After a Special Board “trial” (in his absence), the accused eventually received the sentence, on some convenient occasion. One prisoner mentions simply being handed a grubby typewritten sheet in his cell by a woman trusty, an ex-prostitute, to the effect that the Special Board of the NKVD had condemned him to five years in camp.243
In spite of the vast amount of paperwork, loose ends proliferated. It is said that in the Butyrka a whole block was occupied by prisoners who could not be sent to camps because not only were there no warrants against them, but no papers of any sort existed in connection with them. They had been condemned as groups, and the judges had not been able to compile dossiers, while the labor camps would only accept prisoners with papers.244
The Special Board continued to have this legal position throughout the Stalin period. But while the Board in its official form went on handing out prison sentences (though longer ones than in the previous period), a new and illegal body emerged from it. As early as 27 March 1935, a mere order of the NKVD gave the powers of the Special Board to committees of three NKVD officers, though a representative of the Prosecutor’s Office was to be present at their proceedings, and they were only empowered to inflict the same sentences as the Special Board proper. On 30 July 1937, though this was never announced, new and deadly “Troikas” were set up on Stalin’s instructions (though “on Kaganovich’s initiative” and formally established by a “special instruction” from Vyshinsky), with the power to impose the death penalty.245 Recalling, no doubt consciously and with a view to suggesting revolutionary urgency, the so-named emergency tribunals of the Civil War, they now in fact often—as “Dvoikas”—consisted merely of two members. At the center, as we have seen, Yezhov and Vyshinsky fulfilled this role.
Troikas were established in all the provinces and Republics; their composition varied a little, but seems usually to have consisted of the NKVD chief as Chairman, the Provincial or Republican First Secretary, and the Chairman of the local Executive Committee (or a representative of the Prosecutor’s Office). A recent Soviet article tells us that in practice, the NKVD chief initialed the sentence and it was then carried out, the other two adding their initials ex post facto. As with the Special Board, the defendant was not present at the proceedings of the Troikas. They inflicted the death penalty in absentia on a vast scale. In Uzbekistan, the Soviet press lately noted, the Republic’s Troika ordered 40,000 executions in 1937 to 1938, which would mean over 1 million for the USSR as a whole. (And this, of course, over and above the sentences by the Supreme Courts of the Union and Autonomous Republics, the Military Tribunals, and similar bodies. Moreover, executions could be carried out without even the pretense of a trial, by “special order,” as with G. E. Prokofiev and his subordinates in 1937 and M. S. Kedrov and others in 1941.246
Orders for further executions came from Moscow. Yezhov telegraphed the NKVD chief in Frunze, capital of Kirgizia: “You are charged with the task of exterminating 10,000 enemies of the people. Report results by signal.” The form of reply was, “In reply to yours of … the following enemies of the people have been shot,” followed by a numbered list. An order to the Sverdlovsk NKVD called for 15,000 executions. Another, to a small town near Novosibirsk, ordered 500, far above normal capacity, so that the NKVD had to shoot priests and their relatives, all those who had spoken critically of conditions, amnestied former members of White Armies, and so on, who would ordinarily have got five years or less.247 In February 1938, a recent Soviet account tells us, Yezhov himself went down to Kiev to call a special NKVD conference to order 30,000 more executions in the Ukraine.248
For all the various forms of trial, official death sentences are estimated at not over 10 percent.249 However, this is based only on the information given to relatives, and there was falsification on a large scale, with the sentence of “ten years without the right of correspondence” in fact meaning execution; all the identified bodies in the mass graves at Vinnitsa and Kuropaty were of people who had had such sentences.
A Soviet authority of the Khrushchev period remarked that “many were exterminated without trial or investigation.”250 Vyshinsky himself favored the extralegal method. He several times said, “When it is a question of annihilating the enemy, we can do it just as well without a trial.”251 There seem, in fact, to have been few executions without “trial,” apart from the liquidation of oppositionists already in camps, until 1937. The first blow seems to have been against foreigners resident in Russia, including naturalized Soviet citizens. With no important defenders in the Party and susceptible to the charge of contact with foreign espionage, they began to go to the execution cellars in large numbers late in 1936.
It was usually obvious when an execution was to take place in a central prison. Several warders and an NKVD officer would appear at the cell door, which otherwise seldom happened. There was sometimes time to say goodbye and hand over any remaining property, such as clothes, to one’s cell mates.
The cellars of the Lubyanka were really a sort of basement divided into a number of rooms off corridors. Later on, in ordinary routine, the condemned handed in their clothes in one of these rooms and changed into white underclothes only. They were then taken to the death cell and shot in the back of the neck with a TI eight-shot automatic. A doctor then signed the death certificate, the last document to be put in their files, and the tarpaulin on the floor was taken away to be cleaned by a woman specially employed for that purpose.252 (Execution with a small-bore pistol is not, as might seem, very humane. Of the 9,432 corpses exhumed at Vinnitsa, 6,360 had needed a second shot; 78, a third shot; and 2, a fourth shot, while many others had been struck over the head with some blunt object to finish them off. Again, we are told in a recent Soviet article that in the mass graves at Kuropaty the sand thrown above a new batch of those executed could still be seen moving some time later.)253
At the Lefortovo, the corpses were cremated, and other crematoria seem also to have been used: a tombstone to “ashes of unknown persons” recently noted at the Danilovskii Monastery is believed to cover some who were executed and never identified.254 Elsewhere in Moscow, at the Kalivnikovskoye Cemetery in the heart of the city, there was what has now been described in the Soviet press as “Moscow’s Babi Yar,” where “naked bodies were brought in carts in the middle of the night during the thirties, with rags stopping the two bullet holes in their heads.”255
The final documents in a case were a note to the sanitary-burial services of the NKVD: “please take six, twelve, or some such a number of corpses, date, signature,” and on the other side, “six, twelve, or some such a number of corpses cremated, date and signature of the director of the crematorium.” This refers to important cases, not to those merely shot and buried in mass graves.256
And so it was elsewhere. In Gorky, for example, during the height of the Purge, one estimate is that from fifty to seventy executed corpses were taken out daily from the NKVD headquarters on Vorobievka Street. One prisoner was employed to whitewash the walls of the cells of executed prisoners immediately after they were taken to the NKVD headquarters for execution. This was to cover the names that they had scratched on the walls.257
As I write, mass execution sites are known in several places: the one in Vinnitsa, discovered by the Germans in 1943, where over 9,000 corpses were exhumed, even though part of the area remained uninvestigated; one between Khabarovsk and Vladivostok, where some 50,000 seem to have been executed in 1937 and 1938; one at Gorno-Altaisk; one at Bykovnya, near Kiev; one, with over 46,000 bodies, near Leningrad; one near Tomsk; one close to the well-known Polish grave site at Katyn; near Chelyabinsk; near Poltava; in Donetsk; near Voronezh; and, above all, the mass grave at Kuropaty, near Minsk, of which much was written in the Soviet press in 1988 and 1989, which became the eponym of the later discoveries and where no fewer than 50,000 victims lie buried, while considerably higher estimates have been given in the Soviet press.258 These included many from newly annexed western Byelorussia in 1939 to 1941 (five of the eight mass graves actually dug up were of western Byelorussians, and three were from 1937 and 1938, though this may not be representative). The total in any case is unexpectedly large, especially when five more sites are reported waiting investigation in or near Minsk alone, with others in the Byelorussian provincial capitals. And Byelorussia had in 1937–1938 about one-thirtieth, or 3.4 percent, of the Soviet population, and even in 1939–1941 only about one-eighteenth, or 5.6 percent. The great majority of the dead were peasants and workers.259