The Greatest Battle

by Andrew Nagorski

  All of which meant that the interrogators and torturers had plenty of material to work with when it was time to concoct their cases against the military brass, signaling the start of a wholesale purge of the armed forces. Recognizing that his initial assurance that the military was already cleansed had failed to slow the build-up to the next wave of terror, Voroshilov abruptly changed his message. He pledged to the Central Committee that he would unveil a sinister plot that “will make even your steel-hard hearts shake.” The writing was on the wall, and it would only take a short time for the bloodletting to start.

  In June, the “plot” was revealed. Marshal Mikhail Tukhachevsky, the aristocrat turned Red Army commander who was widely admired at home and abroad, headed the first list of eight culprits. In the 1920s, he had presided over the transformation of the Red Army, which was still very much a product of the Bolshevik Revolution and the Civil War, into a modern fighting force. But he wasn’t one to hide his opinions, and he had found himself at odds with Stalin on more than one occasion. In 1936, for instance, he had predicted that Germany might attack without warning and that the result would be a long, costly conflict. “What are you trying to do—frighten Soviet authority?” Stalin had responded angrily.

  Tukhachevsky and the other top army officers were put on trial on June 11, 1937. A ninth “conspirator,” Yan Gamarnik, the First Deputy Commissar for Defense, managed to commit suicide before the NKVD was able to seize him. By then, no one could have been under many illusions about the methods to be used to extract confessions. When Tukhachevsky’s statements were sent to Stalin to edit, the bloodstains were clearly visible on the documents. Another legendary Soviet general, Vasily Blyukher, who was arrested in October 1938, was so badly tortured because of his refusal to confess that his wife, who was also imprisoned, recalled that he looked “as if he had been driven over by a tank.” His tormenters continued to beat him, and blood flowed from one eye. “Stalin, do you hear how they’re beating me?” he’d shout. He finally died from the unrelenting torture.

  But for Tukhachevsky and the first group, nothing less than a quick trial and formal executions would do. The charge was treason. Shortly before the show trial, Stalin declared, “There was without a doubt a political-military plot against the Soviet regime, which was stimulated and financed by German fascists.” As evidence, he noted that several of the accused had gone to Germany and met with their military counterparts there. The Soviet leader conveniently omitted any mention of the fact that they were traveling under official auspices during the period when the two countries were committed to a policy of military cooperation. He also never acknowledged that it was Tukhachevsky who had warned of the dangers of a German attack. “Spies, spies!” he insisted.

  According to several Western accounts, Stalin may have not invented the charges on his own. The Germans reportedly leaked disinformation about plans for a military coup within the Soviet military to Czechoslovakia’s President Edvard Beneš, who in turn passed them on to the Kremlin. No documents have surfaced to confirm this version of events, which makes some Russian historians doubtful of its accuracy. In any case, Stalin and his henchmen were fully capable of concocting their own phony evidence, and whether or not the Germans were involved, they were going to “prove” their case no matter what. Of course, that meant they’d mete out their version of justice. As Ivan Belov, one of the judges at the trial wrote, “When I saw the scoundrels in the courtroom, I was shivering. A beast was in me. I didn’t want to judge them, but beat and beat them in a wild frenzy.”

  All the defendants had been beaten already, and some were promised leniency if they confessed, or at least leniency for their families. This was commonplace during the Great Terror, as was the casual way in which the authorities forgot those promises once they had extracted the confessions, implicating an ever-growing circle of future victims. But whether they confessed or not, the outcome was the same. Mercy was out of the question. When one of the defendants, General Jonah Yakir, sent in a particularly emotional appeal, Stalin wrote on it, “Swine and prostitute.” Voroshilov dutifully added, “A perfectly precise definition,” and Politburo member Lazar Kaganovich chimed in, “For a bastard, scum, and whore there is only one punishment—the death penalty.” Tukhachevsky—who had tried to argue his innocence in the kangaroo court—and all the others were convicted on June 11. Stalin promptly authorized the death penalty. All eight were shot on June 12.

