To assert minimal control, the Kremlin insisted that its approval be given before an execution was carried out. Local officials put the briefest sketches of the doomed into albums, which began piling up in the hallways of the NKVD in Moscow. Stalin and other leaders signed the front page of hundreds of such albums, sending tens of thousands to their deaths. Some of these albums, complete with the signatures, can now be viewed online.35 The accused never had a minute before the troikas, much less a day in court. By mid-September 1938, even the fiction of this “album procedure” was dropped, and new NKVD troikas were empowered to verify sentences and carry out executions on their own authority.36
The “national operations” against the Germans and Poles set the pattern for the simultaneous repression of (among others) foreign citizens or dispersed ethnic groups from Afghanistan, Bulgaria, China, Estonia, Finland, Greece, Iran, Korea, Kurdistan, Latvia, Macedonia, and Romania. These campaigns were aimed selectively at ethnic groups who were remotely considered counterrevolutionaries or “anti-Soviet elements.” By the time “national operations” inside the USSR ended in 1938, they had arrested almost 350,000 people, of whom 247,157 were executed. Some 88,356 were imprisoned or sent to the Gulag. The ethnic component of the Great Terror represented an increasing part of it, estimated ultimately at around one-fifth of all the arrests and one-third of the executions.37
The Soviets were no doubt apprehensive that the capitalists could infiltrate the country by way of its minorities. At one time Moscow had thought that such groups with ties just over the border could be used to spread Communism. But by the mid-1930s, the Kremlin concluded that the opposite was more likely—namely, that the enemies of Communism would exploit cross-border links to ethnic groups inside the Soviet Union. Thus the authorities decided to move certain minorities into the hinterland and picked up members of such groups who lived anywhere else in the Soviet Union.
This ethnic-oriented terror accelerated quickly. For example, a campaign against the Koreans began on August 18, 1937, with a note from Stalin and Molotov calling for the deportation of 44,023 Koreans from twelve border districts. Three days later an official decree pointed to twenty-three districts, affecting 135,343 people. On September 22, the NKVD asked Moscow for the right to remove each and every Korean from the Far Eastern Region. The reasoning was that any Koreans left behind would be resentful and would become “rich soil for the Japanese to work on.” In the end the entire Korean population of 171,781 was “cleansed,” which is to say resettled, shipped to Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan.38
In a foretaste of the Cold War, the Soviet Union, by the end of the 1930s, cut itself off from the outside world and anathematized not just anti-Communist thinking but even contact with noncitizens. No less vulnerable was the Communist International, or Comintern, whose headquarters was in Moscow. Venerable leaders of the movement who had sought refuge there found themselves under attack. Some parties suffered more than others, like the Polish Communist Party, which was nearly completely annihilated. Also killed were many from the German, Austrian, Hungarian, Italian, Bulgarian, Finnish, and Baltic parties. Soviet citizens who happened to be officials in the Comintern were not spared. Thus the great international organization created by Lenin as the instrument meant to spread the gospel was itself found to be “sinning.” Any “evidence” that these people had conspired against Stalin and the Soviet Union was concocted and had been beaten out of hapless victims.39
Some idea of the immense scale of the terror can be gathered by how many people had run-ins with the secret police (the OGPU; later the NKVD). Between 1930 and 1938, just over 3.8 million people were arrested by police bodies mainly for “counter-revolutionary crimes” or “anti-Soviet agitation.” In 1937 and 1938 alone, when the terror was at wholly unprecedented levels, out of a total of 1.5 million arrested, 1.3 million received a sentence and 681,692 were executed. At the height of the terror (August 1937 to November 1938), on average 1,500 people were shot each day.40 We should be aware that these figures are incomplete because we have only the statistics for the secret police, not for the regular police, whose arrest activities were also vast.
Stalin offered an explanation for the whole thing on November 7, 1937, the twentieth anniversary of the Russian Revolution, when he and two dozen of his cronies met for lunch at the home of Kliment Voroshilov. Also there and taking notes was Georgi Dimitrov, the Bulgarian head of the Comintern. As usual there were too many toasts, and Stalin’s words followed up his earlier rationale for the terror. He gave thanks to the tsars for creating an empire all the way to Kamchatka, saying that the Bolsheviks had consolidated, united, and strengthened the state in the name of the workers and peoples:
Anyone who tries to destroy the unity of the socialist state, who aims to separate any of its parts or nationalities from it, is an enemy, a sworn enemy of the state and of the peoples of the USSR. And we will exterminate each and every one of these enemies, whether they are old Bolsheviks or not. We will exterminate their kin and entire family. We will mercilessly exterminate anyone, who with deeds or thoughts threatens the unity of the socialist state. Here’s to the extermination of all enemies, themselves and their kin!41
A few days later he added in a private conversation that there were those “who had not really internally accepted the party line, had not stomached collectivization in particular,” with its ruthlessness toward the kulaks. These forces then went underground and though “without power themselves had linked up with external enemies, promised Ukraine to the Germans, Byelorussia to the Poles, and the Far East to the Japanese.” Stalin went so far as to claim that “they had made preparations in July for an attack on the Politburo in the Kremlin. But they lost their nerve.” Thus even in private he was trying to justify the terror as defensive and supposedly necessary to avert a coup of some kind.42
Finally, on November 17, 1938, he brought the bloodbath to an end and stopped the nearly twenty special operations that were running more or less simultaneously. The NKVD was to straighten things out, to eliminate “shortcomings,” and thereby to continue making what was called “a positive contribution to the construction of socialist society.”43 However, on a single day (December 12), he decided on the deaths of 3,167 “enemies” already “processed.”44
After the war some of the practitioners of terror, like Kaganovich and Molotov, tried to excuse it all. Molotov said that because of the terror, there had been no enemies behind the lines during the war and no opposition afterward. He admitted that mistakes had been made and said that “Stalin was adamant on making doubly sure: spare no one, but guarantee absolute stability in the country for a long period of time—through the war and postwar years.”45 Late in life Kaganovich again agreed that there had been “errors” but dismissed any responsibility for them. He was sure that many innocent people were condemned to death, and of the “spies” whom he remembered, most, he said, were supposedly Trotskyites. Once again he tried to exculpate the regime of serious wrongdoing. He asked rhetorically: “Were there not many open enemies of socialism, of the October revolution? How many do you need? If you want to protect the revolution, Soviet power and state, then you must beat these wreckers.”46 He was still telling himself the same old Stalinist story.
The terror included a massive campaign against Germans living in the Soviet Union. On July 20, 1937, Stalin ordered the arrest of all of them working in war-related industries, and five days later NKVD chief Yezhov signed Operational Order 00439 against German “spies and wreckers.” Included in the hunt were the few resident German citizens and political refugees, including Communists, though immediately targeted was also anyone with a German background and even Soviet citizens suspected of having ties with such “spies, wreckers, and terrorists.”47 The roundup ran on longer than expected, eventually condemning 55,005, of whom 41,898 (76 percent) were shot. When local police had trouble meeting their quota, as for example in the Sverdlovsk region, they still arrested 4,379 suspects, though only 122 of them were of German origin. To make up their shortfall, they grabbed Russian and Ukrainian deportees.48