The end of the election campaign coincided with another development. The city was getting ready for the New Year, a feast day that was supposed to replace the old Orthodox Christmas. The press was full of advertisements. Whoever wanted to obtain any of the sought-after tickets for one of the New Year balls in the Novo-Moskovskaia, Savoy, National or Metropol would have to have made a booking by the middle of December at the latest. Anyone who wanted to stock up with Christmas cakes, pastries and gateaux for the feast days should have ordered them in advance from Avrora (Petrovskie Linii), Praga (Arbatskaia ploshchad' 2), Livorno (Rozhdestvenka 6) or Sport (Leningradskoe Shosse 9). Christmas flowers were on sale at many points in the city – on Trubnaya Square or opposite the building site for the Palace of the Soviets. The city gradually accelerated down the home straight as the year drew to its close – even the giant Hotel Moskva, which was to open for the New Year with a gala celebration for 400 guests, was supposed to be completed on time.9 And as early as 12 January 1938, the newly elected Supreme Soviet convened for its first session.
Celebratory speeches and music between the mass murders
The speeches of the Cheka jubilee resonated with the memory of the heroic days of the Revolution and the Civil War and also with a certain nostalgia about one’s comrades-in-arms, especially about the founder of the Cheka, Felix Dzerzhinsky, who was referred to again and again as the noble, aristocratic ‘Knight of the Revolution’. But at bottom what was being celebrated was an organization that had just carried out a vast bloodbath and was about to extend and intensify it. By December 1937, the mass operation resulting from operational Order No. 00447 – against the kulaks, anti-Soviet and criminal elements – was more or less complete, and the process was about to be extended to the mass operations against ‘national contingents’. The photograph on the title page of Vecherniaia Moskva displayed the pictures of those responsible for directing these operations, sitting next to each other on the stage: Kaganovich, Redens, Andreev, Shkiratov, Voroshilov, Zhdanov, Yezhov, Bratanovskii and Molotov. Even Dimitrov had taken up his place. The principal speaker of the evening was Anastas Mikoian. Stalin himself turned up for the gala concert that was given after the interval.10 In addition, Comrade Maksimova from the Stalin car plant and a woman worker from the Trekhgornaia factory appeared. Both of them insisted that the NKVD could rely absolutely on the support of the people. In the same vein, Mikhail Frinovskii, the Deputy People’s Commissar of the NKVD, conjured up a vision of the ‘unshakeable union of the Chekists and the people’.11
Those who sat on the stage included some of those principally responsible for having set the mass operations in motion six months previously. They had gone out into the provinces to take charge of operations there and ensure they were carried out. On certain days in the past few months they had appended their signatures to the thousands of death sentences approved by the extraordinary commissions and had even become directly involved themselves – in interrogations and the use of physical force.12 When we gaze into the auditorium of the Bolshoi Theatre, we can see a banner with the inscription ‘Long live the NKVD!’ Well-dressed men and a few women can be discerned. Against the background of decision-making, meetings, and announcements about executions completed, the festivities of 20 December are no more than a breathing space between mass murders. On 19 December 1937, the eve of the celebrations, 154 people were executed on the Butovo shooting range in Moscow alone, and two days later, on 22 December 1937, another sixty-two people were killed.13 Stanislav Redens, the Moscow head of the NKVD, sat on the podium during the celebrations. The guests, who had all come from their various places of work and met up in the capital, would take their departure once again in order to perform new deeds. Even before the start of the mass operations, on 27 July 1937, at the meeting of the Presidium of the Central Executive Committee of the USSR to confer medals on members of the NKVD, Yezhov had announced ‘that we shall make every effort to show by our deeds that we have earned the great trust placed in us by the Party and the government, as demonstrated to us today by their conferring these honours on us. We swear to the Soviet people, our Party and government, and to the leader of our Party, Comrade Stalin, that we shall prosecute the fight against our enemies as relentlessly as hitherto!’ Yezhov promised to train up ‘new men’ and a ‘new cohort of glorious Chekists’.14 According to an internal order issued in connection with the NKVD jubilee celebrations, the jubilee ‘should mobilize all Chekist members of the NKVD (narkomvnudeltsy) for the struggle against all enemies of the Soviet nation; it should sharpen their gaze and increase the vigilance and dedication of all personnel of the Soviet intelligence service.’15 Mikoian’s speech was an act of homage to the organization of revolutionary state terror, an appeal to the indissoluble union of the police apparatus and the population, a warning not to relax their vigilance and a proclamation that the terror was to continue. His speech was interrupted again and again by ‘sustained, tumultuous applause’. Mikoian gave a succinct historical overview. The path taken by the Cheka–OGPU–NKVD, he said, reflected the path taken by the country as a whole. Ever since its establishment, the organization had continued to develop. Mikoian’s speech provided yet another survey of the Civil War – the Petrograd of 1919, Baku, the fighting in the Far East and on the Black Sea – and what he said expressed