  For the families of the victims, the ordeal was often just beginning. As British historian Robert Conquest notes, “wives of enemies of the people” was a penal category in Stalin’s Soviet Union. Compared to others in that category—fifteen of whom were shot on August 28, 1938—Nina Tukhachevskaya and several other widows of the officers in that first trial got off relatively lightly at first. They were sentenced to eight years’ imprisonment. But at the height of the battle for Moscow, in October 1941, the authorities changed their mind. Just as in the case of the pilots Rychagov and Smushkevich, who were executed at about the same time, it suddenly became a matter of urgency to finish them off, no matter that the capital looked as though it was ready to succumb to the German invaders at that very moment. The authorities hastily retried those widows and shot them as well.

  The trial of Tukhachevsky and the others in June 1937 was a signal for the Great Terror to sweep through the armed forces with devastating results. On November 29, 1938, Voroshilov reported, “The purge was drastic and thorough. We purged everyone that it was necessary to purge, starting with the high positions and finishing with the low ones.” He concluded that this accounted for the “impressive” final tally: the Red Army had been “cleansed of more than 40,000 men.”

  The impact is hard to exaggerate. Konstantin Rokossovsky, who was imprisoned for two years but managed to survive and even emerge as one of the top generals during the war, commented, “This is worse than when artillery fires on its own troops.” The purges hit senior officers the hardest, including three of the five marshals, thirteen of the fifteen army commanders, eight of the nine fleet admirals and admirals grade 1, fifty of the fifty-seven corps commanders, 154 of the 186 divisional commanders, and so on down the chain of the command.

  Although about thirteen thousand of the purged officers were reinstated between 1939 and 1941, Khrushchev argued that the toll of executions, arrests, and irreversible dismissals was one of the key reasons why the Soviet military was so poorly prepared to face the Germans in 1941. “So many were executed that the high command as well as middle and lower echelons were devastated,” he wrote. “As a result our army was deprived of the cadres who had gained experience in the civil war, and we faced a new enemy unprepared.”

  According to Stepan Mikoyan, his father, Anastas Mikoyan, agreed with that assessment—although, like Khrushchev, he never dared suggest that anything was wrong with these policies when he served Stalin. “I have repeatedly heard from my father that the loss of the experienced, well-educated and thinking commanders on the eve of the war, especially in its first days and weeks, produced the single most damaging effect on both the preparation for repelling Hitler’s attack and the course of the war itself,” Stepan recalled.

  As a result of the purges, junior officers were quickly promoted, often solely on the basis of their political reliability. In countless cases, men with extremely limited military skills replaced seasoned veterans who were purged. These events didn’t pass unnoticed. The Germans watched the bloodletting inside the Red Army with morbid fascination, concluding that this could only be “disastrous” for their future enemy. It was almost as if Stalin were trying to help Hitler. In his classic biography of Stalin, General Volkogonov, who served as propaganda chief of the Red Army, argued that the purges “forged the defeats of 1941 which were to bring millions of new victims.” This was no overstatement.

  Another early Stalin biographer, Isaac Deutscher, offered a radically different perspective on Stalin’s military purges. “Let us imagine for a moment that the leaders of the oppo
sition lived to witness the terrible defeats of the Red Army in 1941 and 1942, to see Hitler at the gates of Moscow, millions of Russian soldiers in captivity, a dangerous crisis in the morale of people such as had developed by the autumn of 1941, when the whole future of the Soviets hung by a thread and Stalin’s moral authority was at its nadir,” he wrote. “It is possible that they would have then attempted to overthrow Stalin. Stalin was determined not to allow things to come to this.” This sounds like an appalling apologia. It seems to take for granted that there was at least a latent opposition in the army, not just tortured, terrified officers who were forced to confess to nonexistent crimes and traitorous plans.

