Russia's War

by Richard Overy

  The end-product of the system of terror was either refined and soul-breaking torture and a bullet in the back of the neck, or a long spell in a prison camp. The first Soviet forced-labour camps were set up in the early 1920s. Like their Tsarist predecessors they housed a mixture of regular criminals and political dissidents, the latter preyed upon by the former. Those deemed to be hardened enemies of the revolution were transported to the first Soviet concentration camp for political opponents, on the island of Solovki in the White Sea. Housed in a sixteenth-century monastery, the camp was opened in 1923. It was run by the organization that succeeded the Cheka, the State Political Directorate (OGPU), established the same year. The euphemistic title shielded the identity of the state security police who ran the system from the Internal Affairs Commissariat (NKVD). Long before the Stalinist terror of the 1930s, the regime imprisoned or executed thousands in the name of political conformity. OGPU officials, working in the notorious Lubyanka prison in Moscow, beat, tortured, raped and blackmailed their victims, in order to extract fanciful confessions of counter-revolutionary crimes. Even genuine dissidents were made to own up to grotesque conspiracies and ‘deviationism’ quite unrelated to the usually banal pretext for their arrest. Confessions earned a mandatory twenty-five-year sentence, which only the hardiest or the luckiest survived.36

  Two things combined to turn the revolutionary terror of the 1920s into the frantic blood-lettings of the 1930s. First came the drive for forced modernization, the ‘Second Revolution’. The embattled Party found itself facing widespread opposition from the peasants (and from peasants in uniform, who made up 70 per cent of the army rank and file) as the reforms were pushed through.37 The social crisis revived the atmosphere of the civil war, and, as in that earlier conflict, the Party conjured up counter-revolutionary phantoms to secure wider support for radical change. A collective paranoia increasingly permeated every level of the state, down to individual factories or collective farms, where every broken machine or tractor was attributed to counter-revolutionary ‘hooligans’. More often than not the hapless victims were ill-educated, technically illiterate peasant-workers whose only crime was ignorance, drunkenness or poor timekeeping. But they were also plant managers who undershot their monthly quota or engineers who wrestled to install sophisticated foreign machinery in crude, cold and ill-lit workshops. The modernization drive provoked a national witch-hunt, for which there was no rational foundation. As in the witch-hunts of an earlier age, there was no defence. It was sufficient to point the finger of blame; local kangaroo courts did the rest. There was no appeal. Thousands of peasants and workers found themselves shipped to the growing empire of camps stretched across the Soviet Union, understanding neither their crime nor their persecutors.

  Most of the victims of the 1930s were peasants, whose way of life was violently overturned in order to modernize Soviet society. The chaotic conditions of 1932 and 1933, when collectivization was at its height, generated the worst famine of the century. In the grain-rich regions of the Ukraine, the northern Caucasus and Kazakhstan, peasant resistance brought on the full fury of the Party. The farmers' own food was seized, even the seed for the following year's planting. Stalin ordered the security police to seal off the whole of the Ukraine from the rest of the Soviet Union to prevent anyone from leaving or food from getting in. It was almost certainly Stalin's single most murderous act. The most recent Russian estimates indicate a death toll of 4.2 million in the Ukraine alone in 1933. Whole villages starved to death or were dispatched by epidemics to which there was scant bodily resistance.38 In Kazakhstan the mainly nomadic farmers were forced into crude camps and left to die. An estimated 1.7 million, almost half the population of the republic, perished in the most wretched conditions.39 Thousands fled across the Soviet border to escape the death camps. In total an estimated 7 million fell victim to the class war launched in the countryside. Stalin told a critic in 1933 that it was the fault of the peasantry, for waging ‘silent war’ against the Soviet state.

