The Whisperers
Page 31
Stalin must have known that the vast majority of these victims were entirely innocent. But since it only took a small handful of ‘hidden enemies’ to make a Revolution while the country was at war, it was fully justified, in his view, to arrest millions to root these out. As Stalin said in June 1937, if just 5 per cent of the people who had been arrested turned out to be actual enemies, ‘that would be a good result’. Evidence was a minor consideration. According to Nikita Khrushchev, then the head of the Moscow Party Committee, Stalin ‘used to say that if a report [denunciation] was ten per cent true, we should regard the entire report as fact’. Everybody in the NKVD knew that Stalin was prepared to arrest thousands to catch just one spy. They knew that holding back from their quota of arrests would only get them into trouble for lack of vigilance. ‘Better too much than not enough,’ Yezhov warned his NKVD operatives. If ‘an extra thousand people are shot [in an operation], that is not such a big deal’.22
For Stalin and his supporters, the Great Terror was a preparation for the coming war. Molotov and Kaganovich continued to defend this rationale until their deaths. ‘Stalin played it safe’ (perestrakhoval), explained Molotov in 1986. The ‘great purge’ was an ‘insurance policy’ – a necessary means for the leadership to ferret out the ‘waverers’, ‘careerists’ and ‘hidden enemies’ in the Party who might have proved troublesome in time of war. There were mistakes, Molotov admitted, many people were arrested unjustly, but ‘we would have suffered greater losses in the war – and perhaps defeat – if the leadership had flinched and allowed internal strife’.
We were obligated to ensure that in time of war there would be no fifth column. It is doubtful that all of these people were spies, but… the main thing is that in the decisive moment there was no relying on them… If Tukhachevsky and Iakir and Rykov and Zinoviev joined the opposition during war, there would have been a cruel struggle and colossal losses… Everyone would have been destroyed!
In the 1980s, Kaganovich similarly justified the Great Terror: the leadership had realized that a war was approaching, and that the country needed to protect itself by ‘draining the swamp (boloto)’ – that is by ‘destroying unreliables and waverers’. This was not just a post facto rationalization by Kaganovich. In June 1938, he had told the Donbass Party that the mass repressions were necessitated by the threat of war and that the country ‘would be at war already’, if its ‘internal enemies and spies’ had not been destroyed in the ‘great purge’.23
Coordinated in the Kremlin and carried out by the NKVD in the localities, the Great Terror spread throughout society as a series of mass campaigns to purge the country of ‘anti-social’ and potentially ‘anti-Soviet’ elements in the event of war. By far the biggest of these mass campaigns was the ‘kulak operation’ instituted by the infamous Directive 00447: it accounted for half of all arrests (669,929) and more than half the executions (376,202) in 1937–8. Nearly all the victims were former ‘kulaks’ and their families who had recently returned from ‘special settlements’ and Gulag labour camps after completing the standard eight-year sentence for ‘counter-revolutionary agitation and propaganda’ imposed during the collectivization campaign in 1929–30. Stalin was afraid that the country would be swamped by disgruntled and embittered ‘kulaks’ who might pose a threat in time of war. He was particularly concerned by NKVD reports about a White monarchist organization, the Russian General Military Union (ROVS), which was said to be preparing a ‘kulak uprising’ to coincide with a Japanese invasion of Siberia. Tens of thousands of alleged ROVS members were shot in the course of the ‘kulak operation’, although they were seldom counted in official statistics (the Altai NKVD, for example, made a separate report on the 22,108 ROVS members it had shot in 1937). The ‘kulak operation’ was connected to a wholesale purge of the local Soviets. It was particularly brutal in border areas, like the western provinces, and in regions, like the Donbass and western Siberia, where the regime feared the population most.24
