A Greek doctor was charged with espionage on the grounds that he had written to relatives in Salonika describing the characteristics of some fish being bred with a view to the extermination of malarial mosquitoes.131 In December 1937, Greeks were arrested everywhere. Later, the Greek-inhabited area of Mariupol, on the Black Sea, was thoroughly purged in connection with a special Greek nationalist plot which was to create a Greater Greek Republic over a large part of the Ukraine. Its “Minister of Education” was in fact a Russian, but he had been Professor of Ancient Greek at Kharkov University and had spent a year in Athens. The “Prime Minister” had been an adviser on minority questions to the Ukrainian Central Committee.132
Chinese were also arrested en bloc. One is reported as having been charged with taking a job as a tram driver in Kharkov, with the aim of crashing it into any car on the tracks in front of him which contained members of the Soviet Government.133 The national minorities in Russian towns were virtually eliminated. In September 1937, the Armenians in the Ukraine were rounded up. There were 600 of them in Kharkov.134 The Latvians were arrested the same month. An alleged Latvian secret organization had worked for a Greater Latvia stretching over a large part of Russia, including Moscow.135
Members of the smaller national minorities were in as “bourgeois–nationalist” plotters. So were, in most cases, members of larger groups like the Ukrainians. One commented:
I was bound in any event to be regarded as a Ukrainian bourgeois nationalist. True, I had never had anything to do with Ukrainian nationalism, and had never had any sympathy with it, but I had a typically Ukrainian surname, and I had several sympathizers with Ukrainian nationalism among my acquaintances.136
It is an interesting fact that there were almost no accusations through the Great Purge of allegiance to any genuinely reactionary idea. Those accused were almost always linked with the Mensheviks, the Armenian progressive nationalist “Dashnaks,” the Socialist Revolutionaries, or Communist deviationist groups—practically never with Monarchists, Kadets, and the like.
The Jewish Social-Democratic Bund was a particularly fatal association, and many Jews qualified for accusation as either Bundists or Zionists. A case is quoted of an elderly Jew who had worked as a defense lawyer in earlier trials in the Donets Basin and had conducted himself in a way that antagonized the NKVD—by asking it for documents which might be helpful to the defense and so forth. He had learned enough not to defend himself, and on his arrest signed everything that was put before him without reading it. He later found that he had installed himself as a leader of a Bund group, in touch with other counter-revolutionary organizations, including one headed by the Provincial Party Secretary, Sarkissov (a candidate member of the Central Committee). On one occasion, he was told that he was going to be “confronted” by an important accomplice called Abramsohn, of whom he had never heard. When this man was brought in, the investigator said, “Stop looking at each other as if you’d never met before,” so he immediately remarked, “Hello, Abramsohn.” “Hello, er … er … ,” the other started, having to be prompted with his chief’s name. Then they both signed the records of their confessions about each other without looking at them.137
Genuine Bundists, on the contrary, are always reported as being the most refractory in interrogation, being better educated in Marxism than their interrogators, and toughened by a harder underground life in Tsarist times than that of the Bolsheviks.
All former Socialist Revolutionaries were arrested. Weissberg tells138 of a man in Kharkov jail who had joined the Bolsheviks in 1917, but who in 1905 had distributed among the Tsar’s soldiers leaflets provided by the Socialist Revolutionaries. He had then been a young student and, far from being a member of the Party of Socialist Revolutionaries, did not even realize that there was any difference between it and the Bolsheviks.
Almost all ex-Mensheviks were also arrested. We are told that “in 1937– 1941 ninety-seven to ninety-eight percent of Russian socialists were physically annihilated.”139
But everybody with unorthodox ideas of any sort was liable to end up in the camps. Jehovah’s Witnesses were automatic victims. But there were also too-enthusiastic members of legal religions, such as the Baptist mentioned by Solzhenitsyn. Tolstoyans are widely reported, including an aged Tolstoyan woman whose twelve-year-old granddaughter had fought the NKVD officers to try to prevent her arrest.140
Priests had always had a difficult time under the Soviet regime. Now they became almost automatically suspect of capital crimes. Trials of priests were announced throughout the Union. One in Orel in the summer of 1937, involving a bishop, twelve priests, and others, had as one of the accusations “publishing prayers in Old Slavonic.”141 Other accusations were less credible. Three bishops sentenced in February 1938 had “agitated for the opening of previously closed churches,” but their further crimes included sabotage.142 The main Soviet authority of the time mentions that Buddhists were commonly agents of Japan, engaged in sabotaging bridges and farms.143 It was also true that “the activity of the counter-revolutionary Muslim priesthood in the U.S.S.R. is directed by the Japanese Secret Service.”144 Many were accused of railway sabotage.145 One Tatar Imam who had been allowed to visit Mecca was naturally suspect and was soon arrested as a German spy. A “meeting” of about forty leading mullahs, in fact all under arrest, but acting as if it were a normal assembly, accepted the charges against him, and he was shot.146 The authorities also “destroyed not a few nests of spies directed by ‘holy’ Catholic priests” who had been responsible for the sabotage of factories, bridges, and railways as well as espionage.147
If it was neither nationality nor past nor ideas that brought a prisoner in, it might be relationship: the purge within the Party, the Government, and the Army automatically spread in that way. Each of the accused had relatives, and acquaintances who also had relatives. We have already noted (here) the four categories sent by Yezhov to Stalin of people to be shot, of which List 4 is the simple “Wives of enemies of the people.”148 We have seen the liquidation or imprisonment of the generals’ relatives. The military men had, it is true, been shot in comparative haste without public trial. Confessions in the longer-drawn-out affairs were in part obtained by promises not to kill the surviving dependents. Stalin’s promises were sometimes kept. A woman prisoner met in labor camps twelve wives, two daughters, two sisters, and a daughter-in-law of prominent purgees.149 Eight years was the usual sentence.
Typical of purgees of the second rank was Zalpeter, a commander of Stalin’s bodyguard, a Lett, who was arrested, together with his wife. She refused to confess, but was finally confronted with her husband in a very bad state, who mumbled that she had said she would get rid of a picture of Stalin that hung in their new flat (formerly Yagoda’s). For this, she got eight years.150
The wives of the Soviet elite adjusted most slowly of all to their situation in the cells. Their position was an especially difficult one. They had nothing to confess and were unable even to deny the charge, since it was simply of being “wives of enemies of the people.”151 In many cases they had not, as their husbands had, understood the dangerous possibilities before them. On arriving in the cells, some of them were priggish and intolerant of women who had been under arrest for a long time—believing that these earlier cases must have been guilty of some genuine offense.152