This final wave of the Purge in the inner Party, directed against his own supporters, was well defined by a circular put out under Stalin’s instructions, in April 1938, calling for a “liquidation of the consequences of wrecking” in which the “’silent’ politically spineless people should also not be forgotten.”1
Various loose ends were tied up; for example, the First Secretary in Kazakhstan, L. I. Mirzoyan, whom Stalin had attacked at the January plenum, was arrested “on Stalin’s personal orders.”2
There remained bigger game. Postyshev’s arrest was not immediately followed up. Eikhe, Kossior, and Chubar, the doomed members of the Politburo, still featured, though not regularly, with the other members in formal listings, telegrams from the Soviet expedition at the North Pole, and so forth.
Eikhe and Kossior, appearing in good standing until the last week in April, went first. Eikhe was arrested on 29 April, and Kossior (mentioned in an electoral list as late as 28 April) at about the same time3—inaccordance with the NKVD custom of arresting people just before holidays, during which no attempt could be made to trace them.
Stalin was now wholly ignoring the formalities. We are told that there was no “exchange of opinions or Political Bureau decisions” about the arrest of Kossior—or in any “other case of this type.”4
No announcement was made, then or ever, though his arrest must have become known immediately to those interested, for Kiev Radio just ceased to announce itself as Radio Kossior, as it had done for some years.5 The press had other matters to think of. For most of May and June, the new election campaign built up in newspapers, meetings, and any other feasible fashion, on the lines of the fanfares of the previous winter. (When the elections finally took place on 26 June, it was to the accompaniment of another exploit by “Stalinist falcons’—a nonstop flight to Khabarovsk in the Far East by Kokkinaki.)
The absence of both men from the 1 May demonstrations was noted. Chubar was still there. He can be traced as receiving official greetings as late as 9 June. By 1 July, he was no longer listed.
Chubar was later said to have been concerned with shortcomings in industry, and to have had qualms about the new agricultural system. He had been closely associated with Ordzhonikidze and was not pleased with the development of the cult of personality. In the period before his own removal, he is reported as “deeply indignant” about the facts he had learned about illegal repressions. He did not believe that people he had known and worked with for years were really spies. His views on this became known to those in charge of the Purge. On his removal from membership in the Politburo and Vice Chairmanship of the Council of People’s Commissars, he was sent for the moment to work at Solikamsk in the Urals. But he remained there for only “a few months … soon he was arrested.”6
Meanwhile Eikhe, in the new torture center for top officials at Sukhanovka, was being interrogated by the notorious Z. M. Ushakov. Soon his ribs were broken, and he was confessing to being leader of a “reserve net supposedly created by Bukharin in 1935.”7
This was presumably what was mentioned at the Bukharin Trial as “another reserve centre,” allegedly existing at the end of 1935 or the beginning of 1936, when Rykov was supposed to have urged Chernov to get in touch with it “through Lyubimov.”8 It was “another” reserve center because there was also reference to “the parallel group of Rights” allegedly led by Antipov.
There is at least some slight logic in this representation of the latest victims as “Rightists.” They had had no connection whatever with the Trotsky or Zinoviev oppositions, and though they had equally opposed the Bukharinites in 1929–1930, they had been in favor of a lessening of the Terror and reconciliation with Bukharin .
The plan for the next trial was, in any case, changed. Eikhe was instructed to remove his name as reserve center leader and substitute Mezhlauk’s.9
This left a number of ready victims for the first trial planned wholly against Stalinists, leaving the more recently arrested Politburo members and some others in reserve for future use.