There were also large-scale ‘national operations’, wholesale deportations and executions of Soviet minorities who were deemed potential ‘spies’ in the event of war: Germans, Poles, Finns and Latvians, Armenians and Greeks, Koreans, Chinese, even Kharbin Russians, who had returned to the Soviet Union from Manchuria following the 1935 sale of the Eastern China Railway to Manchukuo, the puppet Manchurian state set up by the Japanese in 1932. Stalin’s distrust of the Poles in the western Soviet regions was particularly strong. It dated from the Russian Civil War, when Poland had invaded the Ukraine and then defeated the Red Army when it counter-attacked against Warsaw – a military defeat in which Stalin had been personally humiliated because of his tactical mistakes as a front-line commissar. Stalin saw the Soviet Poles (and many Belorussians and Ukrainians, whom he considered to be really ‘Poles’) as a fifth column of the ‘semi-Fascist’ Polish state of Marshal Jozef Pilsudski, which the Soviet leader feared would unite with Nazi Germany to attack the Soviet Union again. As a result of the ‘national operation’ against the Poles, launched by Directive 00485 in August 1937, almost 140,000 people were shot or sent to labour camps by November 1938.25
So many people disappeared in 1937–8, particularly in the Party and intelligentsia circles of the major capitals, that the arrests appeared random, as if anyone could be picked up by the Black Marias that roamed the streets at night. The prison population was a broad cross-section of the population. Most prisoners had no idea for what crime they were in jail. By the autumn of 1938, virtually every family had lost a relative, or knew of someone with imprisoned relatives. People lived in fearful expectation of the knock on the door in the middle of the night. They slept badly and awoke when they heard a car pull up outside. They would lie there waiting for the sound of footsteps to pass by on the staircase or in the corridor, before going back to sleep, relieved that the visitors were not for them. Liubov Shaporina, the founder of the Puppet Theatre in Leningrad, wrote in her diary on 22 November 1937:
The joys of everyday life. I wake up in the morning and automatically think: thank God I was not arrested last night, they don’t arrest people during the day, but what will happen tonight, no one knows. It’s like Lafontaine’s lamb – every single person has enough against him to justify arrest and exile to parts unknown. I’m lucky, I am completely calm; I simply don’t care. But the majority of people are living in complete terror.26
Vladimir Piatnitsky, Osip’s son, recalls the atmosphere in the House on the Embankment before the arrest of his father:
There were more than 500 flats for elite Party workers in that gloomy building, and arrests were a regular occurence. Because I was always playing in the yard and corridors, I saw several arrests. In the evenings, as it grew dark, the house became deserted and silent. It was as if the inhabitants had gone into hiding in the expectation of catastrophe. Suddenly, several cars would drive into the yard, men in uniform and plain clothes would jump out and walk towards staircase entrances – each one knew the way to ‘his’ address. Then one saw the lights go on in several apartments. Since I knew where everybody lived, I could work out who was being arrested. If all the lights in the apartment went on, it meant there was a search. In those days many people expected to be arrested, but they did not know when their turn would come.27
People waited for their turn. Many packed a bag and kept it by their bed in order to be ready when the NKVD knocked on the door. This passivity is one of the most striking features of the Great Terror. There were many ways to avoid arrest – moving out of town and taking on a new identity by buying papers on the black market being the most simple and effective, for the NKVD was not good at tracking down people on the move.28 The Russian people had a long tradition of fleeing persecution by the state – from the Old Believers to runaways from serfdom – and this tactic was adopted by millions of peasants who ran away from the collective farms and ‘special settlements’. But the urban population by and large remained in place, without any sign of resistance, and waited for the Terror to take th
em.
Looking back, the film writer Valerii Frid (1922–98), who was arrested in 1943, thought that most people were paralysed by fear. They were so hypnotized by the power of the NKVD, which they believed was everywhere, that they could not contemplate resistance or escape.
I can think of no analogy in human history. So I’ll have to make do with an example from zoology: the rabbit hypnotized by the boa constrictor… We were all like rabbits who recognized the right of the boa constrictor to swallow us; whoever fell under the power of its gaze would walk quite calmly and with a sense of doom into its mouth.29
Viacheslav Kolobkov recalls the panic of his father, a factory worker in Leningrad, when a car stopped outside their house at night.
