Due to the enormous number of death sentences they pronounced, Soviet jurists called Ulrikh and his deputy, Ivan Matulevich, ‘Executioners No. 1 and 2’.14 This sobriquet became literally true on July 28, 1938 when Ulrikh personally shot Yan Berzin, former head of the Red Army’s Intelligence Directorate.15
Just before the war, Ulrikh—along with Andrei Vyshinsky, the former chief USSR prosecutor notorious for his speeches at Moscow show trials in the late 1930s—insisted on the creation of three separate high military courts for the army, navy, and NKVD.16 Stalin did not agree. Apparently, he wanted the Military Collegium to remain in the civilian-government structure so it could continue to be used for show-trial sessions, which received wide publicity throughout the Soviet Union and abroad. Show trials took place before specially selected audiences and were the only military tribunal sessions to include a prosecutor and defense counsel (they were excluded entirely during closed sessions), although the defense counsel had no access to the defendant outside of the session. The March 1938 trial of Nikolai Bukharin, an old Bolshevik who was one of the most important Soviet theorists, is the most famous example.
In 1938 a new law introduced a complicated and confusing system of two-institution supervision of military tribunals by the Military Collegium and Justice Commissariat, which continued until Stalin’s post-war reorganization in 1946.17 The Military Collegium continued to be the highest military court, approving death sentences, considering appeals from tribunals, and overseeing the decisions of lower tribunals, but the Justice Commissariat took over the administration of military tribunals and the education of military jurists. By mid-1940, the departmental structure within the Justice Commissariat’s Directorate of Military Tribunals nearly replicated that of the Military Collegium. Its head, Yevlampii Zeidin, ‘was a clever and experienced, but also a cautious and slightly dryish man’.18 Joint orders of the Justice and NKO commissariats appointed members of military tribunals.
During the war, the Military Collegium supervised the activity of front tribunals directly. Ulrikh personally inspected the tribunals of the Western Front four times in 1942, while his deputy Matulevich chaired the Military Tribunal of the Southern Front, and collegium member Leonid Dmitriev chaired the Military Tribunal of the Bryansk Front.19
Exterminating the Enemies
From 1939 to 1941, Stalin and the Politburo approved all death sentences. There were several procedures for this. First, the Politburo approved Beria’s ‘death lists’ with the names of those prisoners whose cases had been concluded and for whom the NKVD recommended the death sentence without appeal.20 These prisoners were condemned by the Military Collegium and executed immediately after the Collegium’s session. For instance, in September 1941, at the beginning of the war, Beria sent Stalin a proposal that 170 prisoners, mostly former high-ranking Party functionaries, be executed. The Politburo decision stated: ‘Capital punishment should be applied to 170 prisoners who have been convicted of terrorism, spying, sabotage, and other counter revolutionary activity, and they should be shot. The Military Collegium of the Supreme Court should hear the materials of their cases.’21 Of course, the Collegium sentenced all the listed prisoners to death.
Similar lists of NKVD officers destined for execution were signed by Stalin alone, and then sent to Ulrikh. Ulrikh then wrote an order by hand for an immediate execution without having the cases heard by the Military Collegium.
The rest of the death sentence cases, including the decisions of military tribunals and appeals by the condemned, were considered by the special Politburo Commission on Court (Political) Cases before they were sent to the Military Collegium.22 Chaired by Mikhail Kalinin, a Politburo member and Chairman of the Supreme Soviet, the Commission included Matvei Shkiryatov, head of the Central Committee’s Commission of Party Control (a sort of watchdog commission within the Central Committee), NKVD Commissar Beria or his deputy, and USSR Prosecutor Bochkov. However, the Politburo approved decisions of the Commission and recommended the cases to be considered by the Military Collegium. At the beginning of the war, the Commission was reduced to three members: Kalinin, Shkiryatov, and Merkulov (Beria’s deputy and from 1943, NKGB Commissar). The number of death sentences considered by the Military Collegium during the war was very high. In 1944 and the first six months of 1945 alone, the Collegium considered more than 43,000 cases,13,000 of which were death sentences pronounced by military tribunals.23
Stalin also controlled a person’s right to appeal a death sentence. Ulrikh or Beria coordinated these appeals with Stalin before the Military Collegium sessions. If he allowed the appeal, the condemned wrote to the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet, but in fact it was Stalin, Politburo members Kalinin, Kaganovich, and Malenkov, and their close associates Semyon Budennyi and Shkiryatov, who decided whether the death sentence should stand or be changed to 20 (later 25) years of imprisonment in labor camps.24
The Collegium Procedure
From the 1930s until 1950, the Military Collegium heard most cases in closed sessions in the building at 23 October (now Nikol’skaya) Street, which still exists in the center of Moscow, between the Kremlin and Lubyanka Square. Each case generally took only ten to fifteen minutes. During the 1930s and 1940s, Marshal Mikhail Tukhachevsky and his seven co-defendants; 25 USSR commissars; 19 republic commissars; 131 brigade, corps, and army commanders; more than 100 professors from various universities and institutes; and over 300 directors of the most important industrial plants, among others, were sentenced to death and shot in the basement by the Collegium’s own team of executioners. A. V. Snegov, a former high-level Party functionary and a rare survivor (the Military Collegium sentenced him to 18 years in labor camps), described the procedure:
A prisoner used to be called from his cell and taken to the yard of the Interior [Lubyanka] Prison, where he was put in a bus called ‘Black Raven’. Usually several prisoners were transported together. The vehicle left through the iron gates at the back of the complex of the GUGB NKVD buildings and… moved backward into the closed narrow yard of the Military Collegium…
The accused were taken from the vehicle one by one, and brought, using the back stairs, to the second floor, where the Military Collegium was sitting. Usually the Army Jurist Vasilii Vasilievich Ulrikh presided during the ‘trial’.
The hearing was short, ten minutes per person. The verdicts—usually a sentence of death by shooting for everyone—were prepared in advance. After the announcement of the verdict, the condemned was brought to the deep basement by the same stairs, and was shot in the back of the head. The executioner was the commandant on duty at the Military Collegium.
The body was dragged to the corner of the basement, where a shoe was taken off the right foot [of the corpse], and a tag made of plywood was attached to the toe. The Investigation File number was written on the tag with a pencil. From this moment on the name of the person was never mentioned again.25