In July the situation in the Far East became even more tense after Japan invaded China. Two important events occurred on 21 August 1937. First, the USSR and China, both with eyes on Japan, signed a non-aggression pact. Second, a resolution was adopted by the Council of People’s Commissars and the Central Committee to “Expel the Korean Population from Border Regions of the Far Eastern Territory.” In the fall of 1937 a massive operation was undertaken to arrest and deport Koreans from this vast region. More than 170,000 people were expelled. The expressed goal was to “prevent the penetration of Japanese espionage into the Far Eastern Territory.”20
The idea that the country had to be purged of a potential fifth column, a recurring theme throughout the 1930s in the USSR, was an article of faith among Stalin’s close associates. Even many decades later, they referred to it:
Nineteen thirty-seven was necessary. If you consider that after the revolution we were slashing left and right, and we were victorious, but enemies of different sorts remained, and in the face of the impending danger of fascist aggression they might unite. We owe the fact that we did not have a fifth column during the war to ’37.21
This was a struggle against a fifth column of Hitlerite fascism that had come to power in Germany and was preparing war against the country of the Soviets.22
There is little doubt that Stalin encouraged these ideas among his fellow Politburo members. From their narrow perspective, he had a logical and convincing argument. The Soviet government had many internal enemies who might be keeping a low profile at the moment but were ready to leap into action as soon as the USSR was challenged by a foreign power. The relatively independent old party nomenklatura, which still had ties to the military and the NKVD, might seek to take charge. Former oppositionists were surely eager to take revenge after long years of humiliation and persecution. The kulaks and the perpetually starving peasants might band together with former members of the nobility, White Guard, and the clergy to follow the example of the Bolsheviks in 1917 and turn war with a foreign enemy into a civil war against a despised regime. Then there were the Soviet Union’s many ethnic minorities with ties to neighboring countries—Germans and Poles especially—who Stalin suspected would collaborate with an enemy based on ties of blood. The way to eliminate these dangers was to destroy as many potential enemies and collaborationists as possible. Such was the logic of Stalin’s fearful and ruthless mind as the threat of war grew. In the fevered imaginations of his inner circle, such a fifth column loomed orders of magnitude larger than it could possibly have been in reality. Phantom threats overshadowed the very real dangers confronting the Soviet Union.
Stalin claimed to have had no part in his own atrocities. He told the renowned Soviet aeronautical engineer Aleksandr Yakovlev that it was all Yezhov’s fault: “Yezhov was a beast! A degenerate. You’d call him at the commissariat, and they’d tell you, ‘He went to the Central Committee.’ You’d call the Central Committee, and they’d tell you, ‘He went to his office.’ You’d send someone to his house, and it turns out that he’s lying on his bed dead drunk. Many innocent lives were lost. That’s why we shot him.”23
The winding down of the Great Terror in late 1938 and early 1939 was accompanied by a campaign to deflect suspicion away from its true perpetrators. This effort was helped by Yezhov’s removal and the very public unmasking of “slanderers” who had submitted denunciations against honest people—supposedly a major cause of the repression. Even today some are willing to argue Stalin’s innocence, proposing pseudo-scholarly theories that the Great Terror erupted spontaneously on the initiative of local officials. Of course, once Moscow issued its orders, the momentum generated was bound to look elemental. In the bureaucratic language of the Stalin era, the behavior of zealous officials was labeled peregiby (excesses). But it was not excesses that determined the scale and ferocity of the Terror. The documentary evidence shows that large-scale operations rarely deviated from Stalin’s orders.
After Moscow’s arrest and execution quotas were received by the NKVD headquarters of each oblast (province) and krai (a territory similar to a province but containing semi-autonomous administrative units), the regional NKVD chief would gather the heads of local (municipal and district) NKVD offices for a meeting, at which the regional quota would be parceled out among the administrative entities (districts, towns, villages, settlements). The first source used in compiling a list of enemies was the card files that the political police kept on various suspected “anti-Soviet elements,” as well as any other compromising materials that came to hand. After a victim was arrested, an investigation was conducted to expose his or her “counterrevolutionary ties” or uncover the existence of “counterrevolutionary organizations.”24 The necessary “evidence” was obtained using a variety of methods, most often torture, which was officially sanctioned by the country’s top leadership. The forms of torture were brutal and sometimes caused an arrestee’s death. One major goal of interrogation was to obtain testimony implicating others, thus generating a second wave of arrestees, who in turn provided more names. These police operations could, in theory, continue indefinitely, or until the potential pool of victims had been thoroughly drained. Such operations did not continue only because Stalin had full control of the state security system and party apparat and could close the spigot whenever he wanted. Every decision to sentence a presumed enemy to a labor camp or to be shot was approved in Moscow.
At first it was assumed that these large-scale operations would conclude at the end of 1937. Gradually, the date was moved back to November 1938. On 17 January 1938, Stalin sent NKVD chief Yezhov new orders:
The SR [Socialist Revolutionary Party] line (both left and right) has not been fully uncovered.… It is important to keep in mind that there are still many SRs in our army and outside the army. Can the NKVD account for the (“former”) SRs in the army? I would like to see a report promptly. Can the NKVD account for “former” SRs outside the army (in civil institutions)? I also would like a report in two–three weeks.… What has been done to expose and arrest all Iranians in Baku and Azerbaijan? For your information, at one time the SRs were very strong in Saratov, Tambov, and the Ukraine, in the army (officers), in Tashkent and Central Asia in general, and at the Baku electrical power stations, where they became entrenched and sabotaged the oil industry. We must act more swiftly and intelligently.25