In Minsk, Uborevich’s “judge” and successor as Commander of the Byelorussian Military District, Army Commander Belov, was almost immediately in trouble. A member of Uborevich’s “nest,” Corps Commander Serdich (an officer of Yugoslav origin) was arrested on 15 July.152 Imprudently enough, Belov intervened in his favor.153 For the moment, Belov was not proceeded against, and presided impotently over the further massacre of his subordinates.
PURGE OF THE POLITICAL COMMISSARS
At the beginning of August 1937, a conference of political workers in the Army was addressed by Stalin. He once more violently attacked enemies of the people.154 Gamarnik’s Political Administration suffered even more than the rest of the forces. At the top levels, there was a clean sweep. Gamarnik’s deputy, A. S. Bulin, had been dismissed by 28 May,155 and later arrested.156 The other deputy, G. A. Osepyan, was already under arrest by the end of May and, refusing to answer questions, was shot on 24 (or 26) June. He was followed by almost all the heads of the political administrations and most of the members of the soviets of the military districts.157 Ippo, Head of the Military–Political Academy in Leningrad, who had been criticized in April, was dismissed on 1 June for political blunders158 and later arrested. By rank, all seventeen of the Army Commissars went, with twenty-five of the twenty-eight Corps Commissars.159
This purge of politicals swept the units as well. In the two months following the June 1937 meeting of the Military Soviet, arrests in the Fifth Mechanized Brigade of the Byelorussian Military District included the Brigade Commissar, the head of its political section, plus five out of the six Battalion Commissars, while the sixth was severely reprimanded.160 A Soviet textbook speaks of “thousands” of leading Party workers in the Army and Fleet being repressed.161
Mekhlis, one of the most sinister and unpleasant of all Stalin’s agents, was confirmed as Head of the Political Administration of the Army in December 1937. He had lately worked as editor of Pravda, but in the Civil War had served as a Political Commissar at Army level. He had a special quirk—to cashier and arrest many political workers on the grounds of their connection with the “anti-Party Army Byelorussian–Tolmachevite Group.”162 In fact, he was condemning the Political Commissars for this long-extinct deviation, which had consisted of enthusiasm for greater political control in the Army! In any case, the grouping of senior Political Commissars who had criticized the Party leadership in the late 1920s was, whatever its particular program, far too independent-minded for the new regime. Mekhlis had insisted that any who attempted to defend them, such as the Head of the Political Administration of the Byelorussian Military District, I. I. Sychev, deserved the same fate as this “band of spies.”163
At the beginning of 1938, the number of political workers in the armed forces was only one-third of its official establishment. As the numbers still in position were 10,500, the implication is that at least 20,000 political workers had gone under.fn10 By 1938, more than one-third of all the Party political workers had had no political education at al1.164
The number of Party members in the Army shrank by about a half.165 At the XVIIth Congress, Voroshilov had given 25.6 percent of the Army as Party workers, the Army numbering in February 1935 approximately 1 million: the net deficit here was therefore some 125,000.
THE OFFICERS FADE AWAY
Everywhere—except as yet the Far East—the Purge began to strike at the whole command structure. The generals who had just been promoted to fill the vacant places now started to disappear.
At a meeting of the Military Soviet of the Caucasus Military District in November 1937, the new District Commander, N. V. Kuibyshev (brother of the dead Politburo member), criticized the purge of the Army as affecting its battle-preparedness. He was shortly afterward arrested.166 And the same fate overtook the Military District Commanders all over the Soviet Union. By the summer of 1938, all who had held these posts in June 1937 had disappeared. At the center, a similar sweep took all eleven Deputy Commissars of Defense.
A Soviet account says that the Air Force and the tank and mechanized forces suffered most heavily.167 Khalepsky of the Armored Forces, Alksnis of the Air Force, and Khripin, Alksnis’s deputy, had made an excellent impression on foreign Military Attachés in the autumn 1936 maneuvers. Khalepsky, who had been relegated to the Communications Commissariat, was arrested in 1937 and shot in 1938.168 Army Commander Alksnis was the youngest of the Tukhachevsky group, being barely forty. Backed by Corps Commander Todorsky, Head of the Air Force Academy, he had worked hard to save his juniors from persecution by NKVD. Alksnis is given on the electoral lists as late as 13 November, but by the last days of 1937 he was under arrest, together with Khripin (as was also Todorsky). Todorsky, arrested in the spring of 1938, was sentenced to fifteen years in May 1939. He survived (the only “repressed” Corps Commander to do so) and was released in 1953.169
The extraordinary deviousness of the NKVD is shown in Gorbatov’s experiences. He learned he was in disfavor (for the second time) when, temporarily commanding the Sixth Cavalry Corps, he went to the stores officer to draw his winter uniform, and found that orders had been received from the corps political officer, Fominykh, then in Moscow, not to give him one. He went to Moscow and was arrested. His wife could not find out what had happened to him. No one would even tell her he had been arrested, until a girl whispered it to her in the corridor of the Red Army Officers’ Hostel.170
Gorbatov has given a brief account of his interrogation. At the Lubyanka, he was at first treated fairly mildly, but bullying set in on the fifth day. He was in a cell with seven others, all of whom had confessed. He was then transferred to the Lefortovo prison, where he shared a single one-man isolator with two others. There he was tortured on the fourth interrogation, and five more torture sessions followed at two- to three-day intervals, from each of which he had to be carried back bleeding to the cell. There were then twenty days’ rest, then five more bouts of torture. No confession could be wrested from Gorbatov, and on 8 May 1939 he was sentenced at a trial lasting four or five minutes to fifteen years’ imprisonment plus five years’ disfranchisement. The NKVD told his wife that as she was “young and interesting,” she could easily get married again.171
Another officer, a former revolutionary sailor in the Baltic Fleet, is reported as also having refused to confess and actually being acquitted, getting a civilian job on his release. He was, however, rearrested six months later.172
But “many splendid comrades and political officers” confessed.
They were “persuaded”—persuaded by quite definite techniques—that they were either German or British or some other kind of spies…. Even in cases when such people were told that the accusation of espionage had been withdrawn, they themselves insisted on their previous testimony, because they believed it was better to stand on their false testimony in order to put an end as quickly as possible to the torment and to die as quickly as possible.173
One Divisional Commander is reported as confessing that he had “recruited” every officer in his division down to Company Commanders.174 And there are many similar stories. Mekhlis even discovered and denounced a group of twelve terrorist-spies in the Red Army Chorus.175