Stalin himself summed up: the Purge had been accompanied by “grave mistakes,” indeed “more mistakes than might have been expected.” “Undoubtedly,” he went on, “we shall have no further need of resorting to the method of mass purges. Nevertheless, the Purge of 1933–6 was unavoidable and its results, on the whole, were beneficial.”137
The phrase “1933–6” might have struck the layman a little oddly. The fact is that the expulsions from the Party at that time had been constitutionally and publicly authorized, while the later Purge had not ever been formalized, and so could be taken as irrelevant.
Party executions, in fact, continued. Over the next years, Stalin and Beria wound up most of Yezhov’s unfinished business.
In July 1939, the Prosecutor’s sanction for Eikhe’s arrest was at last obtained, to some extent legalizing the position. Eikhe was presented with the charges against him on 25 October 1939, and wrote to Stalin protesting his innocence—and blaming the frame-up in part on Trotskyites he now took credit for having persecuted in West Siberia. Ushakov and Nikolayev-Zhurid, he added, had “utilized the knowledge that my broken ribs have not properly mended and have caused me great pain,” as the result of which he had incriminated himself and others. He asked for an end to “the vile provocation which wound itself like a snake round many persons, in large measure through my meanness and criminal slander.”138 There is a story that, temporarily insane by torture in 1938, he had cried out that he confessed his “guilt of belonging to a criminal organization which goes by the name of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party (bolsheviks).”139
One of the charges against Eikhe is a trifle mysterious. He was accused of being responsible for certain “resolutions of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party (bolsheviks) and of the Council of People’s Commissars.” He pleaded that the resolutions in question “were not made on my initiative and without my participation,” and were “in any case correct.” Those made without his “participation” can only have been resolutions of the Council of People’s Commissars, to which he did not belong until October 1937. The natural explanation would seem to be that the charge was a general one, made against a number of accused, some of whom
Eikhe’s letters to Stalin were ignored, though evidently kept on file. On 2 February 1940 he was finally brought before a court, where he withdrew his confessions and again attributed them to torture by the investigator, and was then shot. (His wife was also executed.)140 It is interesting, in view of the previous association of political and military executions, that Admiral Dushenov, Commander of the Northern Fleet, former sailor on the
None of those liquidated at this time could be considered as anything resembling an alternative political leadership to which the Party or the country might have turned in a crisis of the regime. In fact, few figures of any repute still survived. Bubnov had been shot, or died in prison, on 12 January 1940.fn1 (His daughter Valya was sent to labor camp.)143 And the last leading figure of the Stalinist cadres to go was Antipov, who (presumably having been the token non-death sentence in one of the earlier mass killings) was liquidated in Stalin’s elimination during the first German advance of all former such cadres remaining. Stalin’s victory on the political front had been complete. Now, in the disaster arising from his own miscalculation, no move to replace him was possible. Subjected to this very severe test, the Purge proved to have accomplished its object.
BOOK III
