On May 1, 1937, Tukhachevsky stood with Stalin and other dignitaries atop the Lenin Mausoleum for the annual parade. Commissar of Defense Voroshilov and Marshal Semyon Budyonny were also there. They were closer to Stalin politically and personally and had been pressing him for more than a year to cleanse the army of “enemies.” The immediate background to Tukhachevsky’s case was that, apart from criticizing Budyonny, he additionally began trying to push out Voroshilov. Top establishment figures did not welcome such behavior.15 On the evening of May 1, to his cronies, Stalin mentioned wanting “to finish off” enemies in the army, even in the Kremlin. The wheels of terror began to grind, and several generals were arrested and tortured to get evidence. On May 11, Tukhachevsky was asked to resign as deputy commissar of defense, and eleven days later he was arrested, along with a handful of the high command.16
The sensational news made the rounds, and on June 2 Stalin spoke to a hundred assembled military leaders about an alleged “military-political” conspiracy with Nazi Germany. He called for more vigilance, and soon directives were issued to the military districts to stir things up. It all happened so fast. By June 11 a special military tribunal, not open to the public, had tried Tukhachevsky and seven other generals. The results were a foregone conclusion, given that two days before the trial Stalin had had confessions beaten out of the accused, to reveal to the Politburo. The dictator kept mumbling that it was all “incredible, but it is a fact.”17
Just over a week later 980 senior officers and political commissars were taken into custody for being part of the “conspiracy.” A Soviet general later said that “they were the flower of the officer corps, with civil war experience, and most of them were relatively young.”18 In the next two years, some 33,460 were dropped from the officer corps and nearly one-quarter of them arrested. The top command of the army and navy was decimated, with disastrous effects on the country’s readiness to face an aggressor.19
To drive the point home, on August 15, following Stalin’s orders, the NKVD issued Order 00486 calling for the arrest of the wives of all traitors and others condemned by the military tribunals.20 They were to serve five to eight years in a correctional labor camp. Most eventually ended up in Akmolinsk, Kazakhstan, in a special “camp for the wives of traitors to the motherland,” or ALZhIR. Their children were taken away, separated even from one another, and given new identities.21
Another side of the terror focused on Soviet society, in a process that began in the late 1920s and gradually accelerated in lockstep with Stalin’s “second revolution” to deal with opposition to it. Society at large was going to be “cleansed” in a final settling of accounts with the “vestiges of defeated classes” that, he said, had been accumulating since the revolution in 1917. Stalin decided that they and their families could never be assimilated and thus that all of them would have to be eliminated, either killed immediately or sent away to the camps.
Stalin’s “strange theory” held that Communism had to be defended against a whole range of “anti-Soviet elements,” the “last remnants of dying classes”—such as kulaks, private dealers, former nobles, priests, and more. They were all subverting the great experiment in socialism. In early 1933 he inaugurated a campaign against “thieves and wreckers in the public economy, against hooligans and pilferers of public property.”22 He demanded “a strong and powerful dictatorship of the proletariat” that would “scatter to the winds the last remnants of the dying classes.”23 Tens of thousands were picked up, put in front of OGPU troikas, and sent to the camps.
By 1937 the struggle that had gone on for years reached an altogether new stage, and on July 2 Stalin composed a Politburo directive calling for radical steps against “anti-Soviet elements.” The next day Yezhov instructed his officers to draw up, within five days, lists of all kulaks and criminals who had returned from exile. The first category and those deemed the “most hostile” were to be shot, once their case had been reviewed by a troika. The second type, while “less hostile but still dangerous,” were to be sent to the Gulag for eight to ten years. The document was ready for the Politburo approval on July 30.24
Secret Order 00447, the “operation to repress former kulaks, criminals and other anti-Soviet elements,” became a deadly instrument that reached far out into the countryside.25 Today the document reads like a demand to exterminate the social “leftovers” that the revolution had passed by. Once and for all they were to be destroyed “in the most merciless way possible.” The list began with kulaks, included the clergy and those in religious “sects,” former members of armed bands or oppositional parties, bandits, and the Whites. It went on to target criminals, from cattle thieves to repeat offenders.26 Although Lenin had composed lists like this, he wanted the people put in concentration camps. Stalin was prepared to kill nearly all of them.27
Given the quota thinking of the age, target figures were set. In total 79,950 were to be shot and 193,000 sent to the Gulag. Troika “courts” barely read dossiers of the accused, as for example when on a single day (October 9) a Leningrad troika sent 658 prisoners to their death. The next day in Omsk, another troika “sentenced” 1,301 people, of whom 937 were shot. Stalin himself chastised those who did not show sufficient zeal by getting through enough cases. Local enthusiasts met their quotas and rushed to seek permission to raise them. Ultimately Operation 00447 resulted in the “sentencing” of more than 767,000, of whom 387,000 were executed.28
The terror “cleansed” all aspects of the arts and sciences and was a new and even more vigorous stage of the assault on “anti-Soviet intelligentsia” that had begun in the 1920s.29 Working-class education was encouraged, with hundreds of thousands entering postsecondary schools for the first time. A new generation of intellectuals and political leaders, people like Leonid Brezhnev—future leader of the post-Stalinist Soviet Union—rose to prominence during the 1930s. The other side of the coin was that those with the wrong social origins—such lishentsy, or “former” people, like former policemen, nobles, merchants, and so on—were systematically denied such opportunities. Social origins became almost as indelible as race and nearly impossible to erase. During the Great Terror tens of thousands of these “formers” were killed.30
LINKS REAL AND IMAGINED TO “FOREIGN ENEMIES”
The Kremlin’s concern about a possible fifth column contributed to Operation 00485 against “Polish diversionist and espionage groups and organizations of the Polish Military Organization (POV).”31 That organization had long disappeared, and now an evil eye was cast on the hundreds of thousands of Poles in the USSR. Filtering them proceeded with Yezhov’s order of August 11, 1937, two days after the Politburo approved it.32
Stalin encouraged cleansing “the Polish espionage mud.”33 The police on the ground were more concerned about meeting their quota than about checking into espionage charges, and they trawled for suspects by looking through telephone books for Polish-sounding names. Whether such persons were Polish or not was immaterial. In total, 139,835 people were arrested, of whom 111,091 were executed. The rest were sent to the Gulag.34