According to the report, the source of the whole venture lay in the Executive Central Committee’s authorization in December 1934, following Kirov’s assassination, of action outside the law. Stalin and Zhdanov’s telegram to Kaganovich and Molotov preparing the ground for the February–March 1937 Central Committee plenum was cited as the direct trigger for mass repression. Stalin’s personal responsibility for the widespread recourse to torture of the accused was stated in numerous testimonies, including those of officers from the Internal Affairs ministry (MVD) who were themselves victims of the repression, and by three documents appended to the report: a telegram from Stalin dated 10 January 1939 reaffirming the validity of ‘physical methods’; a memo giving his approval for the execution of 138 high-ranking officials; and the letter he received from P. I. Eikhe (Politburo member) prior to his execution. Between 1937 and 1939, Stalin and Molotov personally signed around 400 lists of people to be executed (a total of 44,000 names).
The aim of Pospelov’s report was not simply to take stock of the past. Its content was also a burning issue in debates about policy and strategy, which we shall study in Part Two. The overall toll of the terror was much heavier, since the verdict of the 1950s mostly dealt with victims from the party’s ranks.
10
THE SCALE OF THE PURGES
A complete history of the purges of 1937–8 may very well never come to be written. But if we wish to grasp a phenomenon that exceeds the bounds of the imagination, we need to consider different data. We shall begin with the estimates made by various agencies, which are sometimes difficult to interpret because they are based on different sources, calculations, figures and dates, but which nevertheless permit a reasonable approximation. For the pivotal phase of the purges – 1937–8 – we can turn to a text written by an ad hoc commission appointed by the Central Committee Presidium in 1963, and chaired by I. M. Shvernik.
According to some sources, the years 1937–8 saw the arrest of 1,372,392 people, of whom 681,692 were shot. The figures given by Khrushchev to the Central Committee plenum in 1957 were somewhat different: more than 1,500,000 arrested and 680,692 shot (the differences stem from the criteria employed by KGB statisticians). Sources for 1930–53 indicate 3,778,000 people arrested, of whom 786,000 were executed.[1]
Other data are concerned exclusively with the category of ‘administrative repression’ – i.e. handled by non-judicial bodies: the NKVD’s ‘special concilium’ in Moscow and its equivalents at lower administrative levels, the aforementioned ‘troikas’ responsible for most of the ravages of 1937–8. They virtually had carte blanche and, as we have seen, pressed the Kremlin to increase their quotas. The NKVD’s special concilium, set up on 10 July 1934, was an exceptionally industrious body: it condemned 78,989 people in 1934, 267,076 in 1935, 274,607 in 1936, 790,665 in 1937, and 554,258 in 1938. If they were able to do such a ‘great job’, it was because they dispensed with procedural niceties. In most instances, the accused was not even present. A case might be dealt with in ten minutes, resulting in sentences of between five and twenty-five years in a camp or even immediate execution. Most of the victims were accused of ‘counter-revolutionary activities’ – hence the brevity of the trials and the quantity of executions.
The data produced by NKVD researchers themselves afford another source. The ‘historic’ Central Committee decree of 2 July 1937, which we have already mentioned, instructed the NKVD to destroy ‘enemy groups’. Quotas for arrests were fixed in advance and transmitted to administrative regions for fulfilment, just like grain procurement campaigns. These quotas were subdivided into categories of crimes, and the sentences likewise prescribed. Thus, category 1 included 72,950 people to be arrested and executed, the total being divided between the different regions. Category 2 numbered 186,000 people to be transported to camps. Additional forestry camps were to be opened for this purpose, but rapidly became overcrowded. The whole procedure was truly Kafkaesque: the number of enemies was stipulated in a quota, but it was permissible to exceed it. It only remained to name the culprits.
The figures for annual arrests are as follows: on 1 January 1937, 820,881; on 1 January 1938, 996,367; and on 1 January 1939, 1,317,195. Of these totals, the labour camps received 539,923 prisoners in 1937 and 600,724 in 1938. That year, the influx into the Gulag peaked. In fact, 837,000 detainees were released from camps and colonies following a reexamination of their cases under Beria’s authority during a ‘rectification campaign’ ordered by Stalin. In 1939, however, the repression resumed afresh and on 1 January 1940 the number of inmates of camps and colonies reached 1,979,729, most of them common-law prisoners. Political prisoners, condemned under the ‘counter-revolutionary’ articles of the criminal code, accounted for 28.7 per cent of the total, or 420,000-plus persons. The number of inmates was also increased by the transfer of prisoners from recently annexed territories, to whom we must add the people arrested following these annexations. The application of the decrees issued in 1940 and 1941 punishing theft and unauthorized departure from the workplace also helped to swell the numbers.[2]
The havoc wrought by the purges, particularly among party and state cadres, is not easy to assess numerically. A valuable source on turnover among personnel in the Railways Commissariat in 1937–8 indicates that 75 per cent of managers and technical officials (senior and middle-ranking cadres) were replaced in the course of these years.[3] These data cannot be extrapolated to the whole machinery of government, but they permit us to speak of a haemorrhage of cadres, even in the strategically most sensitive agencies.
The consequences of the terror were felt throughout the economy, the bureaucracy, the party, and in cultural life. By mid-1938, the human, economic and political damage and its cost were such that a change of course was essential and almost predictable. A ‘normalization’ was indicated and was conducted in the usual fashion: someone had to be ‘named’ as the culprit responsible for the ‘deviations’. This was not a problem, since there were no innocents in this affair. The turn was signalled by the dismissal of Yezhov from his post as NKVD head and his replacement by his deputy, Beria, on 25 November 1938. Yezhov was arrested in April 1939 and accused – as the standard formula dictated – of being ‘at the head of a counter-revolutionary organization’. He was executed in February 1940, in accordance with the same script as that of 1936 when the then NKVD head, Yagoda, was eliminated. Those in the know could begin to speculate about the next occurrence of the same scenario.
In the context of the ‘new line’, several hundred thousand people were released from the Gulag, but these were primarily common-law criminals, not political prisoners.[4] After the Eighteenth Party Congress, some victims of the purges were rehabilitated. Once again, however, this cosmetic operation involved only a limited number of people relative to the scale of the purges – just enough for Stalin to be able to appear as the one who restored justice and punished the guilty. Such benevolence was further displayed somewhat later by the arrest and partial massacre for a change of numerous NKVD agents, accused of going too far by attacking party members and innocent citizens. Between 22,000 and 26,000 of them joined their victims in camps or graves. No one knows whether this cohort included the worst of them. Still, it must have reassured many people. Khlevniuk maintains that in the course of 1939 self-confidence inside leadership circles returned: salaries were increased and arrests were now subject to more stringent rules. Moreover, the perceptible downplaying of Yezhov’s agency after his demise persuaded party cadres that they had regained ground from the security apparatus, even if a number of regional and city party bosses were purged together with unworthy chekists for having deviated from the right path.
1
E. M. Adreev, L. A. Karskii and T. L. Khar’kova,
2
3