  But then Deutscher banished any suggestion that there might have been some truth to Stalin’s charges against his victims. “Among all the documents of the Nuremberg trial of the Nazi leaders not a single one contains as much as a hint at the alleged Nazi fifth column in the Soviet government and army,” he added, somewhat curiously, in a footnote. “Could there be a more eloquent refutation of the purge trials than that amazing gap in the otherwise abundant evidence of Hitler’s preparations for the war?”

  Deutscher also failed to ask the logical question that flows from his earlier speculation about how Tukhachevsky and the legions of murdered commanders would have reacted to the setbacks of 1941 and 1942. If they had survived and the purges hadn’t happened, would those defeats have been anywhere near as devastating as they proved to be? Judging by the reflections of Rokossovsky, Khrushchev, Mikoyan, and so many others from that era, there’s little doubt that the Red Army would have been a more effective force under those circumstances—even if, in all probability, it still would have been fighting a desperate battle for survival. But at least it would have been a battle for survival against the Germans, without the additional burden of the battle for survival in the face of the unremitting terror from within.

  Wherever and whenever Stalin extended his power, terror followed against the civilian population as well. Once the Soviet Union invaded Poland from the east, dividing up the battered country with the Germans as spelled out in the Nazi-Soviet pact, both the German and Soviet occupiers launched terror campaigns against the local population in their respective occupied territories. In what had been eastern Poland, the Soviet authorities quickly organized special trains to deport an estimated two million of their new subjects between September 1939 and June 22, 1941. Hundreds of thousands died either in the horrific train convoys or at the remote destinations in the camps of northern Russia, Siberia, and Kazakhstan or in exile in regions where many froze or starved to death.

  “At a time when the Germans were still refining their preparations for Auschwitz and Treblinka, the Soviets could accommodate a few million Polish and Western Ukrainian additions to the population of their ‘Gulag archipelago’ with relative ease,” noted British historian Norman Davies. According to a saying that the Poles attributed to the Russians during that time, the occupiers divided the Polish population under their control among “those who were in prison, those who are in prison, and those who will be in prison.”

  And then there were the mass executions. Stalin was determined to wipe out those Poles who might one day still try to resist the subjugation of their country by the Soviet Union. In March 1940, the Kremlin decreed the “supreme punishment—execution by shooting” of 14,736 Polish army officers and officials, along with an additional 10,685 Poles held by the NKVD. The bodies of about four thousand Polish officers, each with a bullet hole in the head, were discovered by the Germans in the Katyn forest near Smolensk in 1943. Right up to the collapse of the Soviet Union, the Soviet authorities claimed that the Germans were trying to pin the blame for a German atrocity on the Kremlin. But even then, it was clear that the timing of the massacre, as evidenced by the belongings of the victims, could lead to only one conclusion: this was a Soviet massacre. In a goodwill gesture to Poland in 1992, Russian President Boris Yeltsin finally released the order from the Politburo that officially confirmed that grim fact.

  In the Baltic states, where the Soviets took longer to establish full control, there was a similar preoccupation with targeting anyone who was classified as a potential enemy of the people. Along with such measures as the nationalization of commercial enterprises and the banning of books and other literature deemed as anti-Soviet or nationalist, the arrests began in earnest in Lithuania on the eve of the first elections under Soviet control. Two thousand people were rounded up on the night of July 11 to 12, 1940, and the arrests continued at the rate of two to three hundred a month until the end of the year.

  If any further evidence was needed to demonstrate how preoccupied the Soviet authorities were with repression even as they were receiving daily signals from all over that Germany was preparing its invasion, the timing of the mass deportations from the Baltic states certainly provided it. As early as November 28, 1940, Lithuanian Interior Minister Aleksandras Guzevičius issued a list of no less than fourteen categories of people targeted for deportation. They included members of “leftist” and “nationalist” anti-Soviet parties, veterans of the tsarist or White armies, officers of the Lithuanian and Polish armies, “all political émigrés and unstable elements,” Red Cross officials, clergymen, former noblemen, and merchants, among others. In effect, this amounted to a carte blanche to deport just about anyone. But it wasn’t until the night of June 13 to 14, 1941, just one week before the Germans launched Operation Barbarossa, that the authorities undertook their major action.

