Rivalries between the NKVD and the Army were of course natural in various fields. (The possession by the Police of a large armed force was itself an irritant.) But in addition, the military-intelligence network abroad operated to a certain extent independently of the Foreign Department of the NKVD, and there was a struggle to win it. When Tukhachevsky was arrested, the NKVD gained control. Almost all the military-intelligence agents were recalled from abroad and shot.176 S. P. Uritsky, Chief of Soviet Military Intelligence—the “Fourth Bureau”—from 1935, was arrested on the night of 1 November 1937 and shot “soon afterward.”177
His predecessor as Head of the Fourth Bureau, from 1920 to 1935, J. K. Berzin, who had held a post in the short-lived Soviet Latvian Government of 1919, had been sent to the Far Eastern Army on handing over. From there, he had gone to Spain, as virtual Commander-in-Chief of the Republican Armies under the name “Grishin.” He had clashed with the NKVD, and was arrested on his return.178
The Commander of the International Brigade, “General Kleber,” a Soviet officer whose real name was M. Z. Shtern, but was represented as a Canadian to suit international decorum, was accused of being a member of Berzin’s “spy organization” and beaten on the legs with iron bars.179 However, he was only sentenced to twenty-five years and sent to a labor camp, where he died.180
Brigade Commander “Gorey” (Skoblevsky), who had fought and won the Battle of Madrid for the Spanish Republic, was much feted on his return to the USSR. But soon afterward, about the end of 1937, “the hero of Madrid was slandered” and shot.181 He is said to have been arrested only two days after receiving the Order of Lenin.182
Other military victims among Soviet veterans of the Spanish Civil War were to include the senior military adviser “Grigorevich” (G. M. Shtern), later promoted to Army Commander in the Far East, and the leading Soviet air ace in Spain, “Douglas,” later, as Lieutenant General Smushkevich, Head of the Soviet Air Force; both were shot in 1941.183 Marshal Malinovsky, until his death Minister of Defense, who was also in Spain, describes failing to obey two orders to return and finally getting a third threatening to list him as a “non-returner,” upon which he went back, at a time when, fortunately for him, the worst period of the Purge was over.184 Soviet civilians in Spain also fared evilly. Antonov-Ovseenko, who had operated in the delicate position of Soviet Consul-General in Barcelona, perished, as did Rosenberg, the Soviet Ambassador to the Republican Government. Rosenberg’s crime seems to have been an attempt to arrange the exchange of prisoners with the Franco authorities. Stalin always regarded this sort of thing as suspicious, and was later to show resentment when the Yugoslav partisans entered into similar conversations with the German Command in the Balkans.185
PURGE IN THE NAVY
In the Navy, the Purge was as sweeping as in the land forces. Of the nine Fleet Admirals and Admirals First Grade, only one (Galler) survived the Purge, to die in prison after the war.186 First to be arrested was the brains of the Navy (though no longer holding naval position), R. A. Muklevich. Muklevich, a comfortable, strong-looking man, was an Old Bolshevik with an extraordinary career behind him. Born in 1890, he had become a Party member at the age of sixteen, and in the difficult years 1907 to 1909, still in his teens, had been secretary of the Party organization at Bialystok. He had been called up for the Imperial Navy in 1912 and been active in the Party’s military work from then through the Revolution. During the Civil War, he had served on the staff of various armies and fronts, become Deputy Director of the Army Academy in 1921, then served with military aviation from 1925, and finally taken over effective control of the fleet from 1926 to 1927. As Director of Naval Construction, he had played a leading role in the modernization of the Soviet Navy. His clear view of the problems and unambitious efficiency made him a natural and welcome associate of Tukhachevsky’s group.
He was arrested in May 1937.187 He was not brought to public trial—indeed, there was no announcement made about the trial of any of the naval leaders. He and the Navy Commander-in-Chief, Admiral Orlov, were, however, denounced as accomplices of Tukhachevsky at the XVIIIth Party Congress in 1939. The attack on them, unlike those made on the Army men, contained a specific criticism of their military policies. People’s Commissar for Shipbuilding Tevosyan announced that they had opposed the idea of a powerful surface fleet and that their removal had made it possible to build “a most mighty attacking force”188—a chimera which diverted a large amount of Soviet effort into a hopeless and pointless attempt to match the major naval powers with a battle fleet.
This is doubtless the factual basis to be found, as so often, for one of the incidents in Arthur Koestler’s Darkness at Noon: the execution of the Fleet Commander “Bogrov” on account of a dispute about the nature of the future Soviet Navy. The precise issue, however, is rather different. Koestler has “Bogrov” advocating large, long-range submarines as against Stalin’s view that small, short-range craft were required, the political distinction being that the former implies a policy of aggression and world revolution, and the latter one of coastal defense and a general defensive policy. In reality, the Stalinist view was the more, rather than the less, aggressive (“Stalin had threatened to mete out heavy punishment to anyone objecting to heavy cruisers”).189 Muklevich’s attitude, doubtless dictated by a realistic appraisal of the possibilities, given actual Soviet resources, was a short-range, defensive one. When war came, the Soviet Navy lost effective control of the vital seas, and Muklevich was proved right posthumously—the Soviet Admiralty reverting to his views, though not acknowledging them.
In any event, this argument cannot have been the main motive behind the Navy purge, whose origins were clearly the same as those of the purge in the Army and in the country as a whole. It was less a matter of settling technical disputes by executions than of using technical disputes as one excuse for executions. Muldevich confessed after a week’s severe torture in the Lefortovo prison.190
Next to fall was the Commander of the Naval Forces, Admiral Orlov, together with Admiral Sivkov, Commander of the Baltic Fleet, and Admiral Kozhanov, Commander of the Black Sea Fleet. Orlov was arrested in November 1937, but he seems to have been dismissed as early as June, when Admiral Viktorov, Commander of the Pacific Fleet and himself shortly to fall, was acting as Head of the Navy.191
With the leaders, their subordinates fell in scores.
The Navy by its very nature gave contact, or the possibility of contact, with foreigners. Soviet warships paid courtesy visits. They cruised in international waters. During the Second World War, these suspicious circumstances were to be much exacerbated, owing to collaboration with the Royal Navy at the Murmansk end of the Northern Convoy route. One of the chief figures in One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich is Buynovsky, “The Captain,” who has actually spent a whole month on a British cruiser as liaison officer. “Then after the war some British admiral who should’ve had more sense sent me a little souvenir with an inscription that said: ‘In gratitude.’ I was really shocked and I cursed like hell, so now I’m inside with all the others.”
The atmosphere had been established much earlier. Rear-Admiral Isakov, in his memoirs published in 1961,192 tells a story of a flag officer of his acquaintance, Ozarovsky, who was wrecked in his small sailboat off the coast near Kronstadt. A Norwegian steamer came in sight and lowered a boat. Ozarovsky refused the offer of rescue, though his situation was desperate. Isakov describes Ozarovsky’s feelings. He was bound to be saved. Although he himself could not have been seen from the shore, “the foreign steamer entering a prohibited zone would be seen at once. A cutter would be sent to the scene.” And this in fact happened. Isakov visited him in hospital and asked why he had not let himself be brought to Leningrad by the Norwegians. Ozarovsky replied, “I should have had to give an explanation: when and how this meeting with foreign agents had been arranged and for how much I had sold our operational plans while the ship was passing through the channel.” Isakov felt compelled to agree, and adds that even so Ozarovsky did not escape. He was arrested, interrogated, and tortured for the very reasons he had advanced.