The irony of history extends still further. Praised to the skies, the NKVD was a bureaucracy with its own routines. An internal inspectorate was assiduous in watching over its smooth functioning. Its reports reveal an institution characterized by innumerable irregularities, professional ineptitude, shortcomings and thievery; and we find long lists of criminal acts that had been investigated and reported to higher bodies, with demands for severe sanctions.
A few examples may shed light. In a memo to the head of the NKVD’s cadres department, comrade Veinshtok, who held the rank of major of state security, inventoried the misdemeanours and crimes committed by NKVD agents in 1935. The data supplied by agencies at all levels (from republics to regions) for the first ten months of the year indicated a total of 11,436 offences and crimes. The memo also contained a list of the measures taken by way of sanctions. According to Veinshtok, something was wrong with the administrative policies of regional and local NKVD agencies and the problem should be discussed. The total number of criminal cases was 5,639, of which 3,232 were accounted for by urban sections. But what most worried the major was the fact that 2,005 of those had been committed by section heads themselves.
A breakdown of the punishments by rank indicates that all categories in every branch were committing offences and crimes – whether in the military or transport units – and at every administrative level (heads, their deputies, and junior staff). Thus, of the 3,311 leading personnel at the level of district and town sections, 62 per cent (2,056) received penalties. As Veinshtok commented, it had to be admitted that this was a very high percentage indeed. Sixty per cent of the sanctions against regional agents were for negligence, poor work, drunkenness, debauchery, and other acts bringing the NKVD into discredit. Of these, particular attention should be paid to the high percentage of penalties imposed for disobeying orders and instructions (13 per cent), for breaches of discipline (8.5 per cent), or for infringement of procedural norms (5 per cent). The list also contains cases of embezzlement and misappropriation, concealment of social origins (67 cases), ‘anti-party and anti-Soviet’ attitudes (17), suicides and rapes (78 in total), lack of the vigilance expected of a chekist and party member (76), as well as false statements.
Most of the penalties fell on younger agents, mainly from auxiliary services like signals. But the number of sanctions against the hard core of NKVD personnel with twelve or more years of service was also deemed too high (1,171).[5]
A further report from the cadres department for the period 1 October 1936–1 January 1938 provides information on ‘departures’ from the GUGB (an independent agency within the NKVD). Among the reasons for these ‘departures’, we find 1,220 arrests, 1,268 dismissals and 1,345 transfers to the reserves. To these must be added 1,361 cases of punishment for membership of counter-revolutionary groups, or contact with counter-revolutionaries (Trotskyists), right-wing nationalists, traitors or spies; 267 for ‘workplace disruption’; and 593 for ‘moral turpitude’. Finally, we have 547 individuals who were ‘socially alien’, or in contact with such people, or who had served in the past with the Whites. Among the other various causes for departures from the GUGB were illness (544), death (138), or transfer to other agencies (1,258).
The reports indicate that things did not change until after Stalin’s death. The inspection agencies carried on doing their work and a separate branch, with responsibility for financial controls, also had a lot to say about the high frequency of theft and embezzlement, counterfeit receipts, and false accounting. It paid particular attention to what was going on in warehouses and storage facilities.[6] In addition, there are annual accounting reports for use by the authorities (and by today’s researchers), for the Stalinist period at least. In short, in terms of professionalism, respect for the law, and honesty, the security services were no better than the rest. Efforts were made to improve the quality of the personnel by bringing in thousands of cadres from the NKVD’s own schools. But it took a long time for positive results to emerge.
Such documents on the party’s own security force, poised to save the country from the enemy within, highlight a further dimension of this dark episode: the security services were packed with morally and professionally dubious elements. Commanders were pampered, but were nevertheless demoralized and disoriented by the very character of the task assigned them. They did not have to prove anything, they were simply required to fulfil quotas and, as throughout the USSR’s planned system, to surpass them to obtain bonuses, promotions and wage increases. But the sword they suspended over the head of the country also hung over their own heads – and not for drunkenness or debauchery. All the security services, including foreign intelligence, constantly lived on the brink of a catastrophe lurking within their own regime – and which was much more dangerous than spying or catching spies, combating smugglers or bandits, or facing the other risks associated with their work.
‘MAN HUNT’
Many details about the mass arrests and executions first became available from a committee headed by the party secretary, Pospelov, which was set up by Khrushchev in 1955 prior to his ‘secret speech’ of 1956. In fact, the policy of rehabilitation had already begun in 1954. It is worth starting with this committee’s disclosures, if only in order to appreciate how little was known about these horrendous events not only by the wider public, but even by the political elite itself.[7]
The Pospelov committee received documents from the archives of the secret police, as well as depositions from many interrogators-executioners who recounted how they had obtained confessions from their victims. The Prosecutor’s Office also supplied the committee with a wealth of material. Stalin’s personal role was clearly documented. Other documents showed that the ‘troikas’ (composed of the local party secretary, the head of the secret police, and the local prosecutor), which were responsible for the terror at the local level, kept pressing Moscow to increase the ‘execution quotas’, knowing full well that it was disposed to do so.
When Pospelov presented his committee’s findings to the Party Presidium, a ‘terrifying picture emerged that shocked all those present’. We may surmise that this reaction was not feigned. Few people could fully have imagined the mechanics and scope of what were basically secret operations. The statistics supplied principally concerned party leaders accused of treason, as well as the broad category of people arrested for ‘anti-Soviet activity’, who were mainly party and state cadres. On the other hand, Pospelov said nothing of the enormous category of ‘socially alien elements’. For the fateful years of 1937–8, the report gave the figure of 1,548,366 persons arrested for anti-Soviet activity, of whom 681,692 were shot. Leading personnel in the state and party had been decimated at all levels. Those who replaced them had succumbed in their turn, as had their replacements, and so on. The majority of delegates to the 1934 Seventeenth Congress (the ‘Congress of the Victors’) – 1,108 of them – had been arrested and 848 shot.
The report also cited NKVD orders instructing agents how to conduct the repression and provided an idea of its methods: the outright confection of all manner of anti-Soviet organizations and centres; gross violations of the law by investigators; phoney plots invented by NKVD agents themselves; a total failure by the Prosecutor’s Office to exercise due oversight over the NKVD; judicial arbitrariness on the part of the Military Collegium of the USSR’s armed forces, which condoned ‘extra-judicial procedures’.
7
Our source here is R. G. Pikhoia,