As we have said, by mid-1938 the NKVD itself, at the lower, operational level, had already wished to stop the progress of the Purge for obvious reasons. At the rate arrests were going, practically all the urban population would have been implicated within a few months. But it was caught in its own system. It was impossible for it not to arrest a man who had been denounced as an agent of Hitler. And an interrogator who did not demand the names of accomplices from each of his victims would soon himself come under denunciation for lack of vigilance or enthusiasm. By this time, the idea had grown among prisoners that the more denunciations they made the better;
Some even held the strange theory that the more people were jailed the sooner it would be realized that all this was nonsense and harmful to the Party…. My neighbor on the plank bed in the camp at Kolyma had once been head of the political department of a railway. He prided himself on having incriminated some 300 people. He said, as I had often heard in prison in Moscow, “The worse it is the better it is—like that, it will all be cleared up more quickly.”90
And, in fact, this was of some effect in the railway context (though no doubt elsewhere as well). The Byelorussian leaders complained that the NKVD had arrested every second railway official and that the system was near paralysis.91
Weissberg recounts the arrest in the spring of 1938 of the secretary of the Kharkov medical counci1.92 A man with an excellent memory, he knew the names of all the doctors in the city and denounced them all, pointing out that he was in an especially good position to have recruited them and that they were in any case largely from hostile social classes. He refused to name any of them as the leader of the plot, claiming that post for himself. The doctor told his cell mates that he had been inspired to take this course by reading about the case of a witch burning in Germany at the time of the Inquisition when a young theologian charged with intelligence with the devil had at once pleaded guilty and named the members of the Inquisition as his accomplices. The interrogators were unable to torture him, as he had confessed, and the case went up to the archbishop, who put an end to the business.
A climax of the mass Purge came in the first half of 1938, and the following months saw something of a diminution of pressure. Whether this was due solely to a simple loss of momentum at the lower, operational level, or to political pressures being put on Yezhov from above, is not clear. Stalin’s discontent with Yezhov certainly began in the early summer, when the plans to bring Beria in must have been laid. But he left Yezhov in office, and veteran prisoners speak of a climax of brutality in September.93 In October, the number of Military Collegium sentences actually increased.94
Even before Yezhov’s fall was formalized, a significant case was reported from Omsk, where the Regional Prosecutor and his assistant were tried for abuse of authority, unjustified arrests, and detention of innocent people in prison, sometimes for as long as five months. They were sentenced to two years’ imprisonment.95
This sentence seems only a partial triumph for justice. A few shootings of NKVD interrogators for extorting false confessions by violence are reported to symbolize the actual end of the Yezhov period. Captain Shiroky, of the Kiev NKVD, was sentenced after having been made Head of the Moldavian NKVD. One prison mentions him as a “not particularly harsh examining magistrate.”96 Five other Moldavian NKVD men were also shot.97 There had, indeed, been occasional similar trials before, and speeches throughout the Purge period are full of condemnation of unjust persecutions. But this time, the demonstration was clearly intentional. When certain Party officials became too free with their criticisms of police methods, though, Stalin pulled them up sharply with the telegram of 20 January 1939, explaining that torture was authorized (see here).
At the same time, certain cases which had become more of a nuisance than they were worth were dropped. For example, for the physicist Weissberg an agitation had been raised in the West to which even very left-wing scientists had subscribed. Moreover, papers in his investigation had been inadequate and muddled. It was now abandoned. (Weissberg explains how technical difficulties arose: when it was more or less accepted that the charges against him would be withdrawn, it was found that there were over twenty witnesses who had provided the evidence and it would be necessary to examine them all over again, and by this time they were, of course, scattered in camps throughout the country.)
The gross result of Beria’s assumption of the NKVD was that a proportion of those in prison awaiting trial were released, making a good impression on the populace. Of those already in camp, apart from certain special rehabilitations, like those of some military men in 1940, almost none were freed. An NKVD officer, himself under arrest, predicted this:
‘Some of us will be released just to make it clear there has been a change; the remainder will go off to the camps to serve their sentences just the same.’
‘What will be their criterion?’
‘Chance. People are always trying to explain things by fixed laws. When you’ve looked behind the scenes as I have you know that blind chance rules a man’s life in this country of ours.’98
But in the towns and villages of the Soviet Union, the pressure of haphazard mass arrests greatly eased. The country had been broken, and henceforward a limited number of arrests of men who had given some sort of cause for suspicion of disloyalty was sufficient to maintain the habit of submission and silence.
In general, Beria consolidated and institutionalized the system. From the “Yezhovshchina,” he developed, rather than an emergency operation against the people, a permanent method of rule.
STALIN AND BERIA CONSOLIDATE
The imprisoned Politburo members were not among those fortunate enough to benefit by the fall of Yezhov. While Ushakov and Nikolayev were at work on Eikhe, their colleague Rodos was submitting Kossior and Chubar to “long tortures,” receiving “detailed instructions from Beria.”99
Rodos was to be described by Khrushchev as “a vile person with the brain of a bird and morally completely degenerate.”100 Summoned in 1956 before the Central Committee Presidium, he said, “I was told that Kossior and Chubar were enemies of the people and for this reason, I, as an investigative judge, had to make them confess that they were enemies…. I thought I was executing the orders of the Party.”101 Khrushchev expressed great indignation at this answer, but all the same it is the only justification he gives for the activities of himself and his surviving colleagues during the same period.
On 22 to 26 February 1939, Kossior, Chubar, and others came to trial with another group of figures from politics and the Army, who appear to have been called the “Military–Fascist Center.” Corps Commander Khakanian was shot on 22 February, and Marshal Yegorov on 23 February (though we are recently told that Yegorov, reported by Ulrikh to Stalin as “tried” and shot, died under interrogation).102 On 23 February also came the execution of Kosarev, after a trial which lasted for ten minutes; he had been severely tortured, but had not confessed. The charges included espionage for Poland.103 Presumably, the remainder of the Komsomol leadership was tried on the same day.
On 25 February the three survivors of the abortive Leningrad Center that Zakovsky had mounted in 1937 were shot—B. P. Pozern, P. I. Smorodin, and A. I. Ugarov. So were others, including the chairman of the Uzbek Council of People’s Commissars, S. Segizbayev.