Obsessed with plots and plans to assassinate him, the communist dictator, in 1936, started the infamous “purges”. With the excuse of betrayals, over 300 thousand “comrades” were massacred.
“These rabid dogs must be shot.” The public accuser Andrei Vyshinsky he did not bother to use appropriate language to take on a more institutional role and, in the hall of the Trade Union Palace in Moscow (22 August 1936) to the judges of the “trial of the 16”, he presented requests for conviction that seemed like orders. “I demand that every trace of these bastards be erased.”
The “bastards” he referred to were not part of the ranks of enemies of the people which, according to Soviet ideology, included landowners and landowners, nobles, reactionaries or, in any case, anti-communists. At the bar, she was dragged there old guard of the Communist Party who had enjoyed the personal friendship of Vladimir Lenin and which – at the outbreak of the October Revolution (1917) – had been the first to mobilize and the most resolute to lead the revolt.
The purge of the fathers of the Revolution
The red dictatorship – after having massacred opponents and alleged opponents – was devouring itself. It took place with the generic accusation of “revisionism”, with the aim of replacing an entire ruling class. The evidence was non-existent, witnesses were bribed, confessions were violently extorted. The merits acquired in the field didn’t even count. Among the accused were Grigory Zinonev And Lev Kamenev who, in the Bolshevik nomenclature, had occupied important roles. One had been entrusted with the post of head of the Comintern and the other with the presidency of the Politburo. Both, upon Lenin’s death, when indicating the name of his successor, expressed their opinion Joseph Stalin proving decisive for his success, to the detriment of Leon Trotsky who, on the eve of the plenum, seemed the favourite. However, both of them, despite demonstrating that they appreciated the new master of the USSR, did not hold back from expressing themselves negatively regarding some decisions and this was enough for them to be marginalized and “downgraded” to the role of rector of the Karza University (Zinonev) and director of the Gorky Institute of Literature (Kamenev). No feeling of gratitude which, perhaps, would have been a duty.
The death sentences in this trial were referred to as the result of the first in a series of subsequent “purges”. which – historians’ accounts in hand – meant 340 thousand capital executions.
The truth is that Stalin saw plots even in the depths of a normal discussion and, to get rid of those who shadowed him, he could resort to any meanness. In practicing revenge he was truly steely, as his name suggested. For the rest, he had to deal with the frailties of every mortal.
The imperfect body and the youth of violence
His left foot looked webbed due to the toes that had fused together. One arm was shorter than the other because it had been trampled by a horse. And, in another accident, he ended up with his legs under the wheels of a cart which left him limping. For this reason, at the military visit, he was rejected as “unfit for arms”.
He never escaped the beatings of his alcoholic father who, when he came home drunk, did not hold back either violence or abuse. And if he didn’t beat him, his mother and the seminary professors beat him because he only studied what he liked and was undisciplined in everything else. As a boy, his family called him Soso – with a hint of compassion – to highlight an uncertainty in pronouncing the zeta. At school, they started calling him Koba, which was that of an outlaw from the Caucasus.
He did not lack the stimulus of adventure. He joined the Revolutionary Socialist Party and, in the files of the authorities where he already appeared due to his concerns as a teenager, he fully ended up as a public danger to be tamed. Then: confinement in Siberia, a daring escape and the radical instincts of the political agitator. His time on the run made him suspicious. He looked out for everyone and everyone represented a danger. «He was the very symbol of distrust», the words of one of his youth companions, Semen Vereshchak“even judging him benevolently, one could only define him as the embodiment of subterfuge and falsehood.”
The shadow of the Kremlin on the Kirov crime
The trial of August 1936 had a precedent with the assassination of Sergei Kirov who – according to an anti-Stalinist thesis – had made the mistake of having been elected to the Central Committee with an almost plebiscitarian vote, to the point of overshadowing Stalin himself. Leonid Mikolaiev, a young boy (to whom they attributed Trotskyist militancy), killed him with revolvers but historians, from the beginning, accredited the suspicion that the order had come directly from Kremlin. Too many inconsistencies. The crime took place in Leningrad, in a corridor of the Smolny Palace which housed the offices of the Communist Party. At that moment (exceptionally) there was no one either among the bodyguards or among the security guards, so much so that the murderer was able to act undisturbed. Possible?
The next day, the head of the guard – Mikhail Borisov – died from injuries sustained in a car accident. The men who were in the car with him emerged unharmed from the collision. And all the other security guards were “punished” for their negligence with a promotion in the field. They were assigned to the directors of fairly peripheral institutes so as not to be recognized. Kirov’s assassination provided the pretext to hatch the plots of a plot defined as Trotskyist and to get rid of the old communist guard and get rid of characters defined as “useless”. These were not dangerous people – of course – none of the accused were plotting plots against the leadership. But, in the Soviet Union of the 1930s, Stalin had assumed the role of despot. His sovereignty was a dominion which, at times, he exercised with fury. Any dissent was considered an intolerable outrage to the point that an inappropriate look or applause that appeared not to be enthusiastically convinced could be enough to end up on the unwelcome lists (and therefore to be eliminated). A regime sewn with the thread of fear.
The transition from friend to ex-friend and – from there – to adversary to be buried could have been rapid. After some time, the same collaborators had the opportunity to confess that an invitation to dinner from Stalin could end with a handshake or handcuffs on the wrists.
The judicial farce and the Lubianka lead
These new “homemade” enemies were executed under the guise of applying the law. The Soviet apparatus was able to organize a trial during which the defendants confessed their betrayal of the communist cause and declared themselves deserving of death. Needless to say: the admissions had been extorted or with physical torment capable of breaking any resistance or with psychological torturethreatening retaliation against family members. Therefore, the trial could be resolved in a few hours. And once the sentence was pronounced, the defendants became corpses in the same corridors of the Lubianka.
Thus in the “trial of the 16”. On trial, each claimed to have started a plot to replace Stalin and, if necessary, kill him.
The first confessions came from two agent provocateurs – Valentin Olberg And Konon Berman-Yurin – who, by order of the secret services, lent themselves to playing a double game by presenting themselves in the role of repentant conspirators.
The others followed by admitting what they had been accused of. Someone had exchanged the refusal to defend himself for the promise not to be shot. Someone else worried about safeguarding his wife and children. Useless. Once the sentence was pronounced, when the clocks showed midday on August 25 (1936), the two spies were shot dead with a revolver in the head in order to get rid of inconvenient witnesses. For the other 14 they prepared a firing squad, so much so that, when it was time to sit down at the table for dinner, Stalin received the reassuring message according to which the provisions had been followed “in full and without inconvenience”.
Almost everything, in fact. Because, to eliminate the family members of the accused (who had taken on non-existent guilt to protect them) another couple of months and some greater subterfuge were needed.