exactly the feelings of the old fighters and partisans of the time.16 After the period of open warfare against the armed counter-revolution, speculation and sabotage, the organization had been transformed into the OGPU in order to arm itself against the new forms of wrecking, sabotage, economic counter-revolution and espionage. Mikoian described the third phase as the period of collectivization. ‘What did it mean to lead 100 million peasants onto the path of socialism when they had competed with each other for centuries and each one had laboured only for himself? What did it mean to bring these 100 million individual owners or smallholders, who had never been socialists, to the point of working collectively together in a socialist fashion?’17 It was easy, he said, to talk about these matters today after ‘the profoundest social revolution in the history of mankind’. Mikoian mobilized the entire arsenal of enemies to remind his audience yet again of the life-and-death struggle between Soviet power and the kulaks and their allies, people who had become all the more embittered, cunning and vicious, the more desperate their position was. Victory over them had even led to the emergence of a complacent belief that victory was complete, with the consequence that the enemy had been able to worm his way into the Party, the institutions of Soviet power and even the organs of the NKVD. The ‘blunting of class vigilance and complacency’ had long allowed the enemy to continue committing his crimes unchallenged. It was Yezhov’s achievement to have sharpened the sword of revolution once again and to have brought the NKVD back to the pitch of proficiency in its tasks by unmasking the enemy even within the organs of punishment and repression of the proletarian state – here he was referring to Yezhov’s predecessor Iagoda. On the one hand were ranged the universe of enemies – the ‘gang of Trotskyite–Bukharinite spies’; on the other was the ‘army of Soviet intelligence’. Yezhov had made the NKVD into ‘a remarkable framework of Chekists and Soviet intelligence agents’, and had introduced the Stalinist mode of operation. Mikoian’s speech was redolent of the vocabulary of hard, merciless implacability. He also expressed his sympathy to the members of the NKVD for the excessive demands their work made on them: ‘Our colleagues in the NKVD work hard. Their work is onerous and strenuous, very strenuous, but I believe that, on the twentieth anniversary of their struggles, the members of the NKVD can be satisfied with their victories and with the fact that the nation they serve rewards them with its overwhelming love.’18 Mikoian went on to cite instances of the assistance proffered to the NKVD by the population – he referred to information given, denunciations, especially of the non-Russian agents of foreign enemies, and of those responsible for railway accidents, the mass poisonings of workers and peasants in canteens, the spread of infections in hospitals,
and epidemics. Many such crimes had allegedly been discovered and prevented by the NKVD. Like the Red Army, the NKVD protected the population. For the past sixteen years, the threat of war had loomed over the nation, and war could break out at any time. Amid overwhelming applause, Mikoian concluded with congratulations, and he expressed the hope that the NKVD would always ‘remain abreast of events’, that it ‘would never sink to the level of political philistinism’, that it would continue to act ‘in a clear and decisive manner’, and that it would ‘go fearlessly into battle’ and ‘show no mercy to the enemies of the people’, but be ‘free from panic in all circumstances’.19
Figure 35.1 The ‘vanguard of the workers’ assembled in the Bolshoi Theatre, which had been filled with festive decorations, for the celebrations on the occasion of the twentieth anniversary of the existence of the Cheka
‘Those who sat on the stage included some of those principally responsible for having set the mass operations in motion six months previously. They had gone out into the provinces to take charge of the operations there and ensure they were carried out. On certain days in the past few months they had appended their signatures to the thousands of death sentences approved by the extraordinary commissions and had even become directly involved themselves – in interrogations and the use of physical force.’
This speech combined all the desirable features: the militant justification of ‘the sharp sword of revolution’, the call for the merciless annihilation of the enemy. What Mikoian meant by ‘philistinism’ was simply the leadership’s fear of everyday peace and quiet, the normality of peacetime. He made it perfectly clear that the NKVD was an institution suited to a state of emergency and that it needed the state of emergency in order to survive and to continue to develop. Those assembled in the Bolshoi Theatre must have shuddered once again at the memory of the Cheka’s murderous actions in the Civil War and, above all, of their punitive campaign against the peasants during the period of collectivization. Emerging as they did from the world of the mass condemnations of the three-man commissions and executions, they must have been grateful for Mikoian’s words of comfort and the reassurance that they, who must have known better than anyone what the people really thought about what had been going on throughout the country, were nevertheless the ‘darlings of the people’. But Mikoian’s speech was also redolent of the fear and panic felt by the men responsible for carrying out the mass operations. The stress of the emergency situation, the well-founded fear that they might be the next to fall under the wheels, the orgy of a rhetoric of mercilessness – what tone could be better suited to the twentieth anniversary of the Cheka than that?
