Mass repressions grew tremendously from the end of 1936 after a telegram from Stalin and [Andrei] Zhdanov, dated from Sochi on September 25, 1936, was addressed to Kaganovich, Molotov and other members of the Political Bureau. The content of the telegram was as follows:
"We deem it absolutely necessary and urgent that Comrade Yezhov be nominated to the post of People's Commissar for Internal Affairs. Yagoda has definitely proved himself to be incapable of unmasking the Trotskyite-Zinovievite bloc. The OGPU is four years behind in this matter. This is noted by all party workers and by the majority of the representatives of the NKVD.[1]"
Strictly speaking, we should stress that Stalin did not meet with and, therefore, could not know the opinion of party workers.
This Stalinist formulation that the "NKVD is four years behind" in applying mass repression and that there is a necessity for "catching up" with the neglected work directly pushed the NKVD workers on the path of mass arrests and executions.
We should state that this formulation was also forced on the February–March plenary session of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks) in 1937. The plenary resolution approved it on the basis of Yezhov's report, "Lessons flowing from the harmful activity, diversion and espionage of the Japanese-German-Trotskyite agents," stating:
"The plenum of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks) considers that all facts revealed during the investigation into the matter of an anti-Soviet Trotskyite center and of its followers in the provinces show that the People's Commissariat of Internal Affairs has
- ↑ This telegram is an exceptionally important document, showing that Stalin felt that mass repressions within the Communist party were four years overdue—that is, they should have begun in 1932, when Stalin first demanded execution of members of the opposition group headed by Ryutin, Gorelov and others but was defeated both in the Politburo and at the Central Committee plenum which met from September 28 to October 2, 1932. On Stalin's demand, Henry Yagoda was removed from the post of People's Commissar for Internal Affairs and. on September 26, 1936, replaced by Nikolai I. Yezhov.
chief of the Leningrad NKVD, his assistants I. F. Zaporozhets and F. T. Fomin, and a number of other NKVD functionaries. It found them guilty in that, "possessing information about the projected attempt on Comrade S. M. Kirov, they displayed not only a careless attitude but criminal negligence toward the main requirements of state security, not taking the necessary measures of protection." The defendants all received 2–3 years in a concentration camp (except for one, M. K. Baltsevich, who received ten years inasmuch as his official duties related directly to cases involving terrorism). Sent to Kolyma, they all obtained high posts in the administration of the camps, hut in 1937 all except Zaporozhets were brought back to Leningrad and shot. Zaporozhets, who headed the road-building section at Kolyma, passed through the Yezhov period unscathed.