Every night he would stay awake – waiting for the sound of a car engine. When it came he would sit up rigid in his bed. He was terrified. I could smell his fear, his nervous sweating, and feel his body shaking, though I could barely see him in the dark. ‘They have come for me!’ he would always say when he heard a car. He was convinced that he would be arrested for something he had said – sometimes, at home, he used to curse the Bolsheviks. When he heard an engine stop and the car door slam, he would get up and start fumbling in panic for the things he thought he would need most. He always kept these items near his bed in order to be ready when ‘they’ came for him. I remember the husks of bread lying there – his biggest fear was going without bread. There were many nights when my father barely slept – waiting for a car that never came.30
Faced with arrest, the Bolshevik elite were particularly passive. Most of them were so indoctrinated by their Party’s ideology that any thought of trying to resist was easily outweighed by a deeper need to prove their innocence before the Party. Yevgeniia Ginzburg was the wife of a senior Party leader in Kazan and herself a Party activist. After her husband was taken, she lost her job and feared that her own arrest was imminent. Her mother-in-law was ‘a simple, illiterate peasant woman born in the days of serfdom’, recalls Ginzburg; she ‘was of a deeply philosophical cast of mind and had a remarkable power of hitting the nail on the head when she talked about the problems of life’. This old peasant woman advised her to run away:
‘ “Out of sight, out of mind,” they say. The farther away you are the better. Why not go to our old village, to Pokrovskoye?’…
‘But how can I, Grandmother? How can I leave everything, the children, my work?’ [Ginzburg replied].
‘Well, they’ve taken your job away anyhow. And the children won’t come to any harm with us.’
‘But I must prove my innocence to the Party. How can I, a Communist, hide from the Party?’31
The belief in their own innocence disabled many Bolsheviks. Somehow they managed to convince themselves that only the guilty were arrested, and that they would be protected by their innocence. Elena Bonner recalls overhearing a late-night conversation between her parents, lifelong Party loyalists, following the arrest of a close friend. Elena had woken up in the middle of the night, anxious because this arrest had made her realize ‘that our turn was coming, inexorably and soon’.
It was dark in the dining room, but there were voices in my parents’ room. I went to the door. And I could hear my mother blow her nose. Then she spoke, crying. I had never seen her cry. She kept repeating ‘all my life’ and sobbing… Papa replied softly, but I couldn’t make out his words. Suddenly she shouted, ‘I’ve known Styopa all my life. Do you know what that means? I’ve known him three times longer than you. Understand? Do you understand?’ Then only sobs. And a creak and slippers shuffling on the floor – Papa had gotten out of bed. I jumped away from the door, afraid he was coming out. But he began pacing the room – five steps to the window, five to the bed, like a pendulum. He struck a match. Mama began speaking again, ‘Tell me do you believe it? Do you believe this nightmare?’ She had stopped crying. ‘Do you believe that Agasi… Do you believe that Pavel, that Shurka… Do you believe that they…?’ She didn’t complete her sentences, but it was clear. Then she spoke calmly and softly and said, ‘I know that you can’t believe it.’ Papa replied in a strange, pleading voice, ‘But Rufa-djan [his name for Elena’s mother Ruth], how can I not believe?’ After a pause he went on. ‘They’re not arresting you and me, after all.’32
There were other Bolsheviks, among them Piatnitsky, who were so committed to their Communist beliefs that they were ready to confess to the charges against them, even if they knew that they were innocent, if that was what the Party demanded.* According to Communist morality, a Bolshevik accused of crimes against the Party was expected to repent, to go down on his knees before the Party and accept its judgement against him. This is what Piatnitsky must have meant when he said on the eve of his arrest that if a sacrifice was needed for the Party he would ‘bear it joyously’.
