Persons under arrest must be locked up in rooms ‘suitable for the accommodation of those arrested’. It is vital to take every precaution to prevent ‘flight or excesses of any sort’. Part IV stipulates that the investigation is to be conducted ‘in a swift and simplified manner’. ‘During the trial, all criminal connections of persons arrested are to be disclosed.’ At the conclusion of the investigation, the dossier was to be submitted to the three-man commission. The dossier had to contain the arrest warrant, the record of the search, the materials confiscated in the course of the search, personal documents, responses to the questionnaire given to the arrested person, agency material, a record of the interrogation and the sentence handed down.
Part V specifies the membership of the three-man commission at the republican, territorial and regional levels and then describes the composition of the troikas in general. A public prosecutor could be present at the sessions of these three-man commissions, but it was not mandatory. The troika met at the various offices of the NKVD, but was mobile and could hold sessions externally. The troika inspected the documents and produced a record of its sessions, which included the sentence. This record was then sent on to the head of the operational group which carried out the sentence.
The three-man commission will consider separately the materials presented to it for each person or group of persons arrested as well as for each of the families designated for resettlement. Depending on the nature of the materials presented to it and the degree of social risk represented by the arrestees, the three-man commission can determine whether those who have been singled out for punishment in accordance with Category 2 should be transferred to Category 1. The heads of the three-man commissions are to be listed by name.
Part VI of the order deals with carrying out the sentences. It specifies that the chairman of the three-man commission should choose the personnel responsible for their implementation. The basis for the implementation should be a ‘certified extract from the minutes of the troika session specifying the sentence passed on each convict’ as well as a special directive bearing the signature of the chairman of the troika to be handed to the person carrying out the sentence. In order to guarantee secrecy,
the sentences in the first category are to be carried out in the locations and in the order specified by the People’s Commissars of Internal Affairs, by the heads of governing boards, or by the regional departments of the NKVD under conditions of the strictest secrecy as to the time and place of execution. Documents concerning the implementation of the sentence should be enclosed in a separate envelope and attached to the investigative dossier of each convicted person.
On the organization of the operation and the question of accountability, Part VII states those responsible would be Yezhov’s deputy, Mikhail Frinovskii, and the special group formed to carry out the operation. The records of the sentences carried out, together with the registration cards, must be sent without delay to Section 8 of the Central Department of State Security of the NKVD. Progress reports on the operation must be sent every five days by telegraph and post.
Information about all newly discovered counter-revolutionary groupings, excesses, attempts at flight, the formation of gangs and groups of bandits and all other unusual incidents must be forwarded by telegraph without delay. Exhaustive measures must be taken with regard to the organization and conduct of operations so as to ensure that none of the following events will occur: persons to be punished going into hiding, escaping from their places of residence and especially abroad or forming robber bands and excesses of all kinds. Attempts at active counter-revolutionary acts must be identified in good time and thwarted at once.42
The Politburo resolved to provide the staffing and financial resources required for the operation, to the tune of 75 million roubles, of which 25 million were to be earmarked for rail transport costs. Camp authorities were to be alerted to the need to prepare for the reception of Category 2 prisoners. Other organizations, such as the Party and the Komsomol, were required to boost their personnel in readiness.
Order No. 00447 provided for the arrest of 268,950 people, of whom 75,950 were to be shot. In the course of the operation the figures for arrests were increased to 753,315, of whom 183,750 (including 150,500 further executions) were ordered by decisions of the Politburo of the Central Committee, and a further 300,000 by telegrams from Yezhov – in other words, without any formal decision of the Party leadership. By the end of the operation, in November 1938, 767,397 people had been sentenced, 386,798 of whom fell into the first category.43 Over half of the convictions in the ‘anti-kulak operation’ (50.4 per cent) resulted in death sentences. In that operation – in compliance with Order No. 00447 – 150,000 people were convicted and 30,000 were shot between 5 and 31 August alone.44
Parallel to the mass operation arising from Order No. 00447, which began on 5 August 1937, further mass operations were launched and carried through in quick succession, predominantly in accordance with national criteria.
