Homogenizing labour: purges and the unity of the Soviet nation
Needless to say, such magazines were concerned to depict less the actuality than the reality to come. What happened in Moscow was repeated in many other places. We find the replication, the multiplication, of Moscow as a model simply everywhere. The capital cities of the republics witnessed a boom in new government buildings, often white, constructivist ensembles or single, monumental structures erected in the middle of historical centres. In this way, the Union obtained many capital cities, each with a new face: Alma Ata, Baku, Erevan, Kharkov, Kiev and Minsk. Virgin landscapes that hitherto only trappers or geologists had ventured to enter now became industrial landscapes with characteristic silhouettes – blast furnaces, mine shafts and factories. Fields belonging to the collective farms were endless, stretching as far as the horizon, and the only object for the eye to orientate itself by was the combine harvester or the armada of tractors advancing on the observer. In this way a map of modernization came into being, from which all traces of destruction had been erased. A new type of town or settlement quickly sprang up, with housing estates for workers and engineers, schools, public baths, department stores, sports facilities, clubs, parks of culture and leisure. Diagrams and statistics were ubiquitous, flaunting production figures, ever larger editions and the numbers of graduates of technical colleges or buses in the municipal transport system. The Moscow image-generating machine also served to harmonize and homogenize. It featured fashions and trends, from domestic interiors to clothes. It set the tone and the idiom. It formulated the signals and slogans that became the common currency throughout the country and that simply had to be understood by whoever wished to survive. In a country with so many languages and so many time zones, and where so many individual provinces and regions persisted in living in their own time and in accordance with their own rhythm, it was essential to find a common language and to live in tune with a common rhythm and a time that could include everyone. To achieve that would have been a Herculean task for any political elite, regardless of its origins and political tendency. Nowhere was the task of creating a unified time as urgent, nowhere was the yearning for a homeland as powerful, as in this country, with its vast geographical expanses and its fractured history. And nowhere was it easier for this yearning to become intertwined with the terrorizing imposition of unity from above.16
Almost all the important events of 1937 had a Union-wide dimension. During the show trials, the entire USSR became the setting for conspiracies and terrorist networks. The challenge of the Pushkin jubilee was how to transform a Russian poet into a Soviet one, and as a result streets, squares, theatres and schools throughout the nation were renamed after him. On the day of the census the whole of the country, from Negoreloe on the western frontier to Vladivostok on the Pacific, came to a halt for twenty-four hours in order to be registered. Through the radio the entire Union became a sounding-board for all major events – from the trials to broadcasts about parades on Red Square, from the bells ringing from the Spasskii Tower to the time signal on Moscow Radio. Whatever events were announced – from the premiere of the film Peter the First to the anniversary of the death of the ‘materialist philosopher’ Ludwig Feuerbach – it always meant more than a mere news item. Each item also transmitted messages about common standards, iconographies and language rules. The densely packed calendar of significant dates and anniversaries in 1937 and 1938 represented not so much acts of homage to the past or to the heroes of culture, especially of Russian culture, as contributions to the establishment of a canon, a time horizon that was universally shared, as well as an identical cultural space. What really mattered was the consciously driven production of a Soviet identity, of ‘Sovietness’.17
1937 was a year that played a pivotal role in this transition to the Soviet Union as an imagined community and to Soviet man as a transnational, non-ethnically defined type. The elections were even more significant in this context than the celebrations of the twentieth anniversary of the October Revolution. Between the passing of the constitution in December 1936 and the elections in December 1937 lay an entire year of uninterrupted mobilization, a never-ending series of discussions, election processes and other activities associated with the constitutional and electoral campaigns. In June 1936 the constitution, which had been drafted by a high-ranking commission, was finally produced and submitted for public discussion. It provoked a flood of articles and other responses throughout the summer. Countless thousands of submissions, letters and proposals were sent to the Constitutional Commission. Over 50 million people are said to have taken part in the debates in around half a million meetings.18 These discussions and submissions nevertheless tell us something about the mood in the country. In his speech on the draft constitution at the Eighth Extraordinary Congress of the Soviets, Stalin referred to the popular reactions. In the summer of 1937, preparations began for elections in accordance with the new constitution, which had been designed to take into the account the radically altered class structure of the USSR. All the discriminatory clauses of the old constitution