In the factories, public denunciation meetings of the established type spread to the workers as a whole. A Soviet novel of the Khrushchev period typically describes such a works scene in 1937:
A short man in a lambskin cap angrily announced, “My foreman Sereda failed to issue me with cement. I thought at the time this was suspicious. Yesterday I learned that Sereda was concealing his relationship with one of Makhno’s followers who married his cousin!”
“The fitter Tsvirkun when taking up employment concealed the fact that his old man was an elder of the church!” announced a second speaker.
A third speaker proceeded to expose his former comrade whose parents had been deprived of electoral rights for sabotage during the period of collectivization…46
The extension of the Purge throughout the country was not, as sometimes suggested, just the result of too much eagerness on the part of local NKVD officials who let things get out of control. On the contrary, it was insisted on from the center. For example, on 29 November 1936 Vyshinsky was already ordering that within a month all “criminal cases of major conflagrations, accidents, and output of poor-quality products be reviewed and studied with the aim of exposing a counter-revolutionary and saboteur background in them.” In certain areas, where few prosecutions on charges of counter-revolutionary activity had been brought, severe censure was issued from the Public Prosecutor’s Office in Moscow. In 1937, only eight cases in this category were brought to court through a large part of Siberia, and Moscow blamed this on “a weak and inadequate struggle to stamp out the nests of saboteurs.”47
Arrest quotas were imposed from above. An NKVD local officer who had been in charge of the small Ukrainian district of Chrystyneska is reported in jail as telling of an order sent to him to arrest 3,800 people; even arresting all former prisoners, all those reported by seksots and others would not have fulfilled the quota, so he had to ask village soviets to nominate lists, himself being arrested for this.48 At a higher level, the 1938 Head of the Byelorussian NKVD was reproached for not matching the Ukrainian bag of Polish spies, and managed to pull in 12,000, many of them Jewish shopkeepers.49
In general, occasional highly organized mass trials and much more frequent mass arrests marked the period. In May 1937, the Far Eastern press announced fifty-five death sentences in such trials;50 in June, another ninety-one; in July, another eighty-three; and so on through the year. In Byelorussia from June onward, hardly a week went by without wrecking and espionage being discovered in various industrial enterprises, the Academy of Sciences, the Polish theater, the physical culture groups, the banks, the cement industry, the veterinary services, the bread-supply organization, and the railways. (The local railway authorities were denounced on 8 October 1937 and charged with being not only Polish but also Japanese spies, in accordance with railway tradition.) In Central Asia, it was the same: 25 executions were announced in Kazakhstan51 and 18 in Uzbekistan52 in November. In January 1938 came 26 in Kirghizia53 and another 134 in Uzbekistan .54
On 28 July 1937 E. G. Evdokimov assembled the Party leadership of the North Caucasus Territory and gave instructions for a long-planned superpurge in the area. On 31 July, the local phase of this “general operation” was launched in the Chechen-Ingush Republic in the North Caucasus: 5,000 prisoners were crammed into the NKVD prisons in Grozny, 5,000 in the main garage of the Grozny Oil Trust, and thousands of others in various requisitioned buildings. In the Republic as a whole, about 14,000 were arrested, amounting to about 3 percent of the population. Shkiryatov in person oversaw a further mass operation in October.55
The cold-blooded administrative organization of such mass arrest and deportation comes out very clearly in Serov’s Order No. 001233 for the Baltic States:
Operations shall be begun at daybreak. Upon entering the home of the person to be deported, the senior member of the operative group shall assemble the entire family of the deportee in one room…. In view of the fact that a large number of deportees must be arrested and distributed in special camps and that their families must proceed to special settlements in distant regions, it is essential that the operations of removal of both the members of the deportee’s family and its head shall be carried out simultaneously, without notifying them of the separation confronting them. ARREST
Whether as part of such a special operation, or in the ordinary course of routine arrests, it was usual to take action in the small hours. Two or three NKVD men, sometimes brutal, sometimes formally correct, would knock and enter. A search was made which might be brief but could take hours, especially when books and documents had to be examined. The victim, and his wife if he had one, sat under guard meanwhile, until finally he was taken off. A quick-witted wife might in the long run save his life by getting him some warm clothes. By dawn, he would usually have been through the formalities and be in his cell.
A general describes his arrest:
At two in the morning there was a knock on the door of my hotel room.
“Who’s there?” I called.
A woman’s voice answered: “A telegram for you.”
“Obviously from my wife,” I thought as I opened the door.
Three uniformed men came into my room and one of them told me point-blank that I was under arrest.56
A poet writes of his, also at night:
“Go with you”
you ask, looking for your coat, Your arm fumbles for the sleeve.
You feel overcome by a sudden weakness—
In such a moment you tire as in a lifetime.…
It seems a ravine has opened under your feet,
And the ceiling seems to fall on you.
There is suddenly not enough air in the room—
You breathe
with an effort.57
The New Constitution, indeed, had guarantees against unjustified arrest. Under its Article 127, no one might be “arrested” except by order of a court or with the consent of the Prosecutor. This was anyhow not of much value in the absence of an independent judiciary; and the judicature of the USSR was officially defined as “a means of strengthening the Socialist regime, guarding the rights of citizens and repressing the enemies of the people and the Trotskyite–Bukharinist agents of foreign espionage organizations.”58 But in any case, a distinction was made between “arrest” and “detention.” A man might be “detained” without the sanction of the court or Prosecutor in “all cases where public order and security is threatened.” Moreover, Article 45 of the Corrective Labor Codex reads: “For reception into a place of deprivation of freedom it is obligatory to have a sentence or an order by organs legally empowered thereunto, or an open warrant.”
In fact, a prosecutor’s warrant seems generally to have been provided, though sometimes formalities were dispensed with. For example, a case is reported from the Ukraine in which the police arrested two chance visitors for whom they had no warrant together with the man they were after; each of the two accidentally arrested spent five months in jail before managing to get out.59 Cases of mistaken identity, particularly of persons with common names like Ivanov, are also occasionally noted. Such prisoners were usually released after a few weeks or months, but cases are mentioned of their having confessed to espionage or other crimes before the mistake was discovered. Even then, they were sometimes released.60