Lenin, Stalin, and Hitler

by Robert Gellately

  SOCIALLY DANGEROUS AND SOCIALLY HARMFUL ELEMENTS

  In early 1933 Stalin had signaled a new wave of terror against the “last remnants of the moribund classes—the private manufacturers and their servitors, the private traders and their henchmen, the former nobles and priests, the kulaks and kulak agents, the former White guard officers and police officials, policemen and gendarmes, all sorts of bourgeois intellectuals of a chauvinist type, and all other anti-Soviet elements—have been thrown out of their groove.”

  The Five-Year Plan, said Stalin, allowed these has-beens to worm “their way into our plants and factories, into our government offices and trading organizations, into our railway and water transport enterprises, and, principally, into the collective farms and state farms. They have crept into these places and taken cover there, donning the mask of ‘workers’ and ‘peasants,’ and some of them have even managed to worm their way into the Party.”

  He called for extreme vigilance. The full measure of revolutionary law had to be used “against thieves and wreckers in the public economy, against hooligans and pilferers of public property…. A strong and powerful dictatorship of the proletariat—that is what is now needed, to disperse the last vestiges of the dying classes and to frustrate their thievery.”6

  This mandate led the secret police to sweep through markets, train stations, and poorer parts of cities. In Moscow between January and August 1933, 65,904 were denied passports and driven out. In Leningrad for the same period the number was 79,261. Once word spread, as many or more left these cities of their own accord and in desperation. Yagoda urged police to “clean up” the cities, and hundreds of thousands were expelled. On April 28, 1933, the passport decree was extended to all urban and semi-urban areas, which caught still more in the dragnet. The fate of the expellees varied, but being forced to leave the city turned into a death sentence for tens of thousands.7

  On August 13, Yagoda issued guidelines for “nonjudicial repression” of passport violators, by which special troikas reviewed cases and passed sentences on the lishentsy, the kulaks, those deemed not gainfully employed, and “criminals and other antisocial elements.” The first three types were transported to penal resettlement colonies, while the last group was sent to a work camp for a minimum of three years, sentences given to all repeat offenders. In 1933 the OGPU troikas dealt with 24,369 cases and “convicted” around 7,000.8

  The police were concerned about “socially dangerous elements,” loosely defined as having “two or more past sentences,” as well as anyone with four arrests on suspicion of crimes against property or individuals. Included here were those with records of “hooliganism,” pimping, and other such activities. The secret police prosecuted them all outside the jurisdiction of the courts, as they had done in more limited fashion during the 1920s.9

  By the early 1930s the concept of “socially dangerous elements” had partly been overtaken by “socially harmful elements” (sotsial’no-vrednye elementy). It became a catchall for repeat offenders, and police wanted to use their own authority to quarantine them.10

  Such an approach hit innocent people like the mother of Stepan Podlubny, who was attending an institute of higher learning in Moscow. She was whisked away because her papers were not in order. They had lived since 1931 in Moscow, where she had a respectable position and he was in the Komsomol, but there were kulak connections in their past.

  By the time Stepan found her, she had been sentenced to eight years by an NKVD troika for “concealing her social origins” and branded a “socially dangerous element.” She was sent to a concentration camp in the Urals. Although Stepan was allowed to continue his studies, the stigma was now on his record, and he lost his state funding. The damage caused by his origins could never be entirely undone.11

  A Central Committee directive of May 9, 1935 (order No. 00192), defined “harmful elements” as people with previous convictions and “continuing ties” to the criminal world. Those without a regular job were also singled out, as were “professional” beggars. People who offended the passport laws in some way, and even children (over twelve) “caught in a criminal act,” were all covered by the broad concept of “socially harmful elements.” By the end of 1935, the police netted at least 266,000 such “elements.”12

  The Politburo sought to cure the problem of juvenile delinquency and homelessness and on April 7, 1935, decreed that “the full force of the law” should be used against young offenders. Whereas the older penal code did not permit executing anyone under twelve, the government announced a few days later that the death penalty could be used even against even younger adolescents. A new series of “work colonies” was established for minors. The scope of what happened can be gathered from the fact that between 1935 and 1939, more than 155,000 minors were sent to these colonies. As of April 1, 1939, more than 10,000 children were confined in the Gulag.13

  “ANTI-SOVIET ELEMENTS”

  Stalin personally inaugurated an escalation of repression on July 3, 1937, with a note to Yezhov dealing with what he called “anti-Soviet elements.” He stated it “had been observed that a large number of former kulaks and criminals” who had been deported were beginning to return and were engaging in “sabotage.” They were undermining the collective farms, transportation system, and industry. On Stalin’s orders, “the most hostile” were to be “arrested and executed” by a troika and the less dangerous deported.

  On July 30, 1937, Yezhov issued order No. 00447 concerning “anti-Soviet elements,” which included more groups than those mentioned by Stalin. “Investigative materials” supposedly revealed nine different groups; topping the list were the former kulaks, followed by “socially dangerous elements,” namely former Whites, gendarmes, bureaucrats, bandits, gang abettors, and political opponents.

