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Sleep Well. One after the other the Old Bolshevik leaders confessed and were led away to be shot. The purge reached its peak in 1937 when the Soviet's leading generals were secretly tried, and together with thousands of Red army officers, including all but twelve members of the general staff, were shot. But the trials were only a fraction of the picture. The GPU reached out into every small town and village, arresting minor party members, doctors, engineers, professional men & women, beating them into confessions of sabotage and treachery. In 1938 Stalin called a halt, ordered a purge of the purgers. Henry Yagoda. GPU boss, was tried and shot and so were most of his operatives.
When it was all over, perhaps 7,000,000 people had disappeared, either into the GPU mass burial pits or into the vast slave camps of Siberia. But Stalin could rest: he had destroyed many innocent people, but with the good grain he had also burned the chaff of the old Bolshevik Party, the chief challenge to his power. He himself slept well. The new generation of party members, which he set about recruiting and educating, were functionaries, meek & mild bureaucrats, with a mortal fear in their bowels.
He chose doers, despising the contemplative and the idealistic—the kind who in other nations joined the party in the credulous '30s. Stalin was an administrative genius—with the advantage of being able to concede his errors and bury his mistakes. It took skill to pick devoted men, to enlist their talents while subduing their ambitions, to reward or discard, flatter or blackmail, soothe or scourge, at the necessary moment. Stalin governed by a cunning balancing of tensions, and was himself aloof and unhurried.
There was just one Old Bolshevik left: Stalin sent out his new operatives after him. Halfway round the world, a young Spanish Communist named Mercader, alias Monar (with an assist from the New York Communist Party), found Trotsky in Mexico City and killed him with an alpenstock.
The Ideology. Stalin learned something from the purges: the power that ideas have over men's minds. Since the death of Lenin he had repeated, to the point of nausea, the old Leninist slogans. Now he began to develop the myth of Leninist-Stalinist infallibility. Every Soviet writer, poet, musician and painter was expected to devote his energies to enlarging the myth by incessant repetition. The highest peak in Russia was named for him, as were at least 15 towns, innumerable factories and streets. Copies of his collected works were printed in scores of millions. A new metal was called Stalinite, an orchid was named Stalinchid. Children stood before their desks every morning saying: "Thank Comrade Stalin for this happy life."
The Stalin myth was in working order just in time for the Soviet Pact with Hitler in 1939, and it survived even that cynical deal. The great Stalin myth did not prevent the German army from sweeping through western Russia less than two years later. In the space of four months it had reached the outskirts of Moscow and Leningrad: a feat made possible, in part, by the defection of hundreds of Stalin-hating Russian generals and the surrender of 4,000,000 peasant soldiers. But other millions of Russian soldiers held out, and so did Stalin's luck: General Winter stepped in, as he had 130 years before, when Napoleon was in Moscow.