  The second factor that transformed the nature of the terror in the 1930s was the personality of Stalin. It is hard to judge whether he himself believed the Jacobin statements about the defence of the revolution or the Leninist heritage with which he publicly justified the war on the peasants and the elimination of political enemies. They were useful rallying cries in the internal Party struggles of the 1920s, when Stalin successively rid himself of his most powerful rivals among the old Bolshevik élite – Trotsky and Grigory Zinoviev in 1927, Nikolai Bukharin in 1929 – but Stalin's opportunism in these cases was self-evident. The campaigns of the 1930s against the rich peasant or the industrial saboteur can be explained, though hardly excused, as the product of a deliberate manipulation of popular opinion to secure the Party's goals. Stalinist demonology made the whole system paranoid, but it was not necessary for the leader to share those fears.

  Stalin may not have been paranoid in this sense, but he was consumed throughout his dictatorial career by a profound fear of assassination. His personal security was notoriously extravagant. He travelled in heavily armour-plated cars, surrounded by personal bodyguards supplied by the NKVD. He never drove the same route twice in succession. He ordered curtains to be cropped so that assassins could not hide behind them. He was guarded twenty-four hours a day. By the end of his life the defensive perimeter around his dacha [country retreat] at Kuntsevo on the outskirts of Moscow resembled a prison camp. These might all be regarded as the precautions of any tyrant whose career was littered with men and women with reason enough to murder him. In the Soviet Union they were more than usually necessary, for there was a long tradition of assassination in Russian life. Before the war of 1914 thousands of state officials, from minor bureaucrats to the prime minister himself, Petr Stolypin, were assassinated. Political murder was central to the Russian terrorist tradition that helped to shape the political tactics of Bolshevism. Once in power those traditions were turned against the new masters. Lenin narrowly survived an assassination attempt in August 1920 by a woman who had already spent eleven years hard labour in a Tsarist prison camp for an earlier attempt to murder an imperial official in Kiev. Stalin's personal security, tight though it was, could not guarantee immunity from what was widely regarded (and is still so viewed in Russia today) as a conventional way to settle scores. Stalin never scrupled to resort to assassination himself when he perceived a threat great enough to warrant it.

  What made Stalin's terror different was not merely the scale of arrests and executions – by 1939 there were, in recent estimates, approximately 3.5 million prisoners in the various categories of camps – but the fact that this fearful and vindictive man turned the terror on the very heart of the Soviet system, the Party and the armed forces, even on the NKVD, itself the apparatus of terror.40 The political terror began in 1933 with the expulsion of 790,000 Party members on charges of corruption and careerism, not all of them fabricated.41 In 1934, following the murder of the popular Party leader in Leningrad, Sergei Kirov (probably, but not certainly, on Stalin's orders), draconian powers were granted to the state to arrest, try and execute political conspirators summarily, without due process of law.

  Within weeks of Kirov's death thousands were rounded up in Moscow and Leningrad, accused of a plot to overturn Stalin. At the Leningrad headquarters of the NKVD, 200 suspects a day were shot.42 The outcome of the investigation was the first of the major ‘show trials’, which opened on 15 August 1936 with the trial of the Zinoviev circle. The fabricated plots, linking Communist leaders with foreign imperialists or renegade socialists, above all with that exiled and disgraced apostate, Leon Trotsky, were fed as truth to the public at home and abroad. Many Soviet citizens, with access only to the mass media controlled by the regime, believed the accusations. The show trials held between 1936 and 1938 produced one confession after another of counter-revolutionary crimes, beaten and extorted from the defendants. Stalin is said to have undertaken occasional interrogations, though it is almost beyond credibility that he could
have believed the web of deceit that was spun at his own ordaining. His real political skill, and a feature of his behaviour throughout the dictatorship, was to be perceived by the public as the incorruptible statesman who had saved the revolution from the machinations of countless fifth-columnists. On occasion he turned the terror on the secret policemen themselves to give the calculated impression that they, not he, were to blame for the orgy of violence – a political practice that he later persistently used to mask his military failures during the war.43

  Stalin was assisted at the height of the terror by two able accomplices, the lawyer Andrei Vyshinsky, who was made Procurator General in 1935, and later became the Soviet Union's first ambassador to the United Nations, and Nikolai Yezhov, who was appointed to head the NKVD in 1936. Together they cut swathes through the Party élite. Of the 1,966 delegates at the 17th Party Congress in 1934, 1,108 were shot as enemies of the people. The two years of the ‘Yezhovshchina’ saw the execution, according to the latest Russian figures, of 680,000 people.44 Almost no area of state or Party was immune from the spiral of terror. There remained not a single base for opposition to Stalin. The fear induced by the terror promoted the most grotesque expressions of loyalty, which in turn laid the foundation for the widespread ‘cult of personality’.