The ‘German operation’, initiated by Order No. 00439, began on 29 July 1937 and involved 55,005 arrests, of which 41,989 (72.6 per cent) resulted in death sentences. From 29 July this order called for the arrest of all German nationals working in military installations or employed in factories working for national defence and on the railways, or who had lost their jobs in factories, including all those Germans who had settled in the region and were living there.45
The ‘Polish operation’, initiated by Order No. 00485, began on 20 August 1937 and involved 139,835 convictions, of which 111,091 (79.4 per cent) resulted in death sentences.46
The ‘Latvian operation’ began on 3 December 1937 and involved a total of 22,360 convictions, of which 16,573 resulted in death sentences.47
This by no means completes the list of orders and mass operations.48 Further operations were aimed at the Romanians in Ukraine, the Finns in Karelia, Iranians, Afghans, Greeks, Estonians, Bulgarians, Macedonians, Koreans,49 Chinese,50 returnees from Harbin,51 and other national minorities who had settled for the most part in border regions. The mass operations also affected particular political groups, such as the former party of Socialist Revolutionaries (SRs).52
The original deadlines were extended in both the action taken against ‘anti-Soviet and criminal elements’ and the mass operations undertaken against members of national minorities. Following pressure from the regions, the quotas for ‘anti-Soviet elements’ were raised by a decree of 31 January 1938 and the operation was extended to 1 April 1938 at the latest.53 The quotas for twenty-two regions of the sixty-eight administrative territories of the USSR envisaged 48,000 executions and 9,200 prison sentences.54
As had also happened previously, inquiries and suggestions for increasing the quotas had arrived from the regions. The Party secretary of the German region (nemobkom) requested an additional 1,000 people up to 15 February 1938; the Party secretary of Gorki, which had already punished 9,600 ‘anti-Soviet elements’, asked for permission for an additional 3,000 people for the first category – shooting – and 2,000 for the second category – labour camp.55
At the same time, the time limit for punishing the national contingents was also extended.56 The majority of the victims of the operation against ‘kulaks, criminals and anti-Soviet elements’ were murdered in the first few months after the passing of Order No. 00447 and up to the end of the year; most of the victims of the ‘national mass operations’ died in the course of 1938. Whereas the ‘anti-kulak operation’ ran out at the end of 1937, the ‘national mass operation’ reached its climax only in the spring of 1938.57
The machinery for arresting, condemning and killing people operated at full throttle. In many places it proved difficult to keep abreast of the numbers of people disappearing. Entire institutions had to cease their activities because of the resulting staff shortages; various industries found themselves paralysed. Frequently, there were no more than two days between arrest and execution and seldom more than a fortnight.58 Lists of people to be arre
sted were already available, for potentially suspect elements had been on file ever since the Revolution, and these files had constantly been updated. The proposed repressive measures could rely on a comprehensive system of documentation. Ever since the 1920s every regional headquarters of the GPU had at its disposal lists of categories of enemies: former civil servants of the tsarist administration, former White Guards, participants in peasant uprisings during the Civil War, reimmigrants, political immigrants, former prisoners of war, members of the clergy who had been sentenced for some offence or other, peasants who had been de-kulakized and arrested. These were supplemented by political deviationists and former Party members, who formed a very large group, exceeding in many places the number of current Party members.59
Once the supply of these categories had been exhausted, the authorities resorted to arbitrary selection. ‘They now compiled lists that stipulated how many people were to be arrested from a particular social stratum or professional group or from a particular sector of the economy.’ A sort of proportionality was to be preserved. Depending on circumstances, interrogations were conducted on the basis of stereotyped questions and the accused were ‘worked on’ – in other words, physically beaten – until their confessions satisfied the requisite pattern: spying for the German fascists, or for Japan, or for the Polish secret service, or whatever. This meant that dozens of confessions could be produced every day – as on a production line – and could be presented to the troikas. They in their turn could process dozens of convictions at every meeting (which were held mainly at night). The Omsk troika set something of a record in this respect, with 1,301 convictions at a single sitting on 10 October 1937. At a rate of 500 cases per evening, as reported by Semenov, the deputy head of the Moscow NKVD, it was impossible to consider each case individually. That was necessarily the situation in the committees at the highest decision-making level, whose members were the recipients of entire ‘albums’ of judgements presented to them for their approval. In this way, Vyshinskii and Yezhov were able to confirm between 1,000 and 2,000 sentences every evening.60
