Stalin’s Approval
It should be remembered that generals were usually arrested with Stalin’s personal approval. The case of Major General Ivan Rukhle is an example of a senseless action during a turning point of the war, leading up to the Battle of Stalingrad.
On the Stavka’s decision, General Rukhle, head of the Operations Department and deputy chief of the headquarters (HQ) of the Stalingrad Front, was dismissed from his posts at the end of September 1942 and then arrested on October 5.16 Before that, on the order of Georgii Malenkov, Stavka’s representative at the Stalingrad Front, Colonel Yevgenii Polozov, HQ chief of the 4th Tank Army, together with the OO of that army, falsified materials against Rukhle. Malenkov chose Polozov for this purpose because Polozov had hated Rukhle deeply ever since Rukhle fired him from the HQ of the front for poor professional performance. Rukhle was charged with treason (Article 58-1b) during the preparation of the previous operation in Kharkov.
In May 1942, approximately 230,000 Soviet servicemen were taken prisoner near Kharkov and 87,000 were killed while attempting to get through the German encirclement. Marshal Semyon Timoshenko, commander of the Southwestern Front; Nikita Khrushchev, a member of the Military Council; and General Ivan Bagramyan, HQ chief of that front, were responsible for the ill-planned offensive that culminated in this catastrophe. After Rukhle received the plan of their offensive for implementation, he tried to contact Stalin through Nikolai Selivanovsky (head of the front OO) and Abakumov, and with their help to send Stalin a report regarding the weak points of the plan. However, Timoshenko had already declared at the HQ meeting that ‘Comrade Stalin, our great friend and teacher, has approved the offensive plans of the front’, and, therefore, that Rukhle acted against Stalin’s will.17 Instead of handing Rukhle’s report over to Stalin, Abakumov informed Khrushchev that some HQ members were against the plan.
Timoshenko and Khrushchev soon realized that the offensive was poorly prepared and would result in total defeat. Anastas Mikoyan, a Politburo member, recalled:
I remember well May 18 [1942], when a serious threat of the defeat of our Kharkov offensive operation was coming. Late at night a few Politburo members—Molotov, Beria, Kalinin, Malenkov, probably Andreev, and I—were in Stalin’s office. We already knew that Stalin had rejected the request of the military council of the Southwestern Front to stop the offensive because of the danger of [German] encirclement. Suddenly the telephone rang.
Stalin told Malenkov: ‘Find out who it is and what he wants.’
[Malenkov] took the receiver and told us that it was Khrushchev…
Stalin said: ‘What does he want?’
Malenkov answered: ‘On behalf of the high command [of the Southwestern Front] Khrushchev requests stopping the offensive on Kharkov immediately and concentrating the main efforts on the counterattack against the enemy.’
‘Tell him that given orders are not discussed, but followed,’ said Stalin. ‘And then hang up.’18
Later, after a special investigation of the catastrophe by Aleksandr Vasilevsky, acting chief of the general staff, Stalin dismissed Bagramyan from his post, while Timoshenko and Khrushchev were reprimanded. Rukhle was chosen as a scapegoat.
Rukhle was brought to Moscow and kept in Lubyanka Prison for the rest of the war. In August 1944 Polozov, arrested for ‘anti-Soviet agitation’ and already sentenced, was placed together with Rukhle, apparently as a cell spy, and advised Rukhle to ‘confess’. But only in February 1952 did the MGB Department for Investigation of Especially Important Cases conclude the case. Rukhle was charged with a ‘criminal attitude toward his duties while being at high positions in the HQ of the Southwestern, and then the Stalingrad Front’ under Article 193-17b. The case was so weak that on September 4, 1952, after the hearing, the Military Collegium returned materials to the MGB for an additional investigation.
On March 23, 1953, after Stalin’s death, the Military Collegium heard Rukhle’s case for the second time. Now he was accused of a ‘criminal attitude toward his duties’ (Article 193-17a), but only at the Stalingrad Front. Rukhle strongly denied his guilt, but the Collegium sentenced him to a ten-year imprisonment, which he had already spent in Lubyanka. Rukhle was released, and on May 29, 1953, the Plenum of the Supreme Court rehabilitated him. After this his rank was restored and he continued his military career.
One lucky navy commander was released through the intervention of a friend. Investigator Mikhail Likhachev, who has already been mentioned, arrested Admiral Gordei Levchenko, deputy Navy Commissar and commander of the troops in the Crimea, on November 16, 1941, after the Crimea had fallen. Later an important investigator in SMERSH and the MGB, Likhachev, who had never been in battle, cynically asked Levchenko: ‘What was your criminal activity in connection with the surrender of most of the territory of the Crimean Peninsula to the enemy?’19
On January 25, 1942, Levchenko was sentenced to a prison term of ten years in a labor camp, and promptly the next day a transcript of Levchenko’s interrogation was on Stalin’s desk. But Navy Commissar Nikolai Kuznetsov courageously defended Levchenko, and a few days later Stalin pardoned Levchenko, who was demoted to captain of the first rank and returned to the fleet. He was appointed commandant of the Leningrad and then the Kronstadt Naval bases. In 1944, he was promoted again to deputy VMF Commissar.
Many other navy commanders were punished and some were executed. On December 1, 1942, Kuznetsov wrote to the Military Council of the Black Sea Fleet: ‘The number of those convicted is enormously high compared to the other fleets… Report to me on the reasons for this large number of convictions and on your measures.’20 Little information is available about most of these cases. Some commanders and pilots were punished if a vessel was blown up by a mine. Others were convicted because they destroyed their vessels to prevent them from being taken by the enemy, an action that tribunals considered treacherous.
The Purges Widen
In June 1942, Beria suggested the GKO would widen the number of crimes for which family members of perpetrators would be persecuted.21 Espionage was one of his examples. From the beginning of the war, the OOs arrested over 23,000 servicemen on charges of espionage, attempts at treason against the Motherland, and treacherous intention. Additionally, in the non-occupied territories of the USSR 1,220 arrestees were sentenced as spies and 2,917 arrestees accused of spying were under investigation. In Beria’s opinion, family members of those sentenced to death for espionage needed to be punished.
Beria also reported to Stalin on another extremely troubling trend: since the beginning of the war, sixteen servicemen had killed their commanders and gone over to the enemy. In fact, there was always tension between privates and commanding officers in the Red Army. As the World War II veteran Vasil’ Bykov recalled, the relationships within the army were based on ‘the rule of complete obedience to superiors and cruelty without mercy toward subordinates’.22 He also explained, from his own experience: ‘Every serviceman felt fear coming from a threat behind, from superior commanders and all punishment organs [OOs, SMERSH, NKVD troops]… When a commander promises to shoot you on the spot in the morning if you don’t take back a farm or a height just captured by the enemy… you do not know who to fear more, the Germans or your commander. A German bullet may miss you, but the bullet of your commander won’t, especially if he involves a military tribunal.’23