The Great Terror полностью

Antonov-Ovseenko was held in a cell on the third floor of the Butyrka prison. He was ill and (as is often reported of the undernourished and overinterrogated) had swollen legs. But he bore himself boldly and entertained his cell mates with stories of Lenin, the October Revolution, and the Spanish Civil War. One of them was Yuri Tomsky (youngest son of Mikhail Tomsky), who has given an account of Antonov’s last days.³⁹ At the interrogation, Antonov refused to sign anything, though the protocols of the interrogation ran finally to 300 pages. One day when they were being gone through, there happened to be a radio on in the investigator’s office. The NKVD man, I. I. Shneyderman, called Antonov an “enemy of the people.” The prisoner retorted, “You are an enemy of the people. You are a regular Fascist.” The radio started to broadcast a mass meeting. “Listen! Listen to how the people celebrate us. They trust us in everything, and you will be annihilated. There,” the NKVD official added, “I have had a medal on your account” (an Order of the Red Star, in the 19 December 1937 Honors List).⁴⁰

Antonov-Ovseenko was sentenced to ten years with the group executed on 8 to 10 February 1938, but was in fact shot. When he was taken from his cell to execution, he took off his overcoat, shoes, and jacket and distributed them to the other prisoners, and then remarked (young Tomsky tells us), “I beg anyone who gets to freedom to tell the people that Antonov-Ovseenko was a Bolshevik and remained a Bolshevik till his last day.” The chief warders then led him away.

Antonov had himself served as State Prosecutor in the early 1930s. He had to wait twenty-five years for his message to be published to the Russian people. All the same, he was lucky. The Mensheviks who died in camps after the 1931 Trial or the Social Revolutionaries like Spiridonova were not similarly vindicated.

Meanwhile, other diplomats were being recalled for execution. The Soviet Minister in Bucharest, Ostrovsky, hesitated to return to Moscow, but went back when Voroshilov, with whom he had served in the Civil War, gave him a personal assurance of his safety. He was arrested on reaching the frontier,⁴¹ though only sent to labor camp.⁴² Others who disappeared included the Soviet envoys to Warsaw, Kaunas, Helsinki, Kabul, Copenhagen, and Riga.⁴³

The veteran of the Baltic Fleet Mikhail Raskolnikov was Soviet Ambassador to Bulgaria, where the NKVD officer sent to purge the legation implicated everyone from the chauffeur, Kazakov, to the Military Attaché, Colonel Sukhorukov.⁴⁴ Raskolnikov himself refused to return to Russia when recalled in April 1939. He was nevertheless rehabilitated in Khrushchev’s time (later restored to the category of traitor, he was more definitively rehabilitated in 1987). This must partly have been due to his particularly fine record in the Revolution and the Civil War, his total lack of involvement in any opposition, and his death within a few months (September 1939). Even Ehrenburg in his published memoirs mentioned having met him at the time when he was deciding to stay abroad and having sympathized with his position. Raskolnikov wrote an offensive letter to Stalin, which was published in the émigré Novaya Rossiya on 1 October 1939 after his death, and also a more moderate statement which appeared in another émigré journal, Poslednie Novosti, on 26 June 1939. In the latter, he says firmly to Stalin, “You yourself know that Pyatakov did not fly to Oslo”—showing that a good deal was known, and discussed, in Party circles.

KOMSOMOL

One major organization remained under its original Stalinist leadership—the Komsomol.

Kosarev had been sent by Stalin to purge the Leningrad Komsomol after the defeat of Zinoviev at the XIVth Party Congress in December 1925. In 1926, the opposition bloc had made a powerful attempt to secure the support of the young and of the students. Most of the “Trotskyist” protest groups were composed of young intellectuals, who attacked Party control over the Komsomol. Half the members of the Leningrad Komsomol Committee were expelled.

Kosarev had been boldly denounced by Kotolynov, then a leading Zinovievite in that body, for tactics of sheer bullying. He went on to practice these in Moscow, becoming a secretary of the Central Committee of the Komsomol in 1927 and its General Secretary in 1929.

Thenceforward, the organization had been a willing tool of the General Secretary, a sort of “Stalinjugend.” Even this was not adequate, as Stalin held that “the very first task of all Komsomol education work was the necessity to seek out and recognize the enemy, who had then to be removed forcibly, by methods of economic pressure, organizational-political isolation, and methods of physical destruction.”⁴⁵ In fact, he wanted the organization to become a youth auxiliary of the NKVD.