Even though the debate about the numbers of victims is far from over, a set of statistics that appeared in 1953 after Stalin’s death still provides a starting point that many researchers accept as realistic. According to these figures, there were 1,575,259 arrests by the security police in 1937–8, 87 per cent of them for political reasons, and 1,344,923, or 85 per cent of those arrested, were convicted.61 The total number of inmates in prisons and camps increased by 1,006,030 in 1937–8. In the past, estimates of executions in those years had varied between 500,000 and 7 million, whereas at present we tend to accept that 681,692 people were shot in 1937–8. If we add in the number of deaths resulting from the harsh conditions in the prisons and camps, we must arrive at a figure of around 2 million deaths directly due to the repressions of those years.62 In percentage terms, this means that 1.66 per cent of the population aged between sixteen and sixty were arrested and 0.72 per cent of the population were killed.63 Even in the light of the never-ending chain of violent excesses that Russia had experienced since the outbreak of war in 1914, that amounts to what Alec Nove has called an unimaginable ‘excess of excess’.
World war, civil war
The mass operations came to a halt with the Politburo’s resolution of 17 November 1938. This document, which was signed by both Molotov and Stalin, called for the continuation of the struggle against spies, terrorists and saboteurs, but criticized the NKVD for the grave ‘errors’ it committed in the course of its work. The document criticized not the terror itself, but mistakes made in the course of its implementation. What was needed was a greater sureness of touch, the perfection of the methods employed in the war against the enemies of Soviet power. Unjustified mass arrests in the course of the mass operations, ‘over-simplified investigative methods’, mistakes and even forgeries in the records were common occurrences, as was the encouragement of such practices by the state prosecutor’s office. All of this was the work of the enemy, who had wormed his way even into the organs of repression – in other words, into the NKVD itself. All the illegal, criminal practices that had been conceived, initiated and implemented by Stalin, the Politburo and the NKVD now stood revealed as the work of the enemy.64 A little later – on 23 November 1938 – Yezhov wrote a letter to Stalin and resigned from his post of People’s Commissar for Internal Affairs. He took up a new post, that of People’s Commissar for Water Transport, while Lavrenti Beria moved up to head the NKVD.65 The end of the mass operations was now followed by the arrest and murder of the leading NKVD personnel, including Yezhov, who, after lengthy imprisonment in Sukhanovka prison, was shot in the cellar of the house in Varsonof'evskii Lane on 4 February 1940, presumably by V. Blokhin, one of his ‘colleagues responsible for special tasks’. His ashes, mixed with the ashes of his victims, ended up in a mass grave in the cemetery of the Donskoi Monastery.
Victims and murders on this scale occur usually only in wartime. The Great Terror was a war against the state’s own people.66 The figures show clearly that the majority of victims came not from the ranks of the ‘old guard’, not from the political establishment, but from the mass of the population. The hundreds of thousands of people who were arrested, persecuted and murdered in the parallel campaigns against ‘anti-Soviet elements’ and ‘national elements’ came from all sectors of the population. These campaigns were a form of war against an imaginary ‘enemy from within’ who was supposed to be in league with the external enemy, who really did exist. The confusion and lack of transparency about who was really an enemy, the murderous pace of events, the widening circle of violence that spiralled entirely out of control – all these things are hard to explain in rational terms. And yet it is possible to discern some lines of development and to identify what Hans Mommsen has called a process of ‘cumulative radicalization’.
