The strength of the party, said Stalin, lay in its connection to the masses. By way of illustration he cited the ancient Greek myth of Antaeus, the son of Poseidon, god of the seas, and of Gaea, goddess of the earth. In battle, Antaeus was invincible because of the strength he drew from his mother via the earth. But one day an enemy appeared who vanquished him. It was Hercules, who held him aloft and prevented him from touching the ground:
I think that the Bolsheviks remind us of the hero of Greek mythology, Antaeus. They, like Antaeus, are strong because they maintain connection with their mother, the masses who gave birth to them, suckled them and reared them. And as long as they maintain connection with their mother, with the people, they have every chance of remaining invincible.71
The military purge began in May 1937 with the arrest of Marshal M. N. Tukhachevsky and seven other Soviet generals, who were accused of a fascist plot to overthrow the government.
Stalin’s doubts about the loyalty of the Red Army dated back to the civil war debate about the recruitment of bourgeois military specialists. In the 1920s White émigré circles fantasised about Tukhachevsky as a ‘Red Napoleon’ and there were fears the armed forces would be infiltrated by former Tsarist officers. There were many Trotsky supporters in the highly politicised armed forces and in 1927 the head of Stalin’s political police warned him they were plotting a military coup. During the forced collectivisation campaign, elements of the Red Army wavered when faced with orders to seize peasant lands and produce.
None of this stopped Tukhachevsky from rising to the rank of deputy defence commissar or from being promoted to marshal in 1935. But Stalin’s attitude towards him changed drastically during the feverish atmosphere that developed after Kirov’s assassination. The trigger for his arrest seems to have been a report from Voroshilov in early May 1937 that the armed forces had been infiltrated by foreign agents and that sabotage and espionage were rife.72 After a summary trial, Tukhachevsky and his colleagues were executed, as were several thousand other officers, in an extensive purge that lasted until the end of 1938. Among those who perished were three marshals, sixteen generals, fifteen admirals, 264 colonels, 107 majors and seventy-one lieutenants. By the time the purge had run its course, 34,000 officers had been dismissed from service, although 11,500 of them were later reinstated.
On 2 June 1937, Stalin addressed the country’s Military Council about the existence of a military-political conspiracy against Soviet power. Its political leaders were Trotsky, Rykov and Bukharin; its military core, the High Command group led by Tukhachevsky. The chief organiser of this conspiracy was Trotsky, who dealt directly with the Germans, while Tukhachevsky’s group acted as agents of the Reichswehr, which controlled them like ‘marionettes and puppets’.
Stalin cautioned against persecuting people just because they had a dubious political background but bemoaned the weakness of Soviet intelligence services, which were ‘childlike’ compared to those of bourgeois states. Intelligence was the Soviet state’s eyes and ears and, for the first time in twenty years, it had suffered a severe defeat, he said.73
Stalin was also perturbed by the subversive activities of so-called kulaks, allegedly rich peasants who had been deprived of their property during the forced collectivisation drive. In early July 1937, the Politburo directed local and regional party leaders to draw up lists of anti-Soviet ‘kulaks and criminals’ who had returned home from deportation exile in Siberia, ‘so that the most dangerous of them can be arrested and shot’.74 At the end of that month the Politburo approved a proposal from the NKVD to repress nearly 300,000 kulaks and criminals, including more than 72,000 summary executions. The stated rationale for this ‘mass operation’ was that anti-Soviet elements were involved in extensive crime, sabotage and subversion, not only in the countryside but in urban areas, too. By the end of the operation, the NKVD had exceeded its target for arrests by 150 per cent and for executions by over 400 per cent.75
The outbreak of the Spanish Civil War in July 1936 had reinforced Stalin’s fears concerning the interaction of foreign and domestic threats. General Francisco Franco’s military mutiny against the country’s leftist government was supported by troops and munitions from Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany. Stalin backed the Republic’s democratically elected government and some 2,000 Soviet military personnel served in Spain alongside the Comintern’s 40,000 volunteers in the International Brigades. He was convinced that Franco’s military successes were the result of sabotage and subversion behind the front lines.76
Spanish communists were in the vanguard of the anti-fascist struggle but there was also a strong anarchist movement and a small but vocal semi-Trotskyist party called POUM (Workers’ Party of Marxist Unification). In the context of the unfolding Great Terror in the USSR, the POUM leftists, who sought a more radical revolution in Spain than the communists, were categorised as Nazi and fascist agents provocateurs. In May 1937 a POUM revolt in Barcelona was put down viciously, including the abduction and execution by Soviet agents of their leader, Andrés Nin.
Stalin became obsessed with the damage that ‘wreckers and spies’ could do if the Soviet Union was attacked by foreign powers and considered Spain an object lesson in that regard. ‘They want to turn the USSR into another Spain,’ he told the Military Council in June 1937.77
In November 1937 Stalin received into his Kremlin office the head of the Communist International, Georgi Dimitrov, a Bulgarian who was in Berlin in 1933 when Hitler came to power and was arrested by the Nazis for complicity in the burning down of the Reichstag. Deported to the Soviet Union in February 1934, it was Dimitrov who, with Stalin’s support, steered the Comintern towards the politics of anti-fascist unity. He delivered the main report at the Comintern’s 7th World Congress in Moscow in August 1935 and was elected its general-secretary, a position he retained until the organisation was dissolved in 1943. Dimitrov developed a close working relationship with Stalin and his notes on their confidential conversations in his personal diary are highly revealing.
Stalin told Dimitrov that the Comintern’s policy on the struggle against Trotskyism did not go far enough: ‘Trotskyites must be hunted down, shot, destroyed. These are international provocateurs, fascism’s most vicious agents.’78
After several attempts, the NKVD did finally manage to assassinate Trotsky, in Mexico in August 1940. Stalin himself edited the Pravda article about his death. He changed the headline from ‘Inglorious Death of Trotsky’ to ‘Death of an International Spy’ and added this sentence to the end of the unsigned article: ‘Trotsky was a victim of his own intrigues, treachery and treason. Thus ended ingloriously the life of this despicable person, who went to his grave with “international spy” stamped on his forehead.’79
Stalin’s orchestration of the Great Terror was an awesome demonstration of his power within the Soviet system. Equally, only he had the power to end the purge. In summer 1938, the Politburo took steps to curb arrests and executions and curtail the activities of the NKVD. In November 1938 Yezhov resigned, confessing that he had failed to root out traitors within the NKVD who had conspired to target innocent people. Arrested in April 1939, he was shot in February 1940. His successor as security chief was Lavrenty Beria, the head of the Georgian communist party.80