Even when not arrested, families suffered terribly. An attempted mass suicide is reported by a group of four thirteen- and fourteen-year-old children of executed NKVD officers, found badly wounded in the Prozorovsky Forest near Moscow.153 The daughter of an Assistant Chief of Red Army Intelligence, Aleksandr Karin (who was arrested and shot, with his wife), was thirteen in the spring of 1937. The Karin apartment was taken by one of Yezhov’s men, who turned her out into the street. She went to her father’s best friend, Shpigelglas, Assistant Head of the Foreign Department of the NKVD, who put her up for the night, but was virtually ordered the next day, by Yezhov’s secretary, to throw her out. Shpigelglas remembered she had relatives at Saratov and sent her there. Two months later she came back: “She was pale, thin, her eyes filled with bitterness. Nothing childish remained in her.” She had meanwhile been made to speak at a meeting of the Pioneers, approving the execution of her father and mother and saying that they had been spies.154
When Weissberg was in the sick bay of the Kharkov prison, there were a number of children there, including a boy who was nine years old.155 When, early in 1939, the Soviet press started to report the arrest of various NKVD officers for extorting false confessions, one case at Leninsk-Kuznetsk in the Kemerovo province concerned children as young as ten years old.156 Four officers in the NKVD and the Prosecutor’s Office received five- to ten-year sentences. In all, 160 children, mainly between twelve and fourteen, had been arrested and subjected to severe interrogation, and had confessed to espionage, terror, treason, and links with the Gestapo. These confessions were obtained with comparative ease. A ten-year-old broke down after a single night-long interrogation, and admitted to membership in a fascist organization from the age of seven. Similar mass trials of children took place in various other cities.157 (There is, indeed, one report of a genuine children’s organization which planned to avenge arrested parents by killing the NKVD officers they held responsible.)158 But, in general, as a Soviet speaker has pointed out, “not only the workers themselves were victims of repression, but also their families, down to the absolutely innocent children, whose lives were thus broken from the beginning.”159
Another “category” was composed of automatic suspects—anyone connected with production, and in particular engineers. In their case, no guesses were needed. They were saboteurs to a man. It did not matter if their record was generally good. Stalin himself had said:
No wrecker will go on wrecking all the time, if he does not wish to be exposed very rapidly. On the contrary, the real wrecker will show success in his work from time to time, for this is the only means of staying on the job, of worming himself into confidence, and continuing his wrecking activity.160
In the economy, the security mania of the NKVD seems to have been genuine. For quite apart from the persecution of actual people, it imposed by about the end of 1935 a system through which guards and watchmen multiplied enormously in the factories, research institutes, and so forth throughout the country. This was in part supposed to be for the prevention of theft, but also against the penetration of “secrets,” many of which were not secret even by Soviet standards and almost none of which would have been regarded as secret in any ordinary community. Moreover, there already existed in every Soviet institution a “secret department,” covering both the political reliability of personnel and the technical secrets; and into its safes anything remotely confidential had to be put each night. It is now stated that in 1939 there were, in a labor force of 78,811,000, no fewer than 2,126,000 guards and watchmen—not counting NKVD militia—and only 589,000 miners and 939,000 railwaymen.161
In this atmosphere, any failure, or any accident, in the economic sphere automatically became sabotage. In the absence of genuine opposition acts, any breakdown had to be made to serve, just as Molotov’s accident at Prokopyevsk had had to be inflated into an assassination attempt in the absence of any genuine one. And already at the Pyatakov Trial, railway accidents had been put to the account of the accused, with Vyshinsky graphically recounting the sufferings of the murdered passengers. In the Bukharin Trial, livestock deaths were attributed to the conscious activities of the plotters. Sharangovich said in evidence, “In 1932 we took measures to spread plague among pigs”; and later, speaking of horses, “In 1936 we caused a wide outbreak of anemia.” Sharangovich also mentions a number of particular plants—a cement works, a flax mill, a pipe foundry, a power station—in Byelorussia (where he was First Secretary) as having been sabotaged under his instructions. Failures in the grossly overextended first Five-Year Plan were very widespread indeed. But even if the local First Secretary was usually responsible, in every case subordinates were involved.
On the economic side, Soviet statistical and planning methods led to an endless strain on skilled management. The planning figures were always unrealistic. To admit failure meant instant arrest, so the directors concealed it as best they could. This led to a vicious circle with doubly erroneous figures in the ensuing period. When the gap grew so large that it could not be concealed, a scapegoat had to be found, and “then there is a crisis and the Chief Director and a number of officials are sent to camps, but those who take their place have to employ the same methods all over again; the system as it stands leaves them no option.162
The directors who organized the new works faced appalling tasks. Lykhachev, of the Stalin Automobile Works in Moscow, had to try to direct 25,000 men, with crises about administration, raw material, or simple negligence arising almost hourly. At the Gorky Works in Gorky, an even larger factory wore out the director, Diakonov, even before his arrest. The head of the automobile industry, Dybets, and his assistant were arrested in 1938. In the same year, in the metallurgical factury in Sverdlovsk, the Old Bolshevik director, Semion Magrilov, shot himself in his office, leaving a long letter attacking the Terror. All those suspected of having read it were arrested and disappeared.163 By the beginning of 1940, this factory had 2 engineers and 31 technicians with the right qualifications, and 270 without. Magnitogorsk had 8 engineers and 16 technicians with diplomas, and 364 without. In general, as a Soviet legal journal tells us, “hundreds of thousands with no qualifications” now took over the engineering and technical work, with disastrous results.164 Production, stagnant in 1937 and 1938, actually went down in 1939.165
The railways were subjected to particularly Draconian laws. The Criminal Codex of the RSFSR, in its Article 59, covered “crimes against the system of government,” including various offenses on the railways which “lead, or might lead, to the breakdown of State transport plans” and of which some examples given are the accumulation of empty trucks and the dispatch of trains off schedule. The prescribed punishment was up to ten years or, if done with malicious intent, the death sentence.
Kaganovich also devised the so-called theory of counter-revolutionary limit-setting on output, with the help of which he organized the mass destruction of engineering and technical cadres. “In a short period of time most of the directors of railroads and of the railroads’ political departments and many executive officials of the central apparatus and lines were dismissed from their jobs and later arrested.”166
As to “sabotage” itself, on the Soviet railways at this time there was an accident of some sort every five minutes. As we have seen in dealing with the Pyatakov Trial, this led to the slaughter of the railway cadres. Kaganovich had made a tour of the railways of the Far East early in 1936. Following this, the Military Collegium went on tour and handed down five death sentences and ten long jail terms in Krasnoyarsk and Tomsk in March, for wrecking for “foreign intelligence services.” This was only a beginning: