The Great Purge
The great purge of the 1930's helped to fill forced-labor camps and formed another major, although perhaps unnecessary, aspect of the five-year plans. It also marked Stalin's extermination of all opposition or suspected opposition and his assumption of complete dictatorial power. Although earlier some engineers and other specialists, including foreigners, had been accused of sabotaging or wrecking the industrialization of the country, the real purge began in December 1934 with the assassination of one of the party leaders who was boss in Leningrad, Serge Kirov, and reached high intensity from 1936 to 1938. The purge eventually became enormous in scope; it was directed primarily against Party members, not against the White Guards or other remnants of the old regime as repressive practices had been before.
The assassin of Kirov, proclaimed to be a member of the Left Opposition, was shot, together with about a hundred alleged accomplices. Revelations at the Twenty-second Party Congress strengthened the suspicions of some specialists that Stalin himself was apparently responsible for Kirov's murder. A Party purge followed. While uncounted people disappeared, the three great public trials featured sixteen Bolshevik leaders, notably Zino-viev and Kamenev, in 1936, another seventeen in 1937, and twenty-one more, including Bukharin and Rykov, in 1938. The accused were charged with association with Trotsky, counterrevolutionary conspiracy, "wrecking," and treasonable alliance with Soviet enemies abroad. Invariably they confessed to the fantastic charges and in all but four cases received the death penalty. Observers and scholars such as Conquest have been trying since to find reasons for the staggering confessions in everything from torture to heroic loyalty to Soviet communism. The purge spread and spread, affecting virtually all Party organizations and government branches,
the army, where Marshal Tukhachevsky and seven other top commanders perished at the same time, and almost every other prominent institution, including the political police itself. It reached its height when Nicholas Ezhov - hence Ezhovshchina - directed the N.K.V.D. from late September 1936 until the end of July 1938. Fainsod wrote the best summary of these events:
The period of the Yezhovshchina involved a reign of terror without parallel in Soviet history. Among those arrested, imprisoned, and executed were a substantial proportion of the leading figures in the Party and governmental hierarchy. The Bolshevik Old Guard was destroyed. The roll of Yezhov's victims included not only former oppositionists but many of the most stalwart supporters of Stalin in his protracted struggle with the opposition. No sphere of Soviet life, however lofty, was left untouched. Among the purged Stalinists were three former members of the Politburo… and three candidate members… An overwhelming majority of the members and candidates of the Party Central Committee disappeared. The senior officer corps of the armed forces suffered severely. According to one sober account "two of five marshals of the Soviet Union escaped arrest, two of fifteen army commanders, twenty-eight of fifty-eight corps commanders, eighty-five of a hundred ninety-five divisional commanders, and a hundred and ninety-five of four hundred and six regimental commanders." The havoc wrought by the purge among naval commanding personnel was equally great. The removal of Yagoda from the NKVD was accompanied by the arrest of his leading collaborators… The Commissariat of Foreign Affairs and the diplomatic service were hard hit… Almost every commissariat was deeply affected.
The purge swept out in ever-widening circles and resulted in wholesale removals and arrests of leading officials in the union republics, secretaries of the Party, Komsomol, and trade-union apparatus, heads of industrial trusts and enterprises, Comintern functionaries and foreign Communists, and leading writers, scholars, engineers and scientists. The arrest of an important figure was followed by the seizure of the entourage which surrounded him. The apprehension of members of the entourage led to the imprisonment of their friends and acquaintances. The endless chain of involvements and associations threatened to encompass entire strata of Soviet society. Fear of arrest, exhortations to vigilance, and perverted ambition unleashed new floods of denunciations, which generated their own avalanche of cumulative interrogations and detentions. Whole categories of Soviet citizens found themselves singled out for arrest because of their "objective characteristics." Old Bolsheviks, Red Partisans, foreign Communists of German, Austrian, and Polish extraction, Soviet citizens who had been abroad or had relations with foreign countries or foreigners, and "repressed elements" were automatically caught up in the NKVD web of wholesale imprisonment. The arrests mounted into the
Michael Lomonosov
Dmitrii Mendeleev
Nicholas Lobachevsky
Ivan Pavlov
Maxim Gorky and Theodore Chaliapin
Nicholas Gogol
Anton Chekhov
Nicholas Chernyshevsky
Michael Lermontov
Alexander Pushkin
Boris Pasternak
Alexander Herzen
Dmitrii Shostakovich
Waslaw Nijinsky
Anna Akhmatova
Modest Musorgsky
Peter Tchaikovsky
Ernest Ansermet, Serge Diaghilev, Igor Stravinsky, and Serge Prokofiev
Leon Trotsky
Joseph Stalin
Lenin
Nikita Khrushchev
Stalin's Funeral. From right: Khrushchev, Beria, Chou En-lai, Malenkov, Voroshilov, Kaganovitch, Bulganin, Molotov.
Soviet Leaders at Kremlin Meeting of the Supreme Soviet Celebrating the Fiftieth Anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution, November 4, 1967. From left: Brezhnev, Kosygin, Podgorny, Suslov.
millions; the testimony of the survivors is unanimous regarding crowded prison cells and teeming forced labor camps. Most of the prisoners were utterly bewildered by the fate which had befallen them. The vast resources of the NKVD were concentrated on one objective-to document the existence of a huge conspiracy to undermine Soviet power. The extraction of real confessions to imaginary crimes became a major industry. Under the zealous and ruthless ministrations of NKVD examiners, millions of innocents were transformed into traitors, terrorists, and enemies of the people.
Orders were even issued to arrest a certain percentage of the entire population. The total number of those taken by the political police has been estimated at at least eight million. Before the great purge had run its course, Ezhov himself and many of his henchmen fell victim to it after Lavrentii Beria, a Georgian like Stalin, took control of the N.K.V.D.
Stalin's System
The great purge assured Stalin's complete control of the Party, the government, and the country. As frequently pointed out, the Old Bolsheviks, members of the Party before 1917 and thus not creatures of the general secretary, suffered enormous losses. Virtually all of those who had at any time joined any opposition to Stalin perished. But, as already mentioned, some devoted Stalinists also fell victim to the purge; it was on the whole that group, together with the military men, that was posthumously vindicated by Khrushchev. When the Eighteenth Ali-Union Party Congress gathered in 1939, Old Bolsheviks composed only about 20 per cent of its membership compared to 80 per cent at the Seventeenth Congress in 1934. Moreover, except for a few lieutenants of Stalin, such as Viacheslav Molotov, born Skriabin, almost no leaders of any prominence were left. For example, with the exception of Stalin himself and of Trotsky, who was murdered in 1940, Lenin's entire Politburo had been wiped out.