were now removed; the privileging of workers over the peasantry was done away with (in the old constitution workers had more votes than the rural population), and those enfranchised were henceforth entitled to propose candidates of their choice. This regulation had been approved at the Central Committee plenum in February and March 1937 and was upheld until October 1937, despite warnings from local and regional Party leaders who were afraid of ‘universal, free and secret elections’, and who warned the centre that the elections were open to abuse by ‘anti-Soviet elements’ and that the entire electoral process could spin out of control. Only at the very last moment – during the Central Committee plenum in October 1937 – was there a radical change of mind. The Party leadership resolved that, in the light of the alleged ‘like-mindedness of those who belonged to the Party and those who did not’, the idea of a plurality of candidates should be abandoned in favour of a common list of candidates from among Party members as well as non-Party members. At the very last moment, then, the risk inherent in the idea of ‘free and secret elections’ was eliminated. Instead, there would be common lists consisting of both Party members and non-Party members, which were to be agreed in advance.19 Whatever degree of pretence was entailed in this ambitious campaign surrounding the Soviet elections, the propaganda conducted on behalf of the new Soviet Constitution and the practical conduct of the elections themselves were by no means meaningless. The measures taken with regard to the practical conduct of the elections included the division of the country into constituencies, the establishment of the machinery needed to ensure the success of the elections, the organization and control of what was said about the candidates – together with their CVs, achievements and shortcomings – and the conduct of the elections themselves. This process involved the nation as a whole, and the result – the Supreme Soviet and its deputies in both chambers, the Soviet of the Union and the Soviet of the Nationalities – reflected what the Communist Party had been seeking – namely, a statistically representative cross-section in which the ‘Soviet people’ could recognize itself as a whole. The election campaign was needed to serve as the sheet-anchor of a characteristic Soviet form of patriotism mediated partly at least by the constitution.
The obverse of this permanent mobilization of the masses was to be found in the mass actions that ran parallel to the preparations for the elections, in the course of which around 1.5 million people were arrested, of whom around 700,000 were executed as ‘anti-Soviet’ and ‘alien’ elements.20 The fiction of ‘free, universal and secret elections’ and the ‘purging’ of society were two sides of the same coin, of the process of completing the ‘unity of the Soviet people’. The issue at stake was not democratic elections but the production of a diffuse feeling of community and belonging, without which no community of that magnitude can exist. Nothing demonstrates better just how fragile it was in reality than the murders that went on out of sight of the ballot boxes.
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The Butovo Shooting Range: Topography of the Great Terror
The Butovo shooting range, on the outskirts of Moscow, was a key location of the Great Terror of 1937 and 1938. The first ninety-one victims were transported from Moscow gaols to the shooting range on 8 August 1937, while the last fifty-two were brought there on 19 October 1938. We have reliable information that, in the intervening fifteen months, 20,761 human beings lost their lives there.1 Mass executions took place in Butovo almost every day; there were more one day, fewer the next. There were also further ‘special locations’ belonging to the Butovskii poligon, and Butovo was just one of a number of places of execution in Moscow and the Moscow region. It was the final destination for thousands of people, hardly any of whom knew why they had been arrested and condemned to be shot. The people whose bodies fell into the trenches after the shot to the back of the head, and who were then buried by a Komsomolets digger procured for the purpose,2 came from all walks of life and from every part of the Soviet Union, and included a large number of foreign nationals, as well as members of all religious denominations. Among those murdered were members of the pre-revolutionary elite, as well as of the Bolshevik old guard. The victims encompassed both nameless individuals and once-prominent personalities: generals, sportsmen, aviators and artists. Butovo became a mass grave for thousands who were shot simply and solely because they belonged to a specific nationality. And many people found their death in Butovo merely because the quota of killings set by the state terror organizations had not been met and even though they did not fit into any of the categories of those selected for persecution. It was enough to be in the wrong place at the wrong time to be caught up in the machinery of the Great Terror. The figures of the executions documented in Butovo between August 1937 and October 1938 are as shown in tables 33.1 and 33.2. On 21 September 1937, 429 people were murdered, on 8 December 1937 there were 474 victims, on 17 February 1938 there were 502, and on 28 February 1938 there were 562. Those were the worst days.3 On 26 June 1938 two people were murdered and on 2 July 1938, one person. For the most part, there were between 100 and 160 executions a day in Butovo.
