It would perhaps be going too far to compare the situation too closely with one common in despotisms—like the Byzantine favorite who “instead of being suffered to possess the reward of guilt was soon afterwards circumvented and destroyed by the more powerful villainy of the Minister himself, who retained sense and spirit enough to abhor the instrument of his own crimes.” Stalin had perhaps no strong liking for Yezhov, who never figures as one of his boon companions. But it would doubtless be Yezhov’s narrow political comprehension, rather than any moral deficiency, that his superior might despise. The comparison is, rather, with the old autocratic tradition of disposing of the executioner who has killed one’s rivals and thereby attracted to himself the main hatred of the survivors—a matter, in fact, of a common historical action which the wretched Yezhov had not the wit to foresee.
As we have said, by mid-1938 the NKVD itself, at the lower, operational level, had already wished to stop the progress of the Purge for obvious reasons. At the rate arrests were going, practically all the urban population would have been implicated within a few months. But it was caught in its own system. It was impossible for it not to arrest a man who had been denounced as an agent of Hitler. And an interrogator who did not demand the names of accomplices from each of his victims would soon himself come under denunciation for lack of vigilance or enthusiasm. By this time, the idea had grown among prisoners that the more denunciations they made the better;
Some even held the strange theory that the more people were jailed the sooner it would be realized that all this was nonsense and harmful to the Party…. My neighbor on the plank bed in the camp at Kolyma had once been head of the political department of a railway. He prided himself on having incriminated some 300 people. He said, as I had often heard in prison in Moscow, “The worse it is the better it is—like that, it will all be cleared up more quickly.”90
And, in fact, this was of some effect in the railway context (though no doubt elsewhere as well). The Byelorussian leaders complained that the NKVD had arrested every second railway official and that the system was near paralysis.91
Weissberg recounts the arrest in the spring of 1938 of the secretary of the Kharkov medical counci1.92 A man with an excellent memory, he knew the names of all the doctors in the city and denounced them all, pointing out that he was in an especially good position to have recruited them and that they were in any case largely from hostile social classes. He refused to name any of them as the leader of the plot, claiming that post for himself. The doctor told his cell mates that he had been inspired to take this course by reading about the case of a witch burning in Germany at the time of the Inquisition when a young theologian charged with intelligence with the devil had at once pleaded guilty and named the members of the Inquisition as his accomplices. The interrogators were unable to torture him, as he had confessed, and the case went up to the archbishop, who put an end to the business.
A climax of the mass Purge came in the first half of 1938, and the following months saw something of a diminution of pressure. Whether this was due solely to a simple loss of momentum at the lower, operational level, or to political pressures being put on Yezhov from above, is not clear. Stalin’s discontent with Yezhov certainly began in the early summer, when the plans to bring Beria in must have been laid. But he left Yezhov in office, and veteran prisoners speak of a climax of brutality in September.93 In October, the number of Military Collegium sentences actually increased.94
Even before Yezhov’s fall was formalized, a significant case was reported from Omsk, where the Regional Prosecutor and his assistant were tried for abuse of authority, unjustified arrests, and detention of innocent people in prison, sometimes for as long as five months. They were sentenced to two years’ imprisonment.95
This sentence seems only a partial triumph for justice. A few shootings of NKVD interrogators for extorting false confessions by violence are reported to symbolize the actual end of the Yezhov period. Captain Shiroky, of the Kiev NKVD, was sentenced after having been made Head of the Moldavian NKVD. One prison mentions him as a “not particularly harsh examining magistrate.”96 Five other Moldavian NKVD men were also shot.97 There had, indeed, been occasional similar trials before, and speeches throughout the Purge period are full of condemnation of unjust persecutions. But this time, the demonstration was clearly intentional. When certain Party officials became too free with their criticisms of police methods, though, Stalin pulled them up sharply with the telegram of 20 January 1939, explaining that torture was authorized (see here).