  The Soviet armed forces appeared to be the only major area of state to avoid the terror, until on the morning of 11 June 1937 Voroshilov announced the sudden arrest of the country's top generals and the unearthing of a treacherous plot whose tentacles reached out to Germany. It was alleged that no less a figure than Tukhachevsky himself was responsible for planning to overthrow the state at the head of a German army of invasion. The precise motives for the purge remain obscure, for the accusations themselves were entirely without foundation. Tukhachevsky was a popular and outspoken man who disliked Voroshilov and the military amateurs in the Party. He crossed Stalin over the issue of political propaganda in the armed forces, which he wanted to reduce. Neither attitude provides a convincing explanation for Stalin's sudden change of heart about the army or for the speed and violence of the purge. The explanation least likely to an outside observer may well be nearest the truth: Stalin's suspicious mind may have been sufficiently aroused by the flimsy rumours of army unreliability currently circulating abroad to take the story of the conspiracy seriously.

  According to one version, German counter-intelligence deliberately planted in Prague a document with Tukhachevsky's forged signature on it suggesting a German–Red Army conspiracy. President Edvard Benes of Czechoslovakia passed the information on when it was discovered, and the NKVD simply extrapolated the plot from the German deception.45 A second version suggests that the NKVD, in order to boost the reputation of its leader, not only encouraged the circulation of foreign rumours and opinions suggesting the unreliability of the army, but may also have had a hand in encouraging the German misinformation. Since Stalin may not even have seen the documents sent from Czechoslovakia, and since the fears of army dissent were already in circulation before they arrived, this version seems the more likely. Yezhov's deputy, Frinovsky, was alleged to have told a Moscow NKVD investigator in the spring of 1937 that he should ‘develop a line about an important, deep-seated plot in the Red Army’. He was instructed to make it clear that Yezhov's own role in unmasking it ‘must appear enormous’.46

  However the purge was plotted, the effect was to persuade the habitually distrustful Stalin that there was some substance to the idea of army disloyalty. The NKVD had in their cells a brigade commander named Medvedev who was chosen as the unfortunate instrument to betray his seniors. He was tortured into confessing the necessary evidence, then recanted and was tortured again until the confessions stuck.47 The details were passed on to Stalin. Mikhail Shpigelglaz, head of foreign intelligence in the NKVD, remembered that the news was treated as ‘a real conspiracy’. In the Kremlin he observed a genuine panic. All Kremlin passes were declared invalid, and NKVD troops were put on a state of alert.48 Stalin did not order Tukhachevsky's immediate arrest but played cat and mouse with him. He had been tailed for some time, as Yezhov searched for incriminating behaviour. He was due to represent the Soviet Union at the coronation of the British King, George VI, in May 1937. His attendance was suddenly cancelled on the grounds that another plot had been unearthed, one to murder Tukhachevsky on his way through Warsaw to London. He was then ordered to take up command of the Volga Military District, a dizzying demotion.49 He must have sensed something worse. To those around him he appeared nervous and depressed. His hair reportedly turned grey in two months.