  While there are differing estimates of the numbers involved, approximately sixty thousand Estonians, thirty-five thousand Latvians, and thirty-four thousand Lithuanians were deported by the Soviet occupiers before the Germans struck, with by far the largest contingents rounded up and sent east in railroad boxcars on that horrific night in June and during the following few days. For such tiny states, those were staggering figures: in Estonia’s case about 4 percent of its population, and for Lithuania and Latvia about 1.5 to 2 percent. If Stalin thought that he was ensuring loyalty by such draconian measures, he was, of course, mistaken. Little wonder that many Balts, like many Ukrainians, were initially convinced that the German invaders were liberating them from Stalin’s reign of terror.

  When the Germans attacked, the first instinct of the NKVD and its bosses was to accelerate its work in the occupied regions of Poland and the Baltic states that were about to change hands again. In the Stalinist mental scheme, all the “anti-Soviet” political prisoners who were still in custody in the border areas couldn’t simply be abandoned. They had to be eliminated. Even if it meant assigning troops to this gruesome task rather than sending them to fight the Germans, this was considered perfectly logical. In Lvov—or Lwòw, as it was known when it was part of Poland until 1939—the NKVD began executing prisoners right on June 22. A Ukrainian uprising briefly forced the NKVD to retreat, but it returned to slaughter the remaining prisoners in their cells. By the time the Soviet troops began to flee, they had killed about four thousand prisoners, leaving their machine-gunned bodies behind in thinly disguised mass graves.

  The NKVD and Red Army troops engaged in similar killing sprees in other Polish and Baltic towns, shooting thousands more prisoners wherever they were held. In the end, some prisoners were abandoned or managed to escape, since the panicked Soviet executioners couldn’t take care of them all. Further back from the border, though, other prisoners of the Gulag were subjected to forced evacuations eastward, usually on foot, because railroad transport was only rarely available. Some of the resulting scenes foreshadowed the death marches from the Nazi concentration camps at the end of the war when the German front was collapsing. “Those who can walk will walk,” one Soviet guard told his prisoners. “Protest or not—all will walk. Those who can’t walk we will shoot. We will leave no one for the Germans.”

  As the Germans continued their drive east beyond the border areas into Russian territory, the Kremlin’s policy toward prisoners remained unchanged. NKVD chief Beria, whom Stalin call
ed “our Himmler,” issued order after order, with the full backing of his boss, to shoot prisoners in Russian cities such as Orel, where 154 were executed before the city fell to the Germans in early October. Even as the road to Moscow looked wide open, the rulers there continued to devote their attention to ordering more such executions.

  Looking at such actions from the perspective of more than six decades later, Viktor Chernyavsky, who served in the NKVD during that period, still found it difficult to understand why these killings should be seen as troubling. “It was a practicality of life,” he explained, referring to the execution of prisoners. “The situation on the front was terrible. Imagine: they had to think how to transport the prisoners and all that stuff. They would call Beria and ask his advice about what to do. The Germans were next door and it was dangerous, so the answer was to liquidate them. Thus, it was a practicality of life. Prisoners were a burden.”

  Even that twisted logic didn’t apply in some cases. The authorities managed to evacuate about three thousand prisoners from Moscow’s Butyrka prison to Kuibyshev, the city on the Volga where evacuees from the imperiled capital were supposed to regroup. But in the midst of all this, they took the time to execute 138 of the most prominent prisoners. In all, according to a recent Russian study, 42,776 prisoners were “lost for various reasons” during the German advance and hectic Soviet retreat and evacuation of towns they could not hold. Many were executed before they ever left their prisons or camps, while others died or were shot during the forced marches.