Table 33.1 Daily executions documented in Butovo, August 1937 to October 1938
Table 33.2 Total executions in Butovo, August 1937 to October 1938
The sharp increase and the abrupt decrease in the mass killings, the scene and the modus operandi in Butovo are symptomatic of what was happening throughout the nation between July 1937 and November 1938: the unleashing of the Great Terror, which claimed a good 1.5 million lives in the fifteen months between the start of the ‘mass operations’ in July 1937 and Yezhov’s dismissal in November 1938, around 700,000 of whom were murdered. The shooting range of Butovo, which before the Revolution had been a rural dacha district with a stud belonging to the Zimins, a music-loving Moscow family, famous as patrons of the arts, now became the setting for the Great Terror on a Moscow-wide scale.4
Looking for traces: the archaeology of the graveyard
Unlike the Moscow show trials, which dominated public perceptions of the ‘Great Purges’, the settings of the Great Terror remained obscure right down to the end of the Soviet Union. For over a half a century the Butovo shooting range was shrouded in mystery. In Butovo the shootings were stopped at the end of 1938, whereas other locations close by – Sukhanovka, Kommunarka, etc., continued to function. For a while, the Butovo site was used for test drives for the ZIS-110 car intended for Stalin’s use. During the war the huts there were used to house POWs. In the 1950s other buildings were added: hostels, schools, a training centre and a sanatorium for the Ministry of the Interior (MVD), as well as a Young Pioneer Camp for the children of ‘Chekists’. The fence around the site was frequently renewed. Butovo was a typical, run-of-the-mill dacha settlement, although of course there were persistent rumours that something out of the way had happened there, and human remains regularly came to the surface.5
Even so, a great effort was needed to identify the actual site of the executions of the Great Terror and to uncover its full extent. Rehabilitation commissions were as important as the archaeologists in unearthing the facts.6 Without the assistance of activists from Memorial and from open-minded KGB personnel, the place would never have been found. The path to its rediscovery was opened with the onset of perestroika. The Congress of People’s Deputies in October 1988 and the Politburo of the CPSU in December 1988 laid the legal foundation for the rehabilitation of those who had been condemned under Article 58 and provided the resources and the staff to launch this expensive process and ensure its speedy progress.In 1991 a special working group was set up, and this group uncovered the documents that pointed to the existence of mass graves in Moscow: the Yauza hospital and the Vaganovskaia and Donskoe cemeteries. But as late as the early 1990s the names of Butovo or Kommunarka still remained quite unknown. Even the ‘Registers of Executions by Firing Squad’ (rasstrelnye knigi), which were discovered in 1991, contained no reference to these places, and the few people who knew about them – members of the old NKVD and then the KGB – remained silent. And even the current members of the KGB who were involved in the day-to-day practicalities of the search found it difficult to locate the places of execution. Finally, however, it proved possible to trace one still living official from the Moscow NKVD, A. Sadovskii, and it was he who was able to point the commission in the right direction. When he was shown the ‘Registers of Executions’ he declared that the place of execution was in fact Butovskii poligon.7 His statement was corroborated by inhabitants of Butovo and by former NKVD drivers. Kommunarka, the other place of execution, was then identified in the same way. In 1993 the site was opened up for visits by families of the victims and by the commission of inquiry, and a first memorial was erected. Campaigners and the Orthodox Church succeeded in preventing the site from being redeveloped.
Figure 33.1 The side elevation of the excavations of the Butovo shooting range in the 1990s reveals remnants of clothing, shoes, shinbones, ribs and skulls with bullet holes.
‘They soon discovered, buried at a depth of 1.5 metres, vestiges of clothes, leather jackets, leather and felt boots, gloves that had been removed and thrown into the trenches, splinters of glass bottles and also human remains.’
Moscow, 1937 Page 66