  Order No. 00447 spelled out in advance—as Stalin had instructed—the two categories of “elements” that were to be found. These were then broken down into separate groups, “the most active” and the “less active but nonetheless hostile.” All those in the first category were to be executed, after what was called “consideration of their case” by a troika. Those in the second category were subject to arrest and confinement in a prison or concentration camp “for a term ranging from eight to ten years.”

  The order set a quota for both types across the country. For example, the Leningrad region was given a quota of four thousand category-one persons (to be executed) and ten thousand category-two (to be arrested and confined for years in a concentration camp). The Moscow region had five thousand in category one and thirty thousand in category two. Even the smallest districts were given quotas.14

  The order also determined for execution a quota of ten thousand already in the camps, a figure soon raised. At Solovki, for example, the initial quota was twelve hundred, but from October 1937 to February 1938 eighteen hundred were executed.15

  These campaigns made no effort to “terrorize” individuals into changing their minds or behavior. There was no discourse with the offenders, no attempt to win them over, for they were deemed beyond redemption.

  There was also no point to the old fiction that work might “liberate” them. They were given nothing more than a shot in the back of the head. Most were chosen by quota as members of mythical collectivities.

  Far from being forced into this by Stalin or Yezhov, local officials tried to outdo one another. Thus, when officials from western Siberia were told they were second in the entire country in the number of liquidations they had carried out, their mood—so one of them later said—“reached ecstasy.” In Karelia, there was “exceptional competition between the NKVD and the local organs to reach quotas.”16

  Yezhov came to believe that quotas might be too small and issued a blank check to officials like the new head of the NKVD in Smolensk in October 1937: “Imprison whomever you should.” Yezhov’s view was that it was better to go “too far than not far enough.”17 Some police used scandalous pretexts to meet their quotas—for example, arresting everyone who o
ne day happened to witness an industrial fire or was accused somewhere else of being involved in a forest fire. Police made these allegations to get a “supplementary quota of 3,000, of whom 2,000” were shot.18

  The Politburo, assailed by requests, showed no qualms about raising “limits” on a weekly basis, including expanding the numbers to be executed. On February 17, 1938, the Central Committee gave (yet again) permission for the NKVD “to carry out supplementary arrests of kulak and other anti-Soviet elements and to submit the cases for consideration by the troikas, having increased the quota for the NKVD of the Ukrainian SSR [Soviet Socialist Republic] by THIRTY THOUSAND.”19

  The troikas went through hundreds of cases on a daily basis. The Omsk troika decided no fewer than 1,301 cases on a single day. These were hardly “hearings” since as usual the accused was not present, but, as more than one member of these courts admitted, there was not even time to read the files. On average in Moscow they went through 500 cases a night.20 In 1938 alone, the Dalstroi troika sentenced 12,566 people, of whom 5,866 were condemned to death.21

  Dalstroi was an acronym for Far Northern Construction Trust, which itself at one time controlled 130 camps with 163,000 slaves ranging over a region larger than the landmass of Western Europe. It was part of the Gulag, and the terror within the terror of Dalstroi during the late 1930s crippled its economic output. Indeed, the repressive inclinations of Stalinism “consistently undermined its own economy.”22

  Grigorii Gorbach, the ambitious chairman of the NKVD in Omsk, was not satisfied with the “allotment” of 2,438 he was given on July 9 and asked Moscow (no reason given) for a higher one on August 4 even before operations began. Twelve days later he reported his men met and exceeded a quota of five thousand executions, and asked for a new target of eight thousand. Stalin himself wrote in the margin of the telegram that he favored granting this request. Gorbach’s feats did not end there, but he brought the same zeal to his work when transferred to the western Siberian province.23

  Another local police official wrote Stalin on October 28, 1938, to say he had just left one locality “where they had already spent all their 00447 allowance, but there were still over 2,000 elements in prisons, whose time limit has been over long ago. All these elements are counterrevolutionary kulaks, members of bourgeois parties, clerical activists. The instruction of their case is over, prisons are overcrowded…. They asked me for a further allowance for 2, 500, a demand that I hereby report to you.”24

  The NKVD needed no explanation for Stalin because it was dealing “the last blow” against well-known enemies. This operation was planned to last four months but was repeatedly extended and ran from August 1937 to November 1938.

  Local officials came up with their own numbers, informed Moscow, and overfilled their quotas. Briefings would be held for regional heads of the NKVD, and a sweep would go off like a surprise commando attack. The camps were turned into places of extermination, to use the term applied by one of Russia’s leading historians today. The Soviets did not use gas chambers, but they murdered on a vast scale. Under order No. 00447, no fewer than 767,397 were sentenced by troikas, of whom 386,798 were given the death penalty.25 This figure does not include the thousands sent to the Gulag. Even though the number of camps kept growing, so many people were sent to them in 1937–38 that overcrowding resulted in a 200 percent increase in mortality rates.26

  The ripple effects of operation 00447 can be seen in a letter of Party member V. Antipov to the Central Committee of the Communist Party on December 12, 1938. He said “thousands of families” who had been banished were forced to seek shelter near railroad stations. The Novgorod NKVD was particularly zealous and in two weeks during late October 1938 exiled one thousand families for the “crime” of being related to someone who was once on trial. The families were given twenty-four hours to depart and sold what they could. Everyone had to leave, the elderly, the infirm, and the children.