Many Bolsheviks attempted to prepare their family for the likelihood of their arrest and, as best they could, to protect them. Pyotr Potapov, a transport official on the Kama River, sent his family to visit relatives in Nizhny Novgorod a few days before his arrest in August 1937. ‘We had not been on holiday for more than five years,’ recalls his daughter. ‘He sensed what lay ahead and was afraid for us. He wanted us to be out of the way when the NKVD came for him.’ Lev Ilin, a senior official on the Murmansk railway, moved his family out of their spacious flat in Leningrad and put them in a small cooperative apartment, so that they would not be forced to share their living space with another family in the event of his arrest. He made sure that his wife, who had never worked, took a job in a textile factory, so that someone in the family would be able to support their daughter. He begged his wife to divorce him, in the hope that she would be protected from arrest herself, but she refused, on the grounds that it would be a ‘shameful act of betrayal’. There were bitter arguments between the couple on this point, right up to the day of Lev’s arrest.33
Stanislav and Varvara Budkevich, who were both arrested in 1937, tried to prepare their fourteen-year-old daughter Maria to cope on her own. They trained her to go shopping by herself, taught her not to say a word about her parents if they were arrested and forced her to read about the show trials in the newspapers, so that she might understand the nature of the threat that might take them both away. ‘I understood everything,’ recalls Maria. ‘My father was close to Tukhachevsky, he worked with him in the General Staff, and our house was full of military personnel, so I understood what was happening when people were arrested, one by one.’ Maria’s father was arrested on 8 July; her mother on 14 July.
Mama sensed that they would come for her that night. For a long time that evening we sat together on our own, without Andrei [Maria’s younger brother], although Mama knew that I had exams the next morning. It was midnight when at last she said to me, ‘It is getting late, off you go to bed.’
The next morning Maria awoke to find her mother gone – she had been arrested during the night – and the NKVD men searching through her room. By her bed her mother had left Maria a goodbye note with some money.34
The jurist Ilia Slavin was arrested on the night of 5 November 1937. He had not written the book commissioned by the NKVD about the reforging of Gulag labourers on the White Sea Canal. On the day of his arrest, Ilia was called into the Party’s offices in Leningrad and offered the position of Director of the Institute of Law; the previous director had just been arrested. Slavin was relieved. He had been expecting the worst, but now it seemed he had been saved. He returned home in a cheerful mood. That evening the Slavin family was celebrating Ida’s sixteenth birthday. As Ida recalls:
Mama laid out a delicious spread. My brother made a special ‘birthday edition’ of our wall-newspaper ‘Hallelujah’ [an agitational billboard maintained at home by the Slavin family] and became the pianist for the evening. I put on a smart new dress to receive my schoolfriends… Papa was in his best form: he played with us, fooled around just like a child, danced with all the girls, drank a lot and even sang his favourite song, ‘The Nightingale’.
When the guests had gone, Ilia began to talk about his plans for the next summer holiday. ‘He wanted us to spend it all together as a family and spoke of going to the Caucasus and the Black Sea.’
The NKVD came at 1 a.m. Ida remembers:
I was suddenly awoken by a bright light and a strange voice, telling me to get dressed quickly. An NKVD officer was standing at the door. He made half an effort to look away as I struggled to get dressed and then led me into Papa’s office. There was Papa, sitting on a stool in the middle of the room, looking suddenly much older. Mama, my brother and his pregnant wife sat with me on the divan. The yardman stood in the doorway while the NKVD officer made himself at home…
I remember only certain moments from that night:
Looking around my father’s office, the NKVD officer (I shall always remember his name: Beigel) would sigh from time to time: ‘What a lot of books you have. I am a student, and I don’t have this many books.’ Leafing through the books, he would stop whenever he found one with an inscription to my father, pound his fist on the table and demand in a loud voice, ‘Who is this author?’
Then in an almost tragi-comic scene Beigel told me to bring my German textbook. Theatrically (he had evidently played this scene in many households with children of my age) he turned to an article by Karl Radek at the end of the textbook. At that time Karl Radek had been arrested but had not yet been sentenced or listed in the press as an ‘enemy of the people’. With a grand gesture Beigel tore the pages out of the textbook, lit them with a match, and said, as if he was a noble hero: ‘Be thankful that this thing has been destroyed and that I won’t have to take you away with your daddy.’ I was too frightened to say anything. But then my father broke the silence, and said ‘Thank you.’…