  Shortly after his arrival to take command he was summoned to a meeting of local political officers. He never returned to his new home. His wife heard of his arrest and rushed to Moscow to intercede. She was promptly arrested along with the whole of Tukhachevsky's family, as was usually the case with alleged traitors. She was eventually killed, together with two of Tukhachevsky's brothers. His sisters were sent to a labour camp, and when his young daughter came of age, she was sent, too. The first military victims were eight senior Red Army commanders, headed by Tukhachevsky. They were taken to Moscow's Lefortovo Prison, set up for special prisoners, and further confessions were beaten out of them. In most cases the only real evidence of sympathy for Germany came from the many visits of Soviet military men to that country during the late 1920s and early 1930s, during the period of close German–Soviet collaboration. Every effort was made to find anything else, however preposterous, as evidence of ill-intent. The first victim interrogated, a corps commander named Feldman, was handed over to one of the NKVD 's notorious sadists, who worked on him behind a locked door. He confessed that the conspiracy was true. A day later Tukhachevsky was given the same brutal treatment and confessed to his own treachery; repeated torture forced him to reveal a wider circle of names. Each victim dragged in friends and colleagues to try to end his own maltreatment. To his interrogator's delight, Tukhachevsky continued to furnish him with names right up to the day of the trial.50

  While the plot was constructed and the lists of victims lengthened, Stalin played out a charade of revolutionary justice. At the Central Committee meeting on May 24 he told the Party leaders of the military plot and passed around voting papers for them to sign, approving the proceedings. The papers were signed by some of Tukhachevsky's closest collaborators, including Semyon Budyenny, who had been promoted to Marshal at the same time as the man on whose fate he was now asked to decide. Budyenny wrote: ‘Definitely yes. These scoundrels must be punished.’51 A week later, on June 1, Stalin staged a remarkable two-week long conference in which he sat with Voroshilov and Yezhov listening to soldiers who had been invited to the Kremlin profess loyalty to Stalin and a forceful rejection of the conspirators. Each of them was searched at the door for arms and then given a blue folder containing details of the charges, drawn up by Vyshinsky as news of each fresh crime was rushed hot from the interrogation room. As they read, some of them found their own names on the list of accomplices. At intervals NKVD men would make their way through the crowd, taking officers away with them. The following day another group of conspirators was detailed on the testimony of the hapless victims of the day before.52 The military purge developed a momentum that took it far beyond the handful of commanders seized in May.

  Stalin was in a hurry to complete the process. On June 9 the indictment was complete. Eight marshals and generals were chosen to sit on the tribunal to try the eight military defendants, all of whom they knew well. The night before the trial, set for June 11, the interrogators extracted a flurry of further confessions which incriminated the very men who would sit in judgment on the morrow. Five of the soldiers sitting on the tribunal bench were executed over the following months. (Marshal Budyenny, who was to be among them, was saved from death when he resisted arrest by force and telephoned Stalin directly.) The trial lasted a day. Tukhachevsky and his codefendants, once free of their torturers, refused to ratify their confessions until they were bullied by the prosecutor to confess
again that some of it was true. Just after midnight sentence was pronounced.53 All eight were shot that day. Tukhachevsky and Jonah Yakir, commander of the Kiev Military District, died expressing their continued loyalty to Stalin, the man who only a few hours before had given his personal approval for their death.54

  After the death of its chief victims, the purge rolled on over the rest of the senior officer corps. Marshal Yegerov was liquidated in March 1938, after his wife was forced to confess her part as a Polish spy; Marshal Blyukher, the son of a peasant, and the most famous of the civil war generals, who was a judge in the Tukhachevsky case, was arrested in October 1938. Alone of the top military commanders he refused to confess anything. He was beaten to a pulp, and one eye was torn out. On November 9, the anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution, he was killed in an office of the Lubyanka as he attacked his torturers. During the purge, 45 per cent of the senior officers and political officials of the army and navy were executed or sacked, including 720 out of the 837 commanders, from colonel to marshal, appointed under the new table of ranks established in 1935. Out of eighty-five senior officers on the Military Council, seventy-one were dead by 1941; only nine avoided the purges entirely, including no fewer than seven who served in the 1st Cavalry Army, which Stalin helped to direct in the civil war.55 Surprisingly untouched was the former Tsarist General Staff officer, the only one to survive into the 1930s, Boris Shaposhnikov. He was one of the three judges in the Tukhachevsky trial not murdered. Stalin was said to show a genuine respect, even awe, in his presence. His Tsarist roots were not enough to condemn him and he lived on, in poor health, until the end of the Second World War.