Ovations for the executioners: morituri salutant
Everyone present at the celebrations knew about the situation in the country as a whole from their own experience, as indeed one of them later admitted under interrogation: ‘We Chekists knew better than anyone that anger was on the increase throughout the country and that we could not simply rely on arrests to get the situation under control … the policy of the Central Committee of the CPSU(B) had to be changed fundamentally.’20 It would not be long before they themselves would become the targets of the newly reinforced ‘vigilance’. As early as the Central Committee plenum of January 1938, criticism could be heard of those who ‘falsified the line’, or permitted ‘excesses’ or ‘mass exclusions from the Party and mass arrests’. People had suddenly begun to talk about ‘the inadequate scrutiny of individual cases’, ‘wholesale trials’ and the like. NKVD officials had gone too far and ‘lost all sense of proportion’.21
This looked like a repetition of what had happened once before, in the spring of 1937, when the arrest of the former People’s Commissar Genrikh Iagoda had unleashed a wave of arrests and suicides among the leadership of the NKVD.22 Iagoda and his cronies had been accused of involvement in a conspiracy which aimed to use Dmitlag, the labour camp of the Moscow–Volga Canal, as the military and logistical jumping-off point for a takeover of the Kremlin and the murder of the Soviet leadership.23 Arrests in this vein continued throughout the summer of 1937, and Iagoda himself was prepared for his role in the approaching show trial. Yezhov’s achievement, according to Mikoian’s speech, was to have uncovered the subversion of the NKVD and to have smashed it.
It was not very difficult to discover ‘enemies’ within the repressive communist apparatus that had emerged from the Revolution and Civil War. The social composition of the leadership of the NKVD on the eve of 1937 is highly revealing. It was a replica of the ‘old guard’ of 1917–20.
By the end of 1936 almost 50% of the leadership were over forty years old and of non-proletarian origin. 48% had secondary education and only 14.5% had college education. The percentage of long-serving Chekists was extraordinarily high. Almost 70% had begun their work in the ‘organs’ in 1917–1920. The length of time served in the Communist Party was also an important factor: 73% of the leading members had joined the Party between 1917 and 1920 and 14.5% had joined even before 1917. 39% of the leading members were Jews, 8% Latvians, 4.5% Poles and only 30% were Russians. The most striking feature of all was the tempestuous political past of the leading Chekists. 21% had previously belonged to the Socialist Revolutionaries, Mensheviks, Anarchists or the Jewish ‘Bund’ – in other words, non-Bolshevik political parties or groupings. 1.8% of them had even fought in the ranks of the ‘Whites’. In 1934 the percentage of leading Chekists with a ‘non-communist past’ was even greater – it amounted to 30%.24
There were plenty of people in this politically, socially and ethnically heterogeneous leadership group who might fall under suspicion of disloyalty or hostility to the Party and who could easily be stigmatized as ‘aliens’ and ‘fifth columnists’ at times of a war scare, real or artificially created.
It was a year before Yezhov himself lost his position. In April 1938 he was first demoted to the post of People’s Commissar for Water Transport, and later – on 25 November 1938 – he ‘resigned’ even from this. In August 1938 Beria was first made Yezhov’s deputy and then – on 25 November 1938 – promoted to the post of People’s Commissar for Internal Affairs. The decree of the Central Committee of 17 November 1938 – ‘On Arrests, Prosecutor Supervision and Course of Investigation’ – was the first document to identify ‘gross infringements of socialist law’ by the organs of the NKVD, including forced confessions and the use of torture, and the end of the mass operations was decreed.25
From there it was but a small step to the accusation that Yezhov himself was the leader of a conspiracy and then – on 4 February 1940 – to his sentencing and execution. By that time he had long since exchanged his place on the stage of the Bolshoi Theatre for a cell in Sukhanovka prison, while his successor, Beria, dominated the scene.
The NKVD purges between 1934 and 1940 amounted to a renewal of the relevant ‘organs’. ‘Between 1934 and 1940, 241 out of 322 republican, regional and district leaders were arrested (that is, almost 75%). The highpoint of the repressions occurred in the first few months after Beria took up his post.’26 The statistics show that, between October 1936 and August 1938, while Yezhov was in command, 2,273 members of the NKVD were arrested throughout the entire Soviet Union; of these, 1,862 arrests involved accusations of counter-revolutionary activities. That meant around 7.5 per cent of the total personnel of 25,000 in March 1937. The overall number of arrested NKVD employees in 1937–8 was 9,500; they included members of the militia, border guards, firemen, etc.27 The effective renewal of the NKVD began with Beria’s assumption of office and was linked to a great wave of dismissals and new appointments. In 1939 around 7,400 employees of the NKVD were dismissed – i.e. around 23 per cent – among them some of those who had been active in Yezhov’s mass terror. However, this was above all a period of growth for the NKVD. At the beginning of 1941, the overall number of employees of the various departments had risen to over 46,000 – i.e. the organization had in effect doubled in size from the roughly 25,000 of 1936. Over half the new Chekists had joined the NKVD
late in 1938 or early in 1939.
Looked at from this angle, the meeting on 20 December 1937 represented a snapshot of the organization. Following Beria’s appointment, four of the five heads of the principal divisions had been replaced, as well as twenty-eight of the thirty-one departmental heads and sixty-nine of the seventy-two deputies. Only one of the leaders serving in the Lubianka in January 1935 had died of natural causes.
Moscow, 1937 Page 72
