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One Party organization had remained not indeed exempt from purging, but only carrying out such purging as benefited its own leader—that of Georgia under Beria. It seems very out of character for Yezhov not to have attempted the destruction of the leading cadres in Tbilisi, and there are indeed reports that he was maneuvering to do this in 1938.²⁴ It is said that Beria was to be arrested,²⁵ but successfully appealed, being supported by Molotov and others.²⁶

Beria’s appointment on about 20 July 1938 to be Deputy Head of the NKVD can only be interpreted as the beginning of Yezhov’s decline. It was a post that had previously been held by men like M. Berman and Agranov—that is, not one suitable for an important Party figure. In fact, Beria was clearly being prepared as a possible successor. He moved into the dacha just vacated by Chubar.²⁷

There is a report that Yezhov and Kaganovich had clashed, not on any question of the desirability of the Great Purge, but on a more direct issue of power. Kaganovich himself supervised the purging of his Commissariats and other organs under his own control, but resented NKVD intrusion except for the technical purposes of arrest, shooting, and so on. According to one account, Yezhov began to implicate Kaganovich himself, and had already forced Bondarenko, Head of the Kharkov Tractor Works, to make statements compromising him.²⁸

On one view, the immediate reason why Stalin listened to the voices being raised against Yezhov is that he had failed to set up further public trials, in particular that of the Rightist “reserve center,” plus a second Military Trial.²⁹

It is quite conceivable that Yezhov had been charged with setting up a fourth great trial, and had failed in the assignment. If this were so, the coincidence of Beria’s appointment and the immediately following secret trial or trials would signify the winding up of an unsatisfactory project by the new management.

But Stalin had for some time been shooting prominent Central Committee members without such formality, and it is difficult to see what further benefits he could now gain from another public trial. Every possible lesson had been rubbed in in the Bukharin Trial. As far as a second Military Trial was concerned, the first had not taken place in public, and the second could have been announced in precisely the same way. Indeed, the mere fact that the new batch of military conspirators was dispatched without public announcement seems to show that Stalin no longer felt the need for such.

Whatever plans Stalin may have had for the future, it was, anyhow, at this point that he abandoned public trials of oppositionists. None of the figures still under arrest was brought before public courts, though almost all seem to have had confessions tortured out of them and to have been brought before these twenty-minute sessions of the Military Collegium.

It seems to have been difficult to extract reliable and durable confessions from the new Stalinist prisoners. Rudzutak (and Eikhe after him) would not repeat before the secret courts which eventually tried them the confessions they had made under torture. This had been true of a number of those who had fallen in the earlier phase of the Purge, but there had been an adequate residuum of confessors. None of the new victims, though, had anything whatever to reproach themselves for from the point of view of having collaborated in any of the oppositions, and could hardly be asked to “disarm.” This had been true only of one or two second-rank prisoners in the Bukharin Trial.

Some of the difficulty may have resided in the fact that those in this middle generation were still rather more than personal nominees or members of Stalin’s extremist entourage. They were still men following their political convictions, attached to Stalin as a leader, but not committed to the idea of his leadership as a matter of ideological dogma. Unlike the men Stalin had assembled from the earlier generation, and against many of whom he was able to exert something like blackmail, almost all the younger cadres were secure in the consciousness of their general and political innocence (if not from our point of view, at least from their own).

Through the autumn, the NKVD Commissar continued to appear with his old prominence; in fact, he was often named higher than his official standing in the Politburo—sometimes before Mikoyan, Andreyev, and Zhdanov.

And he continued his policies. The Purge had grown in size, until finally it had reached such monstrous proportions that even Stalin seems to have seen that the time had come to ease off. This was a matter of major policy: the midsummer changes were perhaps no more than the first moves towards an alternative, based more on particular failures than on the realization that a dead end was being reached in the entire Terror.

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