky, and others had met for what came to be called “the cup of tea” to discuss resistance. Filatov, Mayor of Moscow, was among those present and appears to have given them away (he himself was shot later).133
At the plenum, when it was proposed to grant extraordinary powers to Yezhov and the NKVD, Pyatnitsky spoke strongly against it, and said that, on the contrary, the NKVD was now out of hand and should be more tightly controlled. During the break, several members of the Central Committee advised him to withdraw his statement, and Molotov suggested that he should think of his wife and family. However, he stuck to his guns.