The Soviet leadership, and, above all, Stalin himself, were convinced that the collectivization and transformation of the nation through the process of industrialization had led to the birth of a new society, one from which class antagonisms had disappeared. This was asserted in so many words at the Seventeenth Party Congress in 1934. This also formed the background for the constitutional changes proposing the abolition of discrimination against particular social groups – peasants, the members of the old elites, hostile non-Bolshevik parties – on the grounds that such discrimination had lost its class significance. In the light of this development, the new constitution laid down that free elections based on universal suffrage and a secret ballot should be held in 1937, a project that was not purely demagogic in intention but that pursued a concrete goal: to help the shaken and weakened emergency regime achieve a greater legitimacy and a broader acceptance among the masses. The announcement of these elections and the preparations for them occupied the whole of 1937. To have embarked on this adventure is eloquent testimony to the isolation of the political leadership, and especially the Politburo, and its complete ignorance of the situation in the country. Despite the warnings that were voiced as early as the 1937 February–March plenum, the Politburo stuck to its policy of ‘universal, free and secret elections’ in which anyone would be eligible to stand. However, this policy could be maintained only if care were taken to ensure that every alternative would be suppressed in advance. This was done by means of the mass operations against the so-called kulaks as well as against anti-Soviet and criminal elements.
This meant the destruction of everything that still survived in Soviet society by way of potentially independent elements who might constitute a threat to the regime if they were to unite and whose activities, real or imagined, had allegedly or actually been detected during the election campaign. By June 1937 at the latest, the political leadership must have panicked at the prospect that the ‘kulaks’ who had served their sentences might return home from exile or the camps. And not just the kulaks; there were also the members of non-Bolshevik parties, Party members who had been excluded – since 1922 around 1.5 mi
llion people had been expelled from the Communist Party – the remnants of the old educated classes, and the clergy, who had strong claims to be regarded as the voice of those who still thought of themselves as believers, but also of those whose initiative and entrepreneurial spirit had caused them to be criminalized. All these people, taken together, might indeed have been capable of forming a critical mass representing a serious threat to Stalin’s weakened regime, built as it was largely on force. The targeted liquidation of hundreds of thousands of people who might potentially have become the independent nuclei of a society traumatized and exhausted by catastrophes is the other side of the ‘universal, free and secret elections’ that led straight into the formation of the Soviet ‘parliament’ on 12 December 1937. The starting point – the publication of the rules governing the elections and the decision to go ahead with the mass operations – took place literally on the same day, 2 July 1937, and the end point – the mass operations were set to last four months, i.e. up to the elections on 12 December 1937 – indicate that the planned elections and the targeted liquidation of potential challengers belong together.67
The ‘national mass operations’ ran in parallel to this – and with an even higher percentage of death sentences than the ‘kulak operation’. The closer a national population lived to a frontier, the greater the likelihood that it would become the target of the ‘national operations’ – in other words, collective deportation or killing. The more easily a national population could identify with a homeland beyond the Soviet frontier or with a potential enemy, the greater the probability that it would become the object of repressive measures.68 The arrests and executions of ‘national contingents’ have nothing to do with actual crimes they may have committed, but with ideas of fifth columns, espionage networks, and collaborators against a background of the threat of war.69 The ‘logic’ that united Koreans and Greeks, Finns and Iranians, Germans and returnees from Harbin, Poles and Chinese, was the logic of a real or imagined threat of war, which was transformed into a suspicion of everything that appeared alien, a logic that was single-mindedly converted into a xenophobia that could, for a moment at least, bring a centrifugal society back into equilibrium. The heightening of tension internally through elections that threatened to spin out of control matched a heightening of tension internationally, once all efforts to establish a Europe-wide security system against fascism had failed. The defeat of the Spanish Republic was looming, and Japan’s expansion in China signalled the arrival of Japanese troops on the Soviet frontier in the Far East. Thus the imminent threat of a war on two fronts had become a genuine reality. This was the point to which Molotov kept returning, and he continued to insist on it unapologetically and with utter conviction to the end of his life almost fifty years later:
Moscow, 1937 Page 70
