Page:The Crimes of the Stalin Era (Khrushchev, tr. Nicolaevsky).djvu/4

 In addition, Russian livestock, destroyed by starving peasants, suffered a setback from which, according to Khrushchev, the nation has not yet recovered.

The violence and brutality of what Stalin (and Khrushchev) called "the era of socialist construction" soon repelled many Communist party members previously loyal to Stalin, and by 1934 the dictator no longer had a majority in his own party. Stalin, however, succeeded in having the opposition leader, Sergei Kirov, murdered and thereupon crushed resistance in the Party by mass terror. The Great Purges of 1936–38, known popularly as the Yezhovshchina (after NKVD chief Nikolai Yezhov who conducted them), wiped out an entire generation of Communist leaders. Public trials of such Old Bolsheviks as Kamenev, Zinoviev, Bukharin and Rykov were marked by astounding "confessions" of dastardly crimes; behind the scenes, thousands refused to yield to torture and met their deaths in silence. Khrushchev here tells of several who perished with defiance on their lips. Not only Lenin's old comrades in exile and underground fell; so did hundreds of the very leaders who had championed Stalin in the struggles of the Twenties. In the Ukraine, for example, the purge claimed such Stalinist stalwarts as Vlas Chubar, Chairman of the Ukrainian Council of Ministers for a decade, and Pavel Postyshev and Stanislav Kossior, the Ukrainian Party Secretaries through most of the 1930s. Khrushchev succeeded Kossior.

The Communist leaders who emerged from the Yezhovshchina unscathed were those who had stood by Stalin throughout the bloodbath. Among them were Andrei Zhdanov and Khrushchev, the only two Party Secretaries to profit from the purge; Georgi Malenkov, Yezhov's chief aid; Nikolai Bulganin, who took over the Red Army after Stalin had purged it of its best officers; and Lazar Kaganovich, who had rewritten the Party statutes to expedite Stalin's purge of the Party majority.

During and after World War II, Zhdanov and Malenkov vied for the role of Stalin's second-in-command. Zhdanov's death in 1948 led to the purge of several of his supporters, including the chief state planner, Nikolai Voznesensky. This purge, known in Russia today as "the Leningrad case," boosted the cause of Malenkov and of MVD chief Lavrenti Beria, who had succeeded Yezhov in 1938. But at the end of 1952 came the affair of the "doctors' plot," which not only shocked the world with its vicious anti-Semitism but seemed clearly aimed at Beria. Several of the latter's associates in the satellite states, notably Czechoslovakia's Rudolf Slansky, had already been executed when Stalin suddenly had a stroke and died on March 5, 1953. Malenkov, Beria and Vyacheslav Molotov were the chief speakers at his funeral.

Amid feverish imprecations against "panic" in the ranks, the new regime took over, with Malenkov as Premier, Khrushchev succeeding him within a month as Party Secretary, and Beria seemingly in the saddle. The latter repudiated the doctors' affair, let the world in on the tortures used to extract S4