The Red Army was decapitated. Its best senior commanders were destroyed. In 1932 Boris Souvarine had asked Isaac Babel if there was any change in the Soviet Union. Babel had a one-word answer: war. In the event of war, who would lead the army? Souvarine asked. Babel, who knew the army's top commanders very well, answered without hesitation: Putna.89 Vitovt Putna, who had served in the same guards regiment as Tukhachevsky before the revolution, was among the first to be executed.
From May 1937 to September 1938 the victims of repression [in the military] included nearly half the regimental commanders, nearly all brigade commanders, and all commanders of army corps and military districts, as well as members of military councils and heads of political directorates in the military districts, the majority of political commissars in army corps, divisions, and brigades, almost one-third of the regimental commissars, and many instructors at military academies.90
In reality the army's losses were even more devastating than the above admission in an official publication. Because of the purge in the military the army was totally unprepared at the outbreak of war, entirely lacking a well-trained command staff.
One of the side effects of the terror was a new wave of defections. One defector, Walter Krivitsky, had a chance to reveal some of Stalin's secrets before being murdered by a Soviet agent. In particular, he revealed that Stalin had given orders to the NKVD to collaborate with the Gestapo in falsifying all the documents that later served as the main evidence against Tukhachevsky and the other murdered generals. After the war a Gestapo agent named Alfred Naujocks, who had directed the doctoring of these documents, confirmed Krivitsky's allegations. The only difference was that Naujocks believed the idea had been masterminded not by Stalin but by Heydrich, the head of the Gestapo, who said that "if this affair is successful, it will be Russia's greatest disaster since the revolution."91 Neither Heydrich nor Hitler (who gave the green light for the operation) knew that Stalin had dreamed up the whole elaborate scheme. Stalin oversaw all the details of this purge in person. At the Twenty-Second Party Congress in 1961 it was revealed that there had been no trial of the leaders of the Red Army. The Politburo had simply voted for their execution, then afterward the press accounts told of an imaginary military tribunal, sentences and so on.
Stalin's work in personally supervising the terror consisted essentially in signing lists that were brought to him, lists authorizing the arrest or execution of tens of thousands of leaders of the party, the government, and the economy. He also directly oversaw some of the interrogations, making insertions or deletions in the "confessions" certain victims were expected to sign, including the names of others Stalin might want to be incriminated. Aleksandr Orlov, who held a responsible post at the NKVD in Moscow during the preparations for the first Moscow trial, said that Stalin personally deleted the name of Molotov from a list of "beloved leaders of our party" against whom terror had allegedly been planned by purge victims. Pravda published the list without Molotov's name. There were Stalin, Ordzhoni- kidze, Voroshilov, Kaganovich, Kosior, Postyshev, and Zhdanov.92 Why wasn't Molotov among them? people wondered. "For six weeks Stalin held Molotov between life and death, then spared him."93 In other words, he finally ordered Molotov's name included as one of the "beloved leaders"
targeted by the "terrorists" whose confessions were being prepared for trial.
Stalin personally insisted on the use of torture. Orlov recalls a conversation he had with an NKVD official named Mironov, one of Yagoda's closest collaborators, who was in charge of preparations for the first big show trial. When Mironov had reported to Stalin that Kamenev did not want to confess to crimes he had not committed, the Leader asked the NKVD man, "How much does our state weigh, including all our factories, machines, army, and navy?" The baffled Mironov said he had no idea. Stalin insisted. "Well, it would have to be some astronomical figure," Mironov guessed. "Exactly," Stalin concluded. "Now, could Kamenev or anyone else bear up under such astronomical weight? Don't come back to see me without Kamenev's confession in your briefcase."94
The exact number of victims of the Great Terror is not likely ever to be known. Robert Conquest, who analyzed all available data up to 1971 (for the second edition of his book, The Great Terror) arrived at the extremely guarded estimate that in January 1937 the prisons and camps held about 5 million people and that between January 1937 and December 1938 approximately 7 million more were arrested. Conquest did not include common criminals in this figure, since he did not think they could be regarded as victims of Stalin's terror. Actually, a large number of children of "enemies of the people" were classed among the "common criminals." Conquest estimated that under Ezhov (that is, from January 1937 to December 1938) approximately 1 million were shot and 2 million died in prison.95 Solzhenitsyn's estimate is larger—1,700,000 shot by January 1, 1939.96
In The Great Terror, Conquest wrote that up to 1950 in the camps of the Kolyma region alone at least 2 million prisoners died. In his later book Kolyma he cites an objective and impartial source, Lloyd's Register, for all the ships carrying prisoners to Kolyma were insured by Lloyd's, and comes to the conclusion that no less than 3 million must have died in those camps. The British author added that from 1938 on Kolyma held at least twice as many prisoners as all the prisons of tsarist Russia in 1912 (when there were 183,249 prisoners, the highest number in Russian history up to that point) and that in one camp on the Serpantinka River alone more prisoners were shot in 1938 than in the last hundred years under the tsars.Sol- zhenitsyn, in explaining how difficult it was to imagine the monstrous scale of this empire of prison camps, said that the prisoners themselves gave the exaggerated figure of 20-30 million, "when in fact there were only between 12 million and 15 million."
The first socialist totalitarian state had been built, containing an empire of camps such as history had never seen. Hitler was offended by criticism of the Nazi death camps: "If I had the vast spaces of Siberia, I wouldn't need concentration camps."98 Stalin made use of the vast spaces of the entire Soviet Union and far outdid Hitler in the number of prisoners he held. The empire of the camps, the Culag Archipelago, as Solzhenitsyn was to call it, played an important economic and psychological role. In a country where the number of political prisoners was counted in the millions, the inhabitants could not help feeling a constant daily, hourly pressure crushing their spirit, forcing them to obey, conform, fulfill the quotas, do the work.
The monstrous terror of the Ezhov era (the "Ezhovshchina") shook the country to its depths once more, stunning it with horror, eliminating finally all those who might still show some initiative, have faith in moral values, believe in revolution or in anything other than Stalin. Yes, Stalin had built socialism and created the kind of party he had dreamed of, an order of Knights of the Sword. This party was also Lenin's dream come true, a combat party, a party of a new type. On March 3, 1937, Stalin had referred to the "leading cadres of our party." The top command consisted of 3,000— 4,000 officials; below them was an officer corps of 30,000—40,000; then a stratum of noncommissioned officers numbering 100,000—150,000. The remaining millions of party members were merely the rank and file, a gray herd, to be driven or used as the leaders chose.