The lists of those sentenced by the Military Collegium were sent to Stalin, and given his approval, with only a few Politburo members also signing. Nor did this informal leadership group have much time to spare. Records show that they had to make so many decisions on other urgent matters of policy that these terror orders were usually handled in twenty or thirty minutes. When it comes to the Mass Operations, one finds that the number of victims in these accounted for nearly twenty times the number of victims of the Military Collegium and other lesser tribunals.
I had, indeed, reported on a number of local examples of denunciatory hysteria. But it all had still registered as something like overspill from the main event; that it had worked its way down, as it were by inertia, into the general population. In reality the mass terror was ordered in detail from the top and was directed, with the numbers to be repressed laid down for each province and republic, for strata of the population – with individual crimes of terrorism, espionage and so on added later by the local Troika – and the lists of names then submitted to Moscow for final approval.
The Politburo decision of 2 July 1937, on Anti-Soviet Elements, is signed by Stalin, and addressed to all secretaries of provinces and republics, as a telegram. It starts by saying that many ‘former kulaks and criminals’ are guilty of ‘anti-Soviet and diversionary crime’. The NKVD is immediately to arrest and shoot the most hostile, and send the others to exile. For this purpose Troikas are to be created within fifteen days.
This is followed on 30 July 1937 by the crucial NKVD Operational Prikaz 00447 to ‘repress former kulaks, criminals and other anti-Soviet elements’. In more detail its first paragraph adds, ‘churchmen, members of sects’, and of ‘anti-Soviet political parties, the SRs …’ and others, together with targets such as ‘“Aferisty”’. Various directives based on it were issued – one on the Social Revolutionaries on 18 January 1938, one on Mensheviks and Anarchists on 14 February 1938.
The second section of Prikaz 00447 lists the numbers to be shot or jailed at once in each of the sixty-four provinces and republics named – numbers often increased, frequently with Stalin’s signature, over the next fifteen months. This is followed by treatment of wives of the repressed, who are to serve sentences of varying harshness, depending on their complicity.
This Prikaz then lists by name the members of the Troika in each province or republic. Each Troika is to report its sentences, on a form indicated, six times a month by telegram or urgent post to the Head of the Eighth Department of the Central NKVD (at this time V. E. Tsesarski), though later transferred to the First Special Department (and I. I. Shapiro). The verdicts were sent in the form of ‘albums’, and Moscow’s men had only time to put in a figure (for GULAG years), or, more commonly, just the letter R for rasstrel (shoot).
This anti-‘kulak’ Prikaz was accompanied by orders targeting a different category – the ‘national’. Operative Prikaz 00485 is on the repression of ‘members of the Polish Military Organisation’ in the USSR. Then there is the German Prikaz, 00439, directed in the first place against German citizens, including political refugees from the Nazi regime. The Latvians are covered in Memorandum 49990 of 30 November 1937. The last of these ‘national’ decrees was on the Greeks – Directive 50216, to take effect on 15 December 1937.
Operative Prikaz 00693 of 23 September 1937, citing the original ‘National Prikaz’, covers all ‘border crossers’ – for political reasons or because of ‘better material conditions in the USSR, as a result of unemployment and famine in their own countries’. But the oddest of the ‘national’ categories (see Chapter 9) is that of the Harbintsy – former Russian subjects and their families working on the Chinese Eastern Railway, handed over by the Soviets to Japan in 1935 and until then run by the USSR. (Not a ‘nationality’ at all!)
One finds Frinovsky writing to the Sverdlovsk NKVD of the ‘national’ categories that the victims’ identification documents as sent to Moscow seldom register them as in their supposed national target. But of those arrested in the province as ‘German’ only 390 were German out of 4,142, as also with Poles and others. And similarly with the ‘kulak’ operation: only less than half of the charge sheets identify the victim as ‘kulak’ at all, and even of the 3,789 ‘former kulaks’, 3,552 were workers.16 Similarly, in the West Siberian Krai, those arrested under 00447 included almost as many SR victims as the ‘kulak’ component proper (9,689 and 10,541 respectively).17
It will be seen that the Prikazes do not specify any political or other crime, but merely sections of the population. The Troikas (or Dvoikas Commissions of the NKVD and Prosecutor) are to fill in the actual accusations afterwards. And it is clear, above all, that it was organised and controlled from the centre. So it is now beyond dispute that the mass terror was set in motion from above, and not on any objective basis, true or false, but by quotas of categories thought unamenable to Soviet rule. That is to say the strata were condemned as such and the mass terror is seen as a removal of all that seemed unassimilable to the Stalinist order. Stalin’s mass action against a section of the population was thus taken on ‘ideological’ grounds, merely disguising it as a purge of terrorists, spies and saboteurs necessary to the safety and survival of the regime.
Even local NKVD chiefs, though certainly incited to or predisposed to the currently raging paranoia, are reported as becoming exhausted. When things had got completely out of hand an NKVD Prikaz 00762 was given on 26 November 1938 (following a Politburo decision on 17 November), annulling eleven Prikazy and other instructions from July 1937 to September 1938, and immediately bringing to a close any sort of mass operation, noting too that ‘arrests are to be made on a strictly individual basis’.
So the ‘Great’ terror ends with the appointment of Beria to head the NKVD, which is to say that, even if not great by some standards, terror continued to flourish.
There are a number of other points in the 1990 edition that need input or correction from material not then available. One of these is on the victim totals of 1937–8, of which no full account had yet emerged. So I had little choice but to summarise the long Appendix on the subject in here of the 1968 edition, with estimates based on various sources. As it turned out, this was correct on the vital matter – the numbers put to death: about one million.’
‘Camps’ is a vague and general category; the dating is confused; and the figures given fail to cover various other forms of penal exile18 (or indeed the fate of families); ‘special exiles’ as given by Pavel Polyan for MEMORIAL are in the six–seven million range – and this is not including the eight million who had gone through Gulag by 1940.19 This of course affects the figures given for ‘Arrests’ – both as to dates and because including all arrested for minor offences (sometimes only held for days and often counted again on rearrest).
Even so apparently concrete a number as those dead in camps runs into problems – being affected by the practice of releasing prisoners on the point of death, so that they could be registered as civilian dead; or the writing off of the many deaths among the million-odd Gulag prisoners ‘released’ into penal battalions and driven into attacks by machine-guns. The subject is still full of uncertainties – the most highly detailed Russian analyses continue often to mix both particular categories and the periods covered. To this day it is hard to enumerate those directly suffering – though not so listed. Nor, of course, can we specify so simply the crucial matter of the effect on the general population.20