  Antipov thought that the relatives of those convicted should be deported to places away from the border, but questioned whether it was right to banish “absolutely everyone” associated with some wrecker. The exiles were compelled to move around; they had no housing or jobs. And so the tragedy of operation 00447 kept unfolding.27

  NKVD leaders in Leningrad and Moscow resorted to killing off physically handicapped prisoners who, for a variety of reasons, were tarred with the brush of operation 00447. In Moscow the prisons were overcrowded, and Gulag officials balked at taking eight hundred prisoners already sentenced but considered invalids. In February and March 1938 special hearings sentenced at least 163 to be shot. The police framed them for the crime of “anti-Soviet agitation” when as often as not the victims were simply in the wrong place at the wrong time.28 There is no telling how widespread these practices became.

  The “criminalization of the unpopular, uncontrollable and disruptive activities” by the party-state might have struck a responsive chord among the population. As the “virtual civil war” raged, citizens learned how to cope and also how to benefit from it personally by carefully aimed denunciations of colleagues, neighbors, or functionaries.29 Sarah Davies, writing about Leningrad, notes some sympathy for the unfortunates but also says that “many workers clearly welcomed” the policy of expelling those without passports and “criminal elements” and even “questioned why such undesirable groups had continued to live in the city for so long.” She goes so far as to suggest that “much of the available material points to popular indifference to, and even approval of, the terror.”30

  Ordinary people might well have had little sympathy for the terrorized members of the elite. We need more evidence before we can say how they felt about the terror in general, especially when it happened to people not unlike themselves.

  CHURCHES UNDER THE HAMMER AND SICKLE

  Religion and the churches had been the object of Communist hostility since 1917. For Marxists, religion was the “opiate of the masses” in that it encouraged people to adjust to the world as it was, not struggle against it.

  Numerous religions were represented in imperial Russia, but the religion of the majority was the Russian Orthodox Church. The first step against it was a decree of January 20, 1918, on the separation of church from state and school. It was modeled on a similar decree passed by the Paris Commune in the nineteenth century and (with no irony intended) usually publicized as the Decree on Freedom of Conscience.

  The Soviet measure removed religious symbols from public buildings and allowed for the confiscation of properties. The Communists closed the seminaries and most monasteries immediately, and the Cheka arrested members of the clergy suspected of being political opponents. However, there was no wholesale roundup, and citizens as individuals were allowed to continue their religious faith, at least for the moment.31 In the context of the revolutionary upheaval, it was not yet possible to put together a concerted campaign to eliminate religion altogether.

  After the revolutionary period, the Orthodox Church (and other forms of religion as well) came under assault in three distinct waves: the first at the end of the civil war in 1922; the second during collectivization (1928–32); and the third during the Great Terror (1936–39).32

  Lenin struck the first and typically harsh blow during the famine of 1922 and set the murderous tone. He wrote Molotov and the Politburo on March 19, 1922, that the famine presented an ideal opportunity to “smash the enemy’s head with a ninety-nine percent chance of success.”

  “It is precisely now and only now, when in the starving areas people are eating human flesh, and hundreds, if not thousands of corpses are littering the roads, that we can (and therefore must) carry out the confiscation of the Church valuables with the most savage and merciless energy, not stopping [short of] crushing any resistance.” Lenin referred with approval to Machiavelli, who “rightly said that if it is necessary to resort to certain brutalities for the sake of realizing a political goal, they must be carried out in the most energetic fashion and in the briefest possible time,
because the popular masses will not endure prolonged application of brutality.” Following Machiavelli, he came to the conclusion that they must now “give the most decisive and merciless battle to the [reactionary] clergy and crush its resistance with such brutality they will not forget it for decades to come.”33

  Lenin was concerned that Jewish members of the ruling elite distance themselves from the persecution, lest they provoke an anti-Semitic backlash. His letter to Molotov concluded as follows about the orders that should be formulated at the next Party congress:

  At this meeting, pass a secret resolution of the congress that the confiscation of valuables, in particular of the richest abbeys, monasteries, and churches, should be conducted with merciless determination, unconditionally stopping at nothing, and in the briefest possible time. The greater the number of representatives of the reactionary clergy and reactionary bourgeoisie we succeed in executing for this reason, the better. We must teach these people a lesson right now, so that they will not dare even to think of any resistance for several decades.

  This letter, written when he was already gravely ill, shows how Lenin’s penchant for ruthlessness persisted. He ordered the secret police, for tactical reasons, to keep their hands off Patriarch Tikhon, the head of the Russian Orthodox Church. The immediate consequence was that twenty-seven hundred priests and five thousand monks and nuns perished, and across the country there were an estimated fourteen hundred clashes between loyal parishioners and the police, with two hundred show trials. What happened to the clergy in the camps defies the imagination, with every cruelty and torture imaginable heaped on them.