At the beginning of September, she was arrested. She was later liquidated, together with Yakir’s brother, the wife of another brother and her son, and other relatives.124 A woman cousin is reported as being sentenced to ten years’ imprisonment in 1938.125 Little Peti, now fourteen years old, was sent to a children’s home. Two weeks later, at night, the NKVD took him, and he spent “many years” in camps and prisons. He chanced to meet his father’s A.D.C. in one of the Arctic camps and learned from him the full story of the arrest.126 (In 1961, when Khrushchev was visiting Kazakhstan, Peter Yakir approached him. “He asked me about his father. What could I tell him?”127 At the time of Yakir’s arrest and execution, Khrushchev had spoken of him as “riff-raff who wanted to let in the German Fascists.”)128
Uborevich’s wife (sent to Astrakhan on 10 June) had kept the charges against her husband from their little daughter, not yet in her teens; the girl learned of them from young Peter Yakir. On 5 September, Mrs. Uborevich was arrested by the NKVD. She was able to give her daughter a few photographs, and they never met again. Nineteen years later, in 1956, the daughter learned that her mother had died in 1941.
The daughter was taken to a children’s home, where she found other young girls: Veti Gamarnik, Svetlana Tukhachevsky, and Slava Feldman. They were rounded up on 22 September and sent off, evidently to NKVD children’s settlements.129
Tukhachevsky had a large family. “On Stalin’s direct instructions, the wife of the Marshal, his sister Sofia Nikolayevna, and his brothers Alexander and Nikolai, were physically annihilated. Three of his sisters were sent to concentration camps, as well as the young daughter of the Marshal whom they interned when she reached the appropriate age.”130 This was Svetlana, eleven years old at her father’s death; given a five-year sentence when she was seventeen, as “socially dangerous,” she is later reported as having been in the Kotlas camp, south of Vorkuta, together with Uborevich’s daughter.131 The Marshal’s mother, Mavra, also perished;132 she had refused to repudiate him. His wife, Nina, is said to have first gone insane and to have been taken to the Urals in a straitjacket.133 Two former wives of Tukhachevsky’s, together with Feldman’s wife, are reported to have been in a special “Wives and Mistresses” section of Potmalag—a camp area strict as to discipline, but comparatively mild as to living conditions—in 1937, and to have later been transferred to the Segeta camp.134 Another of the Marshal’s sisters announced that she was seeking permission to change her name. (The daughter and three sisters survived to attend a memorial meeting in his honor at the Frunze Military Academy in Moscow in January 1963.)
Gamarnik’s and Kork’s wives were also shot.135
1937⁃1938
As the Red Army’s best generals were dragged off to execution amid a vast campaign of public abuse, Stalin and Yezhov launched the NKVD on the officer corps as a whole.
Four days after the Tuldrachevsky executions, Brigade Commander Medvedev was tried and shot, on the charge only of Trotskyite ideas, though he told Ulrikh and the Military Collegium that he denied all accusations of counterrevolutionary crimes.136 Within nine days after the trial, 980 officers had been arrested, including 21 Corps Commanders and 37 Divisional Commanders.137 On 19 June, Yakir’s subordinate, Divisional Commander Sablin, was shot. On 1 July, Corps Commanders Garkavi, Gekker, Turovsky, and Vasilenko and Divisional Commander Savitsky perished. (Garkavi’s wife, Yakir’s sister-in-law, was sent to camp, where she died in 1945; his two young sons, after some years in NKVD homes, were both killed in the Second World War.)138 Twenty younger generals from the Moscow headquarters alone were also executed.139 Almost the whole command of the Kremlin Military School was arrested.140 The Frunze Military Academy, which Kork had headed, was swept by arrests. The Head of its Political Department, Neronov, was arrested as a spy. For a time, Shchadenko took over. Not a day passed without the arrest of a member of the staff. Almost all the instructors went to the jails.141 Army Commander Vatsetis was giving a lecture. After an hour there was a short break, which ended with the announcement, “Comrades! The lecture will not continue. Lecturer Vatsetis has been arrested as an enemy of the people.”142 The students, too, were rounded up in droves. All who had references from Gamarnik, for example, were taken. So were those, and there were many of them, who had been sent to the academy from units whose commanders had been arrested.143
In the provinces, it was the same: in the Kiev Military District, 600 to 700 officers of the “Yakir nest” are said to have been arrested at this time.144 A Soviet account of the Khrushchev period tells us that
a new leadership arrived in the Kiev Military District, Shchadenko, a member of the Military Council, from the very first started to take an attitude of suspicion toward the members of the staff. He kept watch, without bothering to conceal it, on the commanders and political officers of the units and was thereafter acting hand in hand with the Special Department. He was also extremely active in the campaign to compromise the commanding officer personnel, which was accompanied by the massive arrests of command cadres and political cadres. The more people were arrested the more difficult it was to believe in the charges of treachery, sabotage and treason.145
A Soviet engineer officer was one of a number who had been working under Yakir (and Berzin) to prepare secret partisan bases, and to train partisans, in the Ukraine. In 1937, they were arrested and accused of “lack of faith in the Socialist state” and “preparation for enemy activity in the rear of the Soviet armies”—or “training bandits and storing arms for them,” as Voroshilov put it.146 The bases were destroyed—to be much missed in 1941, when abortive attempts were made hastily to reconstruct them. The destruction of all but 22 of the 3,500 partisan detachments sent to the Ukraine in 1941 and 1942 is now largely blamed on this fact.147
The future Marshal Biriuzov tells in his memoirs of being appointed to be Chief of Staff of the Thirtieth Rifle Division, stationed in Dnepropetrovsk. When he arrived, he found that the entire command had been arrested, apart from a couple of junior staff officers—with a major in charge of the division. Biriuzov asked on what authority this officer had command, and got the answer, “We act according to regulations: when one chief leaves the division, he’s replaced by the next in command. Just like in wartime.”148
The Commander of the Seventh Cavalry Corps, Grigoriev, was called to the Kiev Military District Committee and accused of connections with the enemy. He was allowed to go back to his post, where he was arrested the next day,149 and shot on 20 November, together with another Kiev District officer, Divisional Commander Dyumichev. Here we have a picture of the NKVD not feeling any necessity to put a general officer under arrest immediately he must have realized his case was hopeless. It cannot, in fact, have had much real fear of desperate military action, as is sometimes suggested.
Even retired veterans became involved. General Bougetsky, the Civil War hero whose wife had been crippled and son blinded while in the hands of the Whites, and who himself had lost his right arm in battle, was interrogated in the inner prison at Kiev. On the heart of this dignified sexagenarian they pinned the Nazi swastika and emptied a spittoon over his head. He was charged with an attempt to assassinate Voroshilov.150 Juniors were treated even more brutally. A recent Soviet account tells us that in the Chita prison, a number of Air Force pilots were interrogated. One had his collar bone broken. They all had